Is Google Getting Better at JS Rendering + More News

This month's Searchlite intro written by Sr. Paid Search Analyst, Tatiana Hasbargen.

 

Hey, hi, hello! Happy Holidays!

We hope you all are taking some much-deserved time for yourselves this holiday season. I don’t know about you, but I am so stoked about winter. For every storm that’s predicted my fingers and toes are crossed that it will be 6 or more inches of snowfall. I’m just so excited to get my snowboard and snowshoes on and hit the slopes and trails!

Enough about me, we have some exciting news at Uproer! We are welcoming two new smarties to our Content Team, Brenna Miles and Sierra Myers. We are so excited to have them on board and to continue to grow our content team and capabilities 

We have a great lineup of articles this month, from GA4 news to JavaScript crawling timelines. Let’s get into it!

Psst... Check out our new team photo!

Brand Positioning & SEO: Aligning User Intent, Data and Brand Strategy

By Tory Gray, The Gray Dot Company 

Key Takeaways:

• Branding and SEO can work hand in hand. SEO plays a key role in how brands can position themselves in front of customers.
• Brand teams can use data and user intent insights from SEO to better convey naming, product road mapping, and much more.
• Using SEO insights can help brand teams quantify the relative interest for different positioning opportunities.

Why it Matters: 

The opportunity to marry branding and SEO strategies is often overlooked. A great brand presence stimulates the impulse for customers to hit "buy now." It's what inspires customers to continue coming back to a site for more. This only happens when a site is positioned in front of the right audiences, and that's where SEO comes into play. Combining the two can create a more valuable experience for customers, and can help drive conversions beyond traffic.

Marketing in a Recession: How to Avoid 5 Common Mistakes 

By Laura Schiele, Search Engine Land

Key Takeaways:

• Do your due diligence before cutting budgets, and try not to cut budgets entirely, reduce them in ad groups where performance indicates.
• Before you reduce budgets, reference the account history and performance data to talk to the client about product and CRM data such as:
  • Product(s)/service (e.i. keyword) that drive highly qualified leads?
  • Product/service focuses for the company in the next year
  • High LTV products, audiences, keywords, etc.

Why it Matters: 

Budget reductions can happen at any time, expected or unexpected. Either way, it’s important to know how to tackle them without negatively impacting your campaigns or your client's bottom line. To be confident in these conversations and to create a strategy that reduces overall spend, but still drives meaningful results, we need to have a good grasp on existing account (or industry benchmarks if your account is new) performance and product/service data from the client.Take all of this information and start to decipher what’s a priority for the client, where you’re aligned, and where you could begin to make reductions. Get granular. Another important aspect that I know I’m guilty of sometimes is not giving campaigns the time they need to learn; try not to cut tests or new campaigns too soon. Lastly, keep an eye on your competitors and weekly cost trends to identify opportunities.

Rendering Queue: Google Needs 9x More Time to Crawl JS Than HTML

By Ziemek Bućko, Onely

Key Takeaways:

• Pages that require rendering have to wait in a rendering queue in addition to the crawl queue.
• The rendering queue is very real and can significantly slow down Googlebot’s discovery process on your website.
• If you’re using JavaScript to generate ANY content, it’s probably better to render it all server-side.

Why it Matters:

If you’re anywhere near SEO, you’ve probably heard that “Google’s getting really good at rendering javascript now, so it’s fine to have javascript everywhere!” This may be my own personal conspiracy theory, but I think that was first uttered by a developer so they could use cool looking animations on a site they were working with.While there’s a kernel of truth in that - Google IS getting better at javascript rendering, and they’re certainly better than they were 8 years ago - the fact remains that Google kicks all javascript to a rendering queue, and how long does that content take to be rendered? This experiment by Onely showed a 9x increase in time to index for javascript rendered content. So that person telling you javascript is basically the same as html for SEO? Now you have data to show them otherwise.

Google Pushes Universal Analytics 360 Sunset to 2024

By Matt Southern, Search Engine Journal

Key Takeaways:

• For clarity, this refers to the enterprise version of Universal Analytics.
• As announced earlier this year, Google is still planning to sunset standard Universal Analytics properties on July 1, 2023.
• Google has recognized that GA4 is not an “+A” product (yet), and is providing some leeway in the transition phase

Why it Matters: 

Google’s transition away from Universal Analytics (UA) and over to Google Analytics 4 has been less than desirable thus far for marketers and analytics professionals. Google has pushed back the goalposts for sunsetting UA for enterprises by 9-months to give large organizations more time to prepare for the migration. In other words, GA4 has not been met with much enthusiasm and Google needs more time to make their product functional for the masses before forcing all businesses over to the new analytics platform.

Other Interesting Stories:

• Most Searched Thing on Google: Top Google Searches in 2022

• ​High Stakes: Netflix's Ad-Supported Tier Arrives as Marketers Face Uncertainty

Tool of the Month:

• 21 SEO Content Writing Tools to Improve Your Workflow