Digital Marketing Mondays
Feb 14, 2022
Topics API to Replace FLoC: Why Privacy-Centric Tracking is Bad News
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A few months ago Google introduced its Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) proposal as its answer to cookieless tracking. This past week, Google announced FLoC would be replaced with a new proposal, Topics API. While it was clear from the beginning replacing cookies would be a challenge, this new proposal brings to light Google's struggle to solve the problem of collecting user data while maintaining their privacy.
In this week’s Digital Marketing Mondays, Devin and Hans discuss what effects Topics API will have on the marketing industry and how it will impact your ability to target audiences in the future.
More episodes from Digital Marketing Mondays
Oct 10, 2022
SEO Best Practices 2022: Why Hub Pages and Content Matter
In last week's episode, we asked whether SEO was still relevant in 2022. The short answer was yes. As promised at the end of last week's podcast, we have continued the discussion.
SEO strategies and trends are often dictated by the current state of Google search, and Google has changed greatly over the years. These changes have been driven partially by weeding out spam content, but also by the emergence of new devices and competitors. Competition fuels Google's need to maintain its status as the best resource for finding anything online. To be the best resource, they need to understand search intent and get the most useful information in front of its users as quickly as possible. With this general philosophy, we've seen Google Search evolve to include shopping carousels, maps, videos, and rich snippets like FAQs.
Google advertising initiatives also play into changes to SEO strategy. Google's ongoing efforts to increase the number of sponsored results with organic results have influenced layout changes within search engine results pages (SERPs). This in turn affects SEO. Organic results have slowly moved down the SERPs, with more ads appearing at the top of the page.
Google's goals can be summarized as increasing ad revenue while maintaining its reputation as the best resource online. Nefarious SEO tactics that used to work, like excessive backlinking and content scraping, not only don't work anymore but actually hurt your rankings in 2022. The amount of spam created through bad practices made for a bad user experience. This, if not corrected, would have cost Google many users. In general, anything that negatively impacts user experience is now penalized, including technical issues such as site speed and lackluster hosting. Google maximizes the visibility of accessible and helpful content.
In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss SEO strategies that work in 2022 and old techniques that should be left in the past.
Resources:
https://gtmetrix.com/
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Oct 3, 2022
SEO in 2022: Is It Still Relevant?
SEO was the biggest topic in the early days of digital marketing. It existed before Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) was first introduced and co-existed with PPC for many years. As is true with everything, we can expect continuous changes in regard to SEO, and much has changed since the nineties. The types of devices people are searching on have grown to include everything from phones to TVs. Search is becoming local to devices, meaning people have access to native search features directly as we see with various Apple devices. With native search, there is no need to go to a search engine to try to find information. The users of search engines are also becoming more educated on how to find the results they want, with the current trend being to end search queries with "Reddit" to find more authentic content. Google search result pages have also been populated with an increasing number of ad placements over the years. What does all of this change mean for SEO's relevance?
In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays Hans and Devin discuss the factors affecting SEO in 2022 and if SEO should play into your marketing strategies in today's marketing landscape.
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Sep 26, 2022
Recession 2022: How It Affects Marketing and Advertising
There is no longer talk of a pending recession - the recession has arrived. With its arrival, it brought about hiring freezes, layoffs, rising interest rates, and companies attempting to minimize their overhead. As more and more companies become reactive to the situation, it is clear this will have an impact on the marketing industry and the marketers that make it up. As companies lay off talent, hiring would become easier if it were not for the economic raincloud over the country. Companies are still advertising but doing so with great caution and consideration in regard to their ad budgets. Eventually, we may see a change in the cost per click (CPC) due to potential changes caused by this recession. As with any disruption, companies and marketers alike will need to pivot and implement strategies that will allow for success in difficult times.
In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss how digital marketing is being affected by the recession, speculate on what the next few months may look like for the marketing industry, and discuss strategies for navigating what's to come.
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