Another round of the Digital Digest! Where we collect all the best SEO, SEM, Inbound Marketing, and general Digital Marketing stories from this past month. And with so many posts and stories appearing in November 2016, there was plenty to choose from – let’s dive in:

General Digital Marketing

• Publishers Are Rethinking Those ‘Around the Web’ Ads: Publishers are beginning to regret their “Promoted Stories” sections, particularly when it contradicts the purpose of the article it appears on.

SEO

• Google: Content Within Tabs & Hidden For User Experience Will Have Full Weight (Search Engine Roundtable): Take with HUGE grain of salt! This was mentioned in context of the new Mobile-first index. And Gary Illyes said “should,” not “will.”
• How to Get the Whole Number Search Volumes that You Miss (iPullRank): Mike King put together a tool to get accurate Search Volume numbers back. It’s pretty clever. Also, there’s a great Excel plugin for SEO linked in the article.

• Google: We’re Moving Search To An Artificial Intellegenc [sic] First World (Search Engine Roundtable): “We’re moving from mobile-first world to AI-first world. We want to build a personal Google for every user.” This seems like a great way to create information bubbles that prevent users from seeing outside viewpoints and interests. I really hope Google mitigates this to decrease information segregation long-term.
• How to Fix and Optimize ALL THE THINGS! (Slideshare): Jon Henshaw of Raven Tools presents a step-by-step audit guide. SRCSET for mobile image serving is perhaps the strongest piece here.

Paid Search

• How to Use Enhanced Campaigns With Geo-Based Bid Modifiers (Search Engine Journal): Geo-targeting & five local search tips that you should be using
• 3 Paid Media Tips For The Customer Journey (Search Engine Journal): Address all stages of the customer’s journey using paid media.
• 5 Ingredients For Writing The Perfect Expanded Text Ad (Search Engine Land): Optmyzr looked at 700 accounts, 1.2 million ads and over 1 billion impressions to find the best ETA combinations.
• 9 Things You Need to Know About Bing Native Ads (Search Engine Journal): Bing is testing a new ad type that will appear on an “intent network” to help marketers reach customers at key moments of intent outside of search. Native Ads have a 5-7x higher CTR than the average display ads on MSN pages.
• Image Extensions Get Another Go In Bing Ads, Now Out Of Beta (Search Engine Land): Image extensions are now available. (Desktops and tablets only) You can add up to six images with different URLs per campaign/ ad group. Bing Ads says it will be experimenting with how images are shown.
• Google AdSense Ads No Longer Allowed on Fake News Sites (Search Engine Journal): Google joins Facebook in the fight against fake news sites. Is it a little too late?
• Thirteen things marketers want to know about expanded text ads, direct from Google (Search Engine Land): FAQ answered by Google’s product management team.
• Bing Ads Tests Dynamic Search Ads (Search Engine Journal): What took so long? Google launched dynamic ads in 2011.

Mobile

• Is Google killing mobile organic search? (Search Engine Watch): Yeah, Paid Ads, Knowledge Graph, and Local Pack are cannibalizing Mobile Organic, and SEO needs to focus on long-tail for query answers.

• Google Launches Mobile-First Index Experiment (Search Engine Roundtable): In short, Google will crawl and index the mobile version of your site as its primary source for content and ranking signals for your site. Google said they “primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results.” So if your mobile site is terrible, that can make for a much larger problem in Desktop rankings as well.

Inbound Marketing

• How IDG approaches editorial strategy (FIPP) – Key Takeaway: Understand what a person’s interests are and the products they’re likely to purchase over time, then provide them information that will help them do that.
• Twitter Just Shut Down Vine 4 Years After Buying It for $30 Million Couldn’t compete with Instagram and Snapchat (Adweek) – Key Takeaway: Companies must diversify their social standing and continue to prompt followers with CTA’s to enter emails & additional information into the website. Don’t build your content house on borrowed land.
• The Magical Content that Gets Links and Shares – New Research (BuzzSumo): BuzzSumo & Majestic have teamed up to provide better information on linking domains & shares.

• 4 Features that Just Made HubSpot Way More Content Friendly (IMPACT / Inbound.org)
  • Content Strategy will help you see what content is bringing in the most leads and give you the data you need to validate your strategy to your clients
  • Composer – allows team to collaborate on blog posts, similar to Google Docs
  • Collect – similar to EverNote’s ability to pin/collect online content you find online for later use or quoting
  • Google AMP – HubSpot has officially rolled out Google AMP to all websites and blogs hosted on its platform
• How to Beat Your Competitors Rankings with More Comprehensive Content (Moz): Know your users so you can answer all their questions on a particular topic in one comprehensive document and present content that your competitors will not or cannot create

• Tom Webster and Edison Research Podcast Advertising Study: “25% of people follow brands on social media, yet 47% follow brands through podcasts“