As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve on a daily basis, we’re continuing to monitor the ongoing developments while remaining cognizant of the potential business impact for many of our partners and clients.
There is no doubt that many local business owners have made short term changes regarding their operations, at a minimum.
Because of this, we made this quick guide to help companies easily and quickly edit their GMB information and profile details reflecting how current operations are running under these abnormal times.
Facebook is seeing an extreme spike in usage across the globe due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the company outlined in a blog post on Tuesday. But most usage is concentrated among private messaging and video calling, products the company does not monetize. As a result, the social media giant says it’s business is suffering while it struggles to keep its communication tools online and stable.
The blog post, penned by analytics chief Alex Schultz and engineering chief Jay Parikh, says total messaging across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in harder hit areas of the globe, like Italy, has increased by more than 50 percent. Video calling on Messenger and WhatsApp in those same areas has more than doubled, the post says.
“The usage growth from COVID-19 is unprecedented across the industry, and we are experiencing new records in usage almost every day,” the duo writes. “Maintaining stability throughout these spikes in usage is more challenging than usual now that most of our employees are working from home.”
Schultz and Parikh note that the spike in usage is not translating to a boon to its bottom line. Messaging services are not monetized like the Facebook News Feed or the standard Instagram feed, at the same time that digital ad spending is decreasing across the board in countries currently in lockdown to stem the spread of COVID-19. So Facebook is being “adversely affected” like many other businesses.
“Much of the increased traffic is happening on our messaging services, but we’ve also seen more people using our feed and stories products to get updates from their family and friends,” the post explains. “At the same time, our business is being adversely affected like so many others around the world. We don’t monetize many of the services where we’re seeing increased engagement, and we’ve seen a weakening in our ads business in countries taking aggressive actions to reduce the spread of COVID-19.”
“We’re just trying to keep the lights on over here,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The New York Times in an interview published today, noting that part of the company’s struggles right now are because it’s keeping a vast majority of its 45,000-person workforce at home. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
A report from Business Insider today says that a Google employee has tested positive for the coronavirus. Google is a large company with more than 100,000 employees across many countries, and BI says that the employee had been in the company’s Zurich office before displaying symptoms…
The company provided a statement to Business Insider today, saying “We can confirm that one employee from our Zurich office has been diagnosed with the coronavirus. They were in the Zurich office for a limited time, before they had any symptoms. We have taken – and will continue to take – all necessary precautionary measures, following the advice of public health officials, as we prioritize everyone’s health and safety.”
BI says that it is preventing Google employees from traveling to Iran as well as two Italian regions where the coronavirus, which causes COVID-19, is seeing large amounts of spread. Starting in early March, the company is restricting travel to South Korea and Japan as well.
Further, Recode is reporting that Google has recently put up signs in some Bay Area offices reminding people to wash their hands and cover their mouths.
Recode has also learned that Google recently put up signs in at least two Bay Area offices outside bathrooms reminding people to wash their hands and cover their mouths, with a link to an internal site about the coronavirus at the bottom. The intranet site has infection prevention tips like asking employees who host events to make sure there is sufficient hand sanitizer and “appropriate hand-washing facilities,” according to a source who works at the company.
Google also announced that its upcoming Google News Initiative Global Summit is canceled due to the “coronavirus situation.”
News: Google just canceled its upcoming Google News Initiative Global Summit due to the “coronavirus situation.” It was a two-day event, held in Google’s Sunnyvale office, bringing together hundreds people across the media industry
The news also comes as Google’s annual developer conference is scheduled for mid-May. Other companies such as Facebook have already cancelled their annual events out of an abundance of caution, but Google has yet to make a decision. The company says they are monitoring the situation.
Google shared a three-step guide on hiring an SEO for businesses who may be doing so for the first time.
This advice was provided in the latest episode of Google’s Search for Beginners series on YouTube, which is an extended version of the advice provided in the previous episode.
The benefit of hiring an SEO, Google explains, is the potential to improve a site while saving time compared to doing in on your own.
Google warns businesses, however, that hiring an SEO also comes with the risk of damaging a site as well as its reputation.
With that said, Google provides a three-step process to vetting an SEO before hiring them which consists of:
An interview
A reference check
A technical audit
Here’s more about each of those steps.
Step One: The Interview
When interviewing an SEO agency to work on your site, Google recommends listening to make sure they’re focused on the right things.
For example, they should be focused on helping a business overall by improving how they appear in search results. Being focused too much on rankings and where a site appears in search results is a red flag, Google says.
It’s a good sign if they ask you questions like:
What makes your business and services unique?
What does your ideal customer look like?
How do customers currently find your website?
How does your business make money (and how can search help with that)?
What other marketing channels do you use?
Do you use offline advertising or social media?
Who are your competitors and what are they doing well?
Consider it a red flag if you’re interviewing an SEO and they’re not interested in your business from a holistic standpoint. If that’s the case, then Google recommends finding someone else for the job.
Another red flag is unrealistic guarantees of ranking first in Google, as no one can promise that.
Step Two: Check References
The second step of the hiring process, as recommended by Google, is a reference check of past clients.
When checking references, Google advises asking questions to gauge how useful the SEO’s guidance was. One of the major things Google points out is asking whether or not the SEO’s results were sustainable.
The mark of a good practitioner, Google says, is their ability to help make SEO an integral part of general business operations.
While speaking with past clients, make sure the SEO was focused on their long term plans and not just quick fixes.
Step Three: Technical Audit
After checking references and narrowing down your candidates, it’s time to request a technical audit. The SEO should come back with a prioritized list of what should be improved to make a site more search-friendly.
Those suggestions should be based on data collected during the audit, and be targeted toward providing a better experience for human visitors (not just search engines).
The SEO should be able to estimate the overall investment required by the business, and the positive impact that will be achieved as a result.
What to do After Hiring an SEO
Lastly, Google provides a few bits of advice on what to do after you’ve hired an SEO.
Before any work is started, it’s important to work with the SEO and agree upon goals, metrics, and how results will be tracked.
Google emphasizes that you should know what you’re going to get out of working together from the very beginning.
Google’s latest episode of “Search for Beginners” covers the top 5 things people should consider for their websites. We think Google saved the best for last because the fifth item on the list involves hiring an SEO.
Videos in the “Search for Beginners” series have been full of DIY tips up to this point, so it’s nice to see Google emphasize the benefits of hiring a professional SEO.
In fact, future videos in the “Search for Beginners” series will dive deeper into the topic of hiring SEOs. Here’s exactly what is stated in Google’s most recent video:
“Are you looking for someone to work on [your website] on your behalf? Hiring a search engine optimizer, or “SEO,” might be an option. SEOs are professionals who can help improve the visibility and ranking of your website. We’ll talk more about hiring an SEO in future episodes.”
Other Website Considerations for Beginners
For those interested, here is the complete list of Google’s top 5 website considerations for people who are new to SEO.
Check if your site is indexed: Perform a search for “site:your-website.com” to see if it’s indexed in Google Search.
Provide high quality content: Follow the advice in Google’s official webmaster guidelines and best practices documents.
Ensure website is fast and accessible on all devices: Visit g.co/mobilefriendly to test mobile-friendliness.
Ensure website is safe for visitors: Secure your website with a HTTPS connection.
Marketers have relied on third-party tracking cookies for the last 25 years to track consumer behavior online. Nearly all ad tech and martech platforms use cookies for targeting, retargeting, display advertising and behavioral marketing in general. Now, that’s all changing.
Today, Mozilla is flipping on the switch to turn on encrypted DNS over HTTPS for U.S. users by default. If you’re unfamiliar with the tech, the pitch is this feature will help prevent internet service providers from tracking the sites you go to.
DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is meant to address the inherent privacy vulnerabilities in how you surf the web. The Domain Name Service (DNS) is, in Mozilla’s words, “one of the oldest parts of internet architecture” and one that hasn’t seen a lot of changes in the past 30 years. This plays into tracking because when you go to a URL, your browser needs to look up the site’s corresponding IP address. It does that via the DNS. But, even if the site you’re visiting is encrypted via HTTPS, the DNS lookup is done over plain text. That means ISPs—or other entities—can, if they so choose, easily figure out what websites you’ve gone to and build up a profile of your browsing habits. DoH is meant to circumvent that by ensuring the DNS lookup is also encrypted. It won’t necessarily stop tracking wholesale, but it will make it more difficult.
Ready or not, the cookie crackdown is in full effect. The cumulative effect of Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) on Safari, Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) on Firefox, and more granular third-party cookie blocking on Chrome are making measuring digital marketing activities increasingly difficult.
That’s not to say that it’s the end of measurement, but things are going to be different from now on. The reality is that marketers need to completely rethink how to use testing frameworks for measuring marketing value.
While it seems pretty scary right now, keep in mind that cookies are a 25-year-old technology and we’ll definitely find a way to move on. It’s going to be all about exploring new technologies, innovation, and striking a balance between profit and privacy choices to avoid another wave of consumer backlash. Taking advantage of first-party data that you get when people intentionally engage with your brand is the first step toward accomplishing this.
Hundreds of millions of people contribute over 20 million reviews, ratings, and other pieces of content to Google Maps’ over 200 million points of interest daily — it’s how the platform continues to grow so rapidly. But user contributions are intrinsically fraught. That’s why increasingly, Google is using AI and machine learning to spot malicious contributions at submission time, ensuring they don’t reach the over 1 billion users who regularly use Maps.
In a blog post, Google said that it uses automated detection systems, including machine learning models, to scan millions of contributions to detect and remove policy-violating content. In the case of reviews, its systems audit every review before they’re published to Maps, looking for signs of fake or misleading content. And its machine learning models watch for specific words and phrases and examine patterns in the types of content an account has contributed in the past, while taking into account suspicious review patterns
Of course, AI isn’t perfect, which is why Google employs teams of trained operators and analysts who audit reviews, photos, business profiles, and other types of content, both individually and in bulk. In 2019 alone, with the aid of machine learning systems that improved in their ability to block policy-violating content and detect anomalies for manual review, human moderators removed more than 75 million policy-violating reviews and 4 million fake business profiles. They also took down more than 580,000 reviews and 258,000 business profiles that were reported directly to Google, and they reviewed and removed more than 10 million photos and 3 million videos that violated Maps’ policies and disabled more than 475,000 user accounts.
“The vast majority of contributions made to Maps are authentic, with policy-violating content seen less than one percent of the time. And we’ll continue to develop new tools and techniques to fight against bad actors,” said Maps director of product Kevin Reece. “Contributed content is an indispensable part of how we’re making Maps richer and more helpful for everyone.”
The metrics update comes after a Wall Street Journal report concluded that there are millions of fake listings on Maps, which have since been removed by Maps’ moderation team. In response to this and other controversies relating to user-submitted content, including an incident involving a drawing of an Android logo urinating on an Apple logo, Google has at various points shuttered public map editing tools and introduced new Maps moderation features.
This purge highlights an important point to anyone thinking of trying to manipulate their reviews to look better to new customers. If your ordinary business practices are such that you are regularly generating negative reviews, then any attempt at growing your business will in turn just generate negative reviews. That’s why it’s better to address the underlying problem than try and cover it up with fake reviews. Besides, it would sure suck to put a lot of work into securing a bunch of fake reviews only to wake up one morning to see them all wiped out by Google’s AI.
(@kerrymflynn)