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.
Hello and welcome to another edition of Intelligency’s weekly digital roundup, delivering you the best digital news from the week. For this week’s edition, there is some great guidance from Google and news about Microsoft and Shopify.
Google Guidance on video embedding for websites.
Google have recently updated their best video practices search documentation to help businesses with their SEO rankings when it comes to embedded videos on a website. Google’s new advice is to create dedicated pages for each video on your site, giving them “maximum exposure”.
The document goes on to say that creators should make sure that any video is the “most prominent subject on the page” by putting the video at the top of the page as this is the most visible. If you’re worried that you might not be able to include a video in an original page, fear not, as Google clarified that it is “fine to include the same video on a dedicated page and its original page alongside other information, like a news article or product detail page” In order to obtain rich results and features such as the ‘Live badge’ and ‘Key Moments’ on videos within Google Search, Google have said this format will be required. To quote the best practices document, “some features require that type of video page, including Key Moments, the Live Badge, and other rich result formats.”
This advice, along with other SEO video best practices, guidances, and recommendations can be found here:
Video Best Practices | Google Search Central
How to get great job candidates through Google Job Postings.
On the topic of Google guidance, they have shared some tips for optimizing career listings on websites and how to improve them in a blog post on Google Search Central. The advice is to make changes to the ‘description’ field of your job posting to make it appear complete within the ‘Job listing’ section of Google Search (which is currently a beta feature).
As of now the description will only show a description of the role itself, however it does not include content such as relevant/desired qualifications or required/desired skills, so Google have advised that including this information within the description can attract ideal candidates and dissuade anyone not suited to the role.
If you have vacancies in your business and want them to be listed on Google, there is a guide on how you can list them here:
Learn About Job Posting Schema Markup | Google Search Central
Misrepresented data on Google Search Console
Users of Google Search Console have discovered that the Search Console has been over counting mobile Page Experience data from the 29th June to the 1st November, google confirmed this in an update to the anomaly section of their help centre; the count should now have returned to normal and reflect accurate numbers.
Here is an image of the official confirmation:
Merchants benefiting from Shopify and Microsoft team-up
Microsoft have officially partnered with Shopify, giving merchants access to Microsoft’s data on customers via the Microsoft Channel app within Shopify. Currently exclusive to the US and Canada, merchants are able to utilize the Microsoft Audience Network and Search Network as well as being able to list their products on the Bing shopping tab and the Start Shopping tab.
Varsha Bolar, one of Microsoft’s Program Managers, revealed that merchants using Shopify will be able to integrate a ‘Buy Now’ button to product ads and listings, but did not reveal a release date for this feature.
Microsoft and Shopify partner up
