Here’s the latest instalment of Digital Marketing Reads, a roundup of some of the more interesting articles we’ve read lately in the digital marketing world.
Are You Making These Big Mistakes with Your Google My Business Listing?
The digital marketing team at Rock Solid Marketing are big fans of Google My Business for promoting our clients’ businesses. We’ve seen just about everything by now when it comes to these listings, so most of the mistakes highlighted in this article aren’t so surprising.
A few Google My Business listing faux pas worth noting:
- Multiple listings at the same address (whether it’s more than one listing for your business, or another business mistakenly using your address… both can hinder your optimisation efforts).
- Not filling out enough of your listing (yes you should definitely put your address and phone number, but it’s also worth uploading photos, garnering Google reviews from happy clients, adding links to your website and appointment portal, and posting some Q&A so that you stand out amongst the local listings).
- Forgetting to update your business phone number and/or address if they’ve changed since setting up your listing.
Google Rolls Out New Spam Algorithm Update
Hot off the presses: Google has JUST released an algorithm update (on 23 June). Don’t worry too much about this one, though: it’s targeting spam in order to improve the quality of search results.
As long as you don’t own a spammy website (y’know, like a website pretending to be someone or some other established brand, or instaling malware upon a visitor’s click), you should be safe from any negative effects of the update. HOWEVER, if you notice a significant drop in site traffic or your site no longer showing up in search results, it’s possible that your site has been hacked (in which case, you should contact our team ASAP!).
According to the article, “Last year Google’s automated systems blocked 25 billion spammy pages from being indexed in search results every day.”
Google limits FAQ rich results to a maximum of two per snippet
Ever notice a list of questions pop up under one of the results that comes up when you search for something on Google?
In case you weren’t aware, you can actually mark up your FAQ page on your website with something called structured data, which basically tells Google that it’s Q&A content. By marking questions as questions and answers as answers using structured data, you’re allowing Google to potentially display some FAQ rich results in your search result snippet.
This both draws more attention to your website in the search results, and also makes it easier for users to find the information they’re looking for – which is always Google’s goal with most any update they make.
Now, only 2 FAQs will show up per snippet – just a head’s up 🙂