Today in Digital Marketing - Long Titles Are Good For SEO, But Are They Good for Podcast Episodes Too, Like This Unnecessarily Long Episode Title (Apologies If This Breaks Your Podcast App)?
Episode Date: February 24, 2021Today: Ignore the standard advice — long page titles might actually help your search ranking. Also: TikTok advertising comes to Canada. Hackers are breaking into Quickbooks files. Agencies get a bre...ak on Google’s partner program. And some welcome upgrades for merchants who use Square.Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a daily email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterMORE:NEW! Podcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin Our Free Slack CommunityGet this as a daily email newsletterEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Leave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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Today, ignore the standard advice, long page titles may actually help your search ranking.
Also, TikTok advertising comes to Canada, hackers are breaking into QuickBooks files,
agencies get a break on Google's partner program, and some welcome upgrades for merchants who
use Square.
It's Wednesday, February 24th, 2021.
Happy Independence Day, Estonia.
I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing.
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One of the downsides to being in Canada is we're rarely first on the list for any cool product
rollouts. We watch as people get access to things like the TikTok ad platform and just dream,
one day, one day we'll get access.
Well, fellow Canucks, our time has come.
TikTok's self-service ad platform is now open to all Canadian businesses.
I will spare you their announcement on this, blah, blah, meaningful connection,
brands and consumers, blah, blah, blah.
But here's what you actually need to know.
First, don't go in expecting Facebook levels of options.
TikTok only has five optimization paths right now.
Reach, traffic, app installs, video views, or conversions.
And unless you're using their pixel
and generating your own custom audiences
off website visits or something,
there's really no B2B opportunities here.
I looked for the very broad interest of marketing, and it didn't exist at all.
There's one nice feature TikTok has above Facebook, and that's the ability to turn off commenting.
You can also prevent people from downloading the ads to their phones.
But one big warning.
Every other ad self-service tool you use has two budget options, daily budget or a lifetime budget.
And while TikTok does have both, it actually defaults to something horrifyingly called
no limit. So trust me, uncheck that and you'll get the regular budget options.
Regardless of your campaign optimization, you can also optimize for a specific engagement. You do
this actually at the ad set level, and you can ask TikTok to focus on getting you more likes or more comments or shares
or full watches. And finally, TikTok is making its Shopify channel available to merchants in Canada,
and they're planning to host a virtual summit for Canadian businesses next month.
And a couple of things for the folks who are on the marketing agency side of things.
First, many of you use QuickBooks as your accounting software.
You should be aware there's been a big uptick in the theft of QuickBooks file data.
I didn't even know this was a thing, but apparently it is.
And hackers are using social engineering to trick people into delivering malware to their QuickBooks data,
malware that is apparently quite hard to detect
with traditional antivirus programs.
This malware is capable of running inside of an email.
Basically, they send decoy documents,
and if someone on your team opens it,
it goes hunting for your agency's QuickBooks files,
and then the hackers upload it to themselves.
And yes, those files are encrypted,
but they have figured out a way to read them anyway.
What's the end game, you ask?
Couple of things. The quick and easy thing they're doing is them anyway. What's the end game, you ask? Couple of things.
The quick and easy thing they're doing
is just selling the data on the dark web,
but they've also been pretending to be the victim agency,
reaching out to their clients or partners or suppliers
and tricking them into making fraudulent bank transfers.
You can mitigate this somewhat
by getting your IT people to make sure
the QuickBooks file permissions
are not set to the everyone group. A better solution? mitigate this somewhat by getting your IT people to make sure the QuickBooks file permissions are
not set to the everyone group. A better solution? Train your people to not open email attachments
from people until they're 100% sure who sent them. Second story for agencies, Google has revised its
partner program after getting a bunch of negative feedback about it.
Google now says, quote, partners have the flexibility to apply or dismiss performance recommendations based on your own assessment in order to meet a minimum optimization score of 70%, unquote.
Originally, you needed to keep that optimization score at or over 70% to qualify for partner status and get that little badge for your website.
What's not clear?
Everything else.
Like, how many recommendations can you dismiss?
Is there a maximum?
Can you just ignore the criteria entirely?
Does this reset every few months or something?
I guess we'll wait to see if Google gives us more info,
but at the least, this is a good start.
Also, that minimum spend requirement of $10,000 US in 90 days is
still there. To be fair, last year they announced it would go up to $20,000, but it looks like
they've shelved that since the pandemic affected businesses. You still have lots of time. These
new requirements don't go into effect until a year from now. The popular WordPress forms
plugin Gravity Forms has added some new functionality for brands that use Square's e-commerce system on their site.
You can now use their Square add-on to set up recurring monthly payments from customers.
You can also now authorize a payment without actually withdrawing the funds from a customer's account until you approve it.
This could be great for stores that may not want to take a payment until they're ready to ship,
or businesses who need to take deposits from their customers.
And refunds are now directly into the WordPress plugin dashboard.
If you publish content on your website, like blog posts or WordPress pages,
you probably know there's a place to put the page title in.
Maybe even a separate place just for search engines if you
use an SEO tool like Yoast. And one of the recommendations these tools always give you
is to keep your title tag under a certain number of characters because after that number,
Google will just truncate it. But is there actually an SEO benefit to having title tags
longer than what's displayed in the search? Apparently so.
Google search engineer Gary Ilias told a recent SEO hangout
that you should keep the title tag precise to the topic of the page,
but not worry if it's too long.
In fact, unless it's obscenely long,
those keywords, even if they're not shown to users,
are still being considered for ranking.
Alright, that's it for today.
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Talk to you tomorrow.