Industry News

On the heels of the March Broad Core Update rolling out, Google is now rolling out the April 2023 Reviews Update. And you're reading that correctly. 'Product' has been removed now that the system covers 'reviews about products, services, and things'.

Google's John Mueller was asked about his feelings on the Google March 2023 broad core update and if he can honestly not say that the "update messed the SERP a bit up." John responded saying, "I've seen a ranking update landing as "oops, everything is wrong." There's always room for improvement, I don't think the team sees it as having "messed up the search results."

Did the Google March 2023 Broad Core Update impact local search rankings? That is the question many local SEOs are asking in the Local Search Forums.

Ravi Mehta’s 4 Effective Product Team Structures is a helpful framework for leaders to figure out how to organize product teams:

Because of the nature of product work, there are two vectors that product teams need to be organized around: area of focus and level of accountability. For area of focus, product teams can align their work with either business outcomes or feature development. When considering the level of accountability part of the structure, product managers...

In Be a thermostat, not a thermometer Lara Hogan provides a helpful analogy for leaders on what to do when meetings go off the rails…

Once you’re able to start noticing when someone’s amygdala-hijacked, or simply that the vibes are off, you can reframe and use “be the thermostat, not the thermometer” for good. Since humans tend to mirror each other, you can intentionally change the energy in the room, setting the thermostat to a more comfortable temperature.

Elena Verna has a great summary of leading metrics for B2B SaaS companies, including some really useful benchmarks. Also a good reminder that revenue is a lagging metric:

Many leaders obsess over revenue. And rightfully so, because revenue is the outcome of any business. But revenue is a lousy metric to goal the team against because it assesses past performance instead of predicting the future.

If you want to dig a little deeper on the best metrics to choose for SaaS companies,...

Last month was jammed packed with Google search news including the Google March 2023 broad core update starting on March 15th and completing on March 28th. We had the end of the February 2023 product reviews update. Google Bard started to roll out, many are not impressed.

I am starting to see early signs of a possible Google search ranking algorithm update touching down this morning, April 3rd. The automated tracking tools are not picking it up yet, but I am seeing some chatter from SEOs who are up already checking their traffic.

Jack Krawczyk from Google, who is the lead on Bard, said on Friday that Bard just rolled out improvements around math and logic. It did this by incorporating PaLM, Google's language model, into Bard.

No image posts today, but it’s a blockbuster edition of the link roundup this week! I hope you find something interesting in here… 1 → LinkedIn power users are turning to ghostwriters (Vox)

LinkedIn remains a complete mystery to me.

“It’s cliché, but it’s true that people want to work with people, people buy from people, people want to see the human side of who you are before they decide to work with you,” says Tara Horstmeyer, an Atlanta-based ghostwriter who offers packages...