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🔍 New retail ad features from Google | More on the diversity update

Good morning search marketers, is every day a deal day? 

If there's one thing Amazon Prime Day (get ready for two full days of it this year!) has done for the retail world, it's reorient promotion calendars away from Black Friday obsession. In announcing several new search ads features for merchants Wednesday, Google emphasized that consumers are "on the lookout for deals year-round."  Seasonality adjustments (teased at Google Marketing Live) are rolling out to allow you to signal Google's Smart Bidding systems to prepare for conversion rate increases during sales and promotions. There are more in-market audience segments available, several updates for Local campaigns and promotions are now available for local inventory ads. 

New data from Searchmetrics indicates Google's diversity algorithm update did impact search results, particularly those that had previously shown three or more results from the same domain. "Keywords returning more than three URLs from one domain in the top 10 are effectively zero, down from 1.8%," Searchmetrics wrote. Last week, Moz released data showing the diversity update had little effect.  

Well, this is handy. Google Search Console now shows you the date your site switched over to mobile-first indexing. (If your site hasn't switched yet, you'll eventually able to see the date when it does happen.)  Also nice are new chart annotations indicating when the site switched over. This will make it a whole lot easier for SEOs to analyze any impact from the switch.

Read on for a Pro Tip on structured data for Bing, the latest Ask The Editors and more. 

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

 
 
 
Pro Tip
 

News flash: Bing wants your structured data, too

"Build web content so that Bing can properly understand it, all of them grounded in this basic sense of visual orientation," explains Damian Rollison of Brandify in his takeaways from the structured data session at SMX Advanced.

"Cata Milos, senior program manager at Microsoft, recommended that we think of the way humans apply visual understanding to complex documents. Human readers are trained to look for important elements like title, author, text and images, and are trained to ignore secondary content such as additional links, ads, site navigation and social media buttons. Given these expectations, web pages should be built in such a way that primary content is clearly identifiable and secondary content is minimally distracting."

"He recommended HTML5 markup as a great way to tag page content semantically, since HTML5 contains tags like header, nav, article and footer that allow you to identify page content in a way that has intrinsic meaning for browsers, developers, search engines, and readers alike. In fact, Milos noted that 45% of Bing's top indexed documents contain HTML5 semantic tags, suggesting that Bing may currently be placing a greater level of trust in semantic tags than Google does."

Read More »

 

Compare 14 top marketing automation platforms

Sponsored by MarTech Today

MarTech Today's "B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer's Guide" examines the market for B2B marketing automation software platforms. This 2019 report includes profiles of 14 leading B2B marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons, pricing information, and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

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Ask the Editors
 

Your questions answered: Periodic Table of SEO Factors

Last week, we held a webinar on our 2019 Periodic Table of SEO Factors and weren't able to address all the questions. Search Engine Land editors Barry Schwartz and Detlef Johnson will be answering many of them here in the days ahead.

How does Google Home/Assistant select answers?

There are three primary ways Google Assistant gets answers: (1) Featured snippets which are sources from content produced by you guys – the publishers on the internet. (2) Direct answers which are licensed content databases, such as lyrics or facts such as how old is Barack Obama. (3) Live results which are things like sports scores, weather and so on. In addition, there are videos that show up on Google Home Hub, there is speakable markup for news and more.

Read More »

 
Search Shorts
 

Jumbo size, too many links and XML Sitemaps.

Full screens. Google's John Mueller said they are looking into adding the full screen, from top to bottom, for the screenshots they use in Google's testing tools.

Links galore. Google has a potential bug that shows an insane number of links in the featured snippets box in Google search.

XML Sitemaps. Gary Illyes from Google said that XML Sitemaps do not have a direct impact on your Google rankings.

 
What we're reading
 

We've curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader

Are Featured Snippets Getting Shorter? The answer Is: Yes and No – RankRanger

'Hey Cortana': The meteoric rise of voice search technology – Microsoft Advertising

Bill Gates calls failure to fight Android his "greatest mistake" – Ars Technica

Effects of Google's New Mobile Search Ad Format – Metric Theory

Google Testing Bringing Back Green Ad Label? – Search Engine Roundtable

How to Automate Your Google Ads KPI Monitoring and Easily Put Fixes into Place to Increase Your KPIs – Adalysis

How to Convince a Clueless SEO Writing Prospect – SuccessWorks

New Research! The State of Paid Social – PPC Hero

Using STAT: How to Uncover Additional Value in Your Keyword Data – Moz

 
 
 
Join Us
 

Unlock actionable SEO & SEM tactics to accelerate your campaign's success. Attend SMX East in NYC!

Attend the only conference in the East Coast entirely devoted to search marketing: Search Engine Land's SMX East, November 13-14, 2019. Join us for a deep dive into SEO and SEM tactics, networking, and top amenities including WiFi, delicious meals, and snacks. You'll come away with at least one tactic that you can immediately put to use… we guarantee it. View rates and register today!