Coming Changes for Digital Marketing From an SEO and PPC Expert

by Andrew Schulkind

We’ve worked with Terri Jenkins and her team at Clear Blue Sky Digital for more years than we can count. We’ve come to rely on her for her expertise and business experience, which make all the difference in search engine marketing. It’s not just about the technical aspects.

I sat down with her recently — virtually, of course — and you can read the highlights of our conversation below.

Let’s start with the question that sparked this discussion. What are Core Web Vitals and why should small business owners care?

First of all, the basics here are still that Google wants to make sure that the end-user experience is good. So, with that in mind, it makes sense that they’d be focused on what they’re calling Core Web Vitals which are Speed, Responsiveness, and Visual Stability. They’re really just a more fully defined version of what they’ve been pushing for several years. Here’s what they’re looking for:

Speed is being defined by “LCP” or Largest Contentful Paint which is the time that it takes for the main content of a page to load. Faster is better and we want to shoot for 2.5 seconds or less.
Responsiveness is measured by “FID” or First Input Delay which is how quickly a page becomes interactive. Again, faster is better and we want to shoot for less than 100 milliseconds.
Visual Stability is measured by “CLS” or Cumulative Layout Shift which is the amount of unexpected layout shift (movement) of a page’s visual content. Google says a good score is less than 0.1.

Why should small business owners care?

First of all, they should care because they want their site visitors to have a good experience and find it easy to do business with them.

Second, these are now part of how Google is ranking your pages. Poor user experience will impact your rank now and that will impact how many users find your site. Google is basically making you care about good customer experience.

Any thoughts on the move away from cookies and what that might mean short-term and over the long haul, both for small business marketers and for consumers?

OK, let’s start with what are they actually discontinuing? Data from third-party cookies will no longer be collected from your browser. First-party cookies will be unaffected. What this means is that the way that advertisers track you around the web (from site to site) is going away. That’s the third-party data that will stop. What it won’t change is that the data you collect from your own website visitors (such as via Google Analytics) will be unchanged.

Consumers probably won’t see a huge difference, since the big advertisers (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) will have their own data to target with.

The biggest impact will be on small advertisers who rely on the third-party data to help refine their campaigns. The big companies with large budgets and other large tech companies will still be able to buy customer targeting data from big data operations like Oracle and Experian, but small companies won’t be able to afford it. Ultimately, what that will do is make advertising more expensive for small companies who will have to rely on less data and more testing. The best thing a small business can do is get educated on how to read their own analytics data, or to hire expert marketers to help them navigate the changes.

Any differences between B2B and B2C marketers?

I don’t really see any differences in how the changes will impact B2B vs. B2C companies. It’s really a matter of how savvy the marketers in those companies are. Do they know who their real target audience is? Are they able to confirm that, and track them via their own analytics? The answers may be a little harder to come by, but smart marketers will still be able to find their audiences.

It looks like ever more power (in the form of data) consolidates to the biggest players in the industry. Have you found that? How do you think that might play out?

Agreed. The big players like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are already sitting on huge amounts of data and will continue to gather it from their customers. It means that we, as advertisers, will be even more at their mercy. Eliminating third-party cookies will likely drive more businesses to advertise on the big platforms, in effect favoring one part of the web over another. Outside of the big players, the cost to advertise will probably go way up.

Any other words of wisdom for small business owners hoping to get more attention for their sites, whether through organic SEO or paid advertising?

As has always been true 🙂 work hard to know who your customer is and what they need to find on your website. Make it easy for them to find you (good SEO); make it easy for them to know what you have to offer and how it helps them (good website copy, good ad copy, clear benefits, customer success stories); and easy for them to buy (clear customer path to purchase, multiple clear calls to action). And again as has always been true, test and refine, then test and refine again. Marketing isn’t a once-and-done thing. It’s ever-evolving and there’s always something new to learn and try!

--- Strategy, Research & Planning ---

Password Safety and Security Tips and Insights

What’s better: long passwords or 8-character passwords that include at least one number, one capital letter, one lower case letter and one “special” character? I recently chatted with Will Hunt of in.security about a favorite geeky topic of mine: passwords. We answer this very question, as well as a bunch of others. Will is full…MORE >
--- Strategy, Research & Planning ---

Marketers Ruin Everything

Remember when email was cool? Before everyone had an email address. Before everyone had even heard of email. The really, really cool kids had “@well.com” email addresses. (That’s WELL as in “Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link.”) The rest of us had addresses like 92304.1263@compuserve.com. Then there was the huge influx of @aol.com addresses and email wasn’t…MORE >
--- Strategy, Research & Planning ---

Website Privacy Policies and Practices – An Insurance Perspective

Following up on our recent chat with Amy Goldsmith, today we sit down with Sean O’Rourke to discuss cyber resiliency for small- and mid-sized businesses. Sean O’Rourke is a cyber liability consultant for Combs & Company, an insurance brokerage and consultancy headquartered in New York City. Sean works with small- and mid-sized businesses to mitigate…MORE >

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-non-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Non Necessary".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

Cookie	Type	Duration	Description
_ga	0	2 years	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to calculate visitor, session, camapign data and keep track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookies store information anonymously and assigns a randoly generated number to identify unique visitors.
_gid	0	1 day	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to store information of how visitors use a website and helps in creating an analytics report of how the wbsite is doing. The data collected including the number visitors, the source where they have come from, and the pages viisted in an anonymous form.
.ASPXANONYMOUS	1	2 months	This cookie is used by sites using the .NET technology platform from Microsoft. It enables the site to maintain an anonymous user-id to track unique users within a session without them logging in or otherwise identifying themselves.
GPS	0	30 minutes	This cookie is set by Youtube and registers a unique ID for tracking users based on their geographical location
uvc	0	1 year	The cookie is set by addthis.com to determine the usage of Addthis.com service.

Cookie	Type	Duration	Description
di2	0	1 year	This cookie is set by addthis.com on sites that allows sharing on social media. The cookie is used to track user behavior anonymously to generate usage trends to improve relevance to their services and advertising.
IDE	1	2 years	Used by Google DoubleClick and stores information about how the user uses the website and any other advertisement before visiting the website. This is used to present users with ads that are relevant to them according to the user profile.
loc	0	1 year	This cookie is set by Addthis. This is a geolocation cookie to understand where the users sharing the information are located.
NID	1	6 months	This cookie is used to a profile based on user's interest and display personalized ads to the users.
uid	0	1 year	This cookie is used to measure the number and behavior of the visitors to the website anonymously. The data includes the number of visits, average duration of the visit on the website, pages visited, etc. for the purpose of better understanding user preferences for targeted advertisments.
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE	1	5 months	This cookie is set by Youtube. Used to track the information of the embedded YouTube videos on a website.

Cookie	Type	Duration	Description
__utma	0	2 years	This cookie is set by Google Analytics and is used to distinguish users and sessions. The cookie is created when the JavaScript library executes and there are no existing __utma cookies. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
__utmb	0	30 minutes	The cookie is set by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to determine new sessions/visits. The cookie is created when the JavaScript library executes and there are no existing __utma cookies. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
__utmc	0		The cookie is set by Google Analytics and is deleted when the user closes the browser. The cookie is not used by ga.js. The cookie is used to enable interoperability with urchin.js which is an older version of Google analytics and used in conjunction with the __utmb cookie to determine new sessions/visits.
__utmt	0	10 minutes	The cookie is set by Google Analytics and is used to throttle the request rate.
__utmz	0	6 months	This cookie is set by Google analytics and is used to store the traffic source or campaign through which the visitor reached your site.
YSC	1		This cookies is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos.

Cookie	Duration	Description
__atuvc	1 year	This cookie is set by Addthis to make sure you see the updated count if you share a page and return to it before our share count cache is updated.
__atuvs	30 minutes	This cookie is set by Addthis to make sure you see the updated count if you share a page and return to it before our share count cache is updated.
na_id	1 year	This cookie is set by Addthis.com to enable sharing of links on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter
ouid	1 year	The cookie is set by Addthis which enables the content of the website to be shared across different networking and social sharing websites.
um	1 year	Set by addthis.com.(Purpose not known)
vc	1 year	This cookie is set by addthis.com on sites that allow sharing on social media.