In this week’s digital news to watch, our Senior Performance Marketing Manager Tom and Senior Performance Marketing Executive Kylie, discuss search traffic, Meta descriptions, Google’s new advertising features, performance max campaigns and Google’s keyword planner tool.
Double your search traffic with eight white hat tricks
You can outsmart your competitors in search results by addressing Google’s key factors with these eight white hat tricks. According to Google, the top five factors that the algorithms take into consideration are; the meaning of your query, the relevance of the webpages, the content quality, the usability of the webpages and context and settings. With that in mind, the eight white hat tricks for outperforming your competitors:
- Mobile-first approach
- Claim your business listings
- Enhance your page experience
- Pay more attention to user experience
- Keyword research
- Have a comprehensive marketing plan in place
- Optimise your webpages
- Include links for link building
Does Meta Description matter for rankings? Google’s response.
Google’s John Mueller has spoken out about whether Meta descriptions matter for search rankings. A Twitter user posed this question to John: “Does adding the location name in the meta description matter to Google in terms of ranking if the content quality is maintained?” John Muller was quick to respond with this statement:
“So the meta description is primarily used as a snippet in the search results page. And that’s not something that we would use for ranking. But obviously, having a good snippet on a search results page can make it more interesting for people to actually visit your page when they see your page ranking in the search results.”
A sneak peek of Google’s new advertising features
With Google’s live marketing conference sitting on the horizon, Google has leaked a preview of their new advertising features. One of the features that will be coming to Google Ads is improved responsive display ads. Under this umbrella comes improvements to mobile layouts, machine learning and image un-cropping.
To welcome the new changes, Google has launched the creative inspiration hub which is available now and is a home on the web to seek inspiration for advertising creativity. Within the creative inspiration hub advertisers can see real-life working advert examples of Discovery, Display, Apps, and YouTube campaigns that have been successful. The features will be officially announced at Google Marketing Live on May 24.
Revenue growth in Google Ads is being driven by performance max campaigns
Google reported strong growth in revenue in Q1 thanks to performance max campaigns. Google reported $68 billion in revenue from Q1, with over 50% of that coming from search and ads. One of the highlights of search performance was from performance max campaigns.
Ruth Porat, Google’s CFO, released this statement: “So in terms of the ad business, I would say, as I did in the opening comments, we were very pleased with the year-on-year Search revenue growth in the first quarter, up 24%.”. Performance max campaigns seem to be key in search growth, and with results from beta testing that highlight Performance Max campaigns having a 40% lower cost per acquisition and a 15X higher conversion rate compared to other campaign types with the same goals, it is definitely worth adopting.
Google’s Keyword planner tool – Nine creative uses.
Google’s keyword planner is a great tool for identifying keywords, however, it has a reputation for being a limited resource and is often discarded due to its high ad-based focus. However, Google’s Keyword Planner is an effective tool and this list of creative uses will help you get the most out of the platform.
- Use low volume, high reward keywords.
- Organise keywords by intent
- Take keyword inspiration from your competitors
- Use page-specific keywords to skyscraper your content
- Utilise keyword questions to hit search intent
- Filter by location
- Optimise your keywords for different devices
- Conduct keyword research by groups
- Bid on branded keywords
If you would like support with your digital marketing or would like any other information, get in touch with our industry specialists by sending us an email to team@modo25.com