Have you tried turning it off and on again?

I’ve been chatting with someone on the marketing ops side of marketing a few times a month just to get an idea of how they think the upcoming cookieless world will affect things on their end. She was telling me about tagging and attribution in the many CRMs that she helps clients with and the conversation drifted to what happens in “the middle.”

Her work encompasses the beginning (planning campaigns and tagging) and the end (collecting attribution data and making decisions based on it). But she didn’t have a lot of insight into the middle. Her assumption was that all SEO and PPC were essentially just “content.”

We walked through the technical basics of SEO and PPC and she asked, “So does anyone not need content?” And it got me thinking about the definition of content. We just assume it means pages or posts on our sites, but content can also encompass Google My Business and social media posts, ad creative and landing pages, infographics and videos, and more. Content is what makes the web work. It goes beyond both SEO and PPC but is also at the core of what they are.

Another Google algorithm update likely happened this weekend

“Many of the tracking tools are showing levels that we have not seen since a Google core update. Moz reported 101 degree weather, Advanced Web Ranking was at the top of its chart,… and the other tools are also super hot,” said Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable. 

The SEO community has only seen some chatter, however, but it was a big deal to some marketers: “USA traffic [is] still way off, down about 30% from the first two weeks of Sept and still dropping. USA has dropped so much that my UK traffic is now 2/3 of USA, for a population 6+X larger,” said one SEO. “Big movements across all topics and countries. The volatility is similar to a core update. It’s the update they started rolling out yesterday,” said another.

Why we care. If you saw big dips in USA traffic last week or over the weekend, it might be attributed to what’s going on algorithm-wise. Let your clients and stakeholders know what happened before they come to you asking about metrics anomalies. 

Facebook and Instagram outages could affect your social advertising metrics

Facebook and Instagram were down for over two hours yesterday. The outrage resulted in quite a few funny tweets, as Twitter was one of the only social media platforms still up at the time. The error message suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error. Those who used Facebook as a login verification for other apps also could not log in to those third-party systems. The outage isn’t the first for Facebook. The app and websites were down in March and July this year, too. 

Why we care. Make sure to mark the outage in your Analytics if you rely heavily on leads or traffic from social. The outage will have a heavy impact on both paid and organic social media campaigns, but fortunately only for a short period of one day.

Search Shorts: Keyword data trends in keyword planner, responsive video ad scripts, deep links with content and PR, and the socialization of GMB

Google is showing trending keyword data within Google keyword planner. “This is a small experiment. We’re always testing new ways to improve our experience for our advertisers and users, but don’t have anything specific to announce right now,” a Google Ads spokesperson told Search Engine Land. Hat tip to Arbab Usmani for sending us a screenshot.

Support for Responsive Video Ads in scripts. Reminder: Last week Google Ads launched support for responsive video ads in Google Ads scripts. If you were using the TrueView for action campaign type, you must update your code to use the new video ad type.

How to use content and PR to build deep links. Deep links can drastically improve organic performance in the long term, but they are hard to get and we can’t influence where publishers link to. Screaming Frog has a guide to work around those issues, though.

Google local search trends: Socialization. Google’s local platform — comprising Google My Business, Google Maps, and the local component of Google Search — has become, under our noses, a massive social network. Google has achieved this status not through traditional methods of connecting users to each other, but by allowing and encouraging users to share their experiences, questions, and opinions about local businesses in a variety of forms and at a massive scale. 

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