Reading: 0118 322 4395 | Manchester: 0161 706 2414 | Oxford: 01865 479 625 | info@sharpahead.com | Office hours: Monday-Friday 9:00am - 5:30pm

 | Office hours: Monday-Friday 8:30am - 5:30pm

 | Email  | Office hours: Mon-Fri 9:00am - 5:30pm 

A reprieve (of sorts) for third-party cookies

A reprieve (of sorts) for third-party cookies

Google’s position on third-party cookies in Chrome has shifted again, and this change is a big one. It now seems that Chrome support for third-party cookies will remain into the indefinite future, albeit subject to enhanced user controls. Rather than going extinct completely, third-party cookies will survive in captivity. 

The news broke in this announcement from Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative on 22nd July.

What's changed?

Prior to this announcement, Google was suggesting that support for third-party cookies would be completely removed from Chrome at some future point. But there was no precise deadline. (A previous deadline of the end of 2024 had already been relaxed.) I wrote about this back in April.

But the new announcement changes this. Support for third-party cookies will remain into the indefinite future. They will, however, be subject to what Google calls “elevated user choice”. There are no details on that at present, but I’m interpreting it to mean it will be easier for a user to opt out of third-party cookies. 

While this announcement only relates directly to Chrome, it seems likely that Microsoft Edge (which shares Chrome’s underlying Chromium technology) will  follow suit. 

This announcement is particularly good news for a number of ad networks that rely heavily on third-party cookies to deliver on their value proposition. (And indeed competition concerns about the adverse impact of the proposal cookie phase-out on these ad networks is arguably one of the reasons why Google has changed tack.) 

What difference does this make to B2B marketers?

If you’re making heavy use of marketing techniques that rely on third-party cookies – for instance, most types of remarketing – then this gives you some breathing space. Those techniques will continue to work into the indefinite future. That’s good news for B2B digital marketers because those techniques are a powerful and cost-effective part of most B2B digital marketing strategies, and because the alternatives that were emerging within the Privacy Sandbox seemed unlikely to perform very well for B2B marketing use cases. 

However the direction of travel here is still clear – third-party cookies are under threat and are likely to be increasingly marginalised, whether by technological fiat or by user choice. I still recommend that B2B marketers treat third-party cookies as an endangered species, and look to shift their marketing mix towards techniques that don’t need third-party cookies. The advice in my previous blog still stands, we can just afford to move a little more slowly. 

Further reading

Search Engine Land has a good sample of industry feedback here.

And as a hint that the regulators may still take an interest in this issue, some polite sabre-rattling from the ICO here.

And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for a B2B perspective on future developments in digital marketing technology and other aspects of B2B digital marketing!

Learning about B2B SEO will make you a better marketer

Learning about B2B SEO will make you a better marketer

All B2B marketers should learn a bit about SEO, IMHO. 

It’s tempting to see B2B SEO as a mysterious dark art, best left to specialist practitioners. And for sure, if your organisation is employing SEO as a key part of its B2B marketing mix, then you’ll need some experts. 

But it’s not hard to pick up at least some of the basic guiding principles of B2B SEO. And if you do, I predict you’ll find that helps you to be a better marketer in all sorts of other ways that seem far removed from SEO itself. 

For example: SEO rewards communicating clearly and authentically. That’s a good habit for all B2B comms. And SEO strategy needs a good understanding of your competitive landscape as seen through the eyes of your prospective customer. We all do better work as marketers when we bring that sort of lens to our work.   

If you’re motivated to learn about B2B SEO you’ll perhaps have noticed that a lot of SEO self-help resources are a bit… generic. 

We’re here to help! We’ve produced two pragmatic B2B SEO guides that are packed full of real-world B2B-specific examples. Why not add these two resources to your holiday reading list? 

  1. Hot off the press: our brand new (July 2024) PDF guide on how to analyse a search-engine results page (or SERP), and how to use that to inform your B2B marketing strategy and identify quick wins. Download it here. 
  2. A classic from 2023, but still completely current: our PDF how to apply Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines to make your B2B Content stand out above the competition. Download it here. 

And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for regular content about B2B search marketing and other areas of B2B digital marketing! 

Winning in SERPs – it’s more than just PPC and SEO

Winning in SERPs. It's more than just PPC and SEO

Winning in SERPs – it’s more than just PPC and SEO

Winning at SERPs

 

SERPs of today

Search Engine Results Pages are evolving at a rapid pace with a diverse range of features including ads, featured snippets, ‘people also ask’ accordions, ‘sources across the web’, maps, images, video, and for some – the more recent Search Generative Experiences (SGE for short).

Safe to say, the SERP is a pretty hectic space these days and with lots of entities trying to raise their heads above the parapet, the question becomes “how do you raise your head higher than the rest?”.   

But in spaces that are so competitive, trying to be top of the top just may not be realistic. So is it really a question of just PPC vs/and SEO or is there more at play?

Scanning the SERP landscape for opportunities

Okay, let’s say you’ve identified 10 priority search terms/phrases for your business but you’re particularly frustrated that one of your most important terms is struggling to rank organically despite your best efforts. What can you do?

For the purpose of this example, let’s take an Office Space provider based in Oxford who want to improve their SEO position for the phrase Serviced Offices Oxford.

Let’s have a look at the SERP

At the top you have ads and, in this instance, one from Arena Offices. The ad takes up a large amount of real estate on the page.

This space is highly competitive with organisations like Regus also appearing here regularly. As they may have large amounts of budget, this begs the question of whether you realistically can or should enter the PPC space and if you do – with which keywords?

Google Ads search results for 'Serviced Offices Oxford' search

Google Maps appear next, with an ad (hello again Arena) before a handful or organic listings.

As we know, the higher you rank, the more traffic you’ll receive but in the case of maps, often users will choose to click on ‘more places’ to refine their search (e.g. is it near the station? Is it near a main road?). Therefore, this definitely offers up an opportunity to gain some in-market traffic.

Google Maps Ads and Organic Listings for 'Serviced Office Space' terms

As you scroll further, you find the space dominated by:

  • Estate Agent websites such as Offices.co.uk, flexioffices.co.uk, easyoffices.co.uk
  • Office Space providers with multiple locations (e.g. Hubble HQ, Pure Offices)
  • You’ve even got Office Space Providers providing blogs on top office spaces i.e listicles – this includes Hubble HQ & Runway East
SERP analysis for the term 'Serviced Offices Oxford'

Looking at this list, if you are an independent Office Space provider with just the one location, chances are you’re unlikely to appear on page 1 of results.

So, what do you do?

If you can’t beat them…can you join them?

In the example above, there are a few key questions to ask:

  1. Should you run ads? Are there other terms to focus on?
  2. Can/Should you get listed on Estate Agent sites?
  3. Can you get featured in the ‘listicles’?
  4. Can you improve your Google Business Profile to rank higher?

The answer will be based on a variety of criteria including:

  1. Cost vs return
    1. If considering PPC, you may need to refine keywords further for higher intent/likelihood to convert as this is a highly competitive space. E.g. should you add in more refinement – ‘small serviced office space’, ‘24/7 office space’, ‘office space with parking’ etc
    2. Getting listed on Estate Agent sites can be expensive so having an idea of what impressions, clicks and conversion rates you can expect from a listing will be key. Consider running a pilot test with a high ranking site as a first port of call
  2. PR capability
    1. To get featured on listicles, you’ll need an outreach plan and have the internal resource and skillsets to achieve this. Get ready to schmooze perhaps with a personalised tour of the space!
  3. Understanding Google Business Profile Best Practice
    1. Ranking well in Google Map results requires a well optimised listing. This means optimising photos, descriptions, products, services and importantly gaining and responding to reviews. Following best practice can pay huge dividends so for local searches is often the number 1 thing you should/could focus efforts on

Identifying SERP opportunities – the ‘SERP Scan’

We have pulled together three additional examples of this ‘SERP Scan’ approach to help identify how you can find new opportunities that support your wider digital marketing efforts.

Controversial…it’s not all about SERPs!

Being visible in generic SERPs for your own website is great but this shouldn’t be the only driver of what content you create.

People will discover your organisation through a mixture of channels including emails, social, WOM, events etc.

Therefore, even if particular pages of your website are never going to rank organically for a particular term, they may still be vital to include on your website in order to show prospects you are relevant to them by providing content that aligns to their role and sector.

Therefore, when it comes to considering what content to add to your website, it’s always a mix of UX, SEO and CRO.

If you want to hear more from us at Sharp Ahead, sign up for our email newsletter and keep an eye on our blog to stay in the loop.

If you want help with your SERP strategy, please get in touch

Tips for Better B2B Research with ChatGPT-4o

Tips for Better B2B Research with ChatGPT-4o

The latest iteration of ChatGPT – ChatGPT-4o – can now browse the web and carry out live web searches.  This is a game changer for generative search in B2B applications. I explained why in our recent blog. 

I highly recommend that anyone with an interest in B2B search marketing tries out the new ChatGPT-4o. If you fancy giving it a go, here are some hints and tips that I and the team at Sharp Ahead have picked up from our testing. 

Before we start: ChatGPT is evolving quickly. These tips make sense today, but they might be obsolete in a few months’ time. I hope they are a useful starting point but please use common sense and your own judgement as you find your way around ChatGPT-4o. 

A reminder: although some of my tips are applicable to older versions of ChatGPT, I don’t recommend the older versions for B2B research. You should use ChatGPT-4o and not the older versions. This means that you will most likely need a paid ChatGPT account which currently starts at US$20/month. (Though there is now some limited access to ChatGPT-4o via the free account tier.) 

We need to talk about Chat 

Tip 1: expect to use multiple prompts 

We’re all used to conventional search engines like Google and Bing. Fire in a few carefully chosen search words, hit Enter and doom-scroll until you find a useful link. That one-shot habit won’t bring out the best of ChatGPT. 

Instead, remember that your interaction with ChatGPT is a conversation in which you will iterate towards the best result using multiple prompts. There’s no pressure to get the right result straight away. You can expect to use at least two or three follow-up prompts to shape the results the way you need them. 

Here’s how I used three prompts to build and refine a shortlist of possible coworking spaces: 

My sequence of prompts went like this: 

  1. What are some of the best coworking spaces in Oxford?
  2. Which ones are dog friendly? 
  3. Put them in a table with pros and cons for each workspace 

Why is ChatGPT like an elephant? 

Tip 2: be ready to start a new chat 

When you are working with multiple prompts it’s important to remember that ChatGPT never forgets – until you tell it to. This is a big difference from a conventional search engine, where your previous queries will have little or no impact on the results from a fresh query.  

 
Sometimes one of your initial prompts will take ChatGPT down a rabbit hole. Don’t expect it to escape. This is dangerous in B2B research because the content of an early prompt might bias the end results of an extended chat in ways that you don’t realise. For example, in one of our tests I asked ChatGPT for “office space providers similar to WeWork”. Even though I tried to broaden the context with subsequent prompts, ChatGPT’s answers remained highly skewed around WeWork for the remainder of the chat. 

Fortunately, there’s a simple answer here. Just start a new chat whenever the previous one is stuck in a rabbit hole: 

You don’t lose anything by doing this. ChatGPT keeps your old chat in a separate thread, and you can switch back to it if you need to cross-reference. If you don’t want to retype a complex prompt, you can quickly copy/paste it from the previous chat. And you can switch back to and continue a previous chat if you need to. 

Making a judgement about whether to persevere with your current chat or when to start afresh is one of the key skills you’ll need to develop to get the best from ChatGPT. Be alert to the signs of a conversational rabbit-hole, such as when keywords from much earlier in the conversation continue to appear with high frequency even when you are trying to broaden things. In my personal experience with ChatGPT, I found it almost always better to start a new chat, and to adjust my prompts in the light of what I’d learned from the previous chat, than to try to rescue a chat that had gone astray. 

You Want Whipped Cream and a Cherry on the Top?  

Tip 3: be demanding about the end result  

ChatGPT has a huge repertoire of skills for collating, formatting and organizing results. These can be a massive time-saver. When you are confident that ChatGPT is giving you the answers you need, use a specific prompt to get them in the exact format you want. 

I often find asking for a table of results gives a very useful output. For example, here’s a prompt you can use to structure a shortlist of potential suppliers: 

  • Can you create a table with a price comparison of their services, which includes hot-desking, short and long-term rental terms, meeting room costs and any other options such as reception, printing etc. Please include their websites and contact details too. 

ChatGPT can do a lot more than just formatting text. For instance, if you’re working with numerical data you can ask it to plot a graph. You might not discover these capabilities at first. Be ambitious in your prompts and ask for what you want, even if you’re worried it might be beyond the capabilities of ChatGPT. It might surprise you! Worst case, you can always just start a new chat. 

Where did you get THAT from?!? 

Tip 4: ask for sources and explanations 

ChatGPT-4o will often volunteer information about its sources. So, you might see website links or other attribution within its output. But if this isn’t present, ask for it via a follow-up prompt. For example: 
“What are your sources for that information?” Or What are your criteria for choosing those results?”

Asking for sources and explanations is important for two reasons. 

Firstly, the information might be directly helpful for you, for instance you might want to read the full text of the original article that ChatGPT used as input to its response. Or you might want to instruct ChatGPT to use different criteria. 

Secondly, these follow-up prompts will help you spot when ChatGPT is hallucinating. All generative AI tools are prone to “hallucinations”, that is, just making s*** up when they don’t have enough information. ChatGPT-4o is much better than previous models in this respect, but it can still fall into the trap of creating a fictitious, people-pleasing answer when it doesn’t have any other way to generate a response. That’s a disaster if you plan to use the output for some serious business purpose. If you ask for sources, you can make a much better judgement about the likely reliability of ChatGPT’s answers. 

In my example, you’ll see that ChatGPT’s sources are somewhat unreliable!  

And indeed, it turns out many of these coworking spaces are NOT dog-friendly. Beware the AI people-pleaser. 

The Latest and Greatest 

Tip 5: force a web search / web browsing 

ChatGPT-4o can search the web and can browse live web pages. But it may choose not to do so if it doesn’t think live web data is necessary to answer your questions. So once again: use a follow-up prompt to force ChatGPT to get current data from the web. 

For example:  

“Please check the suppliers’ websites for the latest pricing information and include that in your response” OrPlease search the web for up-to-date information on this”

Here’s an example of this in use for my coworking space research: 

Come on in, the water’s… mostly lovely  

Tip 6: just try it 

You’ll learn more about ChatGPT in an hour of hands-on practice than by reading a hundred blogs. So dive in and give it a go. Be demanding and put it to work with some challenging, meaningful use cases. 

You’ve nothing much to lose except a bit of time, and a lot to gain if you find it as useful as we have. There are just a couple of caveats: 

  • You will need a paid account. But the cost is pretty minimal given the potential value. 
  • There are some privacy and confidentiality implications. For example ChatGPT can, in principle, use the prompts that you provide to train future models, which could lead to your prompts appearing in the output for other users. If you are planning to use proprietary, confidential or personal data in your interactions with ChatGPT you should be very careful. You may need to consider a different way of using generative AI for applications that work with this type of data. 

We’d love to hear from you

I hope we’ve given you some impetus to explore ChatGPT for your own B2B research applications. We’d love to hear your experiences, good or bad, and any tips of your own that you are willing to share. Please use the comments or get in touch! 

Get expert help from top PPC specialists:

  • Choose the right blend of PPC platforms
  • Optimise your campaigns’ performance
  • Increase your paid advertising ROI

Or contact us directly on
01865 479 625 or
info@sharpahead.com

Office hours: Monday – Friday 9:00am – 5:30pm

Thank you for downloading our doc...

Check out our in-depth guide to B2B SEO content using Google's EEAT guidelines

B2B Digital Rocket Fuel
straight to your inbox

Add your email address below to receive our biweekly newsletter and stay up to date with the latest B2B digital marketing news and insights.

You'll also get instant access to our growing catalogue of marketing resources.

    “An invaluable resource for getting the latest and greatest ideas and tips on B2B digital marketing. My students also benefit from the industry insights”.

    Louize Clarke, Founder, The Curious Academy