🔍 Waking up to Google's COVID ad credits

Jun 19, 2020

Good morning Josb, check those accounts.

Google's ad credits for COVID relief started rolling out to qualifying SMBs in the U.S. yesterday. If you qualify (and this is rolling out in phases), you'll get an email and see a banner notice in your account. But before you go blowing that sweet free cash, consider these 3 questions to maximize your credit.

As many local stores are reopening, Nextdoor is out with free Business Posts. Similar to Google Posts, local businesses can use them to share news and announcements. Nextdoor Business Posts show up in the news feeds of users within a two mile radius of the business. They're yet another sign of Nextdoor's growing suite of paid and free promotional tools for businesses.

Are your products getting free clicks from Surfaces across Google, yet? Google Merchant Center reports clicks, but what happens when those users get to your site? Are they buying? ICYMI, Kirk Williams of ZATO Marketing shared his method of tracking organic traffic from Surfaces across Google on Live with Search Engine Land recently. With some simple UTM tagging, you can separate Surfaces across Google traffic from regular Google organic search traffic in Google Analytics.

Mark your calendars and get registered for SMX Next, our free virtual event happening next Tuesday and Wednesday. We've got keynotes from yours truly (How To Emerge A Nimbler, Smarter, More Successful PPC Marketer), Barry Schwartz (Lessons From Past Google Algorithm Updates & Preparing For What's Next), Greg Sterling (GMB Next: The Evolution Of Local Search) and George Nguyen (Content Marketing In Times Of Disruption), plus lots more sessions and several special Live with Search Engine Land panels. Check out the agenda here.

Keep reading for the perfect way to waste some time today (and more).

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief

Big Picture

Easter egg alert

Search "fireworks" on Google and enjoy the show. Google Easter eggs are a brilliant way to keep users searching. If you're in need of a real time suck, check out our list of other Easter eggs.

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Search Shorts

Racial equality at Google

Google on racial equality. "Today we are announcing a set of concrete commitments to build sustainable equity for Google's Black community, and make our products and programs helpful in the moments that matter most to Black users," Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, said.

URL order in XML Sitemaps. The order of the URLs in your XML Sitemap does not matter to Google, it won't help or hurt you either way said Google's John Mueller.

Nofollow in link HTML tag. Gary Illyes from Google has confirmed that you can use nofollow on link HTML tags and posted four tweets explaining the complications on why it took so long to figure it out.

Scroll search suggestions. This is a weird one. Google is testing showing search suggestions in the search box as you scroll through the search results. This was spotted by Yvo Schaap.

Free search marketing training next week!

Join 10,000+ fellow search marketers next Tuesday and Wednesday, June 23 – 24, for SMX Next… a free virtual event that will equip you with actionable SEO and SEM tactics that can help drive more traffic, leads, and sales.

Register for free »