Now That’s What I Call SEO – Early October 2020

Roll-up roll-up for the latest, greatest and most exciting-est bi-weekly SEO round-up on the block. Stay up to date with all the comings and goings in the SEM industry right here.

The Other Search Engine

Everyone’s favourite search engine that’s named after a Friends character has rebranded — from Bing to Microsoft Bing. I know. It’s very exciting. Here’s hoping they get Chandler as a brand ambassador.

There’s a new, blue logo and a streamlined and simplified homepage:

They’ve also added a whole raft of new AI driven search suggestion features to improve UX and help people find what they’re looking for.

This seems like as good a time as any to actually talk about Bing. While it’s very much the unloved sibling of the search landscape, it does have some interesting tricks up its sleeve that are worth considering, especially for B2B brands:

• LinkedIn integration. This was announced recently – paid Bing ads can be integrated with LinkedIn, allowing you to create audiences based on things like job title, sector or seniority. This has a lot of potential for highly targeted ads that land in front of exactly the right people. Working in conjunction with LinkedIn campaigns, this is a really powerful way to find and remarket customers.
• Start Bar searches. Microsoft is ubiquitous across almost every industry, and Bing searches integrate with the start bar. This is a huge potential audience.
  That said, user behaviour still tends towards using the browser to search but Microsoft are working hard to change that.
• Boomers. There’s a lot of them out there. And when Microsoft tells them Edge is the best browser in the world, they believe it. That combined with the fact they don’t understand how to change default search engines creates a captive audience.

Joking aside, if you have an older customer base Bing Ads can be a winner. You can even personalise your messaging to that demographic as you can be sure none of your Gen X audience is going to see that copy…

Location, Location, Location

Google have announced that they are adding more search results data to Google My Business. This has always been a bugbear for people working with GMB – in its current form it is limited in what it tells you about your appearance in the SERPs. So, great news that this is changing.

The most important new piece of information here is that you will now know how many times a business profile has surfaced in Search results. This is great for showing the results of Local SEO work. It is also a great way of understanding what kind of searches are triggering local results.

Although this will add more depth to the data GMB can give you, the best way to truly understand local search is still to use tools such as getSTAT. Why not talk to one of our friendly local SEO experts if you think this is something that would be valuable for your brand?

Google’s Got Gremlins

Our keen-eyed technical SEOs spotted Twitter rumblings that something a little strange was going on with Google’s indexation of pages – specifically problems around canonicalisation. This has now been officially confirmed by Google.

The bug reared its ugly head around September 20th and was eventually squished on October 1st.

Google have said this has now been completely fixed, and that no action needs to be taken on the part of webmasters. If you’ve reported strange things in Search Console relating to indexation and canonical tags, this bug was probably behind it. However, if you are still seeing problems, it’s worth notifying your nearest technical SEO specialist who can take a look for you.

That’s it for this time! Check out our Blog and Knowledge Base for more news and insight from the world of SEM marketing. Or why not get in touch and see what our specialist team can do to help your business grow online?