Stay Ahead this Spring ??: Must-Reads, Podcasts, and Industry Updates
Katherine Watier Ong
Enterprise SEO | Accomplished multi-industry digital marketer | CEO@ WO Strategies. Host of the Digital Marketing Victories podcast. Talks about #journals #.gov #associations, #SEO and #AI
Spring in DC is the best season. It’s not great if you have allergies. There are flowers blooming everywhere, and I’ve been wrapping my client calls and deliverables around enjoying the cherry blossoms, tulip fields, and azaleas. It’s been a nice break from the crushing speed of updates from the digital marketing space.? I hope you’ve also been enjoying spring. Let’s get into the updates below:
New Podcast Episode?
Learn how to increase your emotional resilience and manage change more effectively with Lloyed Lobo! Join us as he recounts his journey from the chaos of the Gulf War to triumph in tech. Learn how resilience and a supportive community helped pave his path to success in digital marketing.
?? Listen Now!
Must Read Industry Research
Where users spend their time online
This is a great ?research piece you need to check out. All digital marketers should be making cross-channel strategies to get in front of their target audience where they spend their time (vs. which channels send the most web referrals).
As Rand puts it, “The web is a big, diverse place and people consume content, learn about products/services/brands, and form opinions about which problems to solve, what to prioritize, who to trust, and where to go next outside of search engines.”?
Everything Google Lied to Us About - Pubcon Las Vegas 2024
This deck by Mic King is SO good. Great tools inside as well. I plan to read it five more times to ensure it all sinks in.
Google Announcements and Updates
Google's March 2024 Core Update
Hundreds of websites have been deindexed. This update targeted low-quality content and spam, and the update aligns with a study by Originality.ai , which found a high prevalence of AI-generated content among the affected websites. Read more here .?And here’s a link to the Originality study .?Here’s Google's language about the update:
"This update involves refining some of our core ranking systems to help us better understand if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people. This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.
We believe these updates will reduce the amount of low-quality content on Search and send more traffic to helpful and high-quality sites. Based on our evaluations, we expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%.”
Here is Google’s response ?to the update related to what you should or shouldn’t do.
Google Clarifies Page Experience & Core Web Vitals Related To Search Rankings
This is a snippet of the new language :
“Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems. We recommend site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with Search and to ensure a great user experience generally. Keep in mind that getting good results in reports like Search Console's Core Web Vitals report or third-party tools doesn't guarantee that your pages will rank at the top of Google Search results.”?
It is still worth emulating your target user’s experience with your website based on their device and connection speed - especially if it’s slow.?
Google rolled out new spam policies.
Google has new/changed search spam policies, which include:
1. Spam Update (with new spam policies ) that explicitly targets:
2. Quality Rater Guidelines Update
Google started testing AI overviews from SGE in the main Google search interface for non-beta users.?
Learn more ?about it.
New head of search at Google
Google has a new head of Search — and she’s all in on AI. Pandu Nayak, a longtime executive overseeing ranking and quality, will now be the chief scientist of Search. More here .
Google has integrated AI into Slides.
Gemini is now available to help you with your slides. You just need to be registered with the Workplace Labs program.
Authoritas’ Google SGE study
It is the only tool on the market currently that tracks SGE rankings. Here are the highlights from the report :
Google’s perspective feature is now “forums.”
Other updates:?
Bing Announcements
Desktop Bing searches are increasing.
Also, Bing powers DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ask, Ecosia, Swisscows, Windows, Copilot, and more. More here .
Head of Bing Search & Microsoft Advertising Leaves
Bing Deep Search is officially live for all users.
Read the details here .
Bing Webmaster Tools Provides you with IndexNow and SEO Insights
It tells you if your inbound links are inadequate if your content quality is too low, if there's no XML sitemap, or if it's suspicious that you have duplicate content. You should check it out.
Bingbot & Brotli compression
Bingbot now supports Google's new compression format .
AI Updates
OpenAI Makes Links More Prominent in ChatGPT
The browse feature ?is available in ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise.
Feds get serious about AI use.
Every US federal agency must hire a chief AI officer and ?provide OMB with a yearly list of AI systems that they use with the risks for each.
A Marketer's AI Survival kit
This piece by Wil Reynolds ?is a must-read for every digital market.
领英推荐
EU AI Act
The Act mentions : “Providers will also have to ensure that AI-generated content is identifiable. AI-generated text published with the purpose to inform the public on matters of public interest must be labeled as artificially generated. This also applies to audio and video content.”
Other updates:?
Companies will most likely be liable for what their AI says it does .
Technical SEO
Google’s goal is to crawl less
Check out Gary Illyes's post ; they are not interested in using IndexNow.
411 about Compression Using Shared Dictionaries?
Useful Information about the shared dictionaries ?for Brotli and ZStandard ?with an explainer video.
INP Explainer video from Google Search Console
Check out the video here: Deciphering INP and Core Web Vitals .
Content
Wikipedia’s Reliable Website List
A great find by Glenn Gabe. You can see the list here .
Humans are being fired as Quality Raters & replaced by LLM As Quality Raters for Search Engines
Check out Dawn’s presentation here .
EEAT Your Soup - Quality Evaluations in SEO by Cindy Krum
Cindy likens EEAT signals to a soup, with various ingredients affecting the flavor, suggesting that EEAT evaluations are not binary but involve nuanced thresholds and that EEAT signals can vary depending on the topic and query context. Watch the video here .
Page Quality Rating Scorecard created by a former Human Rater
Grab the Google Page Quality Rating Scorecard .
Social Media
Gen Z prefers to research brands on social media over search engines.
Pinterest shares algorithm insights as it shifts focus to non-engagement signals
The elements include how to tune for emotional well-being and how to retain users .
TikTok Updates
Local SEO
Video Optimization
SEO Measurement
This is my reading/watching list from last month:
Soft Skills
How to get technical SEO recommendations implemented
Get the tips and guide ?from Aleyda.
I love Aleyda’s communicating the value of SEO based on role:
Agile for SEOs?
How in-house teams get projects prioritized . It's worth reading and bookmarking if you’re working with an Agile shop.
Free Soft Skills University of Cambridge Courses
New Tools & Resources
Here are the new tools and resources I discovered last month:
Feedback & Suggestions
Would you like to share a great resource? If you want to be featured, have a great resource, want to sponsor, or provide feedback for this newsletter, just reply to this email and let me know.
So many updates! You get a free 30-minute consultation with?me ?if you make it to the end of this email. Until next month!
Best,
Katherine
Freelance Graphics Designer (Seeking job in Graphic Design)
6 个月Great Post