Digital Marketing News Recap: What Is New in SEO, PPC and Social Media?

Are you the one who wants to change or the one who wants to fall behind?

It’s time for our quarterly SEO news recap.  WebCEO has carefully picked for you the hottest news and updates that happened in the fields of SEO, PPC and Social Media.

What’s new in SEO and PPC?

Starting from January 23rd, Google made it easier for advertisers to compare the cost of Google Adwords data with other data in Google Analytics with the help of automatic currency conversion.

The Bing Ads platform continues to improve its competitive ad analysis. On February 18^th, Bing Ads released the Competitive Bid Opportunities feature in its ad optimization toolbox for U.S. advertisers. With this new feature, Bing marketers will be able to see the number of keywords that their ads could show up more often for in comparison to their competitors’ ads.

On March 11^th, Google announced a new report in the Google Webmaster tools called the Blocked Resources report. Now, every webmaster can see the list of CSS, image or JavaScript resources that are not accessible for GoogleBots because of being blocked. Besides, now, when you use the Google Fetch and Render tool you are provided two side-by-side screenshots of how your page is seen by Googlebots and by a typical user.

At the beginning of March an SEO rumor started to run that Google is working on a new ranking algorithm based on a site’s truth score instead of its popularity score. This means that in the near future websites that host contradictory or “false” information will be ranked lower than those that have established trust with Google.

On March 16^th, Google announced the release of a new ranking adjustment aimed at better handling of doorway pages in search results. It is considered to be a red flag for website owners and webmasters to build multiple doorway pages in order to maximize their search footprint.

During the last three months, Google has been strongly advising webmasters and website owners to make their sites mobile-friendly for the sake of a better mobile user experience. They have pointed to an upcoming Google Mobile-Friendly Algorithm release. To make mobile optimization easier for us, the Google team keeps on developing its Mobile-Friendly Testing tool, Mobile Usability report and step-by-step webmaster guides. Before it is too late, jump to the WebCEO Mobile Optimization reporting tool and fix all the mobile usability issues you have in order to get your website ready for a mobile-friendly ranking boost.

What’s new in Social Media?  

Facebook is considered to be the most powerful social media platform for communication and business promotion. It continues to walk the talk by adding new features and tools for a better user experience from both personal and business page owners.

One of the latest updates (January 7th) on Facebook, for marketers and business owners, was the incorporation of additional call-to-action buttons at the bottom of business page covers. At the moment, 7 call-to-action options are available:

On January 27^th, Facebook updated its advertising platform by adding conversion lift. Conversion lift works as a kind of A/B testing and helps to measure the impact of Facebook ads on the bottom line of your business. Then, in the middle of February, the ad relevance score and product ads were added to the Facebook Ads.

On March 13^th Facebook informed us about acquiring the top shopping search engine, the Find. Facebook explained that the goal of the acquisition was to improve the quality and relevance of ads for users.

On March 17^th it was announced that those who use Facebook for communication or freelance soon will be able to send or receive money via Facebook Messenger in an easy, no-cost and secure way. Speculations are that the payment system within Facebook won’t become popular among users because of a potential lack of trust of users in the social network. Learn about how marketers can use some of the newly added features on Facebook.

On March 2, Google declared the official death of Google+, sorry, its reorganization (LOL).  Google+ will never be the same again. It will roll into Google’s Photos and Streams product.

Another major event in the social media world is the announcement about a Google-Twitter partnership. On March 20^th, it became known that Google and Twitter reached an agreement about providing the search engine giant with access to Twitter’s stream, Firehose. This means that Google will now be able to index the huge number of tweets (9,000) per second in order to provide users with timely global information. In the past (2009), Google and Twitter used to work together and started the so-called Real-Time search on Google, but the partnership ended in 2011. Let’s see how long their partnership will last this time.

These are the biggest updates of the first quarter of 2015. Remeber, the best way to improve your marketing strategy is to keep up with the changes digital marketing brings.