Weekly Finds - Week 42, 2020
This week with "boring niche" link building, making analytics successful in your company, good welcome emails, and the impact of loading the main content first.
Hey there! This week, I'm adding a little section to Weekly Finds that I call "Quick Finds": short bits of news with my thoughts on them in a few bullet points. After that segment, you find the regular Weekly Finds format. Please let me know how you like with a comment or email reply. THX!
Quick Finds
Get your business ready for what comes next
- Rising retail categories now have an interface in Google Ads that looks like a Google Trends and shows advertisers trending categories and products on the Insights page. Google will also show forecasting data (to encourage advertisers to spend more).
- Google also launches a new automated campaign format, Performance Max Campaigns (what a name), that stretch across all advertising inventories: Display Network, Youtube, Gmail, Discover, Search, etc. The new format allows advertisers to set up a single campaign that's customized across all channels with the help of machine learning.
- Classic Platform Confluence move.
Quick Finds - A new home for Web Stories on Discover
- Web Stories appear in Search, News, and now Discover.
- Another Platform Confluence move: bringing more formats together and interweave them.
Google Shopping Is Not Attracting Sellers Despite 0% Fees
- Google’s free shopping tab strategy doesn’t work out. The problem is that Google has nothing really to offer sellers over Amazon or Shopify.
Weekly Finds
Link building is important for SEO but tedious in dull niches. Siege Media provide actionable tips for building links in B2B or niche industries, such as
- look for broad topics to create content around and do outreach for
- when creating content for broad topics, pitch it in as many markets as possible
- look for topics that gain passive links
Going for broad, adjacent, or related topics is a smart choice for link building. The challenge is to abstract the target market of a company in a niche space to the next higher-level topic.
Another challenge most companies face is messy data without a shared language, knowledge transfer, or trust in the data. A Reforge article on analytics explains the importance of focusing on the users of that data as customers and tagging events accurately to be able to act on the data. Just measuring alone is not enough. The article also points out to create a data dictionary with visualizations that help people understand the data better. One point I love is the idea of tracking journeys: what is the intent behind the data point; what does failure look like; what does success look like? Journeys make data far more actionable.
Next to analytics, newsletters are another area that often needs improvement. Especially good welcome emails are important because they set the tone for content quality of a newsletter. The team from Newsletter Crew subscribed to +70 newsletters and found that most writers don't use the full potential of welcome emails. The article features helpful tips like using creative subject lines instead of the generic "you're on the list" or showcasing your best issues and including your social accounts. Small aspects like that already make a difference. Welcome emails are entry points to solidify the connection with your subscribers. They set the tone for the relationship.
When it comes to the relationship with your friendly neighborhood search engine, a.k.a. Google, prioritizing the main content pays off even beyond Core Web Vitals. Search Pilot tested what happens when you give load priority to the most important content of a page over sidebars and other secondary elements. The thesis is that by loading important content faster, users have a better experience. The experiment resulted in a 16% organic traffic uplift.