Today in Digital Marketing - CaN cAsE-senSiTiVE uRLs hUrT yOuR gOoGLe RaNkiNG?

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

Does case-sensitivity matter on your brand’s web page? Google may be showing photos of your business that you DON’T want out there How does your brand dip its toes into the TikTok waters And a security leak at a major landing page provider may have exposed confidential data. Can you help spread the word? Review this podcast at https://ratethispodcast.com/today AND/OR click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can publish Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: Tod’s web site: http://TodMaffin.com Tod’s agency: http://engageQ.com LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/todmaffin Twitter: http://twitter.com/todmaffin Instagram: http://instagram.com/todmaffin Facebook: http://facebook.com/tmaffin Mixer: https://mixer.com/HappyRadioGuy SOURCES: https://twitter.com/vanschneider/status/1224037023687815169 https://marketingland.com/tiktok-101-a-primer-for-brands-274974 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/url-capitalization-seo/343369/ https://www.seroundtable.com/google-my-business-local-listings-massive-photos-28934.html --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Monday, February 3rd, 2020. Happy Mozambique Heroes Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, does case sensitivity matter on your brand's webpage? Google may be showing photos of your business that you do not want out there. How does your brand dip its toes into the TikTok waters? And a security leak at a major landing page provider may have exposed confidential data. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Interesting thread over on Twitter about Bing. I've got a link in this episode's description. Bing, you remember Bing, don't you? That's Microsoft's competitor to Google. Most people who track these things say Bing only has about a 2 or 3% share of the search market. Nearly all of it goes to Google, of course. But let's not forget that 2 or 3% is still big numbers. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you'll know that Microsoft has been beefing up its ads platform, and it's really quite solid these days. I have to say, Bing is actually the default search engine on my desktop and phone. Why? Well, it's not because the results are better.

I still think Google provides more relevant results. But Microsoft has a brilliant rewards program that includes Bing searches. You get three points for each time you search on Bing, up to 30 points a day, and then you can cash those points in for actual things. In my case, because my wife and I spend a ridiculous amount of time on Xbox, it basically buys us a small Xbox gift card every month or two. That said, probably at least once a day, I have to manually go to Google to do a search because Bing just isn't quite cutting it for that particular query. But if you're in the Microsoft or Xbox world,

you may want to look into their rewards program to get free things by just doing the searching you would do anyway. Heads up if you manage your brand's website. As you probably know, the page names in URLs are case sensitive. For instance, the webpage at abc.com slash lowercase p product and abc.com slash uppercase P product are different pages. Someone recently asked a senior Google engineer online if case matters for your brand's Google listing. And the answer was, yeah, kind of actually. URL capitalization definitely matters, just not in the way you

think. Quoting the Google engineer, Google doesn't consider lettercase in itself as an SEO issue, but you should keep it consistent across individual URLs. This means if you have the same page accessible and indexable for page, that's all uppercase page dot HTML, and all lowercase page dot HTML, Google could crawl both those URLs and the one you want to be ranked may not be the one Google chooses. You could also end up splitting ranking signals between the two pages. That being said, many feel the URLs that use uppercase letters or all caps, with the exception of domain names itself for style reasons, can look messy. And if it is a URL someone might type into a browser, most would default to entirely lowercase rather than using capital letters, something that might be important for those

of us who do offline marketing too. Google's growing influence into business listings continues to climb. Their Google My Business toolset is becoming increasingly integrated into the organic search results. That could be a problem if you're not aware of what's in your listing. Remember, Google lets people upload photos of your business, or any photo really, to your business listing. Now, Google usually sends you a notification that there's a new photo there, and you can turn that off if you want,

but I would venture to say not many digital marketers are actively monitoring that. And that may become more important now that it seems Google is making those images show up huge on desktop. When people click into your business, some are seeing those images take up literally half the screen width. It appears to be in testing on desktop for now. This is something

that's been on mobile for a while though, so best to double check the images that Google is using to represent your brand and be sure you're cool with those images. TikTok is getting lots of attention these days and you might be thinking, where do I even start? How does a brand get on there and not make stupid boomer mistakes? Well, Marketing Land has a great piece up there today that breaks down some examples of brands succeeding on TikTok. One case study in the piece is about Chipotle. Quoting now,

Chipotle teamed up with its fans to create a series of challenges. Its first viral challenge kicked off in May 2019 after a customer filmed a video doing a lid flip, which Chipotle then posted to Instagram. That post racked up over a million views, prompting the brand to turn to TikTok to invite customers to try the lid flip trick for themselves with a branded hashtag challenge. The hashtag Chipotle lid flip challenge received more than 104 million views,

111,000 video submissions and more than 59,000 participants during the campaign. Unquote. Noticeably missing from the case study was any uplift in actual revenues or visits. It's not even clear if Chipotle measured that for themselves. I assume they did and didn't want to share it. Anyway, the article is a great read if you are trying to wrap your head around how to get your brand on TikTok. And there's a link to the article in this episode's description. If you use a landing page provider Unbounce and have sensitive information there in draft, episode's description. Unbounce confirmed this in an email to its customers late last week, saying, Some of your landing page contents may have been viewed by this researcher.

The researcher had no access to any personally identifiable information, credit card information, or lead data. If you are still concerned about that, reach out to the people at Unbounce. And remember, bugs happen. We have worked with the Unbounce people before here at our agency and have always found them to be responsive and helpful. So go easy on them. Well, if you value a daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to rate and review this podcast. There's a link in this episode's description that makes this a very easy one-click process. Corey Dobbin, founder of Aaron Advertising's very first tweet ever said,

I listen to this every morning. Incredibly insightful for anyone getting into the weeds of digital advertising. Thank you very much, Corey. And if your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement, or digital marketing, check out our agency at engageq.com. Follow me on social. Links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. I'm off to the periodontist now for a appointment that I assume involves a lot of freezing. Please pray for me. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes.

You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.ca.