🔍 Featured snippet jumps are live | Curb-side for SMBs

Jun 04, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, visitors might not be landing at the top of your pages.

Now when users click on your featured snippets from Google Search results, they'll either be taken directly to the featured snippet text on the source web page and/or highlight the text featured in the snippet on that web page. Google has been testing this for the past couple of years and confirmed yesterday that it rolled out last week. There's no markup or action to take to enable this, it will happen automatically. As Barry Schwartz notes, you might want to reevaluate the location of calls to action and or ads on pages this affects.

Location signals as reopening expands. As areas start to reopen, location data and analytics can play an important role in helping local businesses come back. "If I know you went into my store for the last six months, but you haven't been in the last two, I need to make sure that I'm reaching out, letting you know that my location is open, that my brand is there, that these are the hours of operation, because the muscle memory is already set — it's getting rebuilt now," said Foursquare CEO David Shim on Live with Search Engine Land.

"Location [data] allows you to look back, see these [behavior] changes and start to say, 'What are the ones I want to now potentially try and change back?' or, 'What are the ones I want to try and lock in?" added Duncan McCall, CEO of PlaceIQ during the live panel. Watch the clip here.

Expanding our recruitment networks. I've seen and heard many conversations happening around how companies — and marketing firms and teams, specifically — can affect change and not just pay lip service to the Black Lives Matter movement. Recruiting and hiring more black and minority executives and employees is an obvious call to action. If you're looking to expand your recruitment network, Historically Black Colleges and Universities is one place to start, suggested Duane Brown of Take Some Risk on Twitter. "Talk and mentor at HBCUs. Post jobs at their job boards. Ask leadership why your agency/brand has no POC or Black people in the senior ranks to start," said Duane.

There are a number of job sites and resources and recruitment firms such as the Minority Professional Network (which also has a job board) specializing in diversity hiring. If you have more suggestions, please share them with me at gmarvin@thirddoormedia.com.

Keep reading for a Soapbox from Bill Dinan with a call for SMB solution providers to think about solutions like supporting curb-side that will help keep small local businesses afloat.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief

Soapbox

Don't kick SMBs to the curbside – for many, it's their new lifeline

As many states are beginning to ease their COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, local businesses that rely on in-person touchpoints are investing in strategies to enable consumers to pick up goods curbside. This move is important as many consumers continue to remain at home. In addition to offering curbside pick-up, many local businesses are also having to expand and evolve their market and product offerings to remain afloat.

While technologies that exist to enable curbside pick-up have been around for years, they have historically catered to the Target's of the world and are not error-proof. As local businesses embark on curbside service to either re-emerge after being shuttered for more than a month or as an additional revenue stream, most are having to adopt or improve an e-commerce site, including a fulfillment center, that is then integrated back to a curbside app. For a small business or a local franchise now looking at these technologies to enable efficient curbside pickup, they require solutions that are geared to getting it up and running without IT support and infrastructure, as well as efficient implementation and ease of use.

What we are now seeing is an unprecedented market opportunity for small business technology and marketing providers to support the innovation and adoption of technologies that will enable curbside pick-up as well as the marketing and operations side of a local business. Handling online orders, managing the supply chain and fulfillment and interaction management – and then efficiently running a well-timed curbside pickup – will require SMB-focused solution providers to up their game in terms of product innovation, delivery, customer service and review management.

– Bill Dinan is president of the not-for-profit trade association Localogy

How Digital Transformation Empowers Brands To Deliver To Consumers With Urgency

We're living in a world disrupted by factors out of our control. But in the wake of a pandemic, companies still need to deliver – and with urgency. As shoppers navigate their interrupted world, they are changing the way they browse and shop for products. With delivery and curbside pickup turning into the preferred, and sometimes only, option for shopping, the integration of physical and digital channels in the supply chain is now more critical than ever. Join this webinar to discuss how disruptive changes to the CPG industry during the pandemic have accelerated the need to transform the way we do business.

RSVP Here »

Search Shorts

Old domain names, desktop crawlers and sarcasm detector.

Old domains. Google's John Mueller said there was no ranking change for old domain names.

Desktop crawler. If GoogleBot desktop is still the primary crawler on your site, it means Google does not think your site is ready for mobile-first indexing. But nevertheless, it will be moved eventually to mobile-first indexing. John Mueller of Google said on Twitter "while there's no need to do anything special, I'd still double-check the usual things to make sure your site is as strong on mobile as it is on desktop, for search & your users."

Jokes and sarcasm. Can Google recognize jokes and sarcasm? John Mueller of Google said on Twitter "looking around, researchers have used various tools to automatically recognize jokes, humor, irony, sarkasm, etc., so my hunch is requiring markup to a joke on the web is probably unnecessary."

Traveling in Q4? [Survey]

For most marketers, attending in-person events is a key component to their professional development. But COVID-19 has significantly impacted the ability to travel, at least for now. How are you thinking about and planning your fourth quarter event schedule?

Take the survey »