Marketing Letter - 👀 SGE Soft Launch Gets Harder

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that’ll get you gains even in the hard times

NBD.

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ Beating the Spam Update 🫡

→ SGE Soft Launch Gets Harder👀

→ Marketing on Meta in 2024 ✅

→ TikTok Drops Lead Gen Playbook 📈

→ more, obviously 💬

LFG.

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In this week's video, I got to share my experience on how we recovered from the Google spam update and how we removed the manual penalty from our accounts. In addition, I also talked about some of the sites that got rejected and approved. Come through.

​YouTube​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ Google’s long-awaited SGE is finally available to everyone, and AI overviews from SGE are being tested in the main Google search interface in order to get responses from regular people who haven’t “opted in” to SGE. Why does it matter? According to Barry Schwartz, “These AI answers may push down both the organic and standard search ads. It may result in less, or potentially more, traffic to your site, depending on where the citations are referenced from and where Google places the ads. The likelihood is, these experiences will likely drive less overall traffic to sites than what the current Google Search results do.” We’ll see.

→ This thread goes 50+ hours deep and comes up with some solid insights. For example, “the average SGE response contains 8-10 links from 4 unique domains. There can be up to 37 links in an SGE response spread out over 5 different carousels. The average SGE answer box contains 3,485 characters.”

For answers to more questions like "Which verticals are most affected?", “Which websites get attribution from SGE answers as a source?”, and "Which terms trigger SGE?", and looks at data such as trigger-rate by query length, click through to Landwehr's thread.

→ For a solid rant that inspired a (failed) clapback from the Google Search Liaison, click here. Basically, Mike Futia proves “Google basically took a bunch of low-effort, low-quality niche sites that DESERVED to get hit. Came up with a list of elements/features they all had in common. Pattern-matched that across the whole web with their machine learning. And in the process, a bunch of high-effort, high-quality blogs also got hit as collateral damage.” Oof.

→ If you’ve been annoyed that Conversion Metrics are inexplicably inconsistent between Google Analytics and Google Ads, you’re not alone, but they’ve finally fixed that. Now, to fix everything else.

→ James Lee breaks down the dumbassery of the recent updates well:

“-Don’t run ads
-Delete TOC plugin
-Add a shopping cart icon
-Certain WP themes are bad now
-You can’t write for keywords anymore”

lol.

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ HubSpot & TikTok have teamed up to drop a “lead generation playbook,” featuring strategies for ideal workflow for lead generation, a general breakdown of TikTok's lead gen options. Beyond this, there are specific best practices like "visuals help," "be conscious of the number of questions," "include a review screen," and more.

→ Stumbled onto this list of 5 advertising best practices re: Meta in 2024 and thought it was worth passing along. The TLDR; simplify your account structure, leverage new lead generation features, experiment with Advantage+ placements, embrace creative enhancements (where possible), and test your Meta Advantage+ audience.

→ What’s that? ANOTHER new API access adjustment on X? Sure, why not. “Top Up,” for both Basic and Pro tiers, basically means that subscribers can post an extra 10k times every month.

→ Here’s a piece on why the “Why the latest TikTok ban attempt is different — and what it means for marketers.” On the one hand? It’s possible. On the other? I’ll believe it when I see it. So, what does it mean for marketers? Among other things, get ready to juice your Reels and line Zuck’s pockets.

AI Insight 🤖

→ Bing Deep Search finally dropped, after a few months of hype. What’s the big deal? It uses Bing’s existing index and “leverages GPT-4 to expand and enhance your query, and determine possible intents.” Relevant quality factors include freshness, page popularity, source credibility, and more. Also, it's slow AF at the moment. Early opinion is that this AI Search option could be better for driving clicks than Bing Chat, Bard, or SGE.

→ If you’re looking for some inspo content, check this article on AI sites that beat the Spam update. Relevant factors for the food-related niche site covered in this article include: hosted on Squarespace, full of colorful and simple images, following rigid and carefully crafted prompts, and more.

→ If you’re curious about the 8 Google employees who wrote the “Transformer” paper and inspired arguably the biggest breakthrough in the recent history of AI, check this Wired.com piece.

→ Charles Floate’s “3 MINUTE HUMAN AI SEO ARTICLES w/ Cuppa ☕️” post is worth a look.

Jacky Chou​
Founder of Indexsy
hello@indexsy.com
Let's Connect on Twitter👇

​​

1238 Seymour Street, Vancouver, BC V6B 6J3
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​