Welcome back to the Overit SEO Brief! This Brief is for Q3 2023, which marks our 1 year anniversary of the SEO Brief! We couldn’t have done it without you, our viewers and readers, so thank you for being here.
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Google Launches a Paid Pilot Program for Enhanced Customer Support Aimed at Small Business Advertisers
As reported by Matt Southern from Search Engine Journal, among others, Google recently announced the launch of a pilot program offering Paid Customer Support to smaller advertisers.
The motivation behind the new pilot program was the gap between the level of attention the highest-spending advertisers have historically received compared to the millions of smaller advertisers that have not received such support.
Google stated:
“A common complaint from customers is that they want more specialized advice from Google experts and ideas for how they can improve their ads campaigns and optimize their budgets.
The paid pilot for our smallest customers gives them a level and quality of support that has historically only been accessible to our largest customers.”
It’s no secret that smaller advertisers on Google Ads have had to rely on mostly automated emails and user-generated forums to get answers and meaningful support for their ad campaigns.
While a pay-to-play option still isn’t ideal, it’s at least a step in the right direction. Google indicated the initial pilot will be intentionally small, but they will iterate upon it from what they learn and slowly expand the program to more and more small advertisers.
Here at Overit, we’ll continue to monitor this program and how agencies can access and leverage the program on behalf of their clients. If you’ve been invited to participate in the Pilot, send us an email or drop a comment to let us know what your experience has been so far.
Google Adds a New Feature Supporting Social Media Links Within Business Profiles
Google recently announced the integration of social media link management within Google Business Profiles. This long-awaited feature will now allow businesses to add, edit, and manage links to their social media accounts on the most common platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube, among others.
While social media links have often been displayed within localized search listings, these links were typically scraped automatically by Google, they were not always accurate, and Business Profile managers had little ability to directly manage these links themselves.
This new feature will allow businesses to share accurate links to their social profiles, extending their visibility on Google’s ecosystem and offering new ways for prospective customers to find and engage with the business online.
This new feature has not fully rolled out to all Google Business Profiles but is expected to over the coming months. If you have a Business Profile on Google and maintain social media accounts as well, see if your dashboard has the new feature.
Google Search Console Fixes Link Reporting Bug
The Google Search team recently announced that a bug impacting the link reporting feature in Google Search Console has been fixed. The bug was first spotted and reported around June and July this year and led many website stakeholders to believe they had suddenly lost a lot of external backlinks.
Google reps assured users that the bug only impacted reporting on Search Console and that the bug had no impact on how Google discovers, crawls, indexes, or ranks websites. If you have a Google Search Console account and have seen recent drops or gains in links reported, it may be tied to this recent bug and subsequent fix.
And speaking of Google Search Console, we have a question from the mailbag! This Brief’s question comes from Morgan in Lake Placid, who asks:
“If my company already uses Google Analytics, do we need to set up Google Search Console as well?
That’s a great question, and the short answer is: Do you need to? No. Should you? Yes!
If organic search traffic matters to your company’s website and business objectives, then it’s a good idea to set up a Google Search Console profile. While there are some slight areas of redundancy between Analytics and Search Console, the former is an all-around analytics tool for traffic across channels, while the latter is a specialized tool that reports on Google organic search exclusively. Search console is these days one of the few tools that provide keyword-level traffic reports, which are important for understanding which specific terms drive search traffic to the website.
Additionally, there are helpful reports and tools to optimize how Google discovers, crawls, indexes and ranks pages on your website, including crawl reports, webspeed insights, and link discovery.
It’s a 100% free tool that integrates into existing Analytics accounts and other Google data platforms like Looker Studio. If you have already Analytics, Search Console is a natural next step for building out your data infrastructure.
That’s all for today’s brief! What do you want to hear about? Drop us a line at [email protected]. We’ll see you in Q4!