Today in Digital Marketing - Want 60% More Conversions? Check Your Thumb.

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, the dramatic effect one simple change at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. are being booted off Google Maps. It's Friday, August 6th, 2021. Happy National Day, Bolivia. I'm Todd Maffin. Here is what you missed today in digital marketing. And we start with the Friday quiz brought to you by EngageQ Digital.

Starting point is 00:00:56 How many affiliate links are too many for Google? In other words, what is the number of affiliate links on a single page that will result in a demotion in your Google ranking? Is it even one affiliate link will reduce your ranking? More than three links on a single page? More than three links for every 200 words on the page? Or do the number of affiliate links on a single web page not affect ranking at all? The answer, later in today's episode.

Starting point is 00:01:31 Okay, audience interaction time. There is an outstanding thread on Twitter today by Matthias von Appenschroder, an e-commerce marketer in Denmark. It's all about fine-tuning the menu on your website. And let's start with a reminder that almost all web traffic comes from mobile devices. I want you to hold your phone right now, tuning the menu on your website, and let's start with a reminder that almost all web traffic comes from mobile devices. I want you to hold your phone right now, or if you're driving, think about where

Starting point is 00:01:50 your hand is when you're holding it. At the bottom, right? Now, if you're right-handed, like civilized people, think about the areas of the screen your thumb can easily get to. If you're like most people, you've got a comfortable range from the bottom left of the screen to the middle, then to the middle right. Some areas are just completely out of range of your thumb, yes? Like the top left, or depending on the size of your phone, anything at the top. So then why do all of us have little hamburger menus at the top left of our websites? When you think about it, and honestly I'm a little embarrassed this never occurred to me, perhaps the worst place to put a web menu is at the top left. You can't tap it with one hand.

Starting point is 00:02:34 How big a deal is this? Mathias says that after redesigning their navigation, they lifted their conversion rate by 60%. Quoting him, To put 60% in perspective, I would have generated $1 million more in sales this year if I had implemented this January 1st instead of recently. Unquote.

Starting point is 00:02:57 The full thread is definitely worth a read and has a number of case studies of other redesign efforts and the results. You can find it at b.link slash menu thread. One of the biggest changes in the last year to how Google decides how high up the search listings your site appears has been a relatively new metric called Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals is actually three metrics, how fast the biggest element of a page loads, how soon someone can interact with the page, and how much the layout jumps around.

Starting point is 00:03:29 While SEO pros have been talking this up, and third-party tools have been integrating measurement tools into their platform, Google themselves somewhat downplayed the importance of the metric. It's not that it wasn't important. Having good scores is good for a user experience, after all. But they said the only way they'd use it as any kind of ranking factor is in a tiebreaker situation. For instance, the ranking of two web pages with roughly the same content and relevancy

Starting point is 00:03:55 would be decided in that case on which had the better Web Vitals score. But now, Google seems to be adjusting that advice. Answering a question on Reddit this week, Google search advocate John Mueller said, It is a ranking factor, and it's more than a tiebreaker. But it also doesn't replace relevance. As an SEO professional, your job is to take all of the optimizations and figure out which ones are worth spending time on.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Any SEO tool will spit out tens or hundreds of recommendations. Most of those are going to be irrelevant to your site's visibility and search. Finding the items that make sense to work on takes experience, unquote. You can find the thread in the r slash SEO subreddit under the discussion called Anyone Else Not Buying Core Web Vitals? My favorite comment in the thread? As usual, you don't have to run faster than the bear. You just have to run faster than the other guy. By the way, Google has also put up a little quiz to test your SEO knowledge on crawling.

Starting point is 00:04:57 It's a pretty basic true and false test, but it's helpful if you want to get more up to speed on how Google's bought crawl's websites. Among the questions, Google prefers fresher content, so I'd better keep tweaking my page. That's false. Google prefers clean URLs and doesn't like query parameters. That's also false. And the faster your pages load and render, the more Google is able to crawl. That's true. You can take the little quiz yourself at b.link slash googlequiz.

Starting point is 00:05:32 If you wake up one morning to find your brand's Instagram account has been banned for some reason, you may have fallen victim to the latest scam circulating around the dark web. Basically, people are offering account ban services for as little as $60. You give them an account you want banned, and they'll get it removed. How? Either they'll take an existing verified account, change the name and photo to the victim's account, then report the victim's account as a copycat, or they'll just get a bunch of accounts to report it as promoting self-harm and suicide. Apparently, Instagram's enforcement bots are so tuned to that particular type of report

Starting point is 00:06:11 that they just shut accounts down with lots of reports in them. One scammer The Verge spoke to said it was so lucrative it was basically a full-time job for him. And that's where part two of the scam starts. Getting your account back. Quoting The Verge, many of the scam starts Getting your account back Quoting The Verge Many of the businesses offering banning services

Starting point is 00:06:29 Also offered help getting accounts back Sometimes for anywhere from $3,500 to $4,000 Some users noted that they received offers of account help Immediately after their accounts were disabled And that often the Instagram account that reported them was following the Instagram account that offered help, unquote. All that to say, if you run a brand account, do everything in your power to get it verified if you can.

Starting point is 00:06:59 You'll find the option in the Instagram app under Settings, then Account, then Request Verification. Speaking of scams, Google is apparently working on fixing a particularly nasty one, though I don't know it's fair to call it a scam. Basically, it involves someone putting up a Google My Business profile for some kind of service, like HVAC repair or window tinting or plumbers. But these companies didn't actually do that work. Instead, they ran a very simple website that looked like they had a local business, but in fact were just collecting leads, which the site owner would then sell to an actual local service business. A couple of weeks ago, one real business owner noticed that his business category

Starting point is 00:07:44 in Google My Business changed from tire store to wheel shop. In fact, this appeared to be happening on every similar business that didn't have an actual storefront address displayed. Turns out this is by design. Google said businesses that are set up only as service area businesses and not necessarily actual storefronts will not have access to certain categories. All this to help cut down on this strange local spam on Google Maps. Both Twitter and Facebook this week offered updated advice for agency people. In Twitter's case, they updated their agency playbook

Starting point is 00:08:22 with advice on creating more effective Twitter ad campaigns, including new usage insights, revised ad specs, case studies, and so on. Their original agency playbook had been around since 2019. Some of the data inside shows that ad engagements are on the rise and younger users are making up more of the audience talking about big issues. They also have a section about how to write good tweets. And I'm a little wary of this. Culturally, in the last year or two, Twitter's been leaning toward more informal language, quicker tweets. Even tweets that look like they've been hastily bashed out by an overworked intern. The playbook shows an example tweet from the HIMS skincare brand that's all lowercase

Starting point is 00:09:04 reading, we sell skincare brand that's all lowercase, reading, We sell skincare. It's really good. You can get it at Target. That's the tweet. Literally, the last line of the tweet reads, That's the tweet. Also interesting to note, Twitter's been advising brands lately to not use hashtags too much, in some cases recommending you avoid them entirely. They've also got some data on best practices and conversion tracking, as well as practice templates and a calendar of tweet

Starting point is 00:09:31 prompts for content planning. You can find the whole thing at b.link slash twitter playbook. And as I mentioned, Facebook too has its own help out this week in the form of a series of interviews with experts on responding to industry shifts and building effective Facebook ad campaigns. Which comes at a good time, says socialmediatoday.com, quote, because Facebook, like all digital platforms, is in the midst of a major advertising shift due to the increased focus on data privacy, which has led to both Apple and Google exploring new ways to provide capacity for users to stop apps from tracking their actions. That means less insight for advertisers to go in mapping out their campaigns. And as a result, marketers are being forced to develop new methods of gathering response insights and building their ad campaigns based on expanded inputs and considerations, unquote. In the first interview of the series, Facebook's head of marketing science spoke with a couple of agency folks on how they're coping with these tracking changes and some discussion

Starting point is 00:10:33 around video effectiveness. You can read the interview at b.link slash FB interview. 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. Yelp is introducing two new profile attributes, proof of vaccination required and staff fully vaccinated.

Starting point is 00:11:16 Attributes are little labels you can put on your profile. Others include black owned, LGBT owned and so on. And yes, users will be able to filter their searches for just those locations with that vaccination status. Interestingly, they also made a note in their announcement to say that they will be keeping a close eye on businesses that apply these attributes to their profiles. Apparently, in an attempt to watch for any hateful and harmful content on those business profiles. They say customer reviews that criticize a business's vaccination requirements violate their content guidelines. So far, they've deleted almost 8,000 reviews for violating those rules. This does, of course, seem to be more of a consideration for American businesses, since

Starting point is 00:11:59 out here in the rest of the 96% of the world's population, we consider vaccines a good thing. I know most of America does too, but I guess if you're in the U of the 96% of the world's population, we consider vaccines a good thing. I know most of America does too, but I guess if you're in the US, there's a political layer you've got to consider as well. After all, some people there believe the COVID virus was grown in an irradiated 5G nanomite particle factory and government compliance center headquartered in... Let's say China. Oh, and as for the quiz, what is the number of affiliate links on a single page that will result in a demotion in your Google ranking? The answer? There is no limit. It doesn't matter. Here's Google search advocate John Mueller. The amount of affiliate links that you have on a site is totally irrelevant.

Starting point is 00:12:46 The kind of ratio of links to article length is also totally irrelevant. But essentially what we need to find is a reason to show your site in search for users who are looking for something. And that reason is usually not the affiliate link, but the actual content that you provide on those pages. So from that point of view,

Starting point is 00:13:10 kind of trying to optimize the affiliate links or trying to hide the affiliate links or whatever you're trying to do there, I think is almost like wasted effort because that's not what we care about. We care about the content and kind of why we would show your pages in the first place. And if the content of your page is essentially

Starting point is 00:13:29 just a copy of a description from a bigger retailer site, then there's no reason for us to show your site, even if you had no affiliate links. So you really need to first have that reason to be visible in the search results, and then how you monetize your site or what links you place there, that's essentially irrelevant. The Friday Quiz is brought to you by EngageQ Digital.

Starting point is 00:13:52 We'll handle the engagement and moderation of your social channels so you can focus on building your brand. Check us out at engageq.com. And sponsor this quiz yourself for a whole month for less than $100. Visit todayindigital.com slash ads or tap the link in today's episode notes. Listen, why? Why, why, why, why? Why haven't you joined our Slack community yet? There are 500 digital marketers just like you there asking for help,

Starting point is 00:14:23 sharing advice, posting jobs. We have people from Connecticut to Nigeria, from El Paso, Texas, Thank you. head of local search at top SEO agency, Sterling Sky, the head of Brandify, talking about consumer behavior trends they've noticed with the thousands of Google My Business profiles under their management, like LA consultant, Michael Sanchez, on how he's taken brands from zero followers to millions on TikTok. Even an interview with my friend and sex blogger, Kate Sloan,

Starting point is 00:15:00 on how to crank out quality content when you are completely out of ideas. This content has never been on the podcast. You can only find it in our Slack community. It's free to join. Just tap the link in this episode's notes or go to todayindigital.com slash slack. Today in Digital Marketing is produced on beautiful Vancouver Island by EngageQ Digital. Production support and fact checking by Sarah Guild. and digital marketing is produced on beautiful Vancouver Island by EngageQ Digital. Production

Starting point is 00:15:25 support and fact-checking by Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Music licensing by Source Audio. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends, and I will talk to you on Monday. Bye. 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.C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - Want 60% More Conversions? Check Your Thumb.

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