Digital Marketing News: Google’s New Local Search World

Every week we’re collecting a host of links, videos, and assorted analysis on the ever-changing world of digital marketing. We invite you to skim, share, analyze, argue, and refute – just so long as you don’t get embarrassed at the water cooler again. Here are the latest digital marketing news and trends for the week of May 25, 2018.

How to Survive Google’s New Local Search World

As Wesley Young points out in this post via Search Engine Land, Google continues to push users toward their own properties, making it even more important for marketers to find strategies for thriving within Google’s narrowing boundaries. So how can you take advantage of Google’s features to ensure your business is giving itself the best chance to succeed in Google’s search results?

1. Optimize your Knowledge Graph
2. Actively manage your Google My Business listing
3. Test search results for your local business
4. Consider ads if you want to appear in the top search results
5. Restructure web content to provide answers to questions
6. Utilize Google tools to help manage client listings

Check out this post for more information on how to get the most out of your Google My Business listing.

Google to Require Parallel Tracking in AdWords

Starting on October 30, 2018, Google will require advertisers to use parallel tracking for all AdWords accounts that use click measurement for Search Network and Shopping campaign traffic.

Parallel tracking was introduced in 2017 as a way to accelerate landing page load time by sending customers directly from an ad to the final URL without sending them to the tracking URLs first.

Marketers can opt in from the account-level “Settings” page in the “Tracking” section. For more details, read Laurie Sullivan’s post here.

Google Updates Trends Keyword Tool

Google Trends, a tool that provides insight into search trends worldwide, has undergone a facelift with Google updating its design as well as adding a few features:

• A revamped Trending searches section, showing what is trending in search right now, both daily and minute-by-minute.
• A newly-designed section where you can see Google Trends data stories curated by the News Lab team on everything from the Trump Administration through Mother’s Day. It’s also a great place to find amazing examples of Google data visualizations by newsroom designers from all over the world.
• Easy access to Year in Search data going back to 2001, so you can see how search interest has changed over time.
• New infographic types such as an intensity map to compare different topics in more meaningful ways.

While Google’s blog post on the release is centered on how it will help journalists, the update will also benefit SEOs and content marketers. The intensity map, especially, allows users to see where keywords are popular geographically. Marketers can use these insights to create content and paid campaigns that target specific regions.

Recap of 2018 Industry Developer Conferences

Spring time bring big changes in the digital world, and many of those changes are shared at the industry’s biggest developer conferences. In this episode of Digital Shoptalk, we bring in three guests to discuss the biggest updates from Google I/O 2018, Microsoft Build, and the Facebook Developer Conference.