The Stack is a weekly podcast where we share and discuss the latest trends, news, and content from the world of marketing, sales, and tech. In each episode, Sean, Tim, and Ryan sit down to chat about the hard-hitting questions related to sales, marketing, and tech. You can subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Google Play Music.
In this episode, we talk about the favicon coming to SERP, mobile first indexing, and Google Tag Manager. We would love to hear your thoughts so make sure to comment or tweet us at @Sylvestrer1, @SeanHenri, and @Tendrecroppes or @PepperlandMKTG.
Define a favicon to show in search results
Jamie Leach for The Keyword
Google has made some visual changes to their search engine results page. Google will now be including the favicon of your website next to your link in search results. This allows your brand to be associated with certain types of searches. You will be able to implement some code in the header of your homepage in order to populate your very own icon.
The search results page, too, has changed to help you discover these new types of information and quickly determine what’s most useful for you. As we continue our ongoing efforts to improve Search and provide a modern and helpful experience, today we’re unveiling a visual refresh of the mobile search results page to better guide you through the information available on the web.
Key Takeaways:
- With the addition of being able to add your own favicon to your results, ads will also have an “AD” icon next to each result to properly differentiate between organic and paid search.
- This will also allow Google to test new “action icons” to help people do things like, buy movie tickets and listen to podcasts.
Mobile-First Indexing by default for new domains
Google Webmaster Blog
Mobile-First indexing has been around for a while and isn’t new for a lot of website developers or marketers. On July, 1st of this year, Google will be crawling all new websites (that have not previously crawled) with the mobile version of Googlebot. If you have recently launched a new website, you can see if your pages are being crawled by Googlebot Smartphone or desktop by using the URL inspection tool in search console.
Mobile-first indexing has come a long way. We’re happy to see how the web has evolved from being focused on desktop, to becoming mobile-friendly, and now to being mostly crawlable and indexable with mobile user-agents!
Key Takeaways:
- For other websites that have been around for a while, Google will be determining the readiness of your website based “parity of content (including text, images, videos, links), structured data, and other meta-data (for example, titles and descriptions, robots meta tags).”
- Making sure your website has a responsive design is something Google highly recommends creating a well-structured and organized design.
- Make sure to have consistent URLs across desktop and mobile. Don’t create separate URLs for the mobile version of your site.
Tag Manager: Introducing Custom Templates
Scott Herman for Google Marketing Platform Blog
Google Tag Manager is introducing a new set of features to help you get more control over the tags on your site. These new features will allow less tech-savvy users to implement changes without touching the code. These new features will be available immediately and will help everyone from developers to novice code users to get more control over their data and tags.
Key Takeaways
- Google Tag Manager can be a pretty intimidating application to people who aren’t so familiar. These new custom templates will help all skill levels to implement and monitor tags and data.
- There will be a sandbox-like Javascript coding testing that will help you understand and deploy safer code the first time around.
App Of The Week
CSS Scan 2.0
If you need to replicate any kind of CSS styling on your website, CSS Scan will be your best friend. CSS Scan allows you to understand all styling elements on any page across the web.
Use Cases:
- Replicating elements across your website or a clients can be difficult. CSS Scan can help you quickly identify, copy and implement style changes across your site.
The Lightning Round: What We’re Reading This Week
In this section, we quickly run through some other updates that we didn’t have enough time to deep-dive on, but we still felt were noteworthy.
- People are using Instagram more, Facebook and Snapchat less
- Top 10 personality traits marketers need to succeed [Study]
- Facebook plans to launch ‘GlobalCoin’ currency in 2020
- What’s for dinner? Order it with Google
Listen or watch for new episodes each Friday, or check out the archives to watch past episodes on-demand. Like what you hear? Leave us a review or let us know in the comments!
