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What will you find in April’s edition?
Don’t Let the Death of the Cookie Kill Your Conversions
SEO
Numerous Unconfirmed Algorithm Updates
Bot Traffic & SEO
Time to Optimise for Competitor Terms?
Paid Media
FLoC is Coming
Property Promotion Ads for Hotels Launched by Google
Content Marketing
New Content to get Stuck Into
Getting Creative & Client Wins: A Successful Site Migration for Happy Chef
Come January 2022, Google is waving goodbye to third-party cookies. This means that if you’re currently relying on highly targeted personalized ads which follow users around the internet, you’re going to need to change how you do things. Although 2022 feels like a while away yet, now’s the time to find out what changes you need to make to stop your conversions from taking a nosedive. If you take these things seriously (like we do), you can get ahead of the game using our brand-new free marketing guide, which will walk you through what you can do to keep or put your brand at the forefront.
Find out more about our cookie guide and download it for free.
March was a busy month in terms of suspected Google algorithm updates – although none were actually confirmed.
Many webmasters saw numerous shifts, possible updates and instability around the 3rd, 8th, 11th, 19th and 29th March. The shifts seen on March 11th appear to have been local focused, with the rest being more broad changes.
We haven’t heard anything yet, but there have been times when algorithm updates have only been acknowledged after a few months.
Koozai Tip: Keep monitoring your traffic and annotate your Google Analytics account so you know what is your Dev or SEO work and what is external.
SEO is often seen as how search engines view your website, and if you were receiving lots of spammy bot traffic that would be bad, right?
Well, not necessarily. According to Google’s John Mueller this traffic has no effect on your rankings.
There are other issues of course, such as making sure that your Analytics data is accurate and how big a load on your server these bots are among others. You should try and block all known bots through your GA settings and server-side security, but it can be difficult to stay ahead of the game.
Koozai Tip: It’s difficult to be proactive on new malicious activity, but you can stay up to date with the latest software versions and related news.
The knowledge panel has become ubiquitous in search results, but a new feature seems to be rolling out in it.
Some users in the US have seen a section for competitors labelled ‘Alternatives’ underneath the usual map and address information to the right of search results. This was only on some listings and appeared to be a test, but could it become a permanent fixture?
It’s too early to tell, but it could counteract those pesky competitor paid ads or give you visibility on your competitor terms. It would definitely act as a double edged sword though – letting you gain and lose traffic at the same time (but hopefully more on the gain side).
Koozai Tip: Keep ahead of competitors with more structured data and retain users with good reviews and customer service.
Search Engine Land describes FLoC as “a method for browsers to enable interest-based advertising. It works by gathering data about a user’s browsing habits and then clustering groups of users with similar interests into cohorts”.
Although advertisers have been awaiting the removal of third-party cookies for some time now, we now have some understanding of the tech that will be replacing it. This has generated questions and concerns from both users and advertisers, many of which are unlikely to be addressed until further testing occurs.
Koozai tip: As third-party cookies are phased out, advertisers are looking for new ways to adapt to make sure reporting and targeting is impacted as little as possible. FLoC appears to be the way forward, but nobody really knows what this looks like. There’s some steps that should be taken in the meantime to ensure you maximise your full first-party data gathering techniques. More on this can be found in our guide.
“While standard hotel booking link ads are meant for advertisers to capture a booking for a hotel a user already chose, property promotion ads are designed to enable advertisers to influence the buying decision for users still looking for a hotel,” said Peter Fernandez, Product Manager, Hotel Ads.
Koozai tip: These new ads position themselves at the top of the funnel rather than at the booking stage, like traditional hotel ads. They should be used for awareness and in the consideration phase to appear to users who search for ‘hotel in [location]’ based terms. With this, it’s likely that last click bookings might be low, but be sure to check on the assisted conversions that these campaigns generate as they may be doing more than the data suggests.
Our tip for this edition is around optimisation and tailoring your content. Whilst optimisation is incredibly important, don’t consider it the be-all and end-all for your content creation. You want to focus on tailoring your content for your target customer. Think about things like how will it help them and what value does it have? If you think about precisely who you’re speaking to alongside optimising for certain keywords, your content will have the best chance of ranking. The algorithm, after all, is not a person, but your customers are!
Want to know more about the importance of content? Check out this video from Search Engine Land.
We’ve always got some new blog content to cast your eyes over. Our Koozians have been busy putting blog content together so you have a great source of information for any SEO, Paid, Content or PR queries and questions. We’ve recently published the following:
Understanding Facebook Ad placements
How to find unlinked brand mentions in Ahrefs
Remember to keep checking back as multiple new posts go out each month.
We recently helped US-based chef uniform and accessories company, Happy Chef, smash their recent site migration. How do we know that? Well, post migration, we were delighted to report some fantastic results…
