This week: Clubhouse is open, AMP is going away, and WordPress is stepping up. Here’s what happened this week in digital marketing.

Google Launches Deals Listings in Search

If you’re in the ecommerce space, you’ve got a new way to promote specials and discounts online. Google Shopping now highlights deals in search results. In this case, “deals” means competitively priced products or products sold at a discount. You can upload data about your promotions and discounts to the Google Merchant Center. Then Google will automatically surface your products for relevant queries. Oh, yeah. This whole thing is free of charge. It won’t cost you a penny. There’s more: coming this October, Google will start highlighting deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

WordPress 5.8 Released With Almost 300 Bug Fixes and Enhancements

WordPress 5.8 is out. And it’s packed with lots of goodies. For starters, the new version supports Blocks. That’s a new way to edit the look and feel of your website. You can find it in the Widget section. WordPress even lets you use Blocks while creating a post. That gives you the ability to update the layout of the page while also creating great content. Also, the latest version enables you to set global styles with the aid of a theme.json file. Use that to configure editor settings such as font size presets, custom color enabling, and more. Additionally, the new WordPress gives you the ability to colorize images or videos without the aid of a third-party tool like Photoshop or Premiere Pro. WordPress 5.8 also supports the WebP image format. It loads images faster than “old school” formats like JPG so you can give your visitors a better experience. And it’s got much, much more.

WordPress 5.9 May Boost Core Web Vitals Metric by 33%

The next version of WordPress could improve the Largest Contentful Paint metric by as much as 33%. But “as much as” isn’t an average. In fact, the average LCP speed increase in testing amounted to just 7%. That ain’t gonna cut it for most websites. How does WordPress increase speed? It gives developers more control over lazy loading of images. With lazy loading, the content of the page loads quickly while images are deferred. Unfortunately, when images are deferred, that negatively impacts the LCP metric. The new WordPress gets a better handle on that problem. Still, it looks like the developers have to do some more work to give WordPress web pages a better user experience.

RELATED:  Largest Contentful Paint: How to Solve LCP Issues

Google: No SEO Benefit With Dedicated Hosting

This past week, Google’s John Mueller confirmed that you won’t get a ranking benefit if you use dedicated hosting. Some SEOs think that they’ll get a bounce in the search results with dedicated hosting because pages tend to load faster than with shared hosting. According to Mueller: “Using shared hosting is perfectly fine and does not negatively affect your site in Google Search.” He made the statement during an installment of Ask Googlebot on YouTube. Mueller did say, though, that if a shared server is overloaded with too many websites, that could slow down the response time and make it harder for Google to crawl. But then he dispelled a myth. “Just to be clear, a dedicated server is not always fast, and a shared server is not automatically slow,” Mueller said.

Google Makes It Easier to Optimize Videos for Search

Google is making it easier to promote embedded videos online. You can do that thanks to the SeekToAction markup. With SeekToAction markup, you can identify key moments in your video. Those moments will get highlighted in search results. The markup is similar to other types of schema.org structured data. So if you currently use structured data, you’ve already climbed most of the learning curve. A few requirements to keep in mind, though:

• You’ll need to use SeekToAction markup in connection with VideoObject markup that includes all required properties.
• You must be able to deep-link your videos. For example: http://mysite.com/myvideo?t=30 will start playing the video at the 30-second mark.
• Total video duration must be at least 30 seconds.

You can still identify key moments with the Clip markup if that’s how you roll.

Google Dumps AMP Label in Mobile Search Results

Another sign that AMP is on its way out: Google recently dropped the AMP label on mobile search results. AMP, in case you’re unfamiliar with the acronym, stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It’s a technology used to load pages very quickly on mobile platforms. And it was all the rage about 18 months ago. But when it comes to high-tech, the only constant is change. So now it looks like AMP is on its way out in favor of a responsive design that offers website visitors a great experience on any device.

Google Launches Better, Faster AdSense Code

Using Google AdSense to monetize your site? If so, then you’ll want to pay attention to this news. Google just released new AdSense code that promises to improve performance. According to the Big G: “The new AdSense code allows AdSense to trigger optimization features earlier which can improve the performance of the ads on your site. The new ad code works for both Auto ads and ad units.” You can grab the new code from the AdSense website. But Google said you don’t have to replace the old code with the new code. The old code will continue to work just as it always has.

Instagram Doubles Insights Tracking Period to 60 Days

Good news if you’re into Instagram marketing: Instagram now gives you two months’ worth of insights instead of just one. And here’s some better news: that tracking period will expand to three months later this summer. That’s going to give you a lot more data that you can use to measure your marketing efforts. Before, you needed a third-party tool to track data for more than 30 days. The new calendar tools are already available.

Clubhouse Is Wide Open

Once upon a time, you needed an invitation if you wanted to join Clubhouse. That’s no longer the case. This past week, Clubhouse officially moved out of closed beta. As a result, anybody can join. “We have removed our waitlist system so that anyone can join,” Clubhouse said in a statement. “If you have a club, you can post your link far and wide. If you are a creator with an audience, you can bring them all on. If you’re hosting a public event, anyone can attend. You can bring close friends, classmates, family members, coworkers, and anyone else you like — on iOS or Android.” If you’re unfamiliar with Clubhouse, it’s an audio-only social app. People use it to set up online Clubs where they step on a virtual stage and share their thoughts about various topics.

YouTube Now Adds Chapters to Videos Automatically

This is some fairly sophisticated tech. YouTube now adds chapters to your videos automatically. You no longer need to manually add timestamps and titles. How does YouTube “know” where to add the chapters? It uses machine learning. But you might not want to let YouTube dictate chapter locations for your videos. If that’s the case, you’re welcome to turn off automatic chapters. Just go to Settings > Upload Defaults > Advanced Settings. Then, select the option to turn it off.

Homework

Here are a few things to take care of before you start your weekend:

• If you don’t want YouTube to automatically provide chapters for your videos, be sure to turn that setting off. It’s on by default.
• Now that Clubhouse is open to the public, think about how you can use it to promote your business.
• Use the expanded time period for insights on Instagram to learn more about your marketing efforts on that platform.
• If you’re using AdSense to monetize your site, get the code that loads the ads more quickly.
• If you’re embedding videos on your site, use the SeekToAction markup to optimize your videos for search.
• If you’re in the ecommerce space, take advantage of Google’s free deals listings in search results to promote on-sale products.

  About the author: John Lincoln (MBA) is CEO of Ignite Visibility (a 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 Inc. 5000 company) a highly sought-after digital marketing strategist, industry speaker and author of two books, \"The Forecaster Method\" and \"Digital Influencer.\" Over the course of his career, Lincoln has worked with over 1,000 online businesses ranging from small startups to amazing clients such as Office Depot, Tony Robbins, Morgan Stanley, Fox, USA Today, COX and The Knot World Wide. John Lincoln is the editor of the Ignite Visibility blog. While he is a contributor, he does not write all of the articles and in many cases he is supported to ensure timely content.