I took vacation, but the world kept turning. Weird.
The News
Chat may soon become an essential player in your lifecycle marketing mix. According to a survey from Drift and SurveyMonkey Audience, over 40% of consumers expected a response from a chatbot within five seconds of the original interaction. While email and telephone are still the leading communication channels between consumers and brands, ⅓ of survey consumers said they used online chat in the last 12 months. It will be interesting to see how chat’s growth is incorporated into SEO and content channels. On a personal level, I've been exploring ways chat can supplement SEO traffic and finding some interesting opportunities.
AMP now supports custom JavaScript. This allows AMP pages to make greater use of JavaScript capabilities, introducing more creativity and design freedom into the AMP process.
Amazon black hat SEO continues to grow and deliver value for its shady purveyors. Fake reviews are endemic within many Amazon product categories, and high review counts directly correlate to better visibility in Amazon search results. Due to the impact of reviews on Amazon rank, “review hijacking” has become a popular black hat tactic. This occurs when a product seller associates positive reviews between unrelated products.
Traffic from the Google Images swipe to visit feature can now can be found in Google Search Console from the AMP on Image Results search appearance filter.
Yoast 11.9 launched with improved schema and tighter security, along with improvements to Local SEO and News SEO plugins.
Video marketing is the top priority for the majority of digital marketers this year, according to a report from Mondo. Interesting to see the huge shift in focus to video over the last few years. Instagram stories were the top focus in investment, followed by newsfeed vids. If you’re not incorporating video production and distribution strategy into your content marketing plan, you’re in the minority.
Ranking Factors
