Today in Digital Marketing - 147: What We Learned About SEO From Yesterday’s LinkedIn Blackout

Starting point is 00:00:00 Google's new tool lets you predict product demand, a huge security hole in a major WordPress builder. YouTube's brand lift campaigns get a little broader. Products on your Shopify store can now become shoppable pins on Pinterest. And I really don't hate bats, I promise. It's Thursday, May 7th. Happy National Mining Day, Argentina. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Remember when you and every other marketer changed their messaging to

Starting point is 00:00:32 pandemic-friendly language? Here for you. Here for you. We're here for you. We're here for you. We are here for you. We're here for you. And at that marketing meeting, you thought, you know, like at some point our audience is going to get tired of this messaging. Well, we are getting to that point now. 41% of consumers say they are now ready to hear from brands about things that are not COVID related. The study from Mito polled 7,000 consumers from seven different countries. That said, the messaging worked. Three out of four people said they believed brands care about their well-being based on the ads they'd seen. And 30% said the ads made them feel less anxious. And two interesting findings, I thought. First, most said they would be more open to hearing messaging from small businesses rather than big brands.

Starting point is 00:01:19 And second, ads played during news shows were better received than ads playing during comedy shows. Quoting Marketing Dive, The findings could put marketers in a difficult position in terms of pinpointing the right messaging as some parts of the world begin to reopen, even as multiple reports suggest that reopenings are happening too soon in some cases. The study underscores the need for brands to proceed carefully with their messaging over the next couple of months as they try to balance consumer desire to move on from COVID-19 related messaging with the need to be responsible corporate citizens.

Starting point is 00:01:58 So that was weird yesterday. LinkedIn was just suddenly dropped from Google. For about 10 hours Wednesday, no pages or profiles from the US version of LinkedIn were showing up in the search engine. Well, they're all back now, and we think we know what happened. Speculation is that someone at LinkedIn went into Search Console and accidentally requested removal of the www domain.

Starting point is 00:02:20 I guess thinking that that would, I don't know, tidy up the URLs shown or something. Who knows what they were thinking? Anyway, we did learn something about SEO from the incident. And that's that when you request removal of your brand's pages from search, actually all that happens is those pages get hidden, not actually deleted from the index. Because of that, there's no need to wait for Google to slowly and painstakingly re-index your site. All they do is turn that hidden flag off, and presto, you're back in.

Starting point is 00:02:52 A Google engineer explained it this way on Twitter yesterday. When it's hidden, you've put the remote in the freezer, then forgot about it. That remote is quickly salvageable. But when it's de-indexed, perhaps you once found the remote in the freezer, but then you put it in the bin and then took out the trash. That remote is now slowly salvageable. So there you go. Moral of the story, don't mess with Search Console unless you know what you're doing, and keep good tabs on where that remote is. Google has launched a great new tool for retail marketers, a way to see what retail categories and products are trending in terms of searches.

Starting point is 00:03:30 And you can select it by most rising in the last week, month, or year. For instance, last month, Google says there were spikes in search interest for household supplies and jigsaw puzzles as people spend more time at home. This month, they've seen surging interest for sewing machines and baking materials in the U.S., and tetherball sets and chalk in the United Kingdom and Australia. The new tool is called the Rising Retail Categories tool. Quoting Google, When we previewed the data with a group of businesses, they had lots of creative ideas for how they might apply it,

Starting point is 00:04:04 whether for content creation, promotional efforts, or even new products or services. Here were some of their ideas for how it could help. Content creation. A cookware company noticed that flour was a growing category in the United States. The team was inspired to explore partnering with a famous local chef to create engaging content about recipes that incorporate flour. Promotion. A jewelry company noted rising interest in products in the free weights category, so they might partner with fitness influencers who could help promote their products. Similarly, an online business said it would regularly reference the data to inform which products to feature on its homepage throughout the pandemic. And for product ideas, an apparel company with a fast and flexible production model said its team would use this data to inspire new product line ideas, unquote.

Starting point is 00:04:53 There's a link in the notes to this. They say for the next few months, they will keep it updated with fresh data every day. If your brand's website is using WordPress, and specifically the Elementor Pro page builder plugin, this story is for you. If this isn't you, feel free to use the chaptering function in your podcast app to skip to the next story. Alright, still with me? Security firm WordFence says Elementor Pro has a huge vulnerability exploit, which has not been fixed and apparently is still being actively exploited. Actually, there are two plugins affected here.

Starting point is 00:05:30 First, Elementor Pro, that's the paid version of their page builder. And the hack happens through registered site users. So if you use WordPress built-in blog post comments feature and people have to register on your site before they comment, this affects you. But even if you don't do that, the second plugin that's vulnerable, ultimate add-ons for Elementor, lets a hacker register as a subscriber on your site even if your site doesn't permit it. So basically this second plugin lets someone hack the first one.

Starting point is 00:06:02 WordFence will not say specifically how it works for obvious reasons. There is no fix right now for Elementor Pro. So they say you should immediately downgrade to the free version, which apparently does not have this security hole. As for the Ultimate Add-ons plugin, updating it from the dashboard will patch it. Last couple of weeks, it seems like Shopify and Pinterest have really been pushing out new features quickly, and now they are pushing one out together. That's weird. Anyway, it's a Shopify app integrated into Pinterest that will let sellers quickly upload their catalogs and

Starting point is 00:06:36 instantly create shoppable product pins. The app includes features like tag installation, catalog ingestion, automatic daily updating of products, and even an ads buying interface. The app automatically creates a connection between the individual store and Pinterest, so you don't have to edit any code. Businesses will also see a shop tab appear on their profile as an additional discovery path. Pinterest says the number of users who have engaged with shoppable product pins has increased 44% year over year. As for when this goes live, if you have a Shopify store and you are in the US or Canada, you can install it today. It rolls out to other countries like Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK in the coming weeks. And finally, YouTube has added a nice doohickey for those of us who use brand lift studies.

Starting point is 00:07:30 Those are the ones where brand awareness is your objective and you confirm that awareness with a portion of people who saw your ad by asking them in a quick poll if they remember seeing your brand's ad. And the side note here, this is not to be mistaken with Facebook's version of Brand Lift,

Starting point is 00:07:47 which for all cases, except those with huge budgets, you're actually just getting an educated guess of your lift. They don't actually poll your group unless you have a lot of money to spend. Anyway, YouTube's version will poll people, and here's what's new. They will now poll people viewing on TV screens. So that includes people like me who watch YouTube in the living room by using the YouTube app on our Xbox or through, you know, Apple TV or some other connected TV.

Starting point is 00:08:13 Nice little addition there for sure. I have a correction to make, and it comes from a listener named Brad Fonseca. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Brad says, on your podcast on April 17th, you made note of Bat Appreciation Day, but then said, screw bats, because of the supposed but unproven link between bats and the spread of COVID-19 to humans.

Starting point is 00:08:35 Bats are a very important part of the ecosystem across the world, including here in Canada. Uninformed attitudes and opinions towards bats have led to a number of species becoming endangered. This has been bugging me for a while, and I wanted to at least let you know some additional information. That being said, I love listening to your daily podcast as it helps me understand how marketing and advertising works in the digital and social media age. Thank you, Brad, for the correction. By the way, here in Canada, we have 18 species of bats.

Starting point is 00:09:03 Three of them are endangered. I do welcome your corrections and feedback. You can tweet me. That's the easiest way, at Todd Maffin. There is a link to that and all my social channels in this episode's notes. Classified ads are still available on the show. 20 bucks will let you reach the thousand or so listeners in the digital marketing space who listen every day. There is a link in this episode's description to that as well.

Starting point is 00:09:23 All right, that's it. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 147: What We Learned About SEO From Yesterday’s LinkedIn Blackout

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