Digital Marketing Updates: January 2025

SEO

Updates by Randy McFadden

Key Takeaways from A Study on Google Search Behavior

A study was conducted on 332 million Google search queries that uncovered a wealth of information regarding Google Search behavior. Here are some key takeaways:

• Google maintains a staggering 90%+ of the global search market share, holding this position for over 15 years.
• 44% of searches are for branded terms. This means that close to half of all Google searches were from users looking for a particular brand or organization, illustrating the importance of building a strong brand.
• 50% of searches are purely for information (e.g., news, weather, how-tos).
• Zero-click features, including AI-driven summaries, increasingly satisfy search intents directly on Google’s platform. This shift is most prominent in high-demand categories like Arts, Sports, and Finance.

Google Query Classifiers Reveal Insights on their Algorithm

Mark Williams-Cook held a session unveiling insights from analyzing 2,300+ Google classifiers through an exposed Google endpoint, a treasure trove of data that Google hadn’t publicly revealed. Key findings include:

• Google has a site quality score
  • Site quality score is determined by how many times people specifically search for your website, how often they select the site even if it’s not number one, and how often do your site/brand terms appear on anchor text throughout the web
  • You are not eligible for rich snippet results if your site quality score is lower than 0.4
  • When there is no user data to reference for site quality scores, Google uses content from sites they do have scores for and converts that information into numerical data. This is then used to predict how good a site is going to be based on sites that they know. They call this their “phrase model”.
• Google categorizes queries into 8 intent classifications:
  • SHORT_FACT, REASON, DEFINITION, OTHER, COMPARISON, INSTRUCTION, CONSEQUENCE, BOOL (true/false)
  • Most queries fall into SHORT_FACT or BOOL categories.
• Google’s predictive click-through rate factors into rankings
  • Google predicts CTR using a click_age_probability classifier
  • Google Ads Planner can estimate CTR for queries
• Search results are influenced by consensus data
  • Google evaluates whether content agrees or disagrees with prior information using variables like:
    • consensus_num_passages_agree
    • consensus_num_passages_contradict
  • Queries related to topics like science are more likely to yield consensus-heavy results, while more open-ended concepts like political topics may have more mixed results
• Anchor text mentions are one of the ways Google can tell if your site has a strong brand.

Like the leak earlier in 2024, this contains some valuable information for focusing and prioritizing SEO efforts. We are incorporating learnings into our plans for SEO clients. 

Paid Media

Updates by Casey Anderson

LinkedIn Leveling Up B2B Insights

For advertisers who want to know more about the brands engaging with their ads, LinkedIn now offers the Companies Hub feature. This new feature shares company performance based on low to high engagement level, impressions, clicks, etc. both paid and organic. Companies Hub reporting simplifies the way advertisers can view and build lists from this data for better targeting.

Leverage the filter options to monitor current campaigns, create new audiences and target potential customers through actionable engagement insights.

The Companies Hub can now be found in the LinkedIn Campaign Manager under “Plan”. 

Boosting Personal Posts on LinkedIn

Limited organic reach on your posts got you down? LinkedIn is testing a new personal boost option as a way to amplify personal organic content. This will work for a variety of content types including text, image, video, articles and newsletters. 

This option is a great win for businesses with active thought leaders who promote both their personal brands and company brands on LinkedIn. It’s an opportunity to reach new highly engaged audiences and increase visibility across LinkedIn. 

While Thought Leader Ads have been at play for some time now, allowing businesses to promote personal content, this new promotional functionality relies on the individual LinkedIn user. 

It’s unfortunate that LinkedIn has limited content visibility from personal accounts to a point where paying for engagement is necessary. We’re hopeful that as this rolls out in 2025, we see a shift in content distribution and meaningful engagement.

Google Ad Policy Restrictions

Google is strengthening policies preventing websites with poor site health from advertising. Sites which are flagged with manual actions for violating spam policies in Google Search Console will now face disapproved ads too. The bottom line is that if your site is flagged for spam violations you will lose out on both organic and paid traffic and paid ads will be disapproved.

Monitoring Google Search Console will be an important part of keeping the integrity of your Search campaigns intact. Recognizing the value of having an SEO and paid media team on your side will allow you to quickly mitigate these issues and prevent disruptions.

Hungry for more of the latest?

• Nico’s Analytics Roundup covers recent feature releases and great resources from around the web related to marketing analytics.
• Our latest blog describes how to create tables with sortable date comparisons in Looker Studio.