Today in Digital Marketing - 183: Are Stock Photos Bringing Your Google Rank Down?

Starting point is 00:00:00 T-minus two days before the big Facebook ad boycott. Is your brand ready? Plus, what LinkedIn thinks should be your company's next blog post. Google is giving away e-commerce listings. And we decrypt the mystery of the garage door companies currently spamming Google Maps. It's Monday, June 29th. Happy National Statistics Day, India. I'm Todd Maffin. Here is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by Swanson Health. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Hershey, Starbucks, Levi Strauss, Honda, all brands that over the weekend joined the growing boycott of Facebook

Starting point is 00:00:39 advertising. It's a limited boycott, most brands only planning to halt advertising for the month of July. And some brands, let's be honest, may be jumping on the bandwagon just for the karma. Take Arc'teryx, a winter coat company. They tweeted, quote, effective immediately, we will be halting our global advertising with Facebook and Instagram until at least the end of July in support of the stop hate for Profit campaign, unquote. But here's the thing. They're a winter coat company. And Facebook ad consultant David Herman, who ran the ads of their competitor for two years,

Starting point is 00:01:19 says Arcteryx doesn't run ads in July anyway. Because they're a winter coat company. So sure, they're going to say they're pulling all their ads from Facebook in July. Maybe because they don't run them in the first place. I have reached out to Arc'teryx. They have not yet responded. But two things for you in your role as your brand's digital marketing manager. First, as I said Friday, if you are planning to sit this boycott out,

Starting point is 00:01:42 in other words, you're not planning any changes to your ad strategy, you still plan to run ads on Facebook next month, do you have messaging ready in case you get asked by people why they're seeing your ads online when so many other brands have pulled theirs? Do you have a plan? One of our clients here at my agency is planning to still run ads, but pull them if they get any negative feedback on them being there. Second, keep an eye on the ad market. With fewer big advertisers in the auction, in theory, CPMs should go down. And remember, July starts on Wednesday. As Frankie McDonald would say, be prepared. LinkedIn is getting busier, and not just over the pandemic time period.

Starting point is 00:02:26 They say they're seeing something of a surge in both content creation and interaction between users. They say it's a 55% year-over-year increase in conversations among connections globally. That's since March of 2019. So that covers a lot of time not in the pandemic, though certainly the last couple of months has pushed that up. As for the topics which appear to be behind the spike in content, articles about business continuity more than doubled. Cloud services topics up 78 percent. Cyber security topics up 66 percent. But the big winner, not surprisingly, articles about remote working up nearly fivefold.

Starting point is 00:03:06 So does that mean you should start writing blog posts about remote working? Probably not. Quoting Search Engine Journal, as the number of articles on remote working continues to rise, it perhaps won't be long before engagement starts to taper off. Unless you have something unique to say about remote working, it may be worth considering other According to LinkedIn's report, the strongest content opportunity right now is articles mentioning video streaming. Google is now surfacing shopping results in their main search results pages for free. These used to be sponsored placements, but Google, like many companies, are trying to wrestle back some e-commerce share from Amazon. These products come from feeds that brands set up, and they'll show up in those knowledge panel boxes

Starting point is 00:03:53 when people search for a product. Early testing showed a 70% lift in clicks on the shopping tab. This is first rolling out in the U.S. on mobile devices, then will come to more countries and desktop a bit later. They say the full global rollout should be complete by the end of the U.S. on mobile devices, then we'll come to more countries and desktop a bit later. They say the full global rollout should be complete by the end of the year. Still ahead, Google has always said when you use duplicate content on your website,

Starting point is 00:04:15 you will rank a little less well. But what does that mean for stock photography? If you're using the same smiling handshake photo as a hundred other companies, is your Google ranking going down? Also, why are there countless numbers of fake garage door companies in Google Maps? We have the answer from a local SEO consultant. That's in a minute when Today in Digital Marketing continues.

Starting point is 00:04:46 This episode is sponsored by Swanson Health. They've been in business for more than 50 years now. From quality vitamins to cruelty-free beauty items to eco-friendly home products, Swanson Health can help you keep healthy, all backed by strict quality standards that provide purity and potency. In fact, they carry more than 20,000 wellness products, all at a great value. And listeners of this podcast can get 20% off any order using the code TODAY20 at checkout.

Starting point is 00:05:14 That's on swanson.com and use TODAY20 at checkout. swanson.com Google says it will start clamping down on a type of spam in Google Maps that was new to me. Garage door spam. Yeah, apparently there are just tons of garage door installation and maintenance companies. And most of them fake. There is somebody or several companies creating these fake listings in mass. Like they've obviously figured out a way to do it where they can spit out hundreds, if not thousands of listings a day. Joy Hawkins is a local SEO consultant.

Starting point is 00:05:48 She says the end game lead generation from shady operators. They sell the leads. So when you call the phone number, you get sent to like a call tree. And then, you know, they know that the person wants to get their garage door repaired. So then they sell that to a real business who probably doesn't realize that this listing is competing with them, pushing them out of the results. It's like any client of ours that's in that industry, every month when we go and look, we find new fake listings. So just the volume right now is higher. Like the one example I tweeted the other day where there's the top 20 and there was four real businesses, that is abnormal. It's usually like a third or maybe like 25% or something like that.

Starting point is 00:06:29 That's still high, though. That still strikes me as high. Yes. It is. It's really bad in certain industries. Danny Sullivan, one of Google's search engineers, says that they are aware of the issue and that, quote, we should see some improvements around this in the very near future, unquote. You can follow Joy Hawkins on Twitter at Joy Ann Hawkins or find her agency, Sterling Sky. You don't need to have read too many articles on SEO before you learn that using duplicate content is bad.

Starting point is 00:06:58 If you're running the same blog post that's on two or three other websites, Google's algorithm doesn't like that and it'll probably pull your page's ranking down in the search results. But what about stock photography? The answer, as usual, comes from a guy at Google named John Mueller. He's a search engineer, sort of the face of the algorithm for webmasters and SEO people. And he says it doesn't matter for web search directly. Well, what the hell does that mean? Here's Search Engine Journal's take. There's a longstanding SEO idea that non-original content is a negative thing that can affect rankings, but there's a certain point where that truth can get stretched and used in a different context that

Starting point is 00:07:37 it's not meant to apply to. Stock photography is non-original content, but if Google took marks off for the use of those, half the internet wouldn't rank, unquote. But there is a catch. If you are hoping to rank well in Google Images, then you might run into problems. As Mueller said, quote, for image search, if it's the same image as used in many places, it'll be harder. There's also the potential impact on users after search happens. For example, does it affect conversions if your team photo is obvious stock And it gets more complicated. Search Engine Journal says the context of the image is what matters here. Again, quoting from them,

Starting point is 00:08:20 Sometimes images are used metaphorically, and that's not always the best choice. For example, it is arguably a lost opportunity to use images of race cars in an article about the race to succeed. That's an instance of using an image that takes the word race in a context that's different from the topic. A better choice could be an aspirational image, one that shows the success that can result from using the product. That can be a successful holiday meal, a person graduating from college. Whatever the outcome from the use of the product is, can be a conversion-oriented image, unquote. They've got a great and much longer piece about this up on their site today, and there is a link in this episode's notes if you'd like to follow up with more about stock photography.

Starting point is 00:09:08 Good news for marketers, for whom YouTube is part of the mix. They are working on a new analytics dashboard, one that has smarter explanations about how each video is doing and one that'll give you more insight into how ready that video is for YouTube's homepage and watch next suggestions. That said, the test version of this new dashboard doesn't provide any real advice other than what we already know. One example, Okay, thanks. Also part of the new dashboard, a new search filter to let you see uploads marked as made for kids, and the integration of copyright strike notifications into Creator Studio.

Starting point is 00:09:51 Finally, social CPMs appear to be on their way back up. Some new data from Gupta Media says Facebook and Instagram Global CPMs are back up and in fact past the rate they were at before the pandemic struck. Back in mid-February, their numbers show CPMs around $3. Then a month later, they were under a buck as COVID-19 changed the world. The most recent numbers, around three and a half bucks. As for the breakdown by formats, the Facebook news feed has had the biggest spike and Instagram's feed behind it about a buck lower. But the opportunity might be in Instagram stories, which are under $1.50, Gupta says, and has actually been falling a bit since the first week of this month. Special thanks to Swanson Health. Try them today with 20% off by using the code TODAY20 at swanson.com. Theme music by Mark Blevis. Ad sales by Podcorn.

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Today in Digital Marketing - 183: Are Stock Photos Bringing Your Google Rank Down?

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