Mackerel Media’s Search and Digital Marketing Roundup – June 2024

Maybe it’s the Summer weather, but June has been quite a calm month in the world of SEO. However, there have been a few notable updates which may have an impact on your digital marketing efforts.

 

Google Joins the Phone Age with Mobile-First Indexing

At the start of the month, Google embarked on the last stages of their migration to mobile-first indexing. This means that after July 5th, all sites will be crawled using the Googlebot Smartphone crawler, and their desktop Googlebot will get to enjoy a much needed retirement. This highlights the importance of having a website that is optimised for mobile performance and useability, else your search performance could be impacted.

 

To coincide with any upcoming Summer sales, Google released an update to their return policy structured data, which now allows search results to display an organisation’s return policy. This information will be shown in the brand panel that displays when a user searches for a specific brand. This new update means that you can specify a general return policy for your business rather than defining one for each individual product, thus reducing the amount of product structured data markup required. 

 

On the 20th of June, Google released their latest June 2024 spam update. The last spam update was back in March, and this latest update will help lower the amount of low quality sites we see on search results, and even remove some spam sites completely from search.

 

No More Endless Scrolling!

In an unexpected turn of events, Google has decided to discontinue continuous scroll in search results. This change will be rolled out across desktop searches initially, and continuous scroll will be removed from the mobile results in the upcoming months. Search results will now display “Next” at the bottom of the page on desktop search and a “More results” button will show on mobile search.

Continuous scroll was first rolled out across mobile search back in October 2021, and Google has stated that reverting back to the classic pagination style allows them to serve search results faster. Google has also said that continuous scroll didn’t lead to a higher overall user satisfaction.

However, this change could bring potential challenges – as now websites that rank on page two may start to see fewer clicks and less impressions since the user has to manually navigate to see them.

 

LinkedIn Attempts to Boost Engagement

On the social and networking side, LinkedIn has introduced several new newsletter tools to make it easier for creators to grow their audience and engage with their followers. These new tools allow users to design more visually appealing content and interact with your audience. You can now design covers (with the help of AI) and link to other LinkedIn profiles and pages directly so that users can learn more about anyone mentioned. They have also updated how their newsletter email alerts and in-app messages are sent to help improve engagement.

For those of us who struggle to stay updated with the latest LinkedIn posts and developments, these newsletters are a great way to stay informed without the need to scroll endlessly through our feed.