Search Engine Roundtable Podcast

Google has finished rolling out both the September 2022 core update and product reviews update on Monday, September 26th - yes, there is a lot of confusion. Google fixed a bug with the local search rankings and service area businesses. Google had its big Search On event, I recap most of it. Google product review updates do get periodic updates that may not be announced. Google said if you don’t know if your content is written expertly, then it probably is not. Google said there is no percentage of measurement for duplicate content. Google really wants you to avoid changing URLs just for SEO reasons. Google said page speed issues won’t lead to a site being removed from Google Search. Google is testing the Google Search Cookbook. Google Search talks about when a brand outranks the generic meaning of the word. Google is testing a more like this search feature. Bing is testing traffic analysis in the search results. Microsoft Bing is also testing a web label. Google Ads continues to suffer from latency issues. Google Local Service ads dropped the license number from the listings. Google's John Mueller now is offering to review parts of your public presentation for accuracy. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

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Marguarite (Maggie) Humphrey worked at Cypress North as an intern back in 2019, then went to DAC for a few years, and then back to Cypress North after I interviewed her. Maggie was born in Rochester and met Greg Finn at an RV and Marine industry and Greg offered her an internship. Maggie credited Greg and Cypress a lot for her career, which is always nice to hear.

Maggie started her job at DAC literally a week before DAC closed the office due to COVID. She went fully remote for a full year and then returned to the office and it felt interesting but she is fully back in the office.

At DAC she started as an Account Executive and then became an Associate and has taken on a lot of responsibility for one of their biggest clients. DAC is based out of Toronto but has offices all over, even internationally.

Maggie does both SEO and PPC, so a nice mix of search marketing for this one brand. They manage thousands of locations for that brand, and these smaller franchises have to work harder to develop their own brands and she loves this type of work. Each franchise is owned by a different business and they are somewhat complete. A lot of it is targeting local-specific keywords for the different franchises. We spoke about some of the complications around this type of work.

You can follow Maggie Humphrey on LinkedIn and connect there.

In this week's video, we cover how Google said they try not to overlap search algorithm updates but then announced the rollout of the fifth product reviews update before the core update was done. We also dug into the product reviews update and what we are seeing from it. There is a bug with Google Ads preventing some ads from serving for the past day or more. The other week, Google released a new HTTPS report in Search Console, well, it is causing a lot of confusion. Google’s John Mueller posted what he considers to be a quality issue with a site. Google Search Console’s international targeting report is now really gone. Google said it de-duplicates based on almost duplicates as well. An SEO survey says that SEOs find link acquisition the most challenging part of SEO, and this year. Google is testing highlighting text in the people also ask box. Google is testing placing the image thumbnail in a different location in the top stories carousel. Google is also testing two people also ask results. Bing is testing colored sitelinks box. Google Ads self-upgrade tool is rolling out for local campaigns to performance max campaigns. Also, Monday and Tuesday are a Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashanah, and I will be offline but my site will have scheduled posts - however some folks turn off their site and John Mueller shared tips on how to turn off your site, temporarily, in these cases. Also, I am offline Monday and Tuesday for Rosh Hashanah, happy Jewish new year. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

SPONSOR: This week's video recap is sponsored by Duda, the Professional Website Builder You Can Call Your Own.

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In part one, we learned more about Christine Zirnheld, aka Shep, the Digital Marketing Manager at Cypress North and a co-host on Marketing O’Clock. We also spoke about her being a PPC hypocrite specific with broad match and its powers, in some cases.

In this part, we talk more about the powers of Performance Max Campaigns with Google Ads. She said Performance Max Campaigns does work well for people, including in her own campaigns. The AI is taking over, but she still has some job security she said. But this also is worth testing and trying out because it seems to work well.

We then spoke more about some of their internal meetings about what they learned the previous week. I tried to get her to tell us the craziest thing anyone said or did during the meeting but she didn’t share anything that crazy. So I shared something insane I did once.

We spoke a bit more about social media and her fear of sharing on social. So I shared a story of how I learned from stuff I share online.

You can follow Shep on Twitter @shepzirnheld and make sure to subscribe to Marketing O'Clock.

What a week, we had the launch of the September 2022 core update that started off strong and fast. Google confirmed the helpful content update is done rolling out but I bet most of you didn’t notice anything. Google even possibly had a local search ranking update, or it might be some ranking bug. Google also may be showing fewer featured snippets, maybe. Google Maps review guidelines now disallow incentivizing customers to remove or replace negative reviews. Google said word count is not a thing and even dropped the article too short Search Console error. Google expanded Merchant listings, added new structured data properties and added two new Search Console reports for products. Google also added a new HTTPS report in Search Console. The URL Inspection tool screenshot render feature now seems twice as long. Google is testing highlighted featured snippets, in yellow and blue. Google said crawl spikes aren’t global but rather on a per site basis. Google consolidated its A/B testing help content into a new document in the help section. Google Ads renamed ad extensions to assets and added new streamlined tools. Google Ads has a new page to see all automatically applied recommendations in one bundled place. Google Ads scripts now supports Performance Max campaigns. That was this past week in search at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Sponsored by Wix, check out their new Wix SERP's Up Podcast, I was a recent guest.

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Christine Zirnheld, aka Shep, is a Digital Marketing Manager at Cypress North, is a co-host on Marketing O'Clock, and has been with the company for over four years. Shep came from her maiden name Shepherd and Greg Finn gave him the nickname of Shep, although Greg does not have a nickname. This vlog went out on tons of tangents, I was having fun, I am sorry.

We quickly spoke about how it is hard to be insulted when doing podcasting, writing, and vlogging in this space. Then we jumped into her professional career and why she is where she is. Christine wanted to go to FIT, Fashion Institute of Technology, to go into fashion but was told not to go to school for fashion and first went to school in Buffalo. In any event, to make a long story short, she got a job doing some marketing jobs and then jumped to work in an agency. We spoke about fashion, New York City and buffalos, and other animals. We then also spoke about how boring SEO is compared to PPC.

Shep then spoke about how she is a PPC hypocrite and we stayed on that topic for some time. Specifically, she mentioned how broad match is not that bad and she has seen recent success with it. Shep noticed that using smart bidding, target ROARS, or target CPA, with broad match, has worked pretty well. The results are showing conversions and she is super happy to be proven wrong.

In short, give broad match in specific cases a try, you might be surprised. The moral of the story, test, and test again.

You can follow Shep on Twitter @shepzirnheld and make sure to subscribe to Marketing O'Clock.

This week, I posted the large Google webmaster report a bit late but then dug into the Google helpful content in a lot more detail, so check that out. Google updated the review type results in search which may impact your Search Console reporting. Google Analytics made changes to the Google Ads search query reports for privacy reasons. Google ads have a new set of setup columns. Google Ads will drop top content bidding strategies next month. Google Ads will disapprove ads that don’t see the Better Ads Standards. Google updated its traffic quality site to add more examples of invalid traffic. Microsoft Advertising released a bunch of new features. Google Business Profiles photos is testing showing timestamps. Google is testing a new format for the SEO office hours. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

SPONSOR: This week's video recap is sponsored by Semrush.

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This week, again from Jerusalem, I spoke about this weird rollout for the Google helpful content update. It is weak and slow, but Google did release a form to submit feedback, while the update is not just yet done rolling out (at least at the time of preparing this video on Friday morning around 1 am Friday ET. Google’s John Mueller said there had been no recent search algorithms focusing on links, outside of spam algorithms. Google’s Gary Illyes said soft 404s do waste crawl budget, he also said that Google can crawl different sections of your site differently and access quality differently. Google may remove the word count from the Search Console help documents. Google is testing quick-read icons in Google Search. Google learning video structured data broke out education level by country. Google local business structured data does not support additional types for multiple listings. Google said the growth of microdata is stagnant. Google added a products section to the Google Business Profile guidelines. Did Google remove the review gating policy in Google Maps? Google is testing attribute-based reviews for Local Guides. Google Ads confirmed a big with the share and auction insights report. Google Ads has a new conversion value rules feature. Microsoft Advertising RSAs deadline was expected again. Bill Slawski's SEO By The Sea went offline but the hosting company reactivated it out of respect for the legend. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week from Jerusalem at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Sponsored by BruceClay who has been doing search marketing optimization since 1996 and also has an amazing SEO training platform.

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In part one, we learned about Jill Fecher, Chief Growth Officer at Cypress North. We learned about her past history in marketing, why she joined Cypress North, what she does there, and the importance of job titles and descriptions. In part two we talk about the importance of podcasting for agencies and business development at agencies.

Jill explained that it took a while for Marketing O'Clock to see any metrics and she is experiencing this herself with her new podcast named Agency O’Clock. She explained the payoff of a podcast is a creative outlet to discuss something that may not go somewhere in your job. She hopes her topics are interesting to people but right now, it is an outlet for her - and that is cool.

She also might email an episode to a prospect or client that she finds would be relevant or useful to a conversation she was having with that individual. I explained, you know you made it when that prospect or client emails you that article or podcast without knowing you wrote it or recorded it.

It is hard to track conversions with these podcast efforts, but they know they get leads from it. But I doubt they would stop doing it anyway, they learn a lot from it and it makes them and the community happy.

We then spoke about the differences between doing business development at a traditional agency versus a digital marketing agency. She said it is very different, with a traditional agency, she sold stuff that was more creative or subjective - so her efforts were more relationship based. She was constantly forging new relationships and nurturing old relationships so that she would be included in RFPs and pitch to them. Now, she doesn’t really do any RFPs, for the most part. But the goal was to have such a good relationship that you didn’t have to do an RFP.

In the digital marketing agency, she doesn’t really do RFPs, instead, the relationships are performances based. So her new clients come from people who used their services before, know they can see the version, know what the ROI will be, understand how many leads they might get, and so on.

They know that they can deliver in a digital marketing agency but with the traditional agency it was more about, did they get a newspaper ad insert or a TV spot but it was hard to impossible to track if those converted.

We then spoke a bit more about the topic of tracking and analytics around traditional ads and how it was such a joke. I brought up the AOL search data leak a while back and now how we are losing more and more tracking. I feel like one day we might go back to not being able to track anything.

In traditional agencies there is a lot more emphasis on “industry knowledge,” specializing in a specific industry is super important. That is not the case with digital marketing agencies, it is all about the goals, she said.

You can learn more about Jill Fecher at Cypress North or on LinkedIn and subscribe to the Cypress North YouTube channel.

Google has begun rolling out the helpful content update on Thursday, August 25th. Many SEOs say they are not concerned about this update. Google also seemed to release some sort of update on August 24th. Google Search Console’s video indexing report is now live for all. Google said it will deprecate the international targeting report on September 22nd. Google has updated the core web vitals report to show URL level data for example URLs. Google’s API was not impacted by the Search Console indexing label bug. Google said the quality raters guidelines are not a collection of ranking tips. Google said don’t noindex pages with comments, instead, make sure the comments are high quality. Google added content guidelines for the education Q&A structured data. Google added a “view all business profiles” link in the web search. Google Discover now lets you hide content from a specific author. Google Ads is automatically upgrading some local campaigns to use performance max. Google Ads has no plans for new ad customizers using locations of responsive search ads. Google is testing a new local service ads user experience. Also, Google Local Service Ads is testing excluding areas. Google Maps is now notifying users when their reviews are not posted. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week from Jerusalem at the Search Engine Roundtable.

SPONSOR: This week's video recap is sponsored by Duda, the Professional Website Builder You Can Call Your Own. Join DudaCon for a 3-day online event packed with professional sessions to take your SEO game to the next level. Learn about SEO audits for conversions, Content Gap Analysis and Local SEO best practices directly from leading industry experts. (September 13-15, online)

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