Digital Marketing News 02/01/2022 – 02/07/2022

Web

Wix Upgrades SEO Capabilities with Deepcrawl Integration

Wix Gets an SEO Update through a partnership with Deepcrawl, bringing enterprise-grade technology to eCommerce sites.

An exclusive app built for Wix now offers Deepcrawl's SEO technology to aid better website performance and identify opportunities for digital growth. Users can now monitor their website's health, identify SEO opportunities, and automatically check website coding errors impacting web performance.

The Deepcrawl app for Wix is built with an intuitive user interface that makes enterprise-grade SEO technology accessible even to non-SEO experts. The app also automates weekly website crawls and detects issues and errors that may impact the site's presence in the search engine results page, such as dead-end links, broken pages, and content that doesn't meet SEO best practices. Once detected, Deepcrawl will provide actionable information on how to fix errors.

Nati Elimelech, Tech SEO Lead at Wix, states in a press release, "In partnering with Deepcrawl, Wix is taking another notable step in democratizing SEO and giving all types of users functionalities and capabilities that were previously only available to large enterprises. We look forward to continuing to expand our SEO capabilities to meet the needs of web professionals and businesses today."

Deepcrawl app is now available in Wix Premium through the Wix App Market.

Social

YouTube CEO Defends Removal of Dislike Count

Dislike counts on YouTube won't come back, CEO Susan Wojcicki stands behind the decision of removing this counter. 

Wojcicki reiterates what we've already heard before from YouTube spokespeople, highlighting that the dislikes were removed because sometimes it reflects viewers' perception of the channel and not the video itself.

"We heard from many of you about the removal of public dislike counts on YouTube, and I know this decision was controversial. Some of you mentioned dislikes helped you decide what videos to watch.

However, people dislike videos for many reasons, including some that have nothing to do with the video, which means it's not always an accurate way to select videos to watch.

That's why dislikes were never shown on the home page, search results, or Up Next screens where users were most likely to choose a video."

In addition, Wojcicki repeats the company's standing that removing dislikes sitewide was due to "dislike attacks" to select channels. "We also saw the dislike count harming parts of our ecosystem through dislike attacks as people actively worked to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator's videos."

The dislike button remains on the site, and creators can find their dislike counts in YouTube Studio. It will continue to be factored into recommendation algorithms suggested to users on the home page.

PPC

New Google Partners program Can Help Advertisers Achieve New Levels of Growth

Google aligns partner benefits to industry changes and user feedback. 

Three key areas for this new Google Partners program and benefits update are focused on: Education & Insights, Access & Support, and Recognition & Rewards.

The top 3% of partners in each country annually have achieved Premier Partner status, garnering a wide range of exclusive, high-value benefits, including: 

• Product betas – Ongoing access to current product betas.

• Advanced Google Ads support – Access to 24-hour advanced ads support.

• Executive experiences – Attend invite-only industry events such as roundtable discussions with Google leaders, sessions with other Premier Partners, and opportunities to hear from industry thought leaders.

• Premier Partner Awards – Highlights excellence in digital marketing.

• Newley redesigned 2022 Premier Partner badge – Signals you're recognized as a leading partner.

• High-value incentives – Receive Google Ads credits for your clients. 

All Google partners and Premier Partners in select markets will also get access to monthly Insights Briefing from Think with Google. Starting late February, all Partners will also be listed in the new Google Partners directory—available to advertisers looking for a partner. 

You can apply as a Google Partner through these guidelines.

PPC

Google Ads and Microsoft Bing Ads reported a 32% Increase in Advertiser Revenues

Microsoft reported  "search and news advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs increased 32%. In parallel, Google (Alphabet) reported the same 32% increase in revenue when combining Google Ads, Youtube Ads, and other Google networks, including Google AdSense.  

Overall, Google's fourth-quarter revenues of $75 billion, up 32% year over year, and Microsoft's quarterly revenue was $51.7 billion, which was an increase of 20%.

Search

Google Says Emojis Won't Help or Hurt SEO

Emojis in page titles and meta description is allowed, but they won't affect SEO.

John Mueller, Google's Search Advocate, confirms during the Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout recorded on January 28. One of the submitted questions asks for an update on Google's position on using emojis in titles and meta descriptions. 

It was confirmed that the use of emojis in webpage titles and descriptions would neither hurt nor help SEO as it's not against any of Google's guidelines. However, there's no guarantee that Google will show them in search results. If the emojis are disruptive or make the search snippet look misleading, Google won't display them. Instead, they'll figure out the equivalent word and use that.

"You can definitely use emojis in titles and descriptions on your pages. We don't show all of these in the search results, especially if we think that it kind of disrupts the search results in terms of, it looks misleading perhaps, or those kinds of things. But you can definitely keep them there, it's not that they cause any problems. I don't think you would have any significant advantage in putting those there, because at most what we try to figure out is what is the equivalent of that emoji and maybe use that word as well, kind of associated with the page."

However, Google won't give more weight to titles and descriptions with emojis. "But it's not that you get an advantage for kind of like, oh you have a colorful title kind of thing. So from that point of view, if you like to have these in your titles and descriptions, go for it. If you don't want them there then that's fine too. I don't think it kind of hurts or harms SEO or helps SEO in any way."

PPC

Google Ads rolls out Updates to Discovery Campaigns

Google Ads Introduces a new set of recommendations for Discovery and Video campaigns. 

New set of recommendations include: 

• Discovery Optimization Score

• Auto-applied recommendations

• YouTube campaign optimizations

Until now, Google Ads Optimization Score only includes Search, Display, Shopping, and Video campaigns. Now Discovery campaigns will show a 0-100% score, with 100% indicating that the campaign is at their full potential. Through your Discovery recommendations, you will be notified of the following:

• Fixing disapproved assets

• Audience updates or how to show ads to more customers 

• Using optimized targeting to get more conversions

The second update is within auto-applied recommendations, now letting you auto-apply Google's campaign recommendations at the manager account-level. This means you no longer have to go not individual accounts and apply recommendations manually. There are 22 recommendations you can auto-apply as of now, and the newest updates include improving your responsive search ads and upgrading your conversion tracking.

Lastly, video campaign optimization updates of Google Ads include setting up product feeds, setting up Google Analytics 4, and upgrading your conversion tracking. Cross-platform measurement will help you track conversions accurately if you use video campaigns for top-of-funnel marketing.

What you can do next

• If your site is hosted on Wix, time to explore if Deepcrawl gives you what you need to catapult your organic search engine presence.

• Include basic emojis to give visual appeal to your pages on search snippets and improve click-through rate.

• Apply now as a Google Partner and reap the benefits of insights straight from the top search engine in the industry.

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