How many times have you heard this in the past few weeks? “The COVID-19 crisis is affecting everyone and everything.” Well, even Google is no exception. In an effort to reduce the number of employees in their offices, Google has decided to temporarily suspend several of its features. Suspended features include a lot of user-generated content, including Google My Business reviews and Q&As. Until further notice, Google will not be publishing or reviewing GMB reviews, review responses,
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Should I Pause My Ads? Best Practices During COVID-19
Before reading any further, if you haven’t signed up yet please visit https://www.facebook.com/business/boost/grants to sign up for updates on the Facebook Ads Small Business grant program. Facebook is taking steps to offer help to SMB’s who need to be cost-conscious right now but are having to balance the need to advertise and keep leads coming in - a pretty great opportunity you need to look into. Google is also planning on giving SMB’s who have been active advertisers since the beginning
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How Can We Take SEO Next-Level?
Featured Snippets What do we mean by next-level? We start by identifying specific, advanced tactics to use in order to gain an edge over your competitors. These are not required actions in some cases, but once you have built a great foundation of content and technical SEO implementation these should be on your to-do list. We’re going to start this series by discussing featured snippets. What are featured snippets? Featured snippets are a type of rich search result in the form of short
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A Message from Gruen Agency on COVID-19
We wanted to take a moment to share what the Gruen office will look like for the next couple of weeks, and more importantly, what this means for your digital programs and business. While our team will be working from their homes to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, there will be no change in the support, service, or experience for you and your program deliverables. Our team is already optimized for and comfortable with remote work, so you won’t experience any disruption. We also remain
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What Google’s 2020 Nofollow Update Means for You
Following an initial announcement on September 2019, Google has officially changed the way it interacts with nofollow links. Previously, Google obeyed all nofollow links as a directive, which means it excluded links marked “nofollow” from its Search algorithm’s consideration altogether. Now, as of March 1, Google only treats nofollow links as “hints” as to what to exclude from Search. In other words, tagging a link with nofollow no longer necessarily means Google won’t consider it. Google’s
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Holiday Marketing Ideas for 2020
Part One: 2019 Recap For your business, and millions like it around the world, the holiday shopping season is the most important time of the year. Success can be translated into serious growth, failure can set back an entire year’s growth. There is no such thing as starting too early to plan and generate ideas for your next holiday marketing season. Let’s start today. We’ll begin by pulling together everything you need to review your 2019 holiday marketing efforts, understand what worked (and
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Should You Use Google Tag Manager?
TL:DR Version Yes, you should! If you’ve just been injecting code to your website instead of taking advantage of Google Tag Manager… What are you waiting for? GTM makes it easy to add tracking code and other pixels to your website. It also make it easier to manage AND can give you access to tracking metrics you wouldn’t have otherwise. For example, page scroll depth is trackable through GTM. Longer: Getting started with Google Tag Manager If at this point you haven’t made the decision
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Perfect Pairing: OTT & Facebook
OTT & Facebook Cross-Channel Marketing Creating cross-channel marketing campaigns that add up to more than just the sum of their parts is a challenge. Starting with two channels with complementary messaging can be an effective way to start. In our experience, using two platforms together, such as Facebook and OTT can lead to incredible results when done properly. What is OTT? OTT stands for Over-The-Top and refers to streaming TV over the internet. For example viewing ESPN+ via the app on
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Zero-Click Searches
TL:DR Version: Zero-click search refers to when a user gets the answer or information they searched for directly on a search engine result page (SERP) without having to click on anything. In 2019 we saw a rise in the number of these types of searches. According to Search Engine Land that number is now over 50%. It pays to develop strategies for search with that in mind. The Rise of Zero-Click Searches Search is a constantly changing entity. As we’ve seen already in 2020 with January’s
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Bing Expands Visual Search
TL:DR Version: Bing will be rolling out a feature that lets Windows users quickly upload a screenshot and search for similar images. This means a new potential touch point for e-commerce searches. How stores can optimize to appear in Bing Visual Search is TBD but it should be monitored. Bing Launches Visual Search in the US The great people at Search Engine Land reported on this fun development out of Microsoft. It's helpful to get some info from the source itself and see what
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