Welcome to Part II of Edition No. 48 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Contents
I. Google Search Core Algorithm Update Underway
II. GA4: Item-Scoped Custom Dimensions
III. Your Headers Aren’t As Important As You Think*
IV. Meta’s Latest AI Push
V. LinkedIn: 100 Free AI Courses Through Mid-June
VI. I Love This New TikTok Feature…
VII. …But Twitter’s Latest Feature is Meh
I. Google Search Core Algorithm Update Underway
Google announced Wednesday that its latest core algorithm update is underway and, as is standard, “may take up to 2 weeks to complete.”
🛠 Why does this matter? We have talked about these more in-depth in the past, so here’s a quick recap:
Use Google Search Console to monitor your rankings, especially for your most coveted keywords
Use Google Analytics to monitor your traffic from the “google / organic” source / medium
Just because your pages rankings and/or organic search traffic fall after an update doesn’t mean you have been “penalized”
As always, the best way to protect against algorithm updates is to create high-quality, original content that’s useful to your target audience.
If your traffic drops significantly, you may want to dig deeper and figure out whether there’s some reason Google no longer wants to rank it as high. (There’s no magic bullet for this. You’ll have to analyze on a case-by-case basis.) If your traffic stays relatively the same or increases, keep up the good work!
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II. GA4: Item-Scoped Custom Dimensions
We are excited to announce that Google Analytics will now process item-level custom parameters from the ecommerce events on your website or app, which can be registered as custom dimensions and used in explorations.
Item-scoped custom parameters let you collect more information about items on your website or app, beyond the predefined parameters offered by default. For example, you can send item-scoped custom parameters to collect information about an item's color, size, product rating, and in-stock status.
You can register up to 10 item-scoped custom parameters for standard properties and 25 for Analytics 360 properties as custom dimensions.
🛠 Why does this matter? As you might have gathered, this is geared toward e-commerce sites. But just because you’re not an online store doesn’t mean this won’t be useful.
Perhaps you’re a news site that sells subscriptions, or a consulting site that sells your services – this can still be for you.
You might track dimensions such as subscription length or level, or perhaps number of coaching sessions booked.
While GA4 was not built with content sites and apps at the forefront, it doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of useful tools we can apply to analyze our platform’s users and their behavior.
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III. Your Headers Aren’t As Important As You Think*
*At least not in the way that most people think
There are two search podcasts I try to listen to on a regular basis.
First and foremost, Google Search Off the Record. Secondly, the Search Engine Journal Show.
The latter’s latest episode was a crossover episode of sorts. Google’s Martin Splitt, one of the hosts of the latter’s show, joined the SEJ Show.
(If you’re curious to learn more about search in general, check out the entire episode.)
It’s worth pointing out that there are a lot of questions Splitt declined to answer. One of his more interesting (if not angry) responses was in regard to how headers are used.
I guess this topic comes up so much – and Google continues to give the same answer – that it’s a bit of a sore subject. Regardless, Splitt did share some not-new but still important information:
You can use as many <h1> tags as you want on your pages.
You can use whatever combination of header tags (from <h1> to <h6>, for example) that you choose
🛠 Why does this matter? You may be wondering, aren’t headers important?
The answer is yes. But not in the way that a lot of people think.
Regarding h1s, you can use as many as you want. Google’s (and presumably other search engines’) bots are usually able to tell what a page (i.e. particular piece of content) is about no matter how many h1s you use.
Additionally, an <h1> in and of itself doesn’t hold more “weight” than other header tags.
What is important – this touches more on No. 2 above – is how you structure your page.
Splitt mentioned in the podcast that the NY Times uses a combination of h2 and h5 headers throughout its pages. He said this is unusual, but effective.
Why? Because it clearly lays out the structure of the content.
So, what follows are two examples of how you could effectively structure a news article.
On the left I have added headers that might be used in a more traditional article layout. On the right, a less traditional one:
h1 On-Page Headline h1
h2 Topic h1
h3 Sub-Topic h2
h2 Topic h1
h3 Sub-Topic h2
h4 Sub-Sub-Topic h5
h4 Sub-Sub-Topic h5
You would (and could) only use one of those two headers listed on each line, but I put them together so you can compare side-by-side.
Bottom line: Use whichever headers you want, so long as they have a rhyme and reason. While Google may be able to figure out a more flat header structure, it’s better to make things as easy as possible on the crawl spiders.
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