All Script And Tols For Free: 🔍 Holiday crunch-time tips

🔍 Holiday crunch-time tips

Nov 13, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, this season, people are going to be looking for extra cheer.

I'm already seeing holiday decor and Christmas trees in windows — weeks ahead of a typical year. For many, this year is "going to be an emotionally trying time as they shop for loved ones who cannot be in the same place with them" perhaps for the first time in their lives, says contributor Adam Dorman.

That means we should pay extra attention to tone and images across all of our customer touchpoints. And be prepared to support extra online customer communication.

"Retailers should go overboard to be responsive to shoppers online," he advises. That means ensuring your business is ready to handle a sharp increase in customer messaging on your website, Google My Business, Facebook Messenger, etc. Equally important this season, be sure to clearly communicate your shipping and delivery options on your site, in your ads and your GMB and other online listings.

There may be no more important time for brands and retailers to under promise and over deliver than this holiday season. For more holiday marketing tips, see our Holiday Retailer section.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief

Social Short

Instagram moves Shop, Reels into the spotlight

Shop and Reels tabs are now permanent fixtures on Instagram's home screen, the company announced Thursday. The new design pushes the Create new post and Activity (likes, etc) options out of the main tab options at the bottom of the screen.

Why we care. The changes are aimed at keeping younger audiences and creators engaged and capitalizing on the growth in e-commerce. Shopping is a key piece of Facebook's revenue strategy. Online commerce now accounts for the company's largest advertiser vertical, and the company gets a share of each sale made via Instagram Checkout. Reels, Instagram's short-form video product, is aimed at rivaling fast-growing TikTok. Instagram head Adam Mosseri told CNBC that ads will eventually come to Reels.

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Search Shorts

Crawling, passages and extensions

Machine learning for crawling. For you academics out there, I asked Martin Splitt of Google if Google uses machine learning for crawling and rendering. He said Google does use it for crawling to predict quality and freshness, but not for rendering.

The look of passage indexing. It is hard to know if when Google releases passage indexing if that will look or feel any different to searchers. Glenn Gabe asked John Mueller about this, and John said he was not sure but you can count on Google testing things out.

Core Web Vitals extension. A new Chrome extension shows the Core Web Vitals data from the Chrome User Experience Report in your Google Search Results.

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How a well-oiled marketing operations machine drives business forward

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With so much change affecting marketing teams across the industry, adjusting internal strategies to be more agile, more efficient and better aligned across the organization is key to driving real business impact.

"There's more pressure than ever, that every dollar that we invest has the maximum impact on what we're trying to get out of our marketing initiatives," said Jenifer Salzwedel, Senior Director of Marketing Operations and Enablement at Poly, a company that sells collaboration technology. "We're constantly in planning mode for the next big thing that needs to be done and, in that planning, we certainly then need to figure out how to activate those plans very quickly."

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