DOES OPTING-OUT OF GOOGLE’S FEATURED SNIPPETS WORK?: In January of 2020, Google announced “position 0” was effectively dead; no longer would pages be able to win the featured snippet and first spot on the search engine results page (SERP). SEO experts hypothesized whether the featured snippet actually drove in less traffic than the first organic spot on the SERP. The team over at Moz decided to test this hypothesis and found that opting-out of Google's Featured Snippets resulted in 12% less traffic to the webpage at hand.
Why you should care: Moz shows us that the goal should still be to get your program page or blog post to the featured snippet position on Google’s SERP (despite the removal of position 0). Yes, there’s a chance that users will read the information provided by the featured snippet without clicking through to your webpage, but it surely beats a 12% drop in site traffic.
3 TYPES OF MESSAGING YOU SHOULD BE AVOIDING RIGHT NOW: In the wake of COVID-19, do you worry that your communications are too aggressive toward prospective students? Here are 3 types of messaging that Metric Theory suggests to avoid right now:
Why you should care: Many prospective students (and people in general) are anxious right now, wondering if pursuing the education roadmap they envisioned before COVID-19 will still be affordable and provide the same ROI. Communications with a human touch, empathy, and a true understanding of the difficulties students are facing will work better than those communications that perpetuate angst.
NEW RESEARCH FOR BLOGGERS: Time spent writing a blog post, average blog post length, uncommon blogging tactics with the most impact, and how bloggers drive traffic to their blogs has all changed significantly since 2014. Back in 2014, Orbit Media Studios surveyed 1,000 bloggers. Compare the survey results from then to their 2019 Annual Blogging Survey and you’ll notice many fundamental changes in the blogging world.
Why you should care: Blogging continues to be a great avenue for schools to establish thought leadership, bolster SEO, stay on top of trends. But the processes that go into producing and promoting a blog have changed (did you know the average blog post now takes an average of 3 hours and 57 minutes to write?). See how your blogging tactics and processes match up with the findings from Orbit Media Studios’ annual survey.