In this weeks digital news to watch, our Senior Performance Marketing Manager, Tom, and Senior Performance Marketing Executive, Kylie, discuss the current talent crisis, revenue drop due to changes in cookies, how to improve SEO and the latest updates from Google.
Advertisers are silent about the talent crisis
There is a current talent crisis due to employees not feeling valued in the workplace. This however is not being responded to by advertisers. It is difficult to pinpoint whether advertisers do not recognise the issue in full effect, or whether they believe they can cope with what they currently have.
The issue that comes with the talent shortage is that the cost for talent is increasing due to the shortage. Agencies have adopted the false mentality that they can pay lowest market rates for the brightest people which is deterring the best talent. The drum have highlighted 3 ways in which agencies can retain and nurture their employees.
10-25% revenue drop to be expected by over half of UK marketers
Due to the changes being made to the web to increase users data privacy settings including the reduction of the use of third-party cookies, 52% of senior digital marketers agree that they can expect a 10-25% revenue drop. 41% of digital marketers also expressed their concerns regarding Apple’s new iOS update which involved higher privacy settings.
Google have extended their deadline on depreciating their third-party cookies to 2023. This has given marketers and publishers some breathing space to figure out their next moves, however they must not become complacent as this time will come around quickly.
Using bold text can help your Google SEO
By using bolded text for important highlights within text can help the Google algorithm understand the article better and improve SEO confirms Google’s John Mueller. It was revealed that bold or italicised text is highlighted by Google’s page crawlers and give clearer indication on what the content is about. However, bold text will only improve SEO if the bolded text is relevant to the entire document, and bolding the entire text will have no effect at all.
Google testing IndexNow protocol
Google have announced they will be testing the new IndexNow protocol, following the introduction of this by Microsoft Bing and Yandex a few weeks ago. Google hope that the test will allow them see whether they can improve their overall efficiency and sustainability by using this protocol, as they aim to be carbon-free by 2030.
IndexNow allows site owners to instantly notify search engines about new, updated or deleted content on their site, so that they don’t have to wait for it to be found by bots and reflected in search results. As we said before, this is good news for SEOs so we would definitely recommend adding this protocol to your site if you want to speed up the indexing of your site.
John Mueller confirms its “hard to call a site authoritative after 30 articles”
Google reinforced the importance of posting regular content to your site last week on a Reddit thread last week, where a poster asked Google why their new content wasn’t being indexed despite them thinking their site was authoritative. The poster claimed their new content was not being indexed even after a manual submission.
John Mueller was quick to confirm there was no problems with their crawling and indexing systems at the minute, and instead it was likely that they are just choosing not to index the site as it has been lacking content updates recently. Mueller confirmed that if a site hasn’t been publishing content for a while, Google won’t just automatically start indexing immediately again when a new content piece is published, it will be more selective about what it deems worthwhile to index.
This really reinforces the need for regular content to be posted on sites for SEO purposes, so if you don’t already have one, we’d recommend making a long term content plan to follow, trying to upload these as regularly as possible to support your products, services and site overall.
If you need any help with your digital marketing, please get in touch with our team of specialists at team@modo25.com
