Good morning search marketers, will any of the I/O announcements affect your clients or the way you do your job?
This is George Nguyen, Search Engine Land's associate editor, back again while our Editor-in-Chief Ginny is out getting the scoop for you from Google Marketing Live. It's great to be in your inbox once more, but, while we're on the topic of Google…
Marketers cheered and sneered at some of the I/O announcements. Googlebot's update to the latest version of Chromium got approving head nods for saving us the time and effort of employing workarounds to make our content crawlable. Meanwhile, Assistant's speed boost might just get users to take advantage of it more often, which may incentivize us to factor it into our content planning. FAQ and How-to markup support was the most controversial announcement — it excites us because it's flashy and presents some brands with a way to leapfrog the top organic results through structured data implementation, but it also has us side-eyeing Google for finding yet another method to present users with our content while robbing us of the click.
We've got one more divisive subject to discuss: whether pursuing user-generated content (UGC) for SEO is worthwhile. You'll have to give up some control, but if you've got the budget and resources to curb spam, manage duplicate and low-quality content, and properly configure and maintain your UGC channels, it could be a game changer for both your organic visibility and audience engagement. That having been said, the resources required can be substantial, there are legal considerations and it just may not be a good fit for your brand or your audience.
As always, the insights don't end here. Keep scrolling for our daily Pro Tip, Search Shorts (featuring one of my favorite topics: podcasts!) and much more.
George Nguyen,
Associate Editor
