🔍 Burnout doesn't have to be a fact of agency life | Google's Duplex makes its first international appearance

Oct 23, 2019

Good morning search marketers, is burnout looming for you?

That's a dramatic way to start a newsletter, and I apologize if it hits close to home. Time management is a skill that you can never be too good at, and it can certainly be the difference between thriving in your role and counting down the days … every day.

Successful agencies prioritize time management skills, says Duane Brown, agency founder and head of strategy at Take Some Risk, and Katy Lucey, director of paid social at performance agency Tinuiti. When a client makes an urgent request, "Ask them which other tasks should be pushed to the next week. If everything is a priority then nothing is a priority," said Brown.

Company culture has a big impact on agency employees as well as client outcomes. During the proposal phase, clients should ask agencies about their approach to work-life balance and their time-off policies, Lucey said. You can hear more about how operating processes can improve employee and client retention by attending Brown and Lucey's session, Managing Clients, Managing Yourself, at SMX East in New York next month.

Screaming Frog's latest SEO Spider update, version 12.0, may also be a timesaver for those who need help identifying SEO opportunities. The update provides a source of real-world data that can be used to improve UX through the integration of Chrome User Experience Report and Lighthouse metrics, auto-saves, crawl pausing and resuming, amongst other improvements.

And Duplex, which Google has shown automating tasks such as booking hair appointments and restaurant reservations, is getting tested internationally for the first time. The service will be used to confirm holiday operating hours for a pilot group of New Zealand businesses. If this test rolls out to more markets, managing your Google My Business info could get a bit more passive, and, as more Duplex-powered features are released, it could set the Google Assistant apart from rival voice assistants.

Don't go anywhere, your Pro Tip of the day, Search Shorts and more are just below.

George Nguyen,
Associate Editor

Pro Tip

Rise of the PPC geek

"For many years, we would hear all the SEO geeks lament the lack of collaboration with PPC departments and incompatibility in data sets," explains SMX Advanced Europe moderator Anders Hjorth of Innovell. "But this year, I heard the PPC geeks suggest that a learning organization should be harvesting queries from both organic and paid to build a proprietary library of entities to enrich search marketing operations over time. Perhaps at long last, we will see a technical integration of the two parallel lines of search marketing, organic and paid in harmony."

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Search Shorts

Whitelist and disavows

Disavow links. Nope, you don't need to disavow links if you didn't build spammy links, John Mueller of Google said.

Whitelist IPs. Sure, you can whitelist IPs as a way to block GoogleBot from your server, Mueller added.

Google video series. The Google Webmaster team is launching a new YouTube video series that will be animated and designed for beginners.

See The BIG SMX East Preview!

SMX East kicks off November 13-14 in NYC — and it's our biggest agenda ever. Join us for over 100 search marketing presentations from industry experts and market-defining solutions providers, including two new tracks on agency operations and local search marketing for multi-location brands. Click the link below to access your exclusive preview of everything in store!

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