All You Need To Know On The Latest Changes In Digital Marketing (In Under 10 Minutes)

Well, here we are, 3 months into 2021 and there have been changes afoot in the digital marketing world. Here’s what you need to know for this week to assure you’re up to date with what’s been going on!

SEO Updates

#1: Voice Search Continues to Advance, A feature that was barely spoken of just 5 years ago. Voice Search has advanced rapidly due to the creation and enhancement of Alexa, Google Assistant and other voice assistants. Search Engine Watch reports that voice search revenue will rise to $40 billion by 2022, a statistic that provides food for thought within the SEO world.

Our SEO Specialists at Assured Marketing raelise the opportunity that this presents for new and innovative SEO tactics. With this heavy increase in traffic through Voice Search, it is becoming obvious that getting to the no.1 position will soon be much more important than in conventional text searches. 

#2: User Experience To Become A Major Ranking Factor, Google announced last year in their Page Experience Update that UX was being valued as an important part of SEO, and that they had plans to make UX a major factor in SEO, as part of what they’re calling The Core Web Vitals. Measuring factors such as; load speed, responsiveness and interactivity, Google will now help to  determine a web pages ranking based on these points. 

We believe that the best solutions in adapting to this SEO change are; improving load speed (by compressing images and using plugins like LazyLoader), reducing bounce rate with engaging content and easy user journeys & optimise all elements for mobile as this can be an issue Google will flage more an more often. 

Apple & Facebook’s Advertising Feud Rages On!

This conflict has been somewhat a war of attrition, anyone tuned into developments in paid advertising has been following the updates with great anticipation. Apple’s determination to implement more vigorous privacy measures on their devices is causing problems with the intuitive nature of Facebook Advertising. The new privacy measures will mask links between users and events, preventing advertisers like Facebook from seeing user’s identities. These measures are set to eliminate event tracking on sponsored ads if clicks, conversions and engagements are generated from Apple devices. 

Limiting event tracking in this manner will mean that anyone running advertising campaigns will have less data to work with. This is a problem. Without data, advertising campaigns cannot be properly optimised and correct audiences cannot be fully discovered/identified. Couple this with the fact that it will almost certainly lead to delayed campaign reporting from the advertiser, and you can see the issues these changes are set to cause with regards to easily running successful ad campaigns on social media.

Our Pay-Per-Click (PPC) specialists are ready to adjust to these changes and are currently looking at the best ways to adapt existing and new ad campaigns to match these updates. Following what was advised by PPC Hero earlier this year; we currently believe that the best way to combat these obstacles is to measure event tracking elsewhere. 

Using web analytics to the best of our ability alongside the limited data from Facebook ad campaigns should enable us to piece together the right data. Measuring Facebook Ad campaigns against Google ones will help provide with sufficient data to estimate a ‘hidden multiplier’ (conversions impacted by Facebook versus direct conversions from Facebook). This technique will help to improve understanding better than just measuring direct conversions.

WordPress Updates

Full Site Editing, WordPress are keen to launch their new ‘full site editing’ project, which has 3 main focus areas to improve customizability for WordPress users. Full site editing will look to enable users to better create and edit engaging content layouts with ease. The focus on the new block patterns feature will give web designers the ability to access pre-made patterns thus being able to more easily layout their work for a user friendly site. Whilst the new ‘global styles’ feature will bring a higher level of customization to WordPress sites. Once again the main impact being that things such as aesthetics and layout will be better optimised and easier to customise.

Unlike the changes afoot in Facebook Ads, our web design team are welcoming these changes. They look set to improve the quality of work able to be produced alongside optimising our clients’ website’s needing that all important UX push to help compete with the new SEO changes.