Marketing Letter - 💸 Why SEO Isn’t Dead

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that cites the sources that truly matter:

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ Why SEO Isn’t Dead💸
→ TikTok Enters the Search Ad Ring📈
→ Reddit’s Ad Manager Gets an AI Re-tool👀
→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In this week's video, I share some of the methods I find effective for boosting your site's visibility, ranging from straightforward tactics to more advanced strategies. These tips should help you troubleshoot and resolve indexing troubles while also enhancing your overall SEO approach. Tune in for more.

​YouTube​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ This open letter to Google proposes "increased site diversity," applying "the same content standards of "Helpful Content" to big and small sites alike," and a reduction of " any punishment of sites with small brand footprints" as ways for Google to repair some of the damage it's done. Would be a start. What’s missing?

→ Google Discover is “sending U.S. news publishers much more traffic,” as “Google Discover — the Google product offering personalized content recommendations via Google’s mobile apps — is increasingly becoming a top referrer, up 13%”

Meanwhile, from the same study: “Social’s share of traffic to the 700 U.S. news sites that are Chartbeat clients has dropped by a third since January 2023, from 6% then of all traffic then to 4% of all traffic now.”

→ Here’s a list re: how Google Trends can improve your marketing. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff, but if you’re not already Doing Keyword Research, Building Topic Clusters, Improving Your YouTube SEO, Optimizing Your Local SEO Strategy, Leveraging Seasonal Trends, Leveraging Trending Topics for Social Media Content, and Monitoring How You Stack Up Against Your Competitors- or just want to up your game- it’s worth a read.

→ Here’s a lol— Google has “updated its spam policies document,” adding a new section to the site reputation abuse policy. Forbes mentioned? IDK, LMK, not reading.

→ GA4 is finally catching up to Universal Analytics and releasing new benchmarking data that “lets you compare your analytics data to others in your same industry.”

→ According to Nathan Gotch, here’s “Why SEO isn’t dead” in one image:

AI Insight 🤖

Every week, the AI section of this newsletter bleeds into every other section. And this week is no different, especially re: social media.

→ Reddit just dropped some new AI features for Ads Manager: an ads inspiration library, an AI copywriter, and an image auto-cropper.

The TLDR; the inspo library is a “filterable collection of top performing Reddit ad creative,” the copywriter is still in beta but aims to “generate Reddit-specific advertising copy based on Reddit creative best practices and selected inputs,” and the image auto-cropper “crops imported campaign images according to Reddit’s recommended display ratios.”

→ Another Reddit AI feature? The platform is releasing machine-powered translation and localization in 35+ additional countries.

→ If you missed Meta Connect 2024, here’s a decent overview of what’s worth knowing.

The TLDR; Meta AI voice options include "Dame Judi Dench, John Cena, Awkwafina, Kristen Bell, and Keegan-Michael Key," lots of VR updates, the Llama 3.2 AI model has been released, Meta is releasing a Google Lens competitor for image-based searches, and more.

Also worth noting, Meta AI’s “Imagine” features, aka text-to-image generative AI, are coming to Facebook and Instagram.

→ OpenAI’s “Advanced Voice Mode” may not have John Cena on board, but it’s dropping soon, too.

→ Never a dull moment at OpenAI. Looks like it’s ditching its not-for-profit designation and giving Sam Altman a 7% equity stake in the company.

→ YouTube’s new conversational AI feature “can answer questions about the video you’re already watching” and will include a “Summarize Video” button.

Social Media Round-up📲

→ The next shot fired by TikTok at Google? The platform is finally entering the Search advertising sphere with the TikTok Search Ads Campaign, which “enables sophisticated keyword-based ads which specifically target TikTok's search results page.” TikTok claims that the user experience of ads on the platform won’t change, but the move gives advertisers “a whole host of new features and targeting capabilities.”

This should help advertisers "convert customers when they're most curious," "capture diverse user intent across search queries," and "unlock incremental value." If you want to know more, click the link.

FWIW— “TikTok found that advertisers that run Search Ads in addition to In-Feed Ads see a 20% increase in conversions on average.”

→ Apparently, “X has seen a significant decline in users in both the U.S. and U.K. in recent months,” “active daily users in the UK have dropped from 8mn a year ago to only around 5.6mn now," and "X’s active users in the US have fallen by about a fifth.”

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

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