Good morning search marketers, let's look at the big picture.
It's earnings season, which means we'll be breaking down the numbers to make sense of the stats that matter to marketers. Last week, Microsoft was up. Microsoft's revenue per search continues to improve, according to the company, but volume is still its Achilles' heel. Overall, the company reported better-than-expected earnings in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year, which ended June 30. Yet, the sectors that affect digital marketers most — search advertising and LinkedIn — have seen slowing revenue growth. Search advertising grew just 9% last quarter, marking the third quarter of declining revenue growth. CFO Amy Hood said search advertising grew slower than expected due to lower volume.
That said, Google has also reported slowing ad revenue growth over the past several quarters, and we'll see what it reports next week. Microsoft Advertising rebranded from Bing Ads during the quarter and has rolled out several new capabilities that demonstrate its focus on moving beyond just being a "fast follower" of Google to offer advertisers unique solutions and features.
If you're a novice at JavaScript and want to better understand how it affects your SEO, Google has a new JavaScript SEO Basics section in its Search developer's guide that includes an overview of how Googlebot processes JavaScript. In May, Search Engine Land's Editor-At-Large Detlef Johnson wrote about Googlebot's new ability to render and index client-side AJAX-style JavaScript POST requests and noted some things to keep in mind, including that those requests can count against your crawl budget.
Read on for a Pro Tip on handling less-than-helpful UGC and more.
Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief
