WATCH OUT FOR NEGATIVE SEO: When a competitor builds unnatural backlinks, distributes duplicate content, generates negative reviews, or creates fake social profiles in your name, they’re deploying negative SEO against you. Think spam in the form of low quality, irrelevant backlinks to your site, publishing content identical to yours, or even generating negative reviews on your Google My Business profile. Your competitor’s goal is to ruin your SEO credibility and in effect, negatively impact your business.
Why you should care: If you find a significant drop in your program page’s SEO rankings or overall domain authority of your school, it could be worth taking a look at a competitor program for duplicate content, running a backlinks report, or checking your Google My Business profile for excess negative reviews. The best defense against negative SEO is a good offense – publishing high quality content, improving site speed (especially mobile site speed), and increasing engagement with your content, among other tactics.
LIVE VIDEO IS BECOMING INDISPENSABLE FOR MARKETERS: Facebook claims that live video generates 10x more engagement and 3x the watch time of normal videos. Live video creates a sense of urgency, improves transparency between you and the viewer, and exposes your brand on social media platforms. With no video editing and little scripting, live video presents an authentic portrayal of your brand to the viewer. Another benefit is that social media platform algorithms prioritize high-engaging content, so your high-performing live video content will be displayed on a larger number of individual’s feeds.
Why you should care: Live video is such an easy tool to use thanks to social media platforms, but it also comes with some strategic considerations. You can’t just hop on LinkedIn Live during an Open House and expect all of your LinkedIn followers to tune in. There’s live video promotion, timing, and a quality of video standard to consider. Check out some of these live video best practices before jumping in.
THE SCOOP ON THE 3RD PARTY COOKIE: Google announced it will phase out 3rd party cookies on all Chrome browsers by 2022. What you also may not know is that other popular web browsers, like Safari and Firefox, dropped 3rd party cookies back in 2013! Third-party cookie data allows you to learn about your web visitor's overall online behaviors whereas 1st party cookies collect data about users specific to their visit to your website. Google’s move will prohibit advertisers from following users around on the internet on after leaving their website.
Why you should care: Enrollment marketers should take note that Google is putting its foot down on privacy concerns, which could set a precedent for others moves that aim to prioritize user privacy over advertisers and businesses. The end of 3rd party cookies will hurt higher education advertisers using 3rd party cookie data to show ads. However, if you are merely retargeting your own website visitors via 1st party cookie data, Google’s announcement will have no impact on your ongoing advertising efforts.