The Latest Digital Marketing News with Site Strategics
More digital marketing news was on tap this week with Site Strategics CEO Erin Sparks and Digital Media Director Tom Brodbeck during the latest episode of their award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast. Episode 310 featured special guest Garrett Mehrguth, founder of Directive Consulting, who helped make sense of the latest trending news:
Google Search Console adds Discover report
As reported by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land, Google Search Console adds Discover report so sites that get a significant amount of traffic from Google Discover can make sense of the data it generates.
- Erin Sparks: Google Discover is what used to be Google Feed, which is just a way to quickly see things and topics that interest users.
- Tom Brodbeck: There are people who talk about there being about seven different sources of traffic from Google to your site that you wouldn’t know about because you don’t get any data about it. Well, for those who are keeping track, now that list is down to six. As an Android user, I use this feature a lot, so it’ll be interesting to see how this is incorporated into the report data there in the AMP stories.
- Garrett Mehrguth: I’d be more interested in knowing how a company can get into that Discover feed. I imagine Google is picking and choosing from vetted content publishers who are part of Google News and so forth.
New Google Search Commands – Before: and After:
From Greg Sterling on Search Engine Land, there are New Google Search Commands – Before: and After: for date-specific searching.
- Erin Sparks: The old way of doing date-specific searching was much more complicated and clunky. You had to pull in the calendar tool to make it happen. And there are tons of other search commands to help make searches more effective.
- Garrett Mehrguth: I do a lot of pragmatic searching, but haven’t had occasion to do much date-specific searching. However, as your site’s clicks change over time, it could be very useful to go back in time using date-specific search to pinpoint what you were doing compared to what you’re doing now. We work with Allstate on local SEO. Let’s say Allstate comes to us and says, “Hey, we know we’re doing better on organic, but we’re still losing clicks.” You could then take a keyword query, do the before command, and then see what has happened in terms of Google My Business cannibalization, Featured Snippet cannibalization and so on. And that, by the way, is why it’s so important to focus less on your website and more on your brand. If you’re inherently basing all your value tracking based on website visits, Google is inherently, especially for larger websites and larger enterprise players, decreasing the amount of traffic they’re sending to you through the properties of their engine. And so that is a use case. You could actually go see SERP functionality historically and then see how it’s changed, see if it has been indicative of click rates to your website.
Google’s Next Big Money Maker Could Be the Maps on Your Phone
Could Google’s Next Big Money Maker Be the Maps on Your Phone? This was reported by Gerrit De Vynck on Bloomberg Technology. Google Maps has been around for 14 years and has remained ad-free, but how long will that last? It’s already highlighting sponsored locations.
- Garrett Mehrguth: Considering Google bought Waze years ago, which is a GPS navigation app that would have given them both gamification and native ad capability in a maps app, the question is why they’ve waited so long to try this. But of the course the even bigger question is how will users respond? Will they leave and use other apps for an ad-free experience? That’s what will be interesting to see.
- Erin Sparks: Right. And the key will be whether or not they can monetize it while still maintaining enough integrity in the app’s functionality to keep people using it. It does have to be done right to pull it off and not make a mess of it. And it also has to bring some real additional value to users as well.
Connect with Garrett Mehrguth and Directive Consulting
Twitter: @gmehrguth (https://twitter.com/gmehrguth)
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gmehrguth
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrettmehrguth/
Directive Consulting: https://directiveconsulting.com
Directive Twitter: @DirectiveAgency (https://twitter.com/directiveagency)
Directive Facebook: @directiveconsulting (https://www.facebook.com/directiveconsulting)
Directive Instagram: @directiveconsulting (https://www.instagram.com/directiveconsulting)
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