Our Senior Performance Marketing Manager, Tom, and Senior Performance Marketing Executive, Kylie, discuss this week’s top digital headlines. The biggest news this week is about Primark beefing up its digital marketing for 2022. Plus, Google is still using its original page titles for ranking despite the update. Also, Google has released its Lighthouse update, Facebook’s new ad automation feature, and the reasons why small businesses need more than ever.
Here are this week’s five digital headlines to watch:
Primark beefing up its digital marketing
Primark has always been one to shun digital, with a non-transactional site, their online presence has been minimal. But now, Primark is placing digital marketing at the centre of its strategy with an increase in ‘personalised content’. Alongside this, an improved customer-facing site is coming in 2022. With internet retailing bigger than ever, even physical-only stores are looking to move marketing online.
Google still uses original Page Titles for ranking despite an update
Google’s John Mueller has confirmed that the original page title set by the site owner will still be used for ranking purposes, even when it is re-written in the SERPs.
Following our first update on this a couple of weeks ago, when the update itself was still unconfirmed, we have since seen Google confirm this and now begin to answer concerned SEO’s questions from this. In response to a question during a Google Search Central SEO hangout, Mueller confirmed that currently the original page title is still used for rankings. He did not, however, rule out this changing in the future.
Mueller addressed a question that has regularly come up since. The question is ‘should site owners change their titles to the ones Google re-writes?’ Mueller does not recommend doing this. This is because ultimately you know your site better than Google. However, he did acknowledge that the re-written version may give you some inspiration.
Google Lighthouse Update 8.3.0
Google Lighthouse, the technology behind PageSpeed Insights and Chrome Dev Tools, has been updated to version 8.3.0 to fix some bug issues and provide ongoing improvements.
Alongside some of the incremental improvements Lighthouse is working on, the most important part of this update is the start of Project Fraggle Rock – the first step towards measuring what happens after the page load. The tools we use currently measure things like how long it takes for the page to become interactive, but this next step is to measure and analyse the user flows after this, such as when a user completes an action like clicking a button and measuring what happens next.
Facebook’s new ad automation feature
Facebook is rolling out a new feature to help customers with their ad campaigns. This feature called ‘Ad Strategies’ will streamline ad creation by automating the setup process. For power users, this will likely have little impact but for new users, this will allow them to build funneled campaigns with less overall knowledge.
The reasons small businesses need marketing agencies
96% of SMBs say they would be willing to pay marketing agencies for their services outside of marketing including things like workshops and training. The suggestion being that agencies can continue to provide value outside of traditional marketing services. The research also found that SMBs that worked with an agency were 82% more likely to grow during the pandemic.
The indication is that there is still demand for agencies and additional services combined. Due to the fact that SMBs do better when working with a marketing partner.
Are you looking for digital marketing support? Drop us an email at team@modo25.com for an informal chat. We look forward to discovering how we can support you with your digital marketing success – let’s work together.
