This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Rich Results are on the Horizon for Podcasts
This week, new guidelines regarding structured data for podcasts was released. The new structured data guidelines will allow developers to not only define a podcasts’ title, but add description elements and recent episodes. Structured data tags need be added on a podcast and episode-level to show up as a rich result. These results take up a lot of the real estate on the SERPs, so the extra effort could pay off with more clicks. While only available via Google Home and the Google Search App for Android (v6.5 or higher), support for more devices should be coming soon. Source: Search Engine Watch
Google Adds New Features to Dynamic Search Ads
Three new features have recently been added to Google’s dynamic search ads: page feeds, expanded dynamic search ads, and quality enhancements. With page feeds, you can specify which URL’s to use giving you the performance of DSA’s with the control of a feed. Expanded Dynamic Search Ads are simply the Expanded Ad format rolling over to DSA’s, and quality enhancements are Google’s way of keeping your ads showing to the most relevant audiences possible. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Fred’s Confirmation: Who’s Been Hit the Hardest?
Google confirmed the Fred update, and SEO data collection company Sistrix went to work analyzing the nearly 300 domains that saw a 50-90% dip in visibility after the March 13, 2017 update. Sites that were hit the worst were those with poor content, nonsense articles pumped with keywords and no information as well as sites with tons of advertisements, especially banner ads. Source: Search Engine Land
Google Tests Larger Shopping Ads
An image has recently been floating around Twitter featuring a potential new test from Google. This time, we are seeing even larger Product Listing Ads at the top of the search results page. This test contains only 5 listings, but they appear much larger than the previous format. Some advertisers are in favor of this test, while others believe it will be only a matter of time until the entire first page turns into ads. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google Testing Breadcrumb URLs on Mobile Search
Google has begun testing another variation of mobile search that highlights breadcrumb-styled URLs above the title. Although this testing is still in its infancy, it couldn’t hurt for SEOs to review their current breadcrumb navigation structure. Google supports BreadcrumbList schema but will pull breadcrumb information from the HTML within a webpage. Source: TheSEMPost
Additional Commentary
Facebook Caveats You Need to Remember When Setting Up Ads
Carrie Albright shares some of the top caveats when it comes to managing Facebook ads compared to other platforms. First and most importantly, don’t forget your URL parameters, which can be easily overlooked. Another caveat is that Facebook requires a special approach to copy as you’re showing them an ad they didn’t exactly ask for. This is where an emotional approach to copy can help. Albright also recommends that you keep an eye on user comments, which has its own column in the ad manager. Users and even bots can post comments on your ads, so it can be helpful to keep an eye on what they’re saying about it. Source: Carrie Albright, PPC Hero
Keeping Up with Voice Search
The popularity of voice search continues to grow, but how can marketers optimize for searches that keyword research tools don’t yet report on? Jason Tabeling at Search Engine Watch admits it’s not a perfect science, but isolating keywords like who, what, where, when, why, and how can shed light on how consumer behavior is shifting. Looking at to date year over year data these question based queries have risen by 47% overall and those containing “where” and “when” have risen by nearly 300%. Source: Jason Tabeling, Search Engine Watch
