🔍 Google's Change of Address tool makes moving domains a little easier

Feb 19, 2020

Good morning search marketers. Moving can be such a pain, am I right?

The new features in Google Search Console's Change of Address tool are aimed at helping you move your site from one domain or subdomain to another. The tool now offers redirect validation for the moving domain's top five URLs and shows you the redirect flow, while a warning banner at the top of both the moving and destination domains remind Search Console users that a site is in the process of moving.

Google Ads manager accounts can now share all available audience lists with their sub-accounts. The new feature, called "continuous audience sharing," simplifies the list sharing process for brands that organize multiple accounts under a manager account. Google also said that an option to share sub-account-created lists with the manager account will be arriving in a few months.

To get a pulse on how Amazon advertising is fitting into the broader digital commerce marketing landscape, we surveyed digital advertisers to find out if and how they're using the platform, who's managing campaigns, where budgets are headed and more. The findings show that the share of digital advertising budgets that go to Amazon remains relatively small: of those advertising on the platform, 66% dedicate less than a quarter of their annual digital advertising budget there — 34% spend less than 10%.

But, we should expect to see Amazon budgets grow, as 81% said they plan to increase their Amazon ad budgets in the coming year. More than half said additional budget will come from incremental sources, while 21% said they'll pull from paid social budgets and 17% said budget will come from paid search. Who's managing these campaigns? Topping the list are dedicated Amazon marketers (39%), followed by 28% who said paid search marketers are in charge of Amazon advertising and 18% who said e-commerce marketers manage the campaigns. We will be diving into many of these insights on stage at SMX West this morning.

Speaking of SMX West, this will be our VP of Event Programming Chris Sherman's final conference. For more than two decades, Chris has pushed our industry forward through his writing and brought us together by organizing the best conferences both here in the U.S. and internationally. Thank you for all your hard work over the years, Chris!

Keep on reading to find out how we can all do our part to make the SEO community a more welcoming space, as well as your daily Search Shorts and more.

George Nguyen,
Associate Editor

Soapbox

SEO community must temper responses when idea-sharing to avoid shaming

Feeling trapped in a role/job/company can become a stress for any digital marketer. We all want to be successful, or at the very least perceived as competent. Some of you may remember how a 2016 article arguing that 'technical SEO is makeup' generated a lot of industry furor and might have cost us the ability to freely debate new ideas and welcome new voices about our work.

If imposter syndrome is too strong, we may not attempt to step outside our comfort zone at all. We stay silent.

The SEO community has to work harder to balance calling out misinformation and doing so in a way where people don't feel unduly shamed for sharing new ideas.

But if our career identity is to shame or gaslight others for past behavior or beliefs in the cause of righteousness, then we're on a path to the dark side. When people believe they are 100% right, often their truth is used as a weapon against those who disagree.

The stories we tell ourselves become our reality. Once on a path that may be considered "rogue," would you even notice? Does a fish notice the water around them? Shame is one of the biggest obstacles to innovation.

We are the geeks. We won. Everyone carries a computer in their pocket now. We've earned the right to be kinder to ourselves.

– Andrew McGarry is the owner of The McGarry Agency

Post-holiday analysis: connected TV becomes performance TV

Sponsored content from Steelhouse

The dust has settled on another holiday shopping season, and now it's time to evaluate and analyze what went right for advertisers. As usual, brands and agencies turned to the tried and true ad channels. This year, however, there was a new entry to the list — Connected TV (CTV).

Read more »

Search Shorts

Google spam manual action advice.

Google webspam manual action. Google posted a short video on how to get help in case you got a webspam manual action notice.

Site structure. Martin Splitt from Google said Semantic, meaningful structure is good for your users, but many people don't have that, so we don't put too much emphasis on it.

Web developers SEO cheat sheet updated. The folks at Moz have updated the Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet. Make sure to check it out.

Search marketing training this week in San Jose

Join us this week at SMX West, February 19-20, for actionable SEO, SEM/PPC, and Digital Commerce Marketing tactics (three lanes, no limits!) and invaluable networking with a community of smart, friendly marketers.

Secure your pass now! »