🔍 New GSC controls | Microsoft Advertising's redesign

Mar 31, 2020

Good morning search marketers, what are B2B advertisers experiencing during this time?

Mark your calendar for Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET. I'll be discussing the current state of B2B advertising with Brad Geddes, Matt van Wagner and Michelle Morgan on the next Live with Search Engine Land. We'll have more details on Search Engine Land later today.

In a follow up to his Live chat with local SEOs last week, Greg Sterling asked Rio SEO's Krystal Taing about when local businesses should use "special hours" or "temporarily closed" in their GMB listings.The good news is there will not be long-term ranking implications to using one over the other. Taing also touched on using Posts during this time as well as special GMB limitations for hotels.

New GSC controls rolled out yesterday. Adjust which email notifications you get and whether to show GSC performance in Google Search results when you're logged in.

Microsoft Advertising's UI redesign is coming along. The company announced the new look has expanded to more pages, including a new Manager Account Overview dashboard. If you want to apply for preview access, you can fill out this form.

Will Facebook's massive usage increases (eventually) turn into revenue? The company says all that extra activity isn't driving revenue as businesses have cut back ad budgets. But, Greg Sterling says, that like Amazon, "Facebook is positioned to benefit long term if usage and engagement persist after the crisis is over" — and deferred ad budgets flood back to the platform.

Read on for a Pro Tip on video assets, a Mindful Moment break and more.

Take care,

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

Should we prioritize optimizing older videos or focus on new ones?

"Yes to both – but you want to be smart about it," explains SMX West speaker Joey Daoud of New Territory Media. "When you have a large amount of content, you have a great amount of data on what types of content work well and connects with your audience to inform creating future videos. Videos with a high percentage viewed (meaning people watched most of the video) but a lower view count are the best ones to start with because it means the content is really good but people aren't finding it. Then focus on optimizing the other high views / high percentage viewed videos. Then expand out to the rest of your content (in some cases with outdated or zero view videos, it might be good just to clean house and remove them)."

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5 Challenges in Selling SEO

SEO is hot. Agencies know it and smart businesses know it too. So it should be a slam dunk sale every time, right? Unfortunately, agencies still face hurdles and objections when selling SEO. In this white paper, Boostability put together a summary of the top five challenges you're likely to face when selling SEO, and how to combat them.

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Mindful Moment

This is a difficult time for us all. We are sharing a mindfulness exercise daily to help those interested to take a moment to decompress and regain focus. If you have a tip or exercise to share with the community, please email me at gmarvin@thirddoormedia.com.

This week, we have suggestions from Tara Martello, a meditation and mindfulness coach based in Philadelphia. Today's exercise: Place one hand on top of your head and one hand on your heart or belly. Focus on the sensation of touch to help you get back into your body..

Search Shorts

Google search results are very volatile.

Google Search Volatility. We are not sure what's going on with Google's search results, but the fluctuations and volatility are at pretty high levels. Maybe this is the new norm; maybe search behavior is causing Google's search results to adapt.

Links and merging sites. "Merging or splitting sites always means that the end state will be different from the sum of the starting state," said Google's John Mueller. "So in a case like this, I wouldn't worry about the value of individual links (and cleaning them up is always a good idea regardless)."

Question marks in URLs. It's normal to have question marks in URLs. Search engines can handle it, said Mueller.

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