eCommerce SEO News

CNBC reports that Google recently revamped its Google Assistant division to prioritize Bard AI chat technology, which was introduced to the public as an experimental project. It will impact the future virtual assistant landscape. Recent leadership reshuffling as part of a “code red” effort denotes the integration of Bard into future Google Assistant products. The reorganization involves shifting team members to concentrate on Bard. The organizational changes involved replacing key figures, with Google Assistant’s engineering VP now leading the Bard team’s efforts. Google Assistant, introduced in 2016, is an AI-driven virtual assistant software similar to Siri and Alexa, commonly used for speech recognition across devices. Integrating Bard technology into similar products raises questions about its monetization and use case.

Bard Chatbot gets a new upgrade from Google by incorporating advancements from the Transformer model PaLM, a 540-billion parameter, a dense decoder which will enhance Bard’s mathematical and logical capabilities. The upgrade will allow Bard to tackle intricate arithmetic operations, improve logical inference, understand the context better, and solve multi-step word and math problems. Integrating PaLM’s abilities will create a more powerful AI chatbot with context-sware problem-solving and improved logical inference. It will handle a comprehensive range of math-related tasks and provide more accurate and contextually appropriate solutions making Bard a helpful tool for solving complex problems and streamlining workflows. Users can expect more advancements soon as Google continues to improve Bard’s efficiency and capabilities.

Bing started off as an ad-free all-in-one platform with over 100 million daily active users. But Microsoft now plans to incorporate ads within the AI-powered Bing chat experience. Microsoft aims to provide an encompassing experience, including search, chat, answers, and content creation with this change. They want to drive more traffic and revenue for publishers through new features and advertising and also a healthy ecosystem through collaborations. Since the current chat answer citations and “learn more” links have borne fruit, proposed features include ads in chat, an expanded hover experience, and rich captions for Star partners. Positive publisher feedback and one-third of users in Bing being new denotes that these changes are bound to increase the future user engagement and ad revenue sharing.

Google Ads has come up with a cross-channel conversion credit import update to delve deep into the customer buying journey and help users make informed marketing decisions based on the outcomes. The earlier method involved importing non-direct clicks from Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to Google Ads. The data gets imported only if the last click is from Google advertising. But the new model ensures full cross-channel conversion credit into Google Ads irrespective of the source of the last click. It will be able to provide a more accurate conversion value based on the effects of other channels and do away with discrepancies in the values pursued by Google Ads tracking versus GA4 cross-channel credit. Though the new model has a few limitations, it will soon become a preferred option for reporting owing to accuracy.

Named after the sheep Dolly, the first ever mammal to be cloned, the new release is created by the Databricks enterprise software company. Named Dolly Large Language Model (DLL), the venture is a Chat GPT clone from Open Source GPT Chat. The move is to oppose the adverse effects of monopolization of the AI ecosystem by giant corporations. Dolly is established on an open-source model from the non-profit EleutherAI research institute. It derives the data from the Stanford University Alpaca model. This model was, in turn, created from the LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI), the 65 billion parameter open source model created by Meta, which outperforms the current lot of AIs like GPT-3 by OpenAI and Gopher and Chinchilla by DeepMind. Dolly is all set to democratize the AI ecosystem, making it more transparent, open-source, and accessible.

With the introduction of a new plugin, ChatGPT gets enhanced capabilities and up-to-date information. The language model AI will gain the capacity to access the web for up-to-date and specific data. It can also perform constrained actions like interpreting code, performing computations, and retrieving data from custom knowledge bases on behalf of users. It will also be able to use third-party services. The two major plugins from OpenAI are web browser and code interpreter that allow ChatGPT to access more information from the internet, outside its trained data, to produce accurate and recent outcomes. A third, open-source retrieval plugin for custom knowledge bases lets developers enhance ChatGPT through their own information. The alpha access for the plugin is getting rolled out and will reach more users soon.

Mozilla invested $300 billion in a non-profit, open-source AI company, Mozilla.ai, in a move to counteract the challenges posed by Bing, ChatGPT, and Bard. The idea is to challenge the closed system, profit-based AI ventures through a free, accessible, and open-source AI ecosystem. The move will create a human-first approach with more participation, transparency, accountability, and trustworthiness to AI sources. They intend to enhance internet security and privacy to develop it into a public resource. They want to create a decentralized AI community that can counterweight the impacts of the large tech companies that built AI aimed at profit. Their project includes two aspects, the first being a free, bankable open source generative AI, and the second is a privacy-first recommendation system that bypasses misinformation or security.

In an attempt to outrun competitors in the AI space and to keep up its monopoly in the search engine market, Google has released Bard AI. It is an interactive AI-powered chatbot that helps drive productivity, encourage creativity, and nurture curiosity. Bard can give users tips, descriptions, and assistance with creative tasks like blog outlines. Bard is based on a lightweight, optimized version of LaMDA called the research large language model (LLM). Bard will run parallel to Google searches and not integrate into the search engine. It will operate as a standalone page with a single question box letting searchers check responses or explore their sources across the web. Google is taking measures to prevent AI from producing biased or misleading information like its competitors. Bard AI is currently released in the U.S. and UK.

TikTok is in the works to revamp its user experience by providing an enjoyable viewing experience for its patrons. The option gives users more control over the content they consume through TikTok by refreshing their “For You” feed if the current content is irrelevant. The app has several regulations in place, like Content Levels. But the new feature will avoid repetitive or similar content. The feed refreshes completely to let the user explore new options without changing other settings in the account. Users can additionally filter content by deleting watched videos, clicking the not interested button on videos, or changing the content preferences to remove specific hashtags and keywords. The app is taking these measures to ensure its users receive authentic, safe, and educational content.

Microsoft launches Microsoft 365 Copilot, its latest AI offering with combined capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and data from Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 apps. It integrates well with other apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams to enhance creativity, effectiveness, and skill sets. Copilot helps users create, edit, summarize, or improve the content on Word. It aids in the analysis and exploration of data on Excel. It can make full-blown, visually appealing presentations on PowerPoint and improve communications on Outlook. The AI has a Business Chat feature that unifies information across Microsoft Teams by correlating data from documents, emails, contacts, etc. Microsoft ensures that the software adheres to its AI standards. It is in the testing stage and will soon be available to the public.

The renowned AI safety and research company Anthropic has released a rival for ChatGPT, Claude AI assistant. Anthropic was founded by the former VPs at OpenAI. They aim to offer an AI that produces content that is less toxic, unbiased, and lacks hallucinations. The AI has conversational and text-processing abilities to churn out valid, authentic, and harmless data. The AI comes in two models. Claude-v1 is the powerful premium model programmed to manage sophisticated queries, create imaginative content and process detailed instructions. Claude Instant is the less expensive model with text analysis, simple dialogue handling, summarization, and Q&A documentation capabilities. Users can access both models by signing up on the Anthropic site. Claude is also available in Quora’s new app Poe, DuckDuckGo’s AI DuckAssist, and Notion AI.

Open AI has released its latest AI model GPT-4, a large multimodal model that can assimilate both image and text inputs to create text outputs. The AI is touted to display human-level performance on many academic and professional benchmarks and outperforms all existing large language models. The software is an improved version of GPT-3.5 regarding reliability, creativity, and dexterity in instruction handling. It is also said to be much more secure than its predecessor and can handle many languages, including low-resource ones like Latvian, Welsh, and Swahili. The AI is highly steerable, allowing developers to set its style and task by detailing the directions in the “system” message. On the downside, the software has no knowledge of incidents after September 2021, thereby running the risks of simple reasoning errors and hallucination of facts.

Google announced it would unite the conversion window settings for Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) from March 31. The change is to facilitate consistent reporting between the platforms. After an ad interaction, such as a view or click by the consumer, there is a time gap where the conversion gets recorded, termed the conversion window. Advertisers will no longer have the option to configure conversion windows independently, but there will be reduced discrepancies in performance reporting between the platforms. Google plans to update conversion window settings automatically for conversions imported from GA4 in Google Ads to ensure consistency in reporting. Google is sending emails to advertisers to notify them of this change. Google also gives users a choice to opt out of this update by getting in touch with Google Support.

Google has created new Search Designs for Desktops that display favicons and site names to make them visually distinct in searches. The fresh layout will make it easier for searchers to identify the websites listed in search results and ads. To make them pop in organic search results, Google will display clear labeling ads. The search engine will also add structured data to improve displayed site name accuracy. These efforts aim at enhancing user experience. Site names will help users identify websites associated with webpage links. The favicons are sized and shaped to make them more visible. These upgrades are also applicable to search ads. Labels on search ads will appear clearly on the top-left corner of the ad. Mobile ads will be labeled as sponsored in bold to demarcate them from regular content and improve visibility.

The celebrated privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo unveils its entry into the AI arena with DuckAssist. This feature uses AI generative technology to yield natural language answers to user search queries based on Wikipedia. DuckAssist displays the new instant answer in search results akin to traditional SERPs by scanning sources using active indexing. It relies on authoritative sources like Wikipedia and Britannica for information to reduce inaccuracies. It then uses natural language technology from OpenAI and Anthropic to generate a brief of its findings above the regular private search results. DuckAssist is now available in English on DuckDuckGo’s browser extensions and browsing apps. It is touted to be the first of the many such AI-assisted private search and browser updates to release from the DuckDuckGo in the future.

The new ad experience from Bing, local search ads, was released recently to enhance search prominence and beat competition in the local area. Designed to display on local results entity on Bing’s search engine results page and Bings Maps on PC, it will give brands more visibility and details in local search results. Users must set up location extensions and have a Microsoft Advertising account to create a local search ad. Microsoft is also rolling out multiple updates to aid advertisers. The code-free custom conversion setup wizard tool helps track conversions without updating code. Users can also set up tracking conversion by event by enabling Microsoft Clarity insights inside the UET tag. An option within UET lets users delete unused tags. Updates to custom combinations allow creating a combined audience list for select audience types.

In an exclusive bid to join the new AI trend, Brave Search Engine has announced that it uses AI to summarize web pages in SERPs. The Brave Search Summarizer Technology is an in-house Large Language Model and its summaries are AI-based rich results akin to featured snippets. It comprises three LLMs 2 qualified for different tasks: QA (question answering) to extract solid answers, zero-shot classifiers to weed out spam and related content, and a paraphrasing model that rewrites the content for improved language and readability. The feature expects to expand more than the current 17% search results. The company has announced that the summarizer sometimes combines results from two different websites to create a single summary. But this feature has the disadvantage of the AI making significant mistakes which Brave has been upfront about to its users.

In an attempt to match the increasing demand of job seekers, LinkedIn has decided to highlight five important updates. The “Open-to-work” option allows users to signal to recruiters privately or publicly. The “Skills Match” update helps job seekers understand the skill sets needed for a specific job. The ‘Share Your Resume With All Recruiters’ function facilitates user interaction with talent scouts. The ‘Hiring in Your Network’ process notifies users of potential hires in their network. Finally, the ‘I’m Interested’ button enables users to communicate their interest directly to the hiring company through their LinkedIn page, facilitating consideration for the job available in the future. LinkedIn’s new highlighted features help appease a large chunk of its users by aiding them to find fitting job matches, assess skills and find referrals.

Open AI has made ChatGPT’s AI-powered language and Whisper AI’s speech-to-text capabilities available to developers worldwide through its API. They have reduced ChatGPT pricing by 90%, making it one of the cheapest AIs around. ChatGPT API, priced at $0.002 per 1k tokens, is multiple times more affordable than existing versions. OpenAI has priced the large-v2 open-source model of the Whisper AI available through its API at $0.006 per minute. With the lower price tag, the company aims to let more businesses leverage them for their app development. They believe that more users will help the software grow further. Businesses get a chance to build next-generation apps using two powerful software. It will give developers convenient on-demand access. Also, OpenAI’s serving stack ensures better performance compared to other services in the market.

Google Privacy Sandbox eased user concerns about privacy. Chrome FLEDGE (First Locally Executed Decision Over Groups Experiment) is a Privacy Sandbox proposal facilitating remarketing and personalized audience use cases when a browser blocks third-party tracking across websites and apps. The proposal uses interest groups to showcase relevant ads to users. Google kick-started it in January 2021 and has now released a vital status update. The latest updates include event-level auction win reporting, trusted execution environment (TEE) usage for key/value service, fenced frames, K-anonymity, improved FLEDGE + attribution reporting integration, and bidding and auction services. Marketers have access to transparency and actionable items to prepare for a cookieless world, thanks to new FLEDGE features, service announcements, and proposed timelines.

Google has brought out new tools for the robust performance of Google Search Ads with the help of AI. The first tool automatically creates ad assets using Google’s AI. This feature helps Google to connect the ads to the right searchers by creating additional headlines and descriptions. It allows responsive search ads to showcase ingenious asset combinations, including new assets made on unique contexts like landing pages. The feature is currently available in open beta in English. Users are already witnessing a 2% increase in conversions. The second tool is the new customer acquisition goal for Search campaigns, launched globally with “Value New Customer” and “New Customers Only” modes. It enables users to easily create a consistent pipeline of new customers through Smart Bidding and first-party data.

LinkedIn introduces new SEO tools, content display options, and newsletter features to optimize a user’s LinkedIn presence and enhance viewer reach. LinkedIn users can now customize SEO titles and descriptions of articles they publish to make them show up quickly in searches. Users can access the “Publishing” menu, tap “Settings,” and make edits in the text boxes. These updates also makes searching for articles with specific keywords much simpler. Patrons can also schedule newsletters, highlight images, videos, or documents to make them more seeable on the Activity section of their profiles. They can pick the content to display first and make them appear more in search results. Additionally, LinkedIn has added a central location for analytics and creation tools allowing content creation and performance tracking in one place.

With a slew of over one million users from 169 different countries vying to use the AI-powered Bing search engine and Microsoft Edge browser, Microsoft has now rolled out the mobile version of the software. Bing has received a 71% positive response from testers worldwide. Things have become easier for users with Bing mobile app, now available on android and iOS. Customers can ask questions and receive answers and citations in a jiffy, as they prefer, as texts, bullet points, or simple responses. The software has a whole new look and also supports voice search. Users can now experience Bing on the phone with Edge browser. Microsoft also introduced Bing for Skype, which allows users to add the software to a group like a contact, and all members can view the chat results in real time. This feature may soon come to apps like Teams.

Google introduced a new feature for Search Console, Bulk Data Export, allowing site owners and SEO experts to export daily website performance data, except anonymized queries. The export happens from Google Search Console to Google BigQuery for critical advanced analysis and visualization. It is already available with small and medium websites with data access through the Looker Studio connector interface or Search Analytics API. The new release is a game changer for huge websites with tons of data to process. It allows long-tail query analysis to create more content opportunities for businesses. To configure this report, users must simulate the BigQuery account to receive data and key in details in the Google Search Console settings. The owners will receive an email notification that the export will start in 48 hours.

Google Analytics debuted new features that help users manage large data sets. The rollout offers a better reporting experience, advanced data quality identification, and upgraded sampling controls. The updates help users identify and sort data quality issues as the data quality icon appears at the individual card level. Users can create better reports supported by the “(other)” row message. All properties have a one-click option to construct the same report in Explore to increase granular data for improved accuracy in reporting. The features also support access for Google Analytics 360 properties to new sampling control, expanded data sets, high-priority flagging, and further sampling controls to facilitate precision and speed adjustments to generate accurate insights and better reporting.

The Neeva search engine, launched in the US in 2021, has nearly 2 million users and an extensive independent search index. The company has just introduced Neeva AI, its brand-new ad-free and tracker-free AI-powered search tool. The new product combines the potential of ChatGPT with up-to-date information that Neeva offers. It beats the limitations of large language models like ChatGPT, such as inaccurate sources and outdated data. NeevaAI evaluates the relevance and reliability of a source based on a page’s content and links. It then returns a single, detailed answer proving the program’s authoritativeness and reliability. The company proposes to assist content creators and publishers by contributing 20% of its revenue. NeevaAI is available in English in the U.S., UK, and Canada and in local languages in Germany, France, and Spain.

In a bid to outdo its competitors in the heated AI race, search giant Google has integrated more AI features to enhance its search capabilities. The new additions are to Google Lens and Multisearch. With a new update to Google Lens, one of Google’s flagship features with over 10 billion monthly image searches, users can now search for information directly from their mobile screens. The feature will roll out soon to Android users. Multisearch allows users to search simultaneously with images and text. The feature is available in all languages and countries where Google Lens is accessible. The update also features local search options. Now available in the US in English, these features will soon expand globally to reach all users. The new additions will make Google searches more visual with pictures, videos, and real-world understanding.

In a private event at Redmond headquarters today, Tech giant Microsoft finally put rumors to rest and announced the integration of ChatGPT –like capabilities to Bing and the Edge browser. The company terms it an “AI-powered copilot for the web” that would reshape the future of software. Bing’s new ‘Prometheus Model’ would be more powerful than ChatGPT. It improves the search index by applying AI to the core algorithm, enhances answer relevance and annotation, and updates search results. It currently has a limited preview on the desktop and will soon extend to millions of users and to mobiles. The same chat interface will be available as a sidebar feature in Edge and can interact with web pages. A demo showed it could summarize large PDFs in one click or translate a code snippet from Stack Overflow into another programming language.

Google launches Bard, a competitor for Open AI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT. The tech giant is releasing the path-defining, experimental conversational AI service based on LaMDA. Google started developing effective next-gen language and conversation capabilities based on LaMDA ( Language Model for Dialogue Applications) two years ago. Bard is currently available only to testers, and the tech world will see a rollout in the coming weeks based on expert feedback. The software anchors on the power, creativity, and intelligence of Large Language Models to provide quality responses to specific user queries. Once the public started to lean more on Google for specific-response questions that need technology and human knowledge, it became imperative to create a software, Bard, that can deliver in-depth responses on any subject.

Apart from the already existing free version of the ChatGPT chatbot, Open AI launched a premium service in the US alone. It is called ChatGPT Plus and has enhanced capabilities like response time, peak time, and priority access. Users can access the version at $20 per month. The company plans to keep the free version intact for the free segment users. Open AI is also exploring options for economic and business plans as well as data packs to cater to different audience strata. They will soon extend the services to other countries and regions outside the US. Open AI launched the chatbot as a research preview and started improving its limitations, identifying its strength, and expanding its capacity based on user feedback. Users have so far employed it for many professional cases, including editing, drafting, generating ideas, programming, and learning.

Google Ads introduces a new global feature, account-level negative keywords, to enhance brand safety and suitability. It is a shift to give advertisers more brand suitability controls over their campaigns. The feature was tested for many months before its release this year. The tool lets advertisers add keywords from their account settings page to filter out traffic from Search and Shopping campaigns and search and shopping elements of Performance Max. They can also better manage campaigns and negative keywords by operating them at an account level, not individual campaigns. It will decrease the chances of human error by duplicating keywords. Advertisers can confirm that their campaigns align with their brand values and audience segment. They can also avoid appearing in searches that may tarnish their reputation.

Twitter debuted a new ad unit called Search Keywords Ads to all its advertisers. The tool is similar to promoted tweets that appear on Twitter timelines but with the added advantage of appearing in search results. It allows Twitter patrons to promote their sponsored tweets on search results. It will subsequently help give the tweets reach a broader audience. The new feature allows advertisers to pay for their tweets to rank in searches for particular keywords. An increased user presence through such ads will ultimately drive much-needed revenue for Twitter. Users who search for keywords will automatically be exposed to sponsored tweets. The tweets reach more people with a specific search intent. Once advertisers pay for the feature, they can find Search Keywords Ads as a new campaign objective within the Twitter Ads interface.

Duda, a renowned professional eCommerce website building platform, announced its tie-up with WooRank for access to a suite of powerful digital marketing tools. WooRank is a high-performance SEO auditing and website optimization tool aiding digital marketing agencies with content and social media marketing and performance tracking. The program offers efficient search and marketing tools that are adept at keyword research, rank tracking, SEO performance auditing, and On-page SEO audits. The latest integration will help agencies build robust Duda-based platforms and perform website optimization better with WooRank App within the Duda editor. Users can assess the website traffic and metrics like bounce rates, page views, and session lengths. WooRank can also track traffic sources, web content performance, and the effectiveness of communication channels.

Microsoft’s partnership with Open AI brings our general availability of the company’s Azure Open AI to generate new applications using the latest technology, including ChatGPT. Developers can create and scale new applications with a worldwide reach. Azure Open AI uses open-source and cloud-based machine learning to integrate AI models into the existing infrastructure. With this new development, more businesses can access advanced AI models like GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL•E 2 through Microsoft Azure to create avant-garde applications powering eCommerce. Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, helps SEO professionals and marketers build applications and services through a worldwide network of Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides virtual machines, storage, networking, and other tools for developing and deploying software.

Google Cloud announced four new AI tools that help retailers enhance customer experience and personalized searches on eCommerce sites. They also aid retailers in inventory management and help provide a smooth shopping experience to their customers. The first tool helps with a customized eCommerce browsing experience by enhancing the capacity of the pre-existing Retail Search solution. The second AI tool allows merchants to check in-store shelves by translating visual and text features into actionable insights. The third tool powers an AI-based product recommendation system with new page-level optimization, revenue optimization, and buy-it-again features that harness customer data to drive satisfaction and revenue. The final tool employs advanced machine learning capabilities to arrange products on websites using historical data.

Microsoft is in the works to integrate Open AI’s new wonder child, ChatGPT, into its office software. Soon, software like Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook will have assistance from the popular chatbot. Microsoft 365 is all set to use AI to generate text with simple prompts. The move, if effective, will aid thousands of Word users to increase their productivity with faster language processing. It will also reduce the chances of errors and time consumption drastically. The AI can help Outlook users create error-free mailers and get quicker email summaries. The chatbot analyzes and summarizes documents in no time and can search for specific emails with prompts. Microsoft researchers are working relentlessly to create a tailored AI that can help with each of its popular software, and Open AI’s machine-learning model just might be the answer.

In a move to gain a competitive edge over Google in search results, Microsoft plans to integrate Open AI’s chatbot ChatGPT into its search engine Bing. The company is planning on an end-of-March launch of the product. Microsoft made a $1 billion investment in Open AI in 2019 and has since been working towards an alliance between the two platforms. From October 2022, Microsoft is in talks with Open AI for a second multi-billion investment in the AI business. The concept is to update and boost Bing’s performance with the help of the chatbot technology, making it capable of answering search queries with complete sentences rather than providing a list of links and delivering a seamless user experience. OpenAI plans to charge for ChatGPT in the future, and hence this integration might make Bing the only free entry to the chatbot.

In a recent groundbreaking research paper, Google describes an AI-based algorithm that identifies page quality akin to the helpful content signal. This algorithm has low-quality pages, spam content, and machine-generated content detection capabilities. The signal can handle web-scale analysis and uses only low resources. It is also said to be self-learning to identify low-quality content. Not a company to divulge the details of its popular algorithms, Google does not specify if this algorithm is the same as the helpful content signal. Speculations are rife in the tech community about the similarities between both. The company describes the signal as a series of improvements that are not spam action or manual action and can improve classifiers, rank content, and check if humans make the content.

Open AI is planning to introduce a watermark to identify ChatGPT-generated content in the final version quickly. The watermarking text in ChatGPT will be cryptographic, embedding a pattern of words, letters, and punctuation in the form of a secret code. It will help identify the original author of the article. This move has unnerved the digital marketing community as it might affect the Google ranking of a website containing AI content. Marketers have already started widely using this application to generate content briefs, outlines, and complex articles. But the company’s scientists assure there are ways to beat the system. In a discussion about AI Safety and Alignment work at OpenAI, the company stated that it is a safety measure to combat negative disruption by AI that might harm humanity, like plagiarism and mass propaganda.

ChatGPT OpenAI’s AI-based chatbot can help you find the right prompts. With AI and prompts slowly taking over the SEO industry, it becomes a mandate for SEO pros to master them to remain relevant in the industry and create discernible content. With content generation at its top, prompts have become an indispensable tool for SEO experts. With the right prompts, they can generate quality articles, images, and videos for websites and optimize them to stick to SEO recommendations. Prompts are keywords, relevant words, phrases, and questions users enter into AI tools to generate desired results. Promptology is the art of creating ideal prompts. Based on Large Language Models, users can even set the tone of voice, style and pattern of the content and use business rules to confirm that the concepts created sync with their business area.

After a short gap, Twitter relaunches its check mark for verified accounts. The modified system sports gold checkmarks for businesses and unique labels for official accounts. There are new criteria for users to receive a verified badge. The move aims to rectify Musk’s Blue Verified program that allowed the purchase of a blue checkmark for an $8 monthly subscription. The new launch stops users from impersonating famous accounts. The Blue Verified subscription program costs $8 per month for a web browser subscription. iOS app subscriptions will cost an additional $3. An extra sign-up process verifies if the account is complete, active, secure, and non-deceptive to combat impersonation. The gold checkmarks differentiate between verified businesses and verified individuals. An ‘Official’ label will apply for Government accounts.

Meta brings out new ways for consumers to make money and get quick payouts. It has an update that lets the creators get paid faster. The company has also lowered the expected criteria for the first payment from $100 to $25. They have enabled digital gifts called Stars on Reels and other public events for select creators. These stars prompt viewers to purchase them through the platform, which translates as revenue to the creator. This month, the platform is running campaigns to help drive awareness about this digital gifting system and, thereby, more Star purchases. The Star Party Bonus, which ran from 12/7 – 12/21, gave bonus stars to creators to reach set goals. The Stars Sale, going on between 12/14 and 1/4, spans Reels, Live, and On Demand, where users can buy limited-time seasonal and virtual gifts until the New Year.

Google released the new link spam update for its spam detection system on 14th December 2022. The update is said to create a widespread impact and may take up to two weeks to roll out completely. Google has upgraded its system to detect purchased links and domains used to pass links to other sites. The December 2022 link spam update, coupled with Google’s AI-based spam-prevention system, SpamBrain, will nullify unnatural links that artificially manipulate Search ranking. The system does not just detect spam; it can now isolate the sites passing the outgoing links and those buying them. Google cautions its users that the ranking may change for websites in all languages based on the results from the new update. The update’s impact will squarely depend on the authenticity of the links to your sites.

Google introduced its latest tool Google Search Status Dashboard, to track the current status of systems that impact Search, namely, crawling, indexing, and serving. Google has explained that they want to be transparent with disruptions as and when they happen. They introduced a new tool to simplify the process of communicating the status of Search in the future. The dashboard has several valuable features including RSS feed and view of historical data. It is meant to make information about significant incidents easily accessible and the process of reporting issues quick, accurate, and simple. This dashboard is set to report widespread issues occurring in the last 7 days. Detailed information about the dashboard is available for users on Google Search Central’s dedicated page for the Search Status dashboard.

Google Search result pages have major elements that are often similar to each other, obscure, and difficult to identify. Finding the element you want to search for can be quite a task at most times. Google has created a visual elements gallery to help users choose the most common and impactful elements relevant to a search result page. The gallery contains 22 visual elements suitable for SEO and site owners. Each element falls under broad groups like attribution, text results, video and image results, exploration features, etc. They display an abstract illustration of how it will look on the search result pages. They will also have labels with the name of each element and where you can find more information pertaining to it. The abstract design helps to keep the guide consistent across Search Central Support in 18 languages.

On December 5th Google started the rollout of another helpful content update across search results. In a Twitter announcement, Google elaborates that the feature will become visible from the release date and will take approximately two weeks to complete. It expects to improve the classifier and work globally across content in all languages. The update will boost Google’s Helpful Content System, which was released last August, designed to reward web pages tailored to people’s preferences rather than for search engines. The system augments content that adds unique value in searches rather than the generic information displayed by publishers. This update expands the system to all languages and may include new signals or adjustments to existing signals. More information about this reveal is available on Google’s help page.

Google is making continuous scrolling on desktop feature accessible to its users in the United States. Searchers can now scroll continuously through multiple desktop search results pages at once. Google announced that the SERPs will now display up to six pages of URLs before it asks users to click on the “more results” or “see more” options. The rollout is user-friendly and fast, giving more results with fewer clicks and lesser scrolling efforts. Google generally updates the first page of search results with ads, featured snippets, and such features. The new update is thus beneficial to regular web pages as it increases the likelihood of their content getting more visibility to the researchers before it hits a snag. Google also mentioned that continuous scrolling does not impact the position reporting function in Google Search Console.

LinkedIn introduced the all-new Focused Inbox, which helps patrons quickly pinpoint important messages and reply to them. In an effort to upgrade user experience, LinkedIn’s new feature aims to reduce spam and surface relevant messages for global users. Clients now get a “Try Focused Inbox” invite on login into LinkedIn. Once they click the button, the messages will automatically segregate into two tabs – “Focused” and “Others.” The update uses AI to sift through messages to surface relevant ones based on user inbox preferences. Customers can move messages between tabs or revert to the original settings if they dislike the update. As LinkedIn has become the most popular professional engagement platform with a 20% increase in DMs, this feature will be an added advantage to its consumers.

During the Q&A session of the November edition of Google’s SEO office-hours, Google announced that the faster performance of HTTP/3 does not directly impact a website’s SEO. Google Search Advocate has debunked the enhanced performance theory. Google team explains that HTTP/3 offers better performance than HTTP/2 and HTTP/1. But users would not experience a substantial difference with respect to SEO parameters. They went on to state that Google does not currently consider HTTP/3 as a ranking factor or in web crawling. It implies that the websites which adopt HTTP/3 early would not see enough immediate improvement in search rankings to affect the Core Web Vitals significantly. There could, however, be a potential indirect impact, and Google support for HTTP/3 is still a long way off.

TikTok reveals a new tool that gives businesses helpful insight into audience behavior. The rollout offers users a deeper understanding of customers, which can help them plan paid and organic content strategies. The tool is set up in TikTok Ads Manager and targets advertisers. The upside is the users would not need to pay for advertising to use the tool. It provides data from all TikTok users to guide paid organic content plans. Advertisers can explore their interests, demographics, behaviors, and other parameters and devise strategies to reach them easily. The tool can list the top ten hashtags the audiences engage with most. Appending the hashtags to their videos would quickly boost their viewership and engagement. Users get a finer idea of the audience niche and can set filters to screen information as deemed necessary.

Google has outed an all-new guide that will make users aware of the ranking systems that Google still uses to rank its search results and the ones that are retired. The guide differentiates and alphabetically lists the currently operational and retired ranking systems, making things easier for its patrons. In the guide, Google has also introduced two new terms: ranking “systems” and ranking “updates.” A ranking system like RankBrain constantly runs in the background and performs. On the contrary, a ranking update refers to a one-time change to existing ranking systems. For example, the Helpful Content System always runs in the background. But it receives updates for improved performance. Core Algorithm Updates and Spam Updates also receive one-time changes to their ranking systems to improve their function.

Google recently updated the Review Snippet Structured Data tool, which affects how we write numbers within the structured data code for reviews. The tool recommends one form of writing decimals over another globally popular method, namely, dots, to specify decimals instead of commas. The change, however, has yet to be mandated by Google. The review snippet structured data is relevant for websites featuring product reviews. A valid markup and reviews can result in a rich snippet with stars and a summary of the review or a Knowledge Panel. It included stars and a snippet of the review from the customer. The change will affect featured topics like movies, recipes, books, products, events, apps, etc., that display ratings and reviews. The switch intends to standardize data and make things easier for search engines.

Wix announced a novel way to update page-level settings for technical SEO from a single point. This change gives Wix SEO experts and businesses 100% control to customize important technical SEO-related factors like structured data on a page-by-page level from a single settings page. The new Wix SEO Settings tool allows users to review and edit meta tags, URL slug, indexability, open graph tags, structured data markup, robots meta tags, etc., for each page from one place in the Wix Dashboard. The new update adds efficiency and saves time, especially for big site owners working on SEO strategies. The latest SEO Settings are now applicable for Main and Product pages and help users achieve the flexibility to work faster and scale business.

In their Search On event earlier this year, the tech giant Google announced brand new features for Google Maps. The latest of these updates, the augmented reality-based Live View search for Google Maps, gives users the power to search their surroundings with a smartphone camera. According to ANI reports, the new feature works like the current Live View, which helps users navigate using the phone’s camera in real-time. The Live View mode will overlay arrows on top of user surroundings and direct them to landmarks or places they are looking for. According to GSM Arena, this feature is now available in selected cities like Los Angeles, London, New York, Paris, San Francisco, and Tokyo. The new search option uses billions of Street View images, AI, and AR to give users an exceptional grasp of their surroundings.

Google has rolled out target frequency for YouTube campaigns. The new feature allows advertisers to control how often an ad plays on YouTube. This feature, earlier available only while running connected TV campaigns in Google Display and Video 360, is now globally open for all users running YouTube campaigns. The target frequency capability helps advertisers reach their goals without overloading viewers with too many ads. They can display the ads at a higher frequency without disrupting the ROI. Advertisers can optimize ads for a more precise reach and frequency without upsetting the user experience. The option to select the preferred target frequency offers advertisers a chance to pick a frequency of up to four ads per week. The system then optimizes to provide maximum unique reach at the desired frequency.

A new initiative from Instagram lets users schedule posts and reels directly on the mobile app as early as 75 days. The new attribute is available for professional accounts, Instagram for Business. Or else you can upgrade to a business account. Instagram did not have pre-scheduling previously, and users had to use third-party tools or desktop solutions like Meta Business Suite to access the option. Now all users need is the iOS or Android apps on their phones. The content could be a picture, video, carousel, or reel in the app. All you need to do is schedule content from the Instagram Post Composer by clicking “Advanced Settings,” choosing “Schedule This post,” selecting a time and date for the content to go live, and tapping “Schedule.” The content is ready to publish at prime time slots without your physical presence.

At a live session at Brighton SEO, Google predicted that the strength of backlinks as a ranking factor for websites would drop significantly over a period of time. Google is generally known to discourage any form of unnatural link building practices. This factor may become less crucial to SEO professionals in the coming years. As Google has become more advanced at understanding how content fits in with the context of the rest of the web, its algorithm has slowly started weaning off dependency on inbound links to weigh in site options. Though backlinks might diminish in significance, they will continue to be helpful to Google for content discovery, understanding trust parameters, and site authority. A change is already in motion, and it is a matter of time before backlinks lose their current significance, Google adds.

Facebook extends professional profiles globally, allowing users to utilize features that were previously exclusively for business pages. Users can showcase their products and engage better with the audience. Facebook’s Professional Mode launched last December in the US and eliminated the need to create a separate Facebook Page to display content to a larger audience. The feature helps all users make money creatively. Users can make reels on ‘Reels Play’ to showcase business. “Stars” lets users earn money directly from fans. ‘In-stream ads’ during videos and reels are another way to bring in money. A ‘monthly subscription’ allows creators to share content solely with subscribers. The recommendations, top fans badge, invites, notifications, collabs, and boosts features are innovative ways to create and earn on Facebook.

BigCommerce is a popular eCommerce platform used by eCommerce business owners and developers across the globe. This cloud-based eCommerce software takes massive steps to increase its market reach with firms of all sizes. Last year, the eCommerce platform released an advanced software suite in its B2B edition. BigCommerce has acquired B2B Ninja this year to provide an online price-quoting for firms, irrespective of their sizes. B2B Ninja was launched in 2014 and had an impressive clientele. They are also long-term partners of the eCommerce platform. Following the acquisition, both parties work significantly closely to merge their technology. This merger will offer an advanced price-quoting feature to businesses that deal with complex and high volume quoting.

Screaming Frog has recently announced that they will release version 16.6 of the SEO spider, called Romeo. This latest update contains many new features that will help many eCommerce businesses improve their ranking on numerous search engines. Along with the latest updates, this version also includes bug fixes, and the existing features have been enhanced to offer high-quality performance to merchants and business owners. Google had announced the launch of a new Search Console Inspection API. It enables users to pull Google index data as seen on the Search Console. Screaming Frog has designed their latest version to support the new API in its existing Search Console integration. Thus, users can connect to URL inspection and fetch data whenever they want.

The prominent pop-culture app made the headlines today with a surprising announcement. As we know, TikTok reached its popularity because it allowed users to make cute videos under a restrictive time limit of under one minute. However, the audience wanted to post longer videos over time, so the social media platform increased its time limit to 3 minutes last July. It was a significant change, and the target audience optimistically embraced it. It allowed people to create more quality content. In light of the same, TikTok wanted to ignite the creators’ creativity further, and that’s why they have increased the time limit to ten minutes. This latest attempt to enhance the app experience offers the user or creator more flexibility in the type of content they want to create.

The search engine giant focuses on making Google Ads much more efficient by making new improvements to the ad extensions. Marketers should be aware that significant updates are incoming, particularly for sitelink, structured snippet, and call-out extensions. Google Ads is a crucial advertising tool for many eCommerce businesses. It helps merchants and business owners advertise their brand and simultaneously gain revenue. Ad extensions are designed to offer people more information about a company and facilitate engagement with the advertisement. Developers at Google have modified these ad extensions so that your business can fully reap the benefits. Due to these modifications, advertisers are already witnessing over a 20% hike in average click-through rates.

Google launched the Web Stories Data Dashboard to provide seamless access to users about data related to the performance of the stories. To further help the creators, the search engine giant released a blog that contains helpful information about tracking the performance metrics of web stories. It explained to the creators how to use Google Analytics to assess the performance of the web stories. The new Google Data Studio Template was released for uncovering fundamental insights. The well-known search engine has also used visual tools like charts and graphs in the Data Studio Report to represent the data in a simplified manner. Furthermore, the visual representation will also help users to track crucial metrics like top stories, audience, and average view time when analyzing the performance of web stories.

Twitter has recently taken the initiative of making its platform more transparent for its users. In light of this, they have launched new Bot Labels. Developers can voluntarily add these labels to automated accounts. Bots have always been a problem on the platform. This label is a step in the direction of making the identification of good bots easier. The new bit accounts will have a robot emoji or icon next to their profile couture, and a marker that will represent the account is automated. You can see something in your feed as it will have a computerized tag beneath the profile name on the tweets. This new update is a central issue in combating the misuse of bot accounts on social media platforms. The legitimate bot accounts will help users understand who they are engaging with, which will directly impact content amplification and distribution.

Facebook has already taken down its detailed targeting options on January 19, 2022. The options were related to culturally or politically polarizing topics. The social media platform has been taking conscious steps to make it a safe interface for its users. Sensitive issues like political affiliations, religion, health, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and race can hurt users’ sentiments. Therefore, the social media giant decided to replace the existing targeting ad options and replace them with an improved version. Facebook has pledged to make its platform and company a secure place that doesn’t tolerate discrimination or abuse. The new ad targeting options of 2022 will significantly make the platform user-friendly, business-friendly, and maintain a specific interface.

Link stickers were introduced on Instagram in October 2021. Link stickers were a replacement feature for the social media’s swipe-up feature. The swipe-up part was only available to accounts that are either verified or have many followers. The new link feature offers more benefits to marketers. Certain brands and companies that have utilized the part recorded high engagement rates. Your viewers can now respond or react to your stores with links. This interaction between the brand and the audience will also directly impact your conversation rate. The link stickers can also be customized to cater to the needs of your business. Undoubtedly, the Link stickers are the upcoming social media advertising feature set to dominate the rest of 2022.

Not many marketers or web developers are aware of this, but recent research and studies have shown that adding case studies can enhance the outlook of your business websites. Case studies have a significantly positive impact on how effectively your website will exhibit your firm’s value or expertise to your clientele. Case studies are an integral part of enhancing your brand reputation. However, you must ensure that the content is professionally written. It shouldn’t be hard to read or understand, and at the same time, the content quality shouldn’t drop. An excellent example of top-notch case studies can be seen on Google. The search engine giant ideally represents its tech expertise in the industry. 68% of B2B consumers prefer doing online research, and adding a case study to your website will build your brand credibility, thereby attracting new customers.

LinkedIn proudly announces a $500000 grants program exclusively for black entrepreneurs on the platform to celebrate and observe Black History Month. From February 1st to March 1st is observed as Black History Month. The grants program is one of the broader initiatives taken by the social networking site to show its support to the Black Community. The platform is heavily investing in multi-hyphenate Black entrepreneurs and professionals by enhancing the stories of Black-owned businesses on the LinkedIn platform. Recent LinkedIn data has shown that there has been a significant increase in Black entrepreneurs taking up new projects to accelerate the growth of their business. LinkedIn will continue to provide more incentives and donate to Blavity.org and digitalundivided to boost the annual Black entrepreneurship fellowship programs.

TikTok continues to evolve its platform to make it a safer place for both the audience and businesses while simultaneously developing advanced ad tools to help brands engage with their target audience. In the latest announcement, the social media platform announced the launch of the Brand Safety Center. It will be a central hub for crucial reference points containing all informational material like brand safety guides and resources. TikTok has taken several steps to make its platform transparent with its users, and the new Brand Safety Center falls under this initiative. One can access articles, insights, partnerships, and TikTok’s transparency updates via links available on the hub. It will also aid businesses in understanding how the social media platform works, staying on top of all the latest updates, and more.

Snapchat has more than 319 million users and counting. The majority chunk of users comprises teenagers and young adults, thus making this social media platform ideal for brands to advertise their products and services. Nonetheless, how effective are these ads for eCommerce businesses? To provide insights into the same, Snapchat hired Kantar to analyze the value of its high impact ad alternatives, including SnapSelect, Takeovers, First Commercial, and National Lenses. Of course, these high-end Snapchat adoptions come with expensive price tags, making them suitable for businesses with an increased budget to spare. The data revealed that brand awareness, message association, and ad awareness were significantly boosted for brands using high-impact adoptions. Furthermore, the performance of this ad remained the same for all brands regardless of whether they were more established or their size.

Apple’s latest ATT update has created massive shifts in the ad ecosystem. The update is an opt-in that prompts users to choose individual app tracking on iOS devices. It has made significant hurdles for Meta. The quarterly earnings report highlights that this change will dramatically impact the growth outlook. Meta has been busy finding ways to minimize the impact of ATT updates and help advertisers protect the growth of their business. Meta has released several recommendations to decline the effect of the update. According to the latest reports, it was observed that Meta’s efforts have successfully decreased the underreporting of iOS web conversions to approximately 8% from 15% in September last year. While a significant discrepancy still exists, losses have been lowered because of its measures.

Social media should be strictly regulated and monitored to reduce misleading information and cybercrime on various platforms. With social media apps focusing on making their platform a safer and better place, the rates of cyberbullying, the spread of hate speech, and violence have noticeably decreased. Still, a lot of work is left to make it a secure place for its users. In light of this, Meta has decided to expand its Redirective Initiative into the United Kingdom and Pakistan. Therefore, if any Facebook user searches using words listed or associated with violence or organized hate, the top search result will contain a link to a guide of resources and support. The guide should help them change their ideologies on violent extremism and hate. It will significantly slow down the spread of misinformation and harmful content on the app.

Instagram has introduced a new feature, the “Your Activity” display, that enhances the user’s ability to manage content on the social media platform. This feature was tested over several months and finally launched to empower its users. The social media app also upgraded the Security Checkup interface and Your Activity. It will aid people in protecting their accounts by monitoring the login activity, updating account recovery data, confirming accounts sharing the same login data, and so on. Users can go to the settings section to complete the security process. Furthermore, users can now enable two-factor authentication using WhatsApp in some countries. The security and the content management tool update will pave the way for business owners to implement robust marketing strategies.

SEO experts are aware that backlinks play a crucial role in boosting the SEO rank of a page or a website. According to best SEO practices, these backlinks should be authentic, organic, and relevant. In a recent conversation with Google’s Search Advocate, John Muller, the SEO community received valuable insights into the process of backlinking. Professionals and SEO experts were confused about why websites with spammy or paid backlinks have a higher SEO rank. Muller explains that the search engine knows that some websites don’t follow correct SEO practices, but they do other things correctly. So as long as the excellent SEO will outweigh the lousy SEO, Google will not remove such websites from the ranking. It isn’t easy to fulfill all the 200 and more ranking factors set by Google. Thus, it’s okay if you are short on one or two criteria.

The Sales Navigator tool has been a big hit among professionals using LinkedIn. They use it to communicate with accounts and contacts on this social networking platform. The new features added to the Sales Navigator tool aim to improve its efficacy and performance in finding and interacting with potential leads. Some of the abilities include enhanced CRM cards or advanced search experience. It has also added improvements to the filters. Users can now access a two-panel view that will show them all the available filters on the platform. The intuitive filter grouping launched by LinkedIn will further aid in the precise filtering of the search results. Along with this, LinkedIn users will also witness changes made to the Homepage. It now contains an alert feed that notifies you of anything that requires your immediate attention.

Website owners often face duplicate content issues for their different websites for various locations. The webpages aren’t completely indexed as the same content is present on numerous other websites for different locations. Google Search Console marks them as duplicate content, making it difficult for such pages to perform well. Google’s John Muller advised two methods to handle this problem. The first is to use a single website and build unique landing pages for each location. The benefit of implementing this approach is that you have to optimize SEO for a single website instead of numerous other ones for every area. The second approach is to modify the content. You don’t have to make the content 100% unique for each website, but it should include distinctive elements to indicate your content is duplicated.

Indexifembedded robot tags, Google’s latest innovation, will equip website owners and developers with greater control over how they want their content indexed with a no-index tag. Users can utilize this tag to inform Google if their content is placed inside the iframes to be indexed by the search engine. It was also introduced to solve a severe problem that media houses and publishers have faced for quite some time now. They want their content indexed on third-party pages. However, they don’t want their media pages to index themselves automatically. Google’s indexifembedded is used in such situations. You can highlight a particular part of the page you want to index with a non-index tag. Other than media publishers, anyone who doesn’t want their content to be indexed on Google’s SERP or doesn’t utilize embeds can use indexifembedded.

Twitter has released a “Twitter Toolbox” to offer professional help to marketers and developers. This toolbox comprises reliable, beneficial, and technologically improved creation and analytics tools. It is categorized into three separate segments: Measurement, safety, and Expression Tools. Out of the lot, Measurement Tools seem to be the most suitable category for marketers. It includes a myriad of advanced Twitter apps that equips business owners with valuable insights about their company’s performance on the platform. Moreover, the apps will highlight numerous helpful tweet compositions and offer tweet scheduling options. eCommerce brands have started actively utilizing the toolbox to get more data on their audience and performance to curate suitable marketing strategies.

Social media has boosted companies’ marketing and advertising strategies across the world. It’s crucial to stay updated on the changing algorithms and apps for different social media platforms. This will ensure that your content I optimized and your marketing campaigns are highly targeted. One of the components that regularly changes for platforms is pictures. The requirements are fixed variables from image ratio and size to format and layout. These changes are frequently made to adjust the content enhancements and cater to the audience’s needs. Moreover, the image size changes based on the type of format. For example, Instagram story images should be 1080 x 1920 pixels, and Twitter in-stream photos should be 1600 x 1900 pixels. Social media marketers and experts should keep themselves informed about designing effective strategies.

Backlinko is a well-known Search Engine Optimization training company in the industry. In recent trade, SEMrush, a pioneering industrial company specializing in SEO tools, has acquired Backlinko. SEMrush made this move to boost the curation of top-notch quality content for their Academy. SEMrush Academy is highly recommended and famous for providing free digital marketing courses and assessments. Backlinko’s Brian Dean is one of the top digital marketing experts. His intelligence and drive will help SEMrush Academy curate efficient SEO training and digital marketing resources. SEMrush is wholly focused on building up its educational segment. It wants to expand its knowledge of content marketing and SEO expertise. With the support of Backlinko, both companies will thrive in the industry.

While social media can be a fun, positive place, it can quickly turn into a dark place for some of us. All of us are aware of cyberbullying and other forms of cybercrime. In light of this, Instagram has introduced a new update to the app, according to which negative posts that may involve promoting violence or bullying will get displayed lower on the feed and stories. Instagram already strictly regulated content on their platform based on their set Community Guidelines. Their recent update follows the same footsteps by taking more decisive actions against content that contains hate speech or content that encourages violence and bullying. Previously, Instagram also eliminated or reduced content that consisted of misleading data. Furthermore, accounts posting such information will be less prominent on the app.

This good news is for you, users, and programmers who frequently inspect URLs in massive volume and automate page debugging, then the good news is for you! Google has recently launched a URL inspection API to make this task less time-consuming and more efficient. Google aims to help developers rapidly optimize websites and debug them. Through external applications, Search Console APIs can access information outside their domain. Users can request Search Console for data on the indexed version of a URL structure. The API will automatically return the indexed data that’s presently available in the URL inspection tool. It also equips developers with beneficial information like sitemaps that show the URL’s discovery, schemas detected by Google, the exact time and date of when the page was crawled, Google-selected canonical, etc.

The SEO software Ahrefs has recently launched a brand new SEO plugin for the WordPress platform. Interested users are free to download it from the WordPress Plugin Store. So what’s fresh about this SEO plugin? Well, it has several analytic features that let you assess your website’s functionality. These features are divided into three main categories. The first one gives you a performance Score, according to the number of web pages that are well-performing, non-performing, under-performing, and excluded. The second feature enables you to see the number of backlinks along with any recently discovered or lost links for a specific post. Lastly, the third ability offers organic traffic and ranking for each post. The data for organic traffic is derived from Google Analytics, and for organic rankings, it is from Google Search Console.

Site migration can be a tricky and tedious task, primarily if your site performs well for specific keywords. Google has confirmed that changes in the structure of URLs will significantly affect your site’s SEO performance. This is because Google needs time to comprehend your website’s new URL structure. The search engine generally stores the index on a per-page basis, making it difficult for Google when developers alternate the page URL. Regardless of whether you are making minor changes like adding a slash at the end of the URL or significant changes like changing the entire structure, any changes made will be considered site moves. John Muller advises you to meticulously research your options before changing the URL structure and implement 301-redirect from your old URLs to your new URLs. It makes it simpler for Google to find your web pages.

At the Google SEO office-hours session, John Muller has cleared up some misconceptions related to the use of FAQs. Generally. Business owners, content marketers, and SEO experts trend to include all the FAQs in the FAQ schema page. However, Muller clarified that it was necessary to do so. If your page has a lot of FAQs, Google doesn’t mind you using the FAQ schema markup on the few crucial ones. The explanation behind this is that Google wants websites to have structured data accurately visible on the page. Still, not all content has to be marked by appropriate schema markups. Another reason is that the FAQ snippet on Google SERP is reduced to two. This means that experts will have to choose the two most essential FAQs to help them get an outstanding CTR.

Over the last few days, developers and eCommerce professionals have noticed that the crawl rates for Shopify websites are significantly lower than average. Users have expressed their thoughts on the same by tweeting to John Muller, to which he replied that there were some technical difficulties calculating the crawl rates. Nevertheless, these issues were not particular to Shopify websites only. Such technical glitches are perfectly normal. The drop rate in the crawl rate is temporary, and it automatically catches up a few days later on. There’s nothing that can be changed or done by the engineers at Google. The search engine understands that low crawl rates can be troublesome for your website. It’s recommended that you keep track of Google Search Console to know more about the crawl stats.

Instagram is on a roll by announcing new features add enhances the app experience for its user. Immediately after announcing the expansion of remixable videos in the app, it also highlighted the new display feature of scheduled live streams on the user’s profile. This tool comes in handy for influencers, celebrities, and much more to create hype or awareness about their upcoming live stream on the platform. Along with mentioning your live stream on the profile, this feature will also provide additional information in the form of a pop-up prompt enabling people to sign-up for a reminder for the stream. It will aid in improving influencer marketing on the platform, which B2B eCommerce brands can utilize to organically advance the success rate of their social media marketing campaigns.

For years, newsletter Advertising has been the backbone of marketing and advertising strategies. Even though it is a traditional form of marketing, its importance in the digital marketing world is steadily increasing. There is a lot of misleading information and a lack of awareness surrounding topics related to newsletter marketing. It is one of the reasons why marketers switch to modern platforms to execute their campaigns. A recent digital marketing news report has shown that brands use sponsorships from other companies to expand their audience reach for newsletter advertising. The sponsorships are coordinated between the advertiser and publisher. Also, the design for each newsletter campaign can be customized according to the publisher’s preferences.

Social media apps are in a cut-throat competition to make their platform as shopping-friendly as possible. Snapchat joins the game by introducing a new feature, “Catalog-powered Shopping Lenses,” to their app. This AI tool will change the way consumers shop from eCommerce stores. This feature equips brands to showcase their range of products within one lens. By doing this, users have more virtual try-on options. The disadvantage of online shopping, according to consumers, is that they can’t try on the product. They need to see for themselves to decide if they look in those particular sunglasses, lipstick shade, and so on. This update introduced by Snapchat bridges the gap between online and offline shopping. The lenses will also display product details, such as the price, size, etc.

Two years plus into the pandemic, the people continue to find ways to adapt their lifestyle according to the changes by the virus. It has affected every aspect of our life. The present statistical results for content marketing aren’t as fruitful to B2C marketers. The previous recorded one of three or 34% of B2C marketers reporting a significantly successful content marketing strategy. However, recent research conducted by MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute says that the number has dropped one in four B2 marketers (26%.) The reason behind this drastic drop in the aftermath of intense covid waves. Talent acquisition has become increasingly tedious, disabling B2C business owners to grow content marketing strategies. Furthermore, digital transformation initiatives for eCommerce, sales enablement, etc., have deprioritized the need for an efficient content marketing strategy.

It has come to light that Google has sent emails to all their YouTube publishers stating that their YouTube Adsense payments are separated from other platform Adsense payments. It means that businesses paid through Google Adsense for ads on their YouTube channel, and the website will now receive individual earnings for each. Google is planning to implement this model from March 2022. This announcement has undoubtedly created some tension among the publishers because it means that for them to get paid, the payment threshold has to hit $100. Generally, it is easier to hit the payment threshold sooner as AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search, Adsense for YouTube, etc., were previously combined. Google has acknowledged that the disbursement timing will be disturbed due to this change and requested merchants to adjust with the same.

In a recent survey, from a total of 410 recorded responses, about 42% believe that single image ads perform the best on LinkedIn. Generally, brands have to choose from many LinkedIn ad options ranging from promoted text posts, video ads, single image ads, etc. While these are excellent ad options, brands should select an alternative that meets the requirements of their business goals. To some extent, polls have shown remarkable engagement rates. Mixing polls to your marketing or advertising campaigns on LinkedIn will significantly benefit your company. Even though LinkedIn advises business owners to generate more video ads as they perform best on their platform, users on the app have something else to say. Based on the results of this survey, single image ads remain one of the leading preferences by consumers.

As we are aware, TikTok is the rebranded social media platform of Musically. Previously the platform was used to notify the user when someone viewed their profile. After being remodeled into TikTok, the feature was taken down last year due to data sensitivity issues. However, according to recent reports, it has come to light that the tech developers at TikTok are reportedly bringing back the view option. The option creates more room for internet transparency. The prominently used social media platform wants its user to feel safe while using TikTok by empowering them with crucial information. Along with who has viewed your profile, you will also check when the person has viewed your profile. Like every feature, this function is opt-in, which means it can be switched on or off at any time by the user.

John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate, addresses how search engines use synonyms in response to a question submitted to the Google Search Central SEO office hours. Muller confirmed that Google’s understanding of synonyms is fully automatic. It means humans do not manually write code to teach the search engine’s algorithms the synonyms of every word. This process seems like an unfeasible complicated task in a practical world as it is impossible to manually keep up with the large influx of data every day. Mueller also referred to a conference video from 2019, where Paul Haahr, a Google Engineer, explains in-depth how the search engine’s synonym system works. The video consists of real examples where Google has previously got synonyms wrong and how the engineers learned from their mistakes.

Google has recently announced that user comments tremendously help with your SEO ranking. Not many professionals are aware that user comments can add additional SEO value, which will boost your eCommerce website’s ranking. Nonetheless, the search engine has also mentioned the importance of regulating these comments. Website owners or developers have to moderate the comments to avoid technical issues rigidly. Weed out any comments that are irrelevant, off-topic, or contain spammy links. Such comments can demote your SEO rank and make you liable to pay hefty penalties. When it comes to SEO, there are a lot of complex components that come into play. Expert developers and marketers have to consider user comments while curating their strategies to boost the impact and improve the SEO rank of the website.

A backlink profile is a collection of backlinks leading to your website, as we are aware that backlinks can come from a myriad of sources, including NGOs, publishers, institutions, etc. Google’s algorithm is wired to rank authentic and trustworthy websites higher than other websites. How does Google figure out if your website is reliable? Well, the backlinks from your website as a trust signal to the search engine. According to Google’s recent algorithm update, it evaluates backlinks to guarantee that the destination site is relevant to the user. Therefore, the stronger backlinks your website earns, the higher the SEO ranking on Google will be. If you’re caught furthering your rank using spam backlinks, you can face a penalty. Numerous backlink tools in the market help you manage your profile to boost your SEO strategies and eliminate unhelpful backlinks.

TikTok, a rebranded social media platform beats Facebook in time spent per user. Does this mean brands will shift their focus from Facebook to TikTok and invest their social media campaign resources to this social media platform? An online app Annie reported that TikTok had a 325% increase in time spent per user. This means more users engage on TikTok than Facebook. Large enterprises and multinational companies spend an exorbitant amount on TikTok influencer collaborations and other marketing campaigns to organically increase their sales. TikTok is one the most widely used social media and the platform consistently introduce various algorithm updates such as allowing users to digitally shop and monetize through ads. Start building TikTok marketing strategies to increase your organic social media engagement rate.

In the past couple of months, the world of social media content marketing has witnessed a new trend, and it is utilizing micro-influencers for collaboration. This trend has followed us into the year 2022 and is predicted to grow rapidly in the future. The question that arises is, why choose micro-influencers over famous bloggers and influencers? For starters, influencers with massive follower lists have considerably high price tags that are not affordable by small businesses. Secondly, micro-influencers have more personal and intimate relations with their followers. This results in a high engagement rate. Such types of influencers don’t face the issue of having fake followers on their platforms. This helps in ensuring companies that they are spending time and money marketing to a real or authentic audience.

In this contemporary world, an individual’s life revolves around smartphones. From work, entertainment, relationships to even shopping everything is available at the tip of your fingers. A research study concluded that mobile commerce will double its share in U.S. retail by 2025. It will contribute about 10.4% or more than $728 billion in the future. Mobile Commerce is different from Social Commerce. The latter exclusively use social media platforms as a medium of selling. Whereas mobile commerce refers to the official apps curated by the brand to sell their products or service. Examples of mobile commerce include H&M, Zara, and Amazon apps. This type of commerce has opened up new markets for retailers. With the increase in its popularity, it has become necessary for online retailers to launch their own apps to boost their sales.

The new year of 2022 brings in various changes in SEO, organic traffic, and keyword ranking tied up to prominent search engines like Google. These technological advances are a boon to organizations that keep up with the latest SEO practices. Google’s latest MUM or Multitask Unified Model is an AI-based algorithm designed to modernize the searching process for the audience. MUM sieves through the complex questions to give individuals what they need at their first search attempt. For content advertisers, MUM will increase the chances of your content being chosen as the number one search result. You also need to focus on different factors like including content ranging from audios (podcasts) to videos (How-to videos), page loading speed, and securing feature snippets. Read up more on the MUM algorithm to optimize your content marketing strategy.

As content writers are aware, word count is a crucial contributing factor in determining the quality of written content. However, most of them are also misled into believing that search engines like Google do the same. People assume that along with targeted high-density keywords, word count also aids in increasing the SEO rank of your site. Google has cleared up this confusion by clearly stating that word count was never considered as an SEO ranking factor. Therefore, more words don’t exactly mean it is efficient for your site. As a general rule, a word count of 1000 to 2000 is appropriate as it seemed to rank higher. Above all, remember to focus on the quality of your writing. If your content piece has relevant and unique information it will definitely rank higher in search result pages.

Keywords enhance the SEO potential of any content and it is one of the leading ways utilized by eCommerce marketers to boost the organic traffic on the site. Nevertheless, beginners and even some of the best marketers make a rookie mistake while implementing the keyword strategy. Instead of looking for estimated traffic potential keywords, they search for single-phrase search volume. The latter is specifically meant to be used for Google Ads and not organic search. Most keyword tools offer you basic or generic keywords that do little or nothing to increase the organic traffic of your site. It only leads to the wastage of valuable resources like time and money. Therefore, business owners need to switch to tools that show them keywords with low competition and significantly high traffic potential.

Social publishing is often used as an interchangeable term for content writing, which is a false misconception to have. Social publishing is a form of generating content and publishing in a manner the readers can respond and give their feedback about it. It creates a space where the reader and writer can interact or connect with each other. This provides mutual benefits to both parties. The reader benefits by comprehending the material better, and understating the values of the brand. Whereas the writer benefits by increasing his brand awareness and building a solid relationship with the audience. Many eCommerce businesses whether small or large are switching to these interactive and engaging mediums like social publishing to organically increase their company’s sales and growth.

eCommerce businesses and other large enterprises are utilizing the power of Google News to increase brand visibility on this search engine. Google news reaches a wider section of the audience and it is particularly designed to show the most recent news from reliable and reputable sources. Google news is the ideal way to share any trendy blog, post or announcement to share with your potential customers. However, like any content marketing strategy, you should ensure that your content is efficiently optimized for Google News. Some ways to be ranked higher on Google News is to use location-specific keywords, avoid phrases like “breaking news” and “latest news,” create a separate news section in your site, quote your sources, including statistical data, and write a bold heading title for your article.

The continuous evolvement and updates of social media platforms have opened up a new market for both consumers and merchants. Adding the shop feature or using these platforms to sell your products is definitely one of the leading sources of revenue for small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and enterprises. According to a report by Accenture, global social commerce will grow three times faster than eCommerce. In terms of revenue, it will leap from $492 billion to a whopping $1.2 billion dollars. Gen Z and millennials, which are the two most vital sets of the target audience, spend an exorbitant amount of time on various social media apps, with at least 2 billion making purchases from these apps in 2021. Companies need to pay close attention to these statistics and advance their monthly revenue by selling on social media.

Google has officially detailed the phaseout of third-party cookies to the year 2023, giving more time to marketeers to figure out alternative tracking strategies. The next 12 months are critically important for the marketing industries. Advertisers, publishers, ad tech providers, and marketing executives figure out innovative and ground-breaking techniques to enable them to track consumer data and targeted ads. Nevertheless, the transition to a cookieless future is a strenuous and complicated process. It will gradually crystallize and increment. The fact still remains that whether you like it or not, the cookieless future is near and marketeers need to get out of their comfort zone to test out other alternatives. Companies need to start investing in research and technology to strengthen their marketing department.

EAT principle is the Google contemporary marketing trend to improve SEO rank of companies. For beginners, who are unaware of this trend, EAT which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness is a principle introduced by Google. This prominent search engine giant uses this principle to refine their continuously evolving algorithm. Marketers need to ensure that they develop content based on the preferences of their target audience and user demographics. The latter significantly helps in determining the type of content your target audience will most likely consume. Content that includes links, relevant sources and delivered in a straightforward manner to the reader will always have a higher SEO rank. Big players and startups have started strictly following Google’s EAT principle to stay competitive in the industry.

Email marketing was one of the first few strategies designed to boost organic growth and sales of the company. The power of email marketing is such that it still remains as one of the central driving forces of content marketing. Be it small business or large enterprises, a crucial portion of their lead is generated through email marketing. In 2022, Bi monthly newsletters which consist of a summary of your products or services and brand message is sent out to your target audience. It is an inexpensive yet resourceful form of marketing that will guarantee you organic leads. Smart and efficient marketers know that you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars to enhance your marketing and advertising campaigns. Sometimes, what is cheap and simple works the best for you.

Since the onset of the pandemic, social media’s value for marketing and advertising has exponentially increased. Brands have noted a significant boost on their return of investment or ROI on their social media expenses. Popular social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, more have come with shopping capabilities that lets customers shop from your official social media account. You can link the products to the content you post. This link will redirect your consumers to your social media platform storefront, where they can shop from a range of products. According to the Q4 2020 data 73.7% of total ad expenses went to main feeds for Instagram and Facebook. This if you sign to heavily invest in social media advertising to maximize your sales opportunities, if you haven’t already.

Social media platforms proved to be a robust tool for not just marketing and advertising but also for spreading awareness in the pandemic world. Last two years have seen a whopping increase in the number of people who started using social media or monetized their existing social media platform as a primary source of income. Brands have realized that by collaborating with either micro or popular social media influencers can drastically increase their sales. Customers want honest opinions and reviews of products and they are much more likely to believe a fellow customer than a large corporates. These influencers charge your brands per post on their feed. Endorsements by social media influencers and even celebrities as brand ambassadors facilitates higher engagement rates and boosted organic social media growth.

Not sure if you read the heading right? Well, let’s debunk this prominent misconception for you. Everyone is aware how important Core Web Vitals are. Google considers this ranking factor so seriously that now you can find a CWV metrics on the PageSpeed Insights and a CWV report in Google Search Console. CWV performance on mobile should always be maintained at top-levels. It is because 60% of the total Google searches come from smartphones. However, Google itself previously stated that while Core Web Vitals are critically important, it doesn’t beat high-quality content. There is no use of curating a seamless browsing experience if you are not going to publish relevant content on your website. Meeting consumer requirements and answering user queries is also one of the most essential ranking factors.

Emotions are often the ignored criteria while planning content marketing. Marketers forget that beyond the screens there is a breathing human who reads their content and connects to it. Many established brands have executed successful marketing and advertising campaigns by adding “human touch” or “emotional appeal” to their content. Tap into the emotions of your target audience by producing powerful content. This helps your customers to relate to your posts and understand your brand mission/values. A study connected by the Harvard Business Review  points that most emotions behind viral content are admiration, amusement and interest. Negative emotions also significantly contribute towards the same, but they are not preferred as they naturally create a negative perception about your brand.

After analyzing approximately 1 million instagram brand stories, Socialinsider concluded a ton of valuable data that contributes to the upward trend of this app. Instagram has seen a massive surge in users in the last few years. The app’s continuous new updates are to thank for that. Business owners can post five or less stories everyday to maintain the retention rates above 70%. It is also crucial to maintain a balance between the type of content you post on stories. According to Socialinsider, Instagram users exist faster from video stories and image stories. Therefore, if you aim to further your reach, then you should opt for image stories. By consistently posting on your feed and updating your stories everyday, you will definitely see an improvement in your sales.

This New Year calls for changes in the traditional and outdated SME marketing strategies followed by industrial marketers. Content will be the king of all upcoming marketing and advertising campaigns. Many B2B marketers are already getting behind this trend to get ahead of the competition. They need to generate authentic content to support consumers in making vital purchasing decisions. The content you generate should meet the requirements of your target audience. Apart from producing new content, this SME marketing trend also includes analysis of the current data. Critically evaluate every piece of your content and revamp it according to your business needs. Expert marketers produce content in a way that can be used across all platforms such as social media, website, promotional emails, and more.