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March 2021 News Roundup📰: What’s New In SEO & Affiliate Marketing

Welcome to the March news roundup of the year 2021 🎉 In this issue, I talked a bit about the past and then, I switched to the future… I hope it will be interesting for you 😀 and not very discouraging 😬

So in my March news roundup, you’ll read about:

• December 2020 Update analysis by Matt Diggity 🕵️‍♀️
• Exciting upcoming updates from Ezoic, my go-to ad platform for publishers 🤑
• What Core Web Vitals are 💓
• Research about co-called zero clicks 👆
• Third-party cookies and Google 🍪
• SEO hardship poll 😣
• Update on affiliate marketing taxes in Canada 💸

Let’s dive in 🐋

First, let’s talk a bit about the past and then, we will switch to the shiny bright future… and taxes 😫

How Google’s December 2020 core update affected affiliate sites [data analysis]

👉👉👉  👇👇👇

In this video, Matt Diggity presents his analysis of the December 2020 Google Core Update. 

Initially, he made this video for his course Affiliate Lab (I am a member of it) but eventually, he decided to share it with the rest of the world.

He talks about losers and winners and what his SEO agency is doing to get losers out of the ranking pit. Whether your affiliate was or wasn’t hit, I believe that this video will be useful for you in any case:

Ezoic: Tools to improve Core Web Vitals & site performance

👉👉👉  https://www.ezoic.com/leap/

Do you monetize your website with Ezoic like me? If you don’t, read my post to find out what it is and why you should switch to Ezoic (hint: to make money 🤑).

And if you are, here’s great news for you! 

In about a month (the link above has a countdown ⏳), Ezoic plans to launch a new performance toolset that should greatly help with the speed of publisher websites, more precisely with Core Web Vitals.

Leap is a brand-new speed toolset and it’s totally free 🎉 It includes all features and tools needed to achieve good Core Web Vitals and will replace Site Speed Accelerator, the paid solution Ezoic currently has. 

Why should you worry about it? Well, as I mentioned in my December 2020 news round-up:

[…] as of May 2021, Google will begin using the Core Web Vitals as part of its search engine ranking algorithm[…]

So, making your website fast (at least in the eyes of Google) becomes even more important than ever 😵

Read here to learn more or just watch this video:

And our next item on the list is exactly about Core Web Vitals 🤗

Core Web Vitals: Everything you, your SEO team, and your business need to know

👉👉👉   https://www.deepcrawl.com/blog/webinars/what-you-need-to-know-about-core-web-vitals/ 

The article explains what Core Web Vitals (CWV) are, how to test them, and how to improve these metrics. 

You will learn how to interpret the CWV reports and why you don’t need to start panicking in May 2021 even if CWV of your website are not ideal 😅

So read the article above or watch this video with the webinar about CWV:

Improving your CWV will definitely help you with the fight against your competition. Given the next article, it seems that the fight will be getting only more and more fierce 🤼‍♂️😫

In 2020, two-thirds of Google searches ended without a click

👉👉👉  https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-searches-ended-without-a-click/ 

In this article, Rand Fishkin, one of the famous SEOs, published an update on his research from August 2019. The research was about how many Google searches ended without a click to any web property in the results.

In the nutshell, this number grew from 50.33% to 64.82% in December 2020 😭

In his post, Rand talks about SimilarWeb, the agency that provided the data, and invites everyone to a webinar where he and the SimilarWeb team will present the full data set for the study. 

Go to the article to read more or to register for the webinar (I will be there 🤩).

Fishkin also talks about how Google solidifies its monopoly power in search and advertisement 😒

As you may have heard, Google plans to phase out the third-party cookie on the Chrome browser by 2022. Instead, they will introduce their own system for aggregating user-behavior called FLoC 🐧🐧🐧

More about it in our next item on the list 👇

Preserving privacy and performance will protect the future of advertising

👉👉👉  https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/future-of-marketing/privacy-and-trust/user-privacy-google-advertising/

Here’s a post from Think with Google, a blog written by Google for marketers. The blog is about “everything from high-level insights to deck-ready stats to useful tools.”

The post talks exactly about FLoC I mentioned above:

[…] our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs, which prevent tracking of individuals across the web while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers.

Now, first, the good news 🤩 The website ads won’t die in 2022 when the Chrome browser will phase out third-party cookies 🍪 (read this if you do not know what they are). We can still make money from display ads 🎉

Aaand here’s the bad news 😭 Google will become even more powerful and will continue to dominate the advertisement field and search results. It means that we, SEO masters, will be more dependant on being in a good relationship with Google 😫

All this leads us to the very predictable results of a particular poll….

Poll: 60% of SEOs say SEO is harder than five years ago

👉👉👉  https://www.seroundtable.com/seo-is-harder-31082.html

I think the title says it all 🤷‍♀️ SEO is only getting harder and harder and I totally agree with it.

What do you guys think? Do you agree?

Affiliate marketing taxes in Canada update

👉👉👉 https://livingoffcloud.com/affiliate-marketing-income-taxes-canada/

This is a post I wrote and it is not new… But! I have just updated it with new information about how to file the income coming from selling a website and also about GST/QST. I got this info from my accountant who does taxes for my online business and the online business of one of my local buddies.

Given that this is the period when everybody does their taxes, I thought that this update is worth to be included! 😊

I got new information about selling websites and also sales taxes – check it out!

Did you enjoy my News Roundup? Let me know what you think in the comments!

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