Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
Good Afternoon, and welcome to the Intelligency Digital Roundup.
This week, Twitter rolled out a new feature for advertisers, Google updated their Image SEO best practices, and the company also teased their new products for this year, including a potential ChatGPT competitor.
Let’s get straight into the news.
Twitter Rolls Out Search Keywords for Advertisers.
Twitter has begun to roll out an ad unit for the platform named Search Keywords. Search Keywords allow advertisers to pay for tweets to appear at the top of search results for keywords.
This is similar to the feature that allows a business to pay for their tweet to appear in feeds, but it appears in search results instead.
Advertisers will now be able to reach a wider audience than they originally could.
Once an advertiser logs into Twitter Ads, they’ll be able to see Search Keyword Ads as a new campaign objective. Twitter outlined the new feature below.:
The aim of the objective is to drive traffic to a business’ website.
The campaign objective is unique in that unless a user is actively searching for the keywords in the ad, it won’t appear. So the users you get seeing the ad will be a user who is more likely to convert.
Twitter plans to flesh out Search Keyword Ads to additional objectives in the future.
Like other ads and promoted tweets, Search Keyword Ads will keep the promoted label so users can identify that it’s promoted.
This new campaign objective may be a move by Twitter to generate more ad revenue; as advertisers dropped out of the platform after Elon Musk began to make controversial changes to the platform.
Ad spending on Twitter dropped by 71% as of December 2022.
Google Update Image SEO Best Practices
This week, Google made some fresh changes to two of its SEO help documents. Specific changes included outlining that title and link elements are vital for RSS Feed Follow for Google Discover. Another change to the document stated that the company parses .img elements, including in other elements.
RSS Feed Follow
RSS Guidance was written in the Get On Discover documentation, there’s a new line under the section “Feed Guidelines” which reads:
“The most important content for the Follow feature is your feed
<title>element and your per item<link>elements. Make sure your feed includes these elements.”
Google is basically saying if you want to get the most out of users following your RSS feed on chrome, include the title and link elements.
Image SEO Best Practices
The Image SEO Best Practices was clarified to state that <img> elements are parsed, including when the <img> element is enclosed in another element such as <picture> elements. This applies when images are indexed by Google:
“Using semantic HTML markup helps crawlers find and process images. Google parses the HTML elements (even when they’re enclosed in other elements such as elements) in your pages to index images, but doesn’t index CSS images.”
It’s important if you’re optimising for SEO or using Follow for Google Chrome to keep up to date with these changes so that you’re not hampering your own website.
Google To Debut Chatbot In 2023
As revealed by the New York Times, Google is set to demonstrate a version of Google with Chatbot features later this year.
ChatGPT has garnered discussion over the past two months, and Microsoft may even incorporate it into Bing. As a result of this, SEO experts are wondering how it may look in the future. Businesses already believe that snippets steal traffic, imagine if Google can answer something before you even click a search result.
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai initiated “Code Red” in December following ChatGPT’s release. Pichai reportedly sees it as a threat to the business.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two who founded Google, have been having several meetings about AI Product Strategy, This is the first reported involvement they’ve had with the company since they left, according to The Times.
The Times stated the below:
Google now intends to unveil more than 20 new products and demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year, according to a slide presentation reviewed by The New York Times and two people with knowledge of the plans who were not authorized to discuss them.
Google’s three priorities for the Chatbot:
- Getting facts right
- Ensuring Safety
- Removing misinformation
Watch this space, as I suspect this will get interesting later on in the year.
