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🔍 Question Hub arrives for US publishers

Good morning, Search Marketer, full speed ahead! 

Or maybe not so much if your business uses Slack — the outage yesterday morning, which seemed to be at its worst between 10AM and 12PM ET, was covered by multiple news outlets and a topic of conversation on Twitter. I take this as 2021's way of telling us to ease into things.

Speaking of which, yesterday I opened up my inbox to your new year's resolutions. Thank you to those who responded! Here are a few of the things that seem to be on your minds as we enter this potential-filled year.

  • Straying from the "tried and true": Trying out some of the strategies you've read about.
  • Creating your own sense of balance: Finding more ease in your work, without sacrificing results.
  • Taking care of yourself, physically and mentally: Reading more books and drinking more water.
  • Branding: Getting a knowledge panel to display for your own name.

One of those is mine. Take your guess or share your resolution with me: gnguyen@thirddoormedia.com.

George Nguyen,
Editor

 
 
 
Analytics
 

Bing Webmaster Tools adds crawl requests, crawl errors and indexed pages to performance report

Data for drawl requests, crawl errors, and indexed pages have been added to the search performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools.

These new metrics aren't directly related to the performance of your search results in Bing, but Bing has placed crawling and indexing reports in other areas before, like the sitemaps report, crawl control and URL inspection tool. This isn't just data for the sake of more data — it'll enable you to see if a surge in crawl errors resulted in lost organic traffic, for example.

Tip of the hat to longtime Search Engine Land reader and frequent tipster Frank Sandtmann for spotting this unannounced addition to the BWT search performance report.

Read more here.

 

What 129 million calls can tell us about the state of inbound marketing

Sponsored by CallRail

Inbound marketing has become a strategy small businesses must invest in — but you probably already knew that. What's more compelling is how the results show that call-tracking software is one of the best tools available for measuring attribution and optimizing the effectiveness of your inbound marketing and phone calls.

We analyzed more than 129 million calls across 12 industries to understand inbound marketing's impact on generating calls from leads.

Read more »

 

5 critical elements for local marketing success

This guide from MarTech Today examines the market for local marketing solutions and the 5 critical elements for local marketing success: Listing Management, Local SEO, Local Landing Pages, Reputation Management, and Paid Search and Social Media. Also included are profiles of 17 leading local marketing solution vendors and capabilities comparisons.

Read More »

 
Content
 

Google launches Question Hub for US publishers

After testing in India, Indonesia, and Nigeria, Google has made Question Hub, its tool to collect unanswered questions from users, available to publishers in the US.

This can be a great way for publishers to identify content that their audience is looking for, but that Google is not able to surface useful results for. In the screenshot above, News Editor Barry Schwartz searched for Google Search-related topics — hopefully you'll have better luck, as this is a potential treasure trove of information that could help inform your content strategy.

Read more here.

 

Master the science of search marketing analytics

Join us online, February 23 at SMX Report: a deep dive into everything you need to know about analytics for search marketing. Book now for just $99!

Register now »

 
Search Shorts
 

FAQ rich results and notes for manual actions.

Fewer FAQ rich results. There are some signs that Google may have reduced the number of sites it will show FAQ schema for, again.

Note on a manual action. For the past several years Google has had the ability to send a "note from your reviewer" after you submit a reconsideration request within Google Search Console.  Well, it is rare to see one but it was spotted again just before the New Year by Kristine Schachinger. We hope Google steps up these notes for 2021.

Google crawl JSON API files. Can Google access and crawl WordPress JSON API files?  John Mueller of Google said, "If you have a link there, we might try to fetch it like a HTML page."
"Most likely we won't see anything that looks like a normal HTML page and will just ignore it. We definitely don't just try to use any API endpoint we find," he added.

 
 
 
What We're Reading
 

We've curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.

Google Testing Dynamic Customized Tabs In Local Panel – Search Engine Roundtable

Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of Activism – New York Times

Metric Theory Joins MightyHive and S4Capital – Metric Theory

Pirate Site Search Traffic Tanked Following Google Updates – TorrentFreak

What Should Digital Marketing Agencies Focus on in the Year Ahead? – SparkToro