🔍 From Corona to COVID: Tracking a SERP evolution

Mar 25, 2020

Good morning search marketers, are you rethinking your marketing mix?

You likely heard that the 2020 Summer Olympics will not be held in June as planned due to the coronavirus crisis. While it is often seen as a television advertising medium, the Olympics has a big effect on digital advertising as well. And the Olympics factored into analysts ad spending growth projections for the year. The question is whether these dollars will be redistributed elsewhere or simply vanish. We looked at some of the indicators that point to both scenarios.

COVID-19 is having a dramatic impact on search behavior. On Monday's Live with Search Engine Land episode, Merkle senior SEO manager Alexis Sanders shared some representative client data highlighting some of the wild swings in click behavior as social distancing took hold. A large grocery retailer saw click growth skyrocket by 433% in mid-March, while an online discounter saw click growth drop by 56% during the same period. A hotel client saw revenue from bookings plummet to a 1/10th of what they typically see. It's a small sample, to be sure, but it highlights the striking distances between the so-called winners and losers in this crisis — at least for the time being.

To help some of the hardest hit — small local businesses — Yelp announced a fundraising partnership with GoFundMe on Monday to allow users to donate to businesses directly through Yelp. Donate buttons will appear on the profiles of businesses that meet certain criteria.

Keep reading for a Mindful Moment and a Pro Tip from Brian Harnish on 404s and more.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

How to manage 404s when they aren't normal 404s?

"With normal 404s, 301 redirecting them to working URLs is a good solution. But a page without content is a soft 404, even if it shows a 200 OK status," explains Brian Harnish of Bruce Clay, Inc. "In Screaming Frog, default word count reflects every single word on the page, not just the main content area. You must use Excel to determine 'no content' after exporting your crawl data."

"Create a column in Excel next to Screaming Frog's standard word count, and subtract the total word count of your headers and footers (any sidebars, other text, etc.) from the total word count displayed. This method is more reliable but time-consuming to manually examine your pages to find physical text content."

Learn more »

Mindful Moment

We'll be sharing daily mindfulness exercises to help us all take some time to decompress. If you have a suggestion, please email me at gmarvin@thirddoormedia.com.

"Go for a walk, don't take your phone. Count your steps and as you do so, focus on how your feet hit the ground one at a time," suggests Marc Sirkin, Third Door Media's SVP of marketing and experience.

If you're unable to go outside, you can still practice this. Take a "stroll" around your home or apartment. You might even see your surroundings anew.

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Search Shorts

Google penalties for weird names? Nah...

Weird names. Google won't penalize a site or page because it has a weird brand name or product name, said Google's John Mueller.

Changelog. Lizzi Harvey from Google has put together a changelog page documenting the larger changes made to the Google Search Developer documents.

RIP Dave. Dave Oremland, @localoptimizer, passed away back in January. The local SEO community just found out and is mourning his loss.

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"What should I look for in an SEO solution?"

There's nothing like curling up with a good book — or good Marketing Intelligence Report — when you're stuck inside. MarTech Today's Enterprise SEO Tools For Content Marketing, Search Intelligence, UX, And More guide is an insightful and informative read that will help you understand who the leading players are and what capabilities these platforms provide.

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