SEO Wash-up Monday 19th April

Google Updates

Google ads “phrase match” expands to cover a broad match modifier traffic – They are making some changes to their match types again. It seems that this time phrase match will expand to cover additional broad match modifier traffic. However, they mention that this will continue to respect word order when it’s important to the meaning.

Furthermore they go on to mention that with these improvements, you can reach the searches you want just by using phrase match and without the worry about the searches you don’t want. For example if you are a moving company that wants to reach people interested in moving out of London city. With the updated phrase match, you can reach people looking to move from London to Birmingham, for example, without showing up for people looking to move from Birmingham to London.

Google Ads is rolling out Portfolio bid strategies for manager accounts – Last year July, The Google Ads team mentioned about portfolio bid strategies, an automated, goal-driven bid strategy that groups together multiple campaigns, ad groups, and keywords. Well it seems that now they are saying this feature is available to all manager accounts.

The portfolio bid strategies automatically set bids in Google Ads in order to help you reach your performance goals. They specifically include the following Smart bidding strategies:

• Target CPA
• Target ROAS
• Maximize conversions
• Maximize conversion value
• Maximize clicks
• Target impression share

Once you create a portfolio strategy, it will be stored in your Shared library. This is the central location for managing your portfolio bid strategies and tracking their performance. Portfolio bid strategies were previously referred to as “flexible bid strategies.

Google is testing infinite scroll on mobile search – The search giant is once again testing infinite scroll on the mobile search results. Users have seen numerous tests of infinite scroll, including on desktop results. The mobile search results right now have a ‘more results’ button to load more results but in this test, the button is not needed.

Bing

Bing estimated reading time in search result snippets – It seems that they are testing displaying the estimated reading time for some of the search results. Within some search result snippets, they are adding ‘estimated reading time’ under the snippet. This can be pulling from some structured data or Bing can be using other methods for this.