Digital Highlights from November

Bing announce new set of search penalties for inorganic site structure

credit: BingBing refreshed their webmaster guidelines to include subdomains and doorway pages. In the latter case, they effectively answer several user questions, however the answer is always the same - the single URL destination. It's the domain equivalent of keyword stuffing. The update includes sites that partner with other domains, and is designed to level out the playing field for single domain use, not penalise those who partner to offer a good old honest user-friendly service. It's caused a lot of controversy in the industry - is it needed? Is it penalising the wrong sites? Who's to say whether a site has the customer's best interest at heart? The changes are effective immediately, so it will be interesting to see the impact over the next few months.

Google Ads offer combined audiences for search

There are few things that Ryan Lewis, our Paid Media Director, gets excited about - and Google Ads' latest announcement was one that got a raised eyebrow out of him. That, and Maddi, our Paid Media Executive's story about dry cleaning. You should ask about it sometime. This update allows you to create an infinite number of customer "personas", allowing you to target customers with Ads personalised to a segmented demographic. Google have worded it perfectly, so we've left it to them to explain:

"By creating personas based on your users’ backgrounds, needs and goals, you can target the right customers at the right time. With combined audiences, you can intersect audience segments to express most advertiser personas. For example, let’s say that you are targeting your ad to outdoor enthusiasts (affinity audience) or people looking to buy a car (in-market audience). With combined audiences, you can now intersect the affinity audience with in-market audience and target the ad for your SUV to outdoor enthusiasts who are also looking to buy a car. Without combined audiences, you would also show your ad to people who are outdoor enthusiasts and not in-market for a car or people who are in-market for a car and don’t like the outdoors." - Google Ads Help Resource Centre

Gary Vaynerchuk shares some great content advice

Although we're fans of a polished, well-thought out strategy, for those that are looking to dive into social media, Gary Vaynerchuk has put together this brilliant slide deck: 'How to create 64 pieces of content in a day'. It's packed full of tips on how to dive straight in and produce content that's simple, easy to measure and great for sharing across multiple platforms. It might not be suitable for everyone - especially bigger companies who should be crafting a strategy that reflects their brand and audience - but for those who are dipping their toes in the water for the first time, or who suit a more relaxed approach to content, this is a really useful set of tools to share with your social marketing team.

Christmas ads have launched

Finally, we couldn't sign-off without mentioning the unveiling of the 2019 Christmas adverts. With so many to choose from, we're not even going to begin to debate which one's the best - but we'd love to know which is yours. Retail Week have done a great job of listing all the Christmas adverts, so tweet us your favourite at @SearchSeven to give us some food for thought. Then we'll argue over it.

We've been blogging

In case you’ve missed what we’ve been talking about this month:

Is the lowest price always the most appealing?

Digital Highlights from October

Search Seven Charity Quiz Night - we raised £1,800 for Rockinghorse!

Coming up in December

You just missed it, but our Content & Insights Manager Christina ran a 10k on 1st December to raise money for Epilepsy Society! She completed the run in a very respectable 1hr 05mins, and has so far raised £960. Visit her fundraising page to donate to her chosen charity - every penny goes towards our target of raising £77k by 2021. This week we've got the Sussex Business Awards on the 5th December which we're VERY excited about (and just a bit nervous!). We're nominated for three awards - CSR Excellence Award, Professional Service Award and Businessperson of the Year Award. We're up against some fantastic local businesses, and it's going to be a great night at The Grand.