All Script And Tols For Free: 🔍 Google updates Quality Raters Guidelines

🔍 Google updates Quality Raters Guidelines

Dec 06, 2019

Good morning search marketers, do you pay attention to optimization scores?

As of this week, Google has extended optimization scores to Display campaigns. That means account-level optimization scores now encompass Search, Shopping and Display campaigns. At the campaign level, you may see Display-specific recommendations to add responsive display ads, for example.

These scores can offer good cues for improving your campaign performance, but as always, be sure to carefully review recommendations before accepting them. And on the flip side, a perfect score of 100% does not always mean things are rosy. Just yesterday, I saw a campaign with a perfect optimization score, but the ads weren't even running because of low Ad Rank. Crazy.

Roughly three months since the last update, Google has released a revision of the Quality Raters Guidelines. Associate editor George Nguyen has the rundown of what changed.

The company is also expanding package tracking in search results to more carriers globally. This is the feature that lets users see package tracking details after entering the tracking number in the search box. The early adopters program is open to all carriers that meet the eligibility requirements in countries where Google Search is available.

Keep reading for a Pro Tip on the growing influence of voice search for local marketers, plus your daily Search Shorts and reading recommendations.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

Why voice is growing in importance for local marketers

"Voice activation has seen major growth, thanks to the rise of virtual assistants such as

Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant and Apple's Siri," writes Pamela Parker, senior editor and projects manager at Third Door Media.

"Consider the data:

There will be 8 billion digital voice assistants in use globally by 2023, up from an estimated 2.5 billion at the end of 2018, according to Juniper Research.
Although Google hasn't released new numbers since 2016, at that time a full 20% of searches on the engine were performed by voice. The proliferation of Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa have likely driven that number much higher by now.
Some 55% of U.S. households are forecast to have a smart speaker by 2022, according to OC&C Strategy Consultants."

Parker continues, writing: "The increasing use of voice search means consumers are using more natural language in their search queries, which has big implications for SEO. For example, where they used to type "Pizza delivery near me", now they will say "Where is the nearest pizza delivery place?" Local marketers need to optimize their keywords and tags to accommodate the growing volumes of natural language queries. Many local marketing solutions vendors are working to incorporate voice optimization features in their offerings."

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Search Shorts

Google update, overloading GoogleBot and explaining Search.

December Google algorithm update. There are some rumors and speculation out there now about a possible Google search algorithm update that occurred around December 4th.

Overload GoogleBot. Martin Splitt from Google makes it sound like it is super hard to overload GoogleBot and burn down its CPUs, even with inefficient JavaScript pages.

Google Search Explained video. Do you need a concise, easy to understand and authoritative video on how Google Search works for your client? Check out this new video Google just released that explains crawling, indexing and rankings.

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