SEO News and Social Media Marketing Trends - May 2023
May 09, 2023Episode 7
Katt Wagner
Discover the latest SEO & Digital Marketing news for May 2023, covering updates featuring updates from Google, Microsoft, Bing, Mozilla, YouTube, and the Supreme Court.
This news roundup will help you stay ahead of marketing trends and give you tips and tricks for success in the online marketing world.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xV1h5zjitxY News Topics: 0:00 Introductions 0:27 How to Rank Higher on Google in 2023 (SEO News) 2:17 Q1 Earnings Reflect Search Trends and Consumer Behavior (Google News) 4:22 YouTube Creator Tips & Updates May 2023 (YouTube News) 7:10 Image and Video Are Priority for Search Experience through Bing and Edge Browser (Microsoft News) 7:54 Tackling the Fake Product Reviews Problem (Mozilla Updates) 9:33 New Top Level Domains Open New Domain Name Choices (Digital Marketing) 11:29 Legal News for AI Content: Patents and Trademarks (Supreme Court)
Service & Coaching (Don't see something? Ask! I have services that aren't listed for public booking to help gatekeep my time) https://stan.store/brandhacking
Discover the latest SEO & Digital Marketing news for May 2023, covering updates featuring updates from Google, Microsoft, Bing, Mozilla, YouTube, and the Supreme Court.
This news roundup will help you stay ahead of marketing trends and give you tips and tricks for success in the online marketing world.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xV1h5zjitxY News Topics: 0:00 Introductions 0:27 How to Rank Higher on Google in 2023 (SEO News) 2:17 Q1 Earnings Reflect Search Trends and Consumer Behavior (Google News) 4:22 YouTube Creator Tips & Updates May 2023 (YouTube News) 7:10 Image and Video Are Priority for Search Experience through Bing and Edge Browser (Microsoft News) 7:54 Tackling the Fake Product Reviews Problem (Mozilla Updates) 9:33 New Top Level Domains Open New Domain Name Choices (Digital Marketing) 11:29 Legal News for AI Content: Patents and Trademarks (Supreme Court)
Service & Coaching (Don't see something? Ask! I have services that aren't listed for public booking to help gatekeep my time) https://stan.store/brandhacking
Welcome to this week's roundup of the latest news in the digital marketing world. we're gonna be covering a variety of topics and tips, including search engine updates, social media trends, and how you can put them into practice in your own business or businesses that you help manage for a client. So let's get started. for new story number one, Google recommends focusing on social media popularity to boost indexing and ranking speed according to Gary Illyes from the Google search relations team, a website's popularity on the internet is the second most important factor for fast indexing, following the quality of the content itself Illyes recommended social media promotions to increase your website's popularity and visibility. And stated specifically that once you ensure that your content is the highest quality you can possibly make, try to run some social media promos perhaps so you get people to start talking about your site. That will probably help a lot." When content is shared on social media platforms, it's more likely to be crawled by search engine bots so they can better understand what your website content is about and when it's necessary, when someone's searching for the information, they have a reason to boost your visibility in the search results for that content. But what does this mean for you as a business owner or digital marketer? It's important to focus on creating shareable content that can be easily distributed on social media platforms. And this involves some considerations for the topic and quality of the content itself, as well as some technical considerations, like, is your website mobile friendly? Can someone quickly click a link from a social share and read what they wanna read on your website without formatting issues And in some cases you can write a blog that's optimized for SEO and also highly sharable, but sometimes you might wanna create separate articles to prioritize one goal or the other. My best tip is that before you start writing, ask yourself what would make someone want to share this with their friends, their family, and other people they're connected with. Simply spamming your blog post links to your social media platforms is not gonna do the trick. I have a full guide that covers the difference between copywriting for SEO and copywriting for social media shareability. tips for optimizing posts for social shares, as well as common mistakes to avoid. You can get that in the pinned comment in the description. But in short, Google is looking for ways to reward social media marketing effort. As far as indexing speed and ranking speed. and while we're on the subject of search, let's talk about emerging trends and how the search landscape is changing In it's 2023 earnings report for q1. Google reported that its search and other revenue sources, which includes YouTube we're up just 1.87% year over year, which that's still growth, but it's much smaller than the 24.28% that they saw year over year, last year for Q1 2022. And there are two trends that I see having a significant relationship with this shift. if you're an seo, you've probably experienced this in the last year in particular. Or if you're someone that manages the business analytics for a website. One of the major trends is accelerated Google updates. So as Google tries to face challenges to its own dominance in the search engine world, they've been rolling out these algorithm updates at a faster pace than ever before. This means more volatility and changes in search rankings and indexing, and as a byproduct, that means marketers need to stay on top of the latest updates. A good marketing strategy needs to be agile And for marketers, this means creating platform specific content, staying informed about Google's updates, and regularly adapting STO strategies to the newest trends. The second trend I think is so relevant and you've probably seen yourself is the rise of search in closed environments. A search in a closed environment means that somebody's on a platform and they're doing the search within that platform, rather than going to Google or Bing and starting their search from there. TikTok and Instagram are some of the most popular places where people can go and do a search in a closed environment within the platform. It's estimated that around 40% of people are initiating their searches on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. And this is probably especially true for a younger audience. Now, why this matters and how this ties in intimately with our first news story about social media popularity helping blog and website content index and rank faster, Is that it's more important than ever to create platform specific content and make sure it's optimized for that platform. So for example, The captions for your Instagram post should mention relevant keywords for TikTok videos and reels. You want there to be onscreen texts that says relevant keywords about what your video is about. marketers need to be aware that when uploading social media content, you need to use words and hashtags that tell the platform what your content's about. And use the words that users would search for to find content like yours. For number three, let's look at YouTube updates. YouTube's creator insider Channel has posted a summary of new updates this week. There's a couple of them that are really important, I think you should know, but rather than have to watch the content in full, here are the key takeaways. Number one, podcasts are coming to the YouTube music app. The rollout's going to start with the United States, but it will become available in more regions as time goes on. Two youTube is adding video processing ETAs to the video details page on the studio web version. This means creators and channel managers can go and see the remaining time for a certain level of quality to finish processing. This is great for people that stream live and want to know when a high quality replay will be available for download or for the streamers to start watching. Number three is channel trailer parity on mobile. Now you can set a channel trailer for both subscribed users on desktop and on mobile, and you'll also have the option to mute autoplay on the mobile version. Four YouTube has stated that they are increasing their audio library and their Creator Music library. Now, these are both resources that creators can go to find royalty and copy free and creative commons music to use in their videos. The guidelines are still the same, but it's great to know that there's gonna be more music available in the YouTube audio library as well as in their emerging and growing Creator contributed music library. I'll throw a link in the description so you can access both those libraries. And I've also been building a small playlist of copyright free music that I like to use or have bookmarked for future use. if you wanna jump to my channel and look through my playlist, you can grab that as well. YouTube has made new policy updates to its YouTube partner program. users have long expressed frustration with how they apply to become a YouTube partner program. And then it takes a really long time for them to hear back. or they get rejected and don't know why, and then when they reapply, it takes months for them to finally get approved or understand what they need to do to qualify. the new update will roll out starting June 5th, 2023. So if you've been suspended or rejected more than once, you'll now need to wait 90 days instead of 30 days to reapply. But first time applicants who get rejected, can still reapply after just 30 days. The goal here is to help creators monetize their channel for the first time, rather than have to wait as YouTube tries to catch up with all the applications, suspension and rejection requests. And the last update is creators need to have access to advanced features to be able to use pinned comments. This update is not gonna affect any pinned comments you already have, and you can continue to edit or remove any pinned comments you currently have. But as far as creating new pinned comments, if you don't already have access to advanced YouTube tools and features like live streaming, community posts, and clickable external links in video descriptions, you might lose access to post new pinned comments. If you wanna see if you have this access or get it set up for the first time, it usually only requires verification through your channel history or identification through your Google account, and you can check on a computer by going to your YouTube studio, clicking settings, clicking channel, and then clicking feature eligibility. Now let's shift gears for topic four. We're gonna be talking about Bing and Microsoft. Microsoft wants their search experience to be more focused on rich media like audio, video, and images. With the launch of their next Gen AI powered being an Edge experience, search experiences are gonna become a lot more immersive. This means search results will include more image and video answers. and with the shift towards a more immersive, rich media experience, website owners and SEOs must focus on providing high quality and original content. So if you've been using stock images or no images at all in your blog post, you may wanna go back and revisit this. And if you have images and videos in your content but haven't been doing proper markup or alt text data, you'll wanna go back and clean up that metadata that way, search engines like bing, know when and where to use it and show it to their searchers. News story number five comes from Mozilla. Mozilla's aiming to tackle the fake product reviews problem, and we've all read reviews online, but have you ever wondered if one of them was real or fake? Fake product reviews are a growing problem, especially as programs like Chat, G p T make it really easy to mass produce AI generated product reviews. In an effort to address this issue and enhance their browser experience with Firefox. Mozilla recently acquired Fake Spot. Fake spot is a startup that uses AI and machine learning to detect fake product reviews. By integrating this technology into Firefox, Mozilla users will be able to "cut through deceptive reviews and shop confidently." If you're a business that relies on positive reviews to drive sales, this is really important. And as a bonus, the integration of fake spot into Firefox as a browser can expand your reach to a wider audience, but only so long as you have credible, authentic, genuine reviews. And that's a key takeaway here as a website owner or an SEO, you have to understand that influencer marketing is becoming increasingly popular when it comes to product reviews. This ties back into our previous mention of closed environment searches. As people become wary of the text-based product reviews that they see left on Amazon, that seems spammy or inauthentic, they're going to platforms like Instagram and TikTok to look for real people using real products and giving their honest opinion about them. So if you wanna make the best of this and put it into practice, whether it's for use in your own direct sales or for affiliate marketing, make it a goal to use authentic first person experience reviews in your content. Not only will it be unique content, whether you create it yourself or it's user generated from your customers, but the authenticity is gonna go a long way to boosting your credibility and reputation. which will ultimately drive your sales and your SEO performance. News byte number six is kind of fun. Google has announced eight new top level domains. Top level domains are things like.com or.net or.io, And different top level domains can offer different benefits like availability, localization, niche market designation, branding, cost effective alternatives. so even though.com is the first thing people still think of when they think of a url, in recent times, we've seen growing popularity in things like.io and.biz, and now we've seen the addition of eight more top level domains that will be fully launched to the public on May 10th. So right around the corner, the full list is.dad. So if you're looking for a Father's Day gift, that might be a good one..PhD which is great for academics.. Prof which is great for professional services.. esq which is short for Esquire. So if you're an attorney or lawyer and you're looking to make a domain name part of your branding, that's a great one to look at..foo, which I am a little unsure of how I would use that personally, but if you have ideas, I'd love to see 'em in the comments.. Nexus, zip and move mov. For website owners and SEOs, the introduction of these new top level domains can come with opportunities and challenges. While these domains can provide unique branding opportunities and might be more affordable than the .Com equivalent of whatever you're looking for, These are still new top level domains that consumers might not be familiar with and things like esquire might seem obvious on the surface, but top level domains like dot, zip and mov, which look like file extensions could come off as untrustworthy or just be generally confusing as to what exactly it is if I'm going to this website, U R L. But ultimately I do think it's great that there's more options to choose from. and if you are thinking about launching a website and don't know how to actually do it, you can check out my 20 minute website setup guide. It's a YouTube tutorial and there's also a full text walkthrough, and it'll get you through everything from registering a domain to setting up your hosting, choosing the right server size, your SSL certificates, and getting your website launched for story number seven, I'm probably gonna do longer content on as it evolves and emerges. I am a law and public policy nerd just as a hobby. I don't really have a reason why, but it's an extra big nerd moment when a major rumbling in the law world relates to what I do in marketing and branding. And I've been following what the US Patent Office is going to make of AI generated content a as well as Supreme Court rulings on what exactly means something is transformative. And right now we're in the very early stages of what I'm sure is going to be, tons of litigation and policy writing and decision making as it relates to AI generated content and what is protectable by patent, copyright and trademark. So in the latest story, The US Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge by computer scientist Steven Thaler to the US Patent and Trademark's office refusal To issue patents for inventions that his artificial intelligence system created. So this means it didn't even make it to a hearing at the Supreme Court and that the lower court's ruling stands, the lower court's ruling, was that patents can only be issued to human inventors, and that the AI system could not be considered the legal creator of two inventions that Baylor said it generated. The system called DABUS ] which is short for device for the autonomous bootstrapping of sentience was found by a federal judge in Virginia to not be a person. This aligns with current US patent law, which unambiguously requires inventors to be human beings. And this interpretation was reaffirmed just last year by the patent focused Court of Appeals for the federal circuit. Now, I'm sure this won't be the end of it, and in law it rarely is, there just needs to be a specific instance that's brought to a court and then the decision of which is appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court, which takes time. And I've been considering doing deep dives and readings into the legalese of how things like this work. So if that's something that you think you'd be interested in, let me know below. It would be valuable, not just so you would have the latest takeaway in what the current rules and regulations regarding patents and copyrights and trademarks were as far as user-generated versus AI generated content. But these cases that crawl up the ladder to to the federal court circuit and the Supreme Court always have a level of depth of moral considerations and arguments and ethical considerations and arguments, as well as really strong arguments from both perspectives on the future of technology and how it relates to societal progress. And likewise, in this case, I'm sure we're not gonna hear the end from the opposition. Thaler and his supporters, which include Harvard Law Professors and other legal academics are arguing that the decision as it stands jeopardizes billions of dollars in current and in future investments, which can affect US competitiveness with other countries, and sits at odds with the plain language of the US Patent Act to stimulate innovation and technological progress. So that's just a quick brief of the latest on the US Patent and Trademark Office and the Supreme Court are sitting on the issue. I'll be sure to include short updates on major news in the future. But again, if you'd, if you'd be interested in a deep dive into this kind of overlap with the content marketing and legal world. let me know because I think it's something I'd be really excited about doing. and just this short news update alone raises important legal and ethical questions about ownership, liability, and accountability. So as AI continues to develop and become more prevalent across different industries, policies and stakeholders are going to need to address new issues that arise. It's important for us to know how to maximize the benefits of AI while minimizing any risks and drawbacks to creation through them. So as we wrap up with this roundup of tech news, we can see that SEO and marketing and business trends are changing all the time. And being aware of each of these stories gives you a clue of how you can get ahead of changes that are happening now and as well as what's to come forward in the future. And as always, my goal with Brand Hacking is to help you grow your brand and stay ahead even if you're working with limited time and resources. So if you're subscribed, I'll continue to bring you the latest in seo, social media, marketing and tech trends and news. That way it's easier than ever for you to navigate the ever changing landscape. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.