What will you find in our February 2022 edition?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)study of Digital marketing experts reveals 2022’s most underrated ranking factors. Google confirm their largest local algorithm update in 5 Years. Google announces Search Console URL Inspection Tool API
Paid Media (PPC & Paid Social)Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to be transitioned to Performance MaxGoogle tests bulleted lists in adsFacebook shifts to short-form TikTok style videos
Digital PR, Link Building & Content MarketingNearly half of SEOs would buy spammy backlinks this year, finds pollContent Strategy: Surprising new stat shows why you shouldn’t just follow the dataLink Building: Google say reciprocal links aren’t always bad.
When it comes to SEO and driving traffic to your website, we all know that there are a huge number of variables that go into ensuring that your website can rank as highly as possible in search engines. In fact, Google states that it uses over 200 ranking factors in total to help it determine which results to serve for key terms! All of this can make knowing exactly where to aim your SEO strategy and resources a seemingly impossible task if you’re not an SEO specialist and don’t have your ear to the ground.
Given this, we decided to ask our SEO experts and a select panel of eight industry leading Digital marketingfor their thoughts on what their experience reveals to be the most underrated SEO ranking factors in 2022. Internal linking, trending content and topical authority were firm favourites. Read more about our study to find out which SEO ranking factors to look out for this year.
In recent weeks Google announced one of the largest updates in the local search algorithm for over 5 years. Titled the ‘Vicinity Update’, local businesses saw an increased volatility within the local map pack on Google search. In this update, proximity has become an even more influential ranking factor which means that the closer the business is to the searcher, the higher they are likely to show in the map pack search results.
If you’re a local business looking to rank higher in local search, you may find that now more than ever before you’ll struggle to show up for searches if your business is not in a central location which is associated with a higher search volume. To combat this, make sure that your GMB profile carefully targets all the associated territories or areas that your business serves.
In many cases, it can be better to use a ‘service area’ instead of a singular location as you may show for searches within a larger proximity. If all else fails and you’re really struggling to gain traction in a new service area, town or city, you may need to consider opening a new GMB location in the centre of your target location.
SEO tools, such as Screaming Frog, will soon be able to pull through even more information from GSC, which will help webmasters and businesses get a better understanding of the pages on their site.
Digital marketing tools will now be able to pull through data points such as:Is the URL indexableIs the URL included in the sitemap,Does the URL have a canonical tag What are the referring URLs of the pageWhat’s the robots.txt status of the page
(plus more)
We can’t wait for Screaming Frog to update their software so that we can see these insights whenever we crawl a website, ready for us to do a full technical website audit and SEO analysis.
Google Ads will automatically transition existing Smart Shopping campaigns into Performance Max campaigns between July and September 2022. Local campaigns will automatically be transitioned between August and September 2022. The company will also launch a “one-click” self-service tool in Google Ads for advertisers that would like to transition specific Smart Shopping or Local campaigns ahead of the dates mentioned above.
This is a significant change to how Smart Shopping and Local campaigns work. Advertisers that don’t want to transition those campaigns over to Performance Max should begin exploring other options, as these campaign types (as we know them) will disappear by the end of September.
Performance Max Campaigns enable advertisers to access all of Google Ads’ inventory in a single campaign. This includes Search, Display and YouTube. We set the goal, define the assets and allow Google to use machine learning and automation to get the best results. We’d recommend testing Performance Max Campaigns before the switch over to see how they work for you. It is recommended that you run these alongside existing campaigns before switching over completely.