Mackerel Media’s Search and Digital Marketing Roundup – September 2024
As the seasons start to change, so too do the latest trends and developments in the SEO and social media landscape. At the start of the month, Google reported that their August 2024 core update has now completed rolling out. As reported in our August SEO update, the focus of this update was to optimise search results to serve up the most useful content to users, rather than over-optimised content that only performs well on search.
Google Search Goes AI
It’s not just website owners that are impacted, Google themselves have said that their own AI overviews have been affected by this core update. As AI overviews are gradually being introduced throughout Google search, ensuring that your content offers valuable information, is easily readable and that it contains the appropriate structured data is more important now than ever.
Google Says ‘Cache’ You Later!
Outside of their core update rollout, Google has now officially retired their cache feature. Google originally planned on removing the cached link of pages back in February 2024, however it took them 9 months to action this (no doubt tied up with their recent EU antitrust fines which they’ve had overturned). Fortunately, and no doubt due to the mass outcry from users, they have added a new feature where you can see previous versions of a website in the Internet Archives wayback machine. This change shows a significant change in Google now relying on external websites, rather than trying to maintain their own cached versions all under the Google umbrella.
There have been a few updates over at Meta. The latest development is that Meta are implementing new data restrictions in their Business tools, including restricting custom URL parameters and ads using highly targeted UTMs. Going forward, it would be wise to keep an eye out on your Meta campaigns to check if any have been paused, and update any custom audience rules that use existing rules which include restricted data to prevent any disruption.
Google Assists in Scoring Black Friday Deals
With Black Friday fast approaching (29th of November in case you’re wondering!) Google has lent a helping hand by adding support for sale pricing on Google Merchant product listings. This means that you can now add a sale price next to your product listings, whilst listing the full original price to highlight potential savings and hopefully boost conversions.
Speaking of Black Friday, here at Mackerel HQ we are working on a Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotion playbook, full of tips and strategies to optimise your campaigns and help improve your reach and maximise conversions. This playbook will feature ideas for Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest and other sources of promotion. Once ready, we will share this playbook with all our clients. Watch this space…
