Digital Marketing News: Google Officially Mobile-First

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 March 30, 2018.

Google Officially Announces Mobile-First Index Rollout

Google officially announced Monday one of the worst-kept secrets in the industry:

“…our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for.”

This is an important announcement, but as we mentioned, it’s not necessarily breaking news. Google has been rewarding mobile-friendly content when a user searches on a mobile device since 2015. This is simply a logical reaction to our mobile-first reality, where mobile searches now outnumber desktop searches. Google stresses that this will not affect rankings.

Google Testing Offers Feature for Businesses

If you have a Google My Business profile, you might be able to promote your business’ special offers in organic searches of your Google business listing. Business owners and SEO experts have recently seen the feature within Google Posts, a feature available to businesses with verified Google My Business profiles. Google Posts allows businesses to publish text, multimedia, or events when their business name is searched. “Offers” is a new publishing option and includes:

• A photo
• Up to 300 words of text
• Post title
• Start date/time and end date/time
• Optional coupon code
• A link to the offer

Posting an offer is free, allowing businesses to promote sales without cost. The feature is still being tested and is not available in every profile.

LinkedIn Adds Video for Sponsored Content, Company Pages

LinkedIn announced Thursday two new outlets for video content on the social networking site. Businesses can now promote videos to a targeted audience in the native news feed as well as feature videos on Company Pages.

The first feature is called Video for Sponsored Content and has been in beta testing since October. LinkedIn of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions told Robin Kurzer in this Search Marketing Land post, that “LinkedIn members have spent an average of almost three times the amount of time watching ads embedded with video versus static ones.”

The second feature introduced allows businesses to post videos to their Company Pages, which is “five times more likely than other types of content to start a conversation among members.” The video features are rolling out now and will be available in the coming weeks.