Table of Contents
Hello and Happy New Year!
Our team is definitely looking forward to starting fresh this year, and we have some Resolutions to kick us off. They include things like:
- Taking more me-time
- Cooking Grandma's traditional recipes
- Write creatively more often
- Get accepted into grad school
- Read 25 books this year
Do you have a Resolution? We'd love to hear it! Just reply to this email.
If you're like us, you might find it challenging at times to save and organize the helpful content you come across. That's why we decided to put together a list of our favorite marketing articles from 2020. You can access the Google Sheet here.
Now onto the latest and greatest content for the start of 2021: We share our new guide to optimizing your e-commerce category pages, a full analysis of Google's December algorithm update, and a brand new (free) Google tool that will help you discover unanswered questions about a wide array of topics. Check it out!
Subscribe to our newsletter
Get awesome articles like this one delivered to your inbox monthly.
[gravityform id=6 title=false description=false ajax=true tabindex=49]
How to Power-Up Your Ecommerce Category Pages for SEO
by Griffin Roer, Uproer
Key Takeaways:
- We walk through 8 elements of category page optimization that you should focus on to improve your SEO performance
- Dynamic content is an overlooked opportunity that you can implement to get the edge in search results
- Learn how ecommerce companies often get these optimizations wrong (do any of these describe your category pages?)
Why it Matters: Category pages are often an ecommerce company's best opportunity to drive large volumes of new potential customers through SEO. Our recommendations will help you improve your non-brand rankings and increase traffic.
The Importance Of Content Strategy
by Jarrett Thomas of iPullRank, Paul Zalewski and Steve Pockross of Verblio
Key Takeaways:
- Content strategy is not synonymous with creating blog posts
- A content strategy is all about building a brand, telling a story, and creating content that serves a purpose, and with that content, you'll not only do well with SEO, but that content does well across any platform.
- "Create content around customers, what they want to hear, what you solve, or what you can help solve"
Why it Matters:
Most of the time, we get stuck in the "15K Search Volume or nothing" mentality. This podcast offers an alternative. All content (posts, videos, podcasts, etc) should work together to serve a purpose for your brand. This is particularly helpful in Small-Medium sized businesses as it gives these guys a chance to really carve out their niche in the industry and offer real value rather than chasing highly competitive terms.
Why SEO is the Most Undervalued Marketing Channel
by Rachel Morrow, Tarakeet
Key Takeaways:
- Thinking about SEO as merely another sales channel is misguided and likely to produce poor results
- Today’s businesses face a number of challenges when it comes to SEO but these challenges are overcome through better understanding, greater investment, and full buy-in
- SEO has benefits, such as brand reputation management, that aren’t as easily quantified as keyword rankings, traffic, or links
Why it Matters: When SEO is tacked on as an afterthought, campaigns tend not to provide the kinds of results that encourage further investment. This can perpetuate a negative feedback loop that leads to chronic undervaluing and underperformance of SEO initiatives. It’s only when SEO is integrated into an organization’s broader strategy that we begin to see the full range of benefits SEO can offer.
How Apple’s IOS 14 Release May Affect Your Ads
by Facebook
Key Takeaways:
- Apple’s IOS 14 update will allow users to opt-out of some data collection and sharing
- This has wide-reaching implications, but it has an especially large impact on Facebook Ads
- This article covers off on the biggest ways you might see your Facebook Pixel tracking and measurement impacted
Why it Matters: As a result of this update -- and countless others like it -- Facebook is doubling down on aggregated measurement. But this isn’t new. Platforms have been rolling out changes to measurement, targeting, and ad placement a whole lot over the past year. And we can certainly expect more changes to come in 2021. That means more website authentication, slower reporting, and shorter attribution windows.
It’s annoying for us as marketers, but it’s not a bad thing. Data privacy is the name of the game, and it’s our job to figure out how to maintain performance without relying heavily on the granular data we’ve been used to in recent years.
Google’s December 2020 Broad Core Algorithm Update: Analysis, Observations, Tremors and Reversals, and More Key Points for Site Owners
by Glenn Gabe, G-Squared Interactive
Key Takeaways:
- In early December, Google released one of the highest-impact core algorithm updates in recent memory
- Google’s core algorithm updates don’t target a single ranking factor or industry but are aimed at improving the quality and relevance of results more broadly
- The complexity inherent to modern core updates means there likely isn’t any one single factor responsible for gains or losses in keyword rankings for a given website
Why it Matters: Any time a Google algorithm update goes live, there’s a scramble to see who has been affected and why. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that reactively trying find the “one thing” that impacted rankings is a fool’s errand. Instead, we should heed Glenn’s advice to use the “kitchen sink” approach to recovering from a Google algorithm update.
In other words, be proactive about improving your website and its content and you’ll improve your odds of success. The good news is that those are things we all should be doing anyway.
Free Tool of the Month: Google Question Hub
Google's brand new, free tool helps content creators quickly uncover questions that haven't been answered yet. You can easily explore questions across a huge variety of topics, and star questions you think your audience may be asking.
Plus, after you create your content, you can connect the tool with Google Search Console to track your content's performance right in the app. We highly recommend giving this tool a spin - it might be just the thing you need to brainstorm some fresh content for 2021!
