🔍 Coronavirus disrupting search, digital ad budgets

Mar 11, 2020

Good morning, search marketers, are your budgets in flux?

An analyst report yesterday predicts Google is likely to see double-digit declines in travel ad revenue in the first two quarters of the year due to coronavirus. That got us wondering what everyone is seeing across sectors. We heard from a number of media buyers yesterday about ways in which their clients are thinking about their near-term search and digital media budgets. Some aren't pulling back or pausing yet, while others are seeing dramatic action — and a few are raising budgets. If you have a budget story to share, email me at gmarvin@thirddoormedia.com.

It looks like Google's "key moments" timeline feature for videos that appear in the videos card in mobile search results is expanding. When it debuted, it only appeared for the top video in the card, now "key moments" may appear on multiple videos listed in mobile search results. If you haven't tested the feature as part of your video SEO strategy, now might be time to take another look.

Are you ready to tell the world about your biggest SEM or SEO success of the past year? The deadline to enter the Search Engine Land Awards will be here before you know it — early bird ends on March 27. There are small business and enterprise categories — share your story with the community and be recognized at SMX Advanced. Learn more about the awards here.

Keep reading for a Pro Tip on finding linkable, top-funnel topics for your content and more.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

How to find linkable, top-funnel topics

"The first – and most important – step to influencing bottom-funnel pages with top-funnel content is identifying the right topic. The reason this step is so critical is that you will be investing a lot of time and energy into building and promoting this page, and you want to make sure the topic has legs before you start down that path," explains Andrew Dennis of Page One Power. "The first place to start this process is with competitors. If a competitor has a guide about [X Topic] that has over 100 links, and you don't address that topic on your site, this is likely a topic you should cover as it has proven linkability. You should also keep a list of these linking sites, as they will likely be open to linking to the page you eventually create."

"In fact, even the pages that don't have a ton of backlinks could be potentially linkable topics, but your competitor might have failed to promote their page properly. Explore the SERPs for these pages and their associated keywords to see if the ranking guides have a substantial amount of referring domains. Just because your competitor missed on this opportunity doesn't make it any less of an opportunity."

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New for 2020! Guide to SEO tools for content marketing, search intelligence, UX and more

SEO remains the stalwart mainstay of digital marketing, but its practice has become more complex. Today, SEO includes everything from content marketing and distribution to user experience, and even the core job of gathering and interpreting search intelligence has become more challenging. If you're on the lookout for new tools or platforms to manage your complex and increasingly technical SEO activities, this 76-page report examines the market for SEO software and includes profiles of 20 leading SEO tools vendors, pricing and capabilities information, and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

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Search Shorts

Watered-down pages and a Google easter egg

Watering down indexing issue. When it comes to not blocking search engines from indexing your internal search result page, Google's John Mueller said it's "usually not a spam/not-spam situation, but more about watering down your indexed content with useless pages that compete with each other. More a question of strategy rather than spam."

"Holi" easter egg. Go ahead, search for "holi" in Google and then click on those powder bowls. You can throw colorful powder all over the place.

Work from home. The Google Search Relations team is working from home instead of going to the office or traveling to events, because that is the best way they can continue to help the community for the time being, said Mueller.

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