Microsoft is set to compete with Squarespace and Wix by offering SMBs an easy way to set up an online presence through its Digital Marketing Center program. To me, it feels like a close competitor to Google’s GMB Website offering.

You can bring your own domain or get one created with the extension .biz.site. Also when trying to build one it looked like it was primarily only for US market, also I didn’t see an option to continue without adding an advertising budget.

Small businesses can save time by importing their website information from a Facebook page or an existing advertising campaign. User can customize these components or add any of the following to their website:

• Headline and description
• Customer action button (Call now, Send email, Get quote, etc.)
• Cover image
• Business summary
• Social posts
• Reviews
• Gallery
• Business contact information
• Social links

They could have called it FrontPage 😁

Google is  releasing an update to the Display & Video 360 API which includes the following features:

• A new insertion order targeting service and bulk list method enabling the retrieval of insertion order targeting.
• Additional output-only fields mp3Audio and oggAudio for third-party audio creatives.
• Support for more performance goal types to assign to insertion orders and campaigns, including click and impression conversion rate performance goals.

More detailed information about this update can be found in the Display & Video 360 API release notes.

Requirements regarding the display of VAT on product landing pages in Japan have recently been updated. As a result, and in order to comply with these new requirements, Google will no longer allow VAT to be displayed separately from the price of the product on landing pages for products offered in Japan. Beginning April 1, VAT must be included in the price for the product that is displayed on the landing page.

The temporary ban of Shopping ads that are marketed around the US elections, the candidates, or its outcome from early Jan 2021 has been lifted. Google no longer consider the US 2020 election to be a sensitive event.

Google will stop serving Showcase Shopping ads and remove Showcase Shopping ad groups beginning on April 1, the company stated in an email to advertisers sent on February 23. After April 1, previous Showcase Shopping ad layouts will become part of Product Shopping ad groups. Advertisers will retain access to performance data for removed ads and ad groups in their account reports.

More info in their help documentation.

As you know, the Google Page Experience Update is coming up in May 2021 and a lot of it is based on the core web vitals metrics of Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Lyndon NA points out some tactics that some users might be using eg fake the metrics in order to give their own sites a better score or to give their competitor sites a worse score, to which Googler Malte Ubl says that a page can have multiple LCP candidates and the last is picked, incase the first tactics works now, it will stop working in the future.

Alphabet’s Google is negotiating individual licensing deals with a divided Spanish news industry that could allow the U.S. tech giant’s news service to resume in the country, three sources close to the matter told Reuters.

Starting around February 18, 2021, Google seems to be showing fewer featured snippet results in the search results page. Most, if not all, of the tools that track the Google search results, are showing significant declines in featured snippets showing up.

This may be a bug and Google may start showing these featured snippets again or this may be an intentional change on Google’s end. We do not know but we do know there was a change to how often certain categories of search results in Google will show featured snippets.

Third-party resources are often used for displaying ads or videos and integrating with social media. The default approach is to load third-party resources as soon as the page loads, but this can unnecessarily slow the page load. This article looks at using a facade in place of the third-party content until the user interacts with it.

A facade is a static element that looks similar to the actual embedded third-party, but is not functional and therefore much less taxing on the page load.

Lighthouse audit can look at this and tell you where you can use facades that are already available.

Many SEO tools can’t crawl staging and development sites due to (sensible) measures put in place to avoid premature indexing. But Sitebulb gives you the flexibility to control both how you crawl the site, and how the data is analysed – so you can audit sites as they’ll appear after launch.

As well as the ability to handle both form-based and HTTP authentication, you can choose to ignore Nofollow and Noindex tags, and rewrite canonicals.

As a tl;dr Marketing newsletter subscriber, you can get a free 60 day, Sitebulb extended trial licence here: Sitebulb.com/tldr

This post was published a few weeks ago and it would appear that some users are noticing that hotels can start appearing within the Hotel Pack (local pack) for content (website mentions) found on the hotel’s website. This feature within the local pack for all other categories is not new and has been around for some time, but now hotels can benefit and take advantage of this.

In Jan this year, we also noticed that they were pulling content from websites into Location panels. So it’s possible Google is ramping up its Machine learning capabilities to source relevant content in the various map packs.