Another month of 2020 has passed and yet it still feels like day 200 of March. After all the chaotic events occurred in 2020, we’ve seen some amazing digital marketing news changes that have benefited many businesses. For example, Google, Facebook, and Instagram stepped up and gave much-needed support to small businesses. We’ve also seen some expected 2020 trends surface, such as big updates on user experience and advancement of mobile SEO requirements. Before we look at the things that 2021 has in store… Let’s see what Digital Marketing News happened in November!

Google just released more user trends based on Canadian retail insights! For instance, the survey that Google conducted showed that 65% of Canadians said they will shop online while on vacation. Many people are still shopping in-store during the pandemic. However, 61% said they make all of their purchases online. While those who do shop in-store, 68% said they try not to have physical contact with products at the store. The visible trend here is that Canadians prefer to shop online rather than in-person. Due to the current risks of having close contact with people and the time convenience of shopping online. Let’s see Digital Marketing News below.

Google Page Experience Signals In Ranking

Earlier this year, Google announced that page experience will play an enormous role in how your website is ranked in the search giant’s efforts to serve the foremost helpful and pleasant content from the web in the search results. Page experience will be calculated by existing search signals such as mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS security, and a new measure – Core Web Vitals. CWV includes page loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability as the vital technical measures for an internet site. Google recently announced that the page experience signals in ranking will be in effect in May 2021. What site owners ought to do is leverage the power of Google’s tools like PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report to better the web experience for their visitors. As always, it’s a great idea to review Google’s guidelines and follow best practices with your website and content posting.

Google’s Mobile-First Indexing

For the last five years, Google has been pushing SEO and site owners to focus on Mobile-First Indexing. Mobile-First Indexing means that Google will only use the mobile Googlebot to crawl and index your website. Google was expected to introduce Mobile-First Indexing to ALL sites in September of this year. But due to the pandemic, they pushed this update to March 2021. 

The dangerous part of this update is that everything on your desktop version that’s not visible on mobile will become unseeable to Google for indexing purposes. This involves desktop-only content, comments, reviews, and more. If you have a block of content on your website that’s not shown or visible on mobile, then you will be losing out on rankings for any keywords in that content. It can also misinterpret the meaning of the page and if Google does not think it provides value or is helpful. This can negatively impact your rankings. 

Thus, the primary focus and priority should be the mobile version of your site. After all, phone traffic counts for a minimum of 50% of all web traffic online, and with this modification, there’s really no excuse not to focus on it.

Twitter Introduces S̶t̶o̶r̶i̶e̶s̶ Fleets

After Snapchat’s enormous success with stories and Instagram implementing the same strategy onto its platform. Twitter has now introduced its own version of stories called Fleets. Fleets are tweets that can disappear after a period of time. The attribute was talked about earlier this year (LinkedIn stories made the news then too). Also, it was announced publicly this past Tuesday. Just like how Instagram and Snapchat display their stories as bubbles, Fleets will also be displayed the same way.

Twitter’s inspiration behind Fleets is to make tweeting more friendly. The application hopes this will stimulate users to voice their thoughts. Also, express themselves without feeling the pressure of making a “permanent” tweet and trying to rack up retweets or go viral. Twitter found that users with Fleets were more communicative in their test markets and enjoyed more conversations.