Today in Digital Marketing - hello friend i am the bestest seo find you best position #1 rank

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Is the buying season already over? A warning about SEO consultants. Why Instagram isn't talking about its latest user numbers. How using emotional language could increase your clickthrough rate. TikTok says it's figured out why your CPAs are higher — and it's all Shopify's fault [premium feed].Go Premium! No ads, more stories, and extended deep-dive weekend episodes — https://todayindigital.com/premiumADVERTISING as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/adsShowcase your marketing tool for free! https://todayindigital.com/showcase  JOIN OUR SLACK! https://todayindigital.com/slackFOLLOW US: https://todayindigital.com/socialmedia (TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, and more) ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 dot C-A. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, is the buying season already over? A warning about SEO consultants.

Why is Instagram not talking about its latest user numbers? How using emotional language could increase your click-through rate. And on the Premium Podcast, with more stories, no ads, and deep dive weekend episodes, TikTok says it's figured out why your CPAs are higher, and it's all Shopify's fault. It's Wednesday, December 15th, 2021. Happy Bill of Rights Day, United States. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageHue Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 527. When you look at all the top performing digital ads that are out there, they all usually have some commonality between them. They use arresting visuals, or a clear call to action, or in some cases use emotionally charged words to engage a

consumer. We've known about the effect of emotional words on advertising for years, and countless blog posts, ebooks, and white papers have been written about it. But nowhere is language more important than where you're restricted by space. Think about a search ad on Google. Every word counts because you only get a few of them. So you'd think then there'd be lots of research on the use of emotional language on search ads. The research on keywords is academic research on keywords is I would still say it is sparse. Professor Annie Chakravarti is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Georgia. And I think primarily because of the dimension, you know, the dimensionality of the data,

that the data is so huge, so many things going on in the data that I believe that is one of the reasons why there is not as much research as one would think there would be. This past summer, Professor Chakravarti and her colleagues completed a research paper called Can Emotions Be Used as Keywords for Text-Based Search Engine Advertising? I spoke with her earlier this morning. For example, people use the term peaceful painting. So they are looking for a painting. They may or may not type anything specific like painting by this artist or painting by that artist. But they're at the same time, they're also using the word peaceful. So it's almost as if they are looking for this product, but they're looking for a product which can give them

some kind of emotion, which can, you know, which can give them some kind of emotion which can you know which can give them peace in this case we found that emo if you add emotion to the text of the ad that's great it does lead to higher ad clicks but emotions in the search query doesn't necessarily the the you know so emotion and search query and emotion in the ad, there is no evidence that they would really work together. Or they enhance ad clicks. They work fine independently, but do they enhance each other's effects? We didn't find evidence for that. So the data set you used was from the spring of 2018, so about two, three and a half years old now.

Do you think these findings would hold up if you used more recent data? Or in fact, the effects should be stronger with COVID and with the pandemic when general emotions in the population, it doesn't have to be me and you, general emotions are riding high, people are feeling all kinds of anxiety, people are at home, you know, there's so many emotions that we are surrounded with generally in the last two or three years that I would imagine that if anything, the effects would be stronger. Our full interview covered much more detail, of course, including how much using emotion words in ad copy moves the needle compared to an ad's quality score. What the effect of negative emotion words have on click through rate. Whether you should carry that language over to your landing page, and much more. The full interview is up right now on our premium podcast feed,

which you can subscribe to at todayindigital.com slash premium feed, or tap the link in the show notes. Retailers hoping Super Saturday will make up for lost sales this season might be disappointed. In the final stretch of holiday shopping, fewer people plan to shop, according to data from the National Retail Federation that surveyed 7,400 adult consumers. Here's what the analysis found. Last year, 150 million Americans made their way to stores and online to shop on the last Saturday before Christmas. This year, only 148 million plan to do so. 27% plan to shop exclusively in-store,

32% plan to shop online only, and 41% plan to shop both. 42% said they plan to purchase their last gift before Super Saturday. That's up from 40% last year. Still, more than half of consumers expect they will be picking up last-minute gifts in the week leading up to Christmas. And what are consumers shopping for? According to the survey, the most popular gifts purchased so far this year are clothing and accessories, coming in at 44%. 30% of consumers have bought toys,

26% books and other media, one out of four shoppers opted for a gift card, and 20% bought electronics. Well, the post on Reddit certainly got a lot of attention, probably not the kind the OP wanted. It read, quote, I just closed a deal with one of the top three news outlets in my country. They want to enhance their writers' SEO writing skills and audit completion and their technical SEO.

Any experience and tips when working with large news sites welcome? The company has 250 reporters. 200 news articles get published each day. About 25 different outlet brands and niches. So the scale of things worries me a bit, The Reddit community, as you probably know, generally speaking, doesn't suffer fools well. Some of the replies included, shouldn't these be things you ought to already know if you're getting paid to do SEO for a major news outlet? And am I reading this correctly? You signed a client for whom you have no idea how to do the work. Good luck to both of you. And this has been the trend for the past five years. SEOs with no idea what they

are doing keep landing big clients. I haven't quite figured out how this madness is happening, but I think it might be lack of education by executives and the fact that people who are good at sales have been sold ebooks and courses on how to get rich, all of them teaching you to sell SEO and learn it later, unquote. So friends, if your brand is in the market for an SEO consultant or company, make sure you take the biggest, proudest nerd in your office and have them grill this consultant on the basics, just to be sure. With all this news about government inquiries and TikTok, you might think that Instagram's popularity was declining. Well, think again. Instagram has unofficially reached a record

milestone of 2 billion monthly active users. That's according to anonymous Instagram employees who leaked the news to CNBC. One employee claimed that Instagram surpassed the threshold about one week before Facebook's decision to change its name to Meta, which we reported on October 28th. Back in September, TikTok reported 1 billion users on its platform. So why didn't Instagram brag about having twice as many users? Well, maybe it's not exactly the right time for the platform to flaunt its number of users, and it probably never will be. This has been a controversial year for the company for many reasons, including an internal study that found the platform might contribute to body image issues in young girls, and allegations that it doesn't do enough to

protect the mental health of young users. The company actually hasn't made its user numbers public officially since it hit 1 billion daily active users in 2018. It took 8 years to get there and 3 years to apparently add another billion users. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. New data from Edison Research has found that if you produce or market a podcast, do not ignore YouTube. Edison's podcast Consumer Tracker Report

asked people, what platform do you listen to podcasts on the most? Top positions were, of course, Spotify and Apple. But when they instead asked, what platforms do you ever listen to? YouTube appears to be the platform with the most momentum. An Edison executive says he hears the most disagreement about this particular finding, quoting Inside Podcasting's report on this today. The reasons include not measuring podcasts on YouTube and even not wanting it to be true.

But he reminds us that the listener is never wrong. So when considering why people who use audio first apps to listen to podcasts would ever use YouTube, the answer is discoverability. The Edison executive puts it as this, quote, It's not purpose built to subscribe to a podcast, but it is built for you to find one. Speaking of podcasting, a major audio company is learning the importance of inclusivity. The National Association for the Deaf and Disability Legislation, known as the ADA, quote,

Quoting the complaint, Defendants' failures to provide transcripts of their podcasts excludes deaf and hard-of-hearing persons from the critical sources of news, entertainment, educational programs, and popular culture that defendants make available to their hearing customers in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, unquote. Although the lawsuit pertains to podcast transcripts specifically, it is critical for marketers to consider inclusivity across all platforms. Here are a few strategies to make your content accessible to people with disabilities.

Always include alt text on your images. Check your colors and fonts. Make sure that they're easy to read and provide good contrast. Ensure that your videos have closed captioning. And perhaps consider including trigger warnings for sensitive topics. Snap, the parent company of the Snapchat app, announced today that it has paid over $250 million to more than 12,000 creators on Spotlight. Spotlight is Snapchat's version of TikTok.

It is also known as Reels on Instagram. It's known as Idea Pins on Pinterest. The format allows users to reach a wider audience instead of just sending snaps from friend to friend. The company says that 65% of Spotlight submissions use one of Snapchat's creative tools or an augmented reality lens. Additionally, creators can profit from Spotlight through in-app gifting and the creator marketplace, which lets brands collaborate easily with AR developers and influencers. Snap now has more incentives to encourage creators to use its app, so if it's not part of your New Year's marketing strategy, maybe it should be.

Adobe is giving marketers an early Christmas gift, sort of. The company announced a free creative suite called Creative Cloud Express that includes lightweight versions of Photoshop Illustrator and Premiere Pro. This is sort of an enhanced version of the app formerly known as Spark. I kicked it around a bit this afternoon. It's very similar to Canva. The app gives you access to thousands of templates, millions of images from Adobe stock, and thousands of fonts. And by access, I mean the free ride

ends there. Pick from almost any of the stock images and it will try to upsell you into a monthly subscription because Adobe is going to Adobe, am I right? Creative Cloud Express is available at express.adobe.com on the web or in your app store for iOS and Android. More interestingly in their announcement, I thought, was that they have announced their intention to acquire ContentCal, a social media scheduling tool. The company says look for those capabilities to be integrated into Creative Cloud Express sometime soon. ELF, a cosmetics brand known for being ahead of the trends on TikTok, may have missed the mark with its holiday messaging this year. The company has debuted a movie called Big Mood, Big Elfin City on the platform, which comes in three three-minute videos. It features some of TikTok's most recognizable influencers and references videos and audios that have been

exploding in popularity over the past year. So why isn't it generating any engagement? At the moment, Part 1, of course, has the highest number of views out of the series, with only 2,600. For reference, the company has 359,000 followers. If I were in Gen Z, I would probably describe it as being cringe. But from a marketing perspective, the company released a 9 minute movie on a short form video platform

users spend most of their time scrolling their For You page so a 3 part series that you have to watch in chronological order doesn't really make sense also a lot of the viral trends in the video are pretty dated so if marketers have learned anything from social media's golden child this year Doesn't really make sense. Also, a lot of the viral trends in the video are pretty dated. So if marketers have learned anything from social media's golden child this year, maybe it's to stop trying so hard. So, side note, my apologies to those of you on the premium newsletter.

If you don't see today's issue in your inbox, check your spam folder. The subject line in the newsletter is always the same as each day's podcast title. In today's case, I was trying to be a little bit fun, so I made it, hello friend, I am the bestest SEO you can find you best position number one rank. So I'm guessing that none of you got today's newsletter as a result. Like I say, check your spam folder. Hey, while we're speaking of mistakes, so here's a lesson. Don't try to design something if you're not a designer. I had this bright idea that I was going to print these cards out, like business cards, but square that were things I could hand out to people that I meet, colleagues and maybe at conferences or so on that gives people, you know, one or two months free trial of the newsletter and the premium podcast. So I did, I made it.

I sent it off to, you know, Vistaprint or one of those places. They came back yesterday. And here's the problem. The back, which is where the text is, is like microscopic-sized text. And what happened, obviously, was when I was making it in Photoshop or whatever, Pixelmator I use, I failed to remember that this would all be scaled down to like a two-inch square. So it looked great on my big 27-inch monitor that I had zoomed 300%,

and then I got them, and it's almost like they're, they're almost completely illegible. So yeah. And if you're curious, you know, if you're into the schadenfreude, uh, check out my Twitter account. I tweeted a photo of what the cards look like. My Twitter account is at pod map and all right. Talk to you tomorrow. No homie, just stay you No matter what they say No matter what they do No homie, just stay you