Today in Digital Marketing - "Alexa, Create More Long Tail Keywords Please."

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi friends, just a quick word before we start. I was having some audio trouble today. I got a new microphone. It was not agreeing with logic. So, my apologies for the kind of glitch and over-modulation that you will hear in here. I will be working to resolve it over the weekend. Thanks very much for your patience, and here's the episode. It is Friday, January 3rd, 2020. Happy Women's Day, India. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Facebook Ads Manager gets another placement, a huge one. How will Siri and Alexa affect your brand's SEO strategy? TikTok says, oh my God, we totally didn't mean to create a deepfakes feature in our app. And an important update on the poop emoji. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:46 When two guys left Yahoo and built a messaging app in 2009 called WhatsApp, they made their users a promise. We will not have ads in our app. And then Facebook came along and bought it for $19 billion. And hey, guess what's happening now? Yes, ads. Good news for us digital marketers, of course. We get another placement in the Facebook Ads Manager,

Starting point is 00:01:09 one with some strong European and Asian penetration, and one with 1.5 billion users. Bad news for the two founders who left Facebook once it became clear that ads were coming. Now we know the roadmap. Ads will launch on the status screen this year. That's the section where you post text, gifs, videos, images, all of which evaporate after 24 hours, much like Snapchat. All of which makes WhatsApp's pre-acquisition blog post a number of years back a little

Starting point is 00:01:39 embarrassing in hindsight. It read in part, advertising isn't just a disruption of aesthetics, it insults your intelligence. Ouch. One of the big shifts in the last few years is a movement toward voice-activated devices. Siri, Alexa, Cortana, you know the crowd. As we get into 2020, it's making some digital marketers think more deeply about how this voice trend will change how people search for your brand's website. Already, Statistica says 20% of Google searches are made with voice. Some researchers are saying that number could hit 50% by the end of this year. So will you have to change your brand's SEO strategy?

Starting point is 00:02:24 An interesting article today in SearchEngineWatch.com that looks at some potential impact. Among the things the article says you will want to consider, queries will likely be longer using voice, more like full sentences. So you may need to start building out some long tail keywords in your copy. Backlinko says voice searches are currently an average of 29 words long. That is some long tail. And those keywords, key phrases more accurately, of course, those keywords are going to be more conversational in tone, not just random words sort of slapped together. Voice searches also use question words more frequently, like when, how, and where. And there does seem to be more emphasis on using voice for local search.

Starting point is 00:03:19 So if you have a bricks and mortar operation, you may want to optimize for searches that contain the phrase near me. The full article is quite detailed and really very helpful, and there is a link to it in this episode's description. On the other hand, one guy named Gary Ilias thinks all this talk about optimizing your brand's SEO efforts for voice is a complete waste of time. Gary tweeted yesterday, it's a new year, maybe we can put the voice search optimization fad to sleep finally. Oh yeah, one more thing about Gary. He works at Google. He's a Google index analyst. Quoting SEO Roundtable, Gary has said numerous times that what will be big

Starting point is 00:04:01 in the near future is around images and multimedia. Stop worrying about voice search, they've been saying. In fact, they've been shying away from adding voice filters to Google Search Console reporting for a reason. So, in everything in our world, definitely do it. Except also, don't. Rumors floating around that TikTok's parent company has developed an unreleased feature that creates lifelike deep fake videos. Apparently, researchers found some code in TikTok that lets users take a multi-angle biometric scan of their face, then choose a pre-selected videos where they want to add their own face in. In my experience as digital marketers,

Starting point is 00:04:47 we tend to approach these kinds of things in one of two ways. Either we jump all over it, be the first brand to use it, or when a fan of our brand uses our assets to do something creative, we send a cease and desist letter out. Obviously, the latter is not the answer. And as technologies like this become more popular, we are going to see more and more people using your brand to make their own creations. As I've said countless times, both here and in keynote speeches and in blog posts, we should encourage this behavior,

Starting point is 00:05:17 not try to shut it down. If this deepfakes feature does launch, it will be quite a bit more advanced than that face swapping technology we've seen in similar apps. Let's also not forget that a Chinese company owns TikTok, and nobody really knows how much data they are required to hand over to the authorities. Scanning your facial features and handing over your facial biometric data sounds, well, a little sketchy. For its part, TikTok said that the code was in there accidentally and was actually intended for its sister app. And sorry, we didn't mean to. We are totally taking that code out now for sure. Okay, thanks then. First abbreviated week of the year, so the lightning round is a little slow today. You can now have Apple engrave a poop emoji on your new AirPods case when you buy it.

Starting point is 00:06:13 That's it. End of lightning round. I promise for you new listeners who have come in from the ads, lightning round is usually much more compelling than that. If you're looking for some weekend listening, the premium feed has a bunch of good stuff, a full description of Facebook algorithmic repair, a deep dive into the TikTok organic algorithm,

Starting point is 00:06:32 plus my exclusive interview with Mitch Joel on the future of digital agencies. And coming next week, the five-step methodology we use here at EngageQ for handling negative reviews and comments on social media. Click the link in this episode's description or visit todayindigital.com and look for the button that says premium episodes. Follow me on social.

Starting point is 00:06:54 Links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend and I will see you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - "Alexa, Create More Long Tail Keywords Please."

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