monique.johnson

M Posted 4 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

Search engine optimizers had their work cut out for them in 2021, with an array of hefty updates to contend with. In contrast, the first half of January has been somewhat sedate. But that doesn’t mean nothing has happened.  

Google released new Search Console features that will help site owners prepare for its February update. And features added to Bing’s IndexNow protocol may signal significant changes in the way search engines index content. A tentative rollout by Google of a “Shops” section on some mobile results pages will also be good news for e-commerce merchants.  

Here’s your roundup of the latest updates, announcements, and search-related tidbits from the last two weeks.  

Google to Roll Out Page Experience to Desktop Websites in February

February will see Google bring page experience ranking to desktop sites, following on from its update to mobile between June and August 2021. The rollout will run until March.  

Google states: “We'll begin using page experience as part of our desktop ranking systems beginning in February 2022. The rollout will be complete by the end of March 2022.” 

Earlier this month, software engineer Malte Ubl reiterated that desktop ranking factors will be based largely on Core Web Vitals. Mobile-friendliness will not be taken into account. 

While this update has been anticipated for a while and doesn’t constitute a major change (don’t expect any significant shifts in rankings), it’s not insignificant and you should ensure desktop versions of your sites are up to scratch.  

Google Search Console Launches New Desktop Page Experience Report

As of January 17th, Google Search Console users can take advantage of dedicated reports covering desktop experience, accessible from the “Page experience” tab on the Search Console dashboard.  

The interface displays several site metrics, including the percentage of “Good URLs” and the total number of desktop impressions, along with statuses of Core Web Vitals. Advice is also provided about how to improve under-performing pages.  

This new feature is particularly notable because it gives you the opportunity to optimize your desktop pages before the ranking update comes into effect in February.  

“Shops” Module Added to Mobile Search for Select US-English Terms

Google has verified that it has added a “Shops” section to mobile search results for some commercial terms in the US.  

This feature is distinct from the shopping ads carousel, which appears at the top of general search results pages, because entries link to category pages of stores rather than individual product listings. The module shows three results and extends to display ten, with the order determined by organic rankings.  

Online merchants will be eager to learn how to take advantage of this opportunity for increased exposure. Unfortunately, the inclusion of sites in “Shops” results is determined by organic rankings. As of now, there is not a direct path to have your site include shops, which emphasizes the importance of e-commerce best practices including full schema markup on your pages.  

John Mueller: URL Changes Can Take Months to Process

Google Search Central uploaded a video to its Youtube channel in which John Mueller, a well-known “Search Advocate” at Google, explained that site-wide URL changes can take months for Google to process.  

Google stores a unique URL for every page of a website, along with associated information relating to links, content, ranking signals, etc. Therefore, when a site changes core parts of its URL, every page address in Google’s database needs updating.  

So does this mean that web admins should avoid large URL changes altogether? Not necessarily.  

The video should act as a caution against URL changes during periods of high traffic (such as for ecommerce stores during Christmas). Google provides extensive documentation that should always be followed.  

SEOs Expected to Dedicate Money to Content Moving Into 2022

SEO consultant Aleyda Solis ran a Twitter poll with the question, “In what area do you expect to allocate more resources/efforts in SEO this year (based on what you have planned so far at least)?”  

Participants overwhelmingly chose “Content,” which garnered 50% of votes. “Technical Optimization” came second and “Link Building” third. 

This finding aligns with our own November webinar survey where we found that the overwhelming majority of participants reported they plan on ramping investments in content and technical SEO in 2022. See the results of our own informal survey.  

IndexNow Starts Sharing URLS Between Bing and Yandex

IndexNow is a ping protocol that enables admins to alert search engines to content updates and changes on their site.  

Updates submitted to one IndexNow API endpoint will now automatically be shared with all other participating search engines, the two largest of which are Bing and Yandex (Google is exploring the possibility of joining).  

So what’s the impact of this change?  

Having the ability to instantly inform search engines of newly-published and amended pages cuts down on the time it takes to index them. There are absolutely no downsides to using IndexNow and the new co-sharing function should mean greater immediate exposure for your web pages.  

IndexNow Releases a WordPress Plugin

IndexNow has also released a plugin for WordPress users. The plugin streamlines the process of using the IndexNow ping protocol and removes the need for manual key-based ownership verification. Once you’ve downloaded the plugin, it will automatically submit new and updated URLs on your site.  

Doodle for Google Focuses on Self-Care

Here’s something a little more light-hearted to end on. Google will be focusing on the topic of self-care for the 2022 Doodle for Google contest. The competition is open to students in the US and entries close on March 4th.  

tvura

M Posted 4 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

To kick off the year, BrightEdge hosted an instructional webinar, SEO Pro Tips for Success in 2022, with useful pointers on SEO execution and measurement. As part of that discussion, we explored four imperatives:

1. Tell the Right Story 
2. Reduce Manual Work 
3. Simplify Communication 
4. Practice Flexible and Agile Execution 

We've compiled the guidance from the webinar into two valuable resources you can download today:

1. The SEO Pro Tips for Success eBook - this provides tips from our power users on executing SEO in the BrightEdge platform
2. The complete "SEO Pro TIps for Success in 2022" webinar recording

Like the webinar, most guidance around SEO is focused on “what to do,” such as teaching SEO fundamentals, implementing best practices, how to respond to algorithm updates and the like. This what-to-do instructional approach is valuable. It can, however, be made more valuable by also explicitly calling out what not to do. In that vein, we wanted to explore a few examples of how efforts to follow these four imperatives can be blunted.  

Tell the Right Story 

While this imperative has both external- and internal-facing implications, here we’re referring mainly to how SEO is represented internally. Like any organizational function or initiative, SEO competes for resources. Faithfully telling the right story begins with an orientation toward the dynamics of competing for limited resources: first winning the needed buy-in from management, whether that be budget or support from other functions like IT or content development, then justifying those investments, and finally leveraging SEO success to win favor for subsequent initiatives.  

To do this successfully, it is essential to tell the right story about the initiative for the audience. Too often, we see SEO teams land on the right strategy, but struggle to win or maintain organizational backing because they don’t communicate the benefits and realities in a way gatekeepers care about.  

For example, over the last couple of years, SEOs have been closely monitoring Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals can be difficult to address, because in many cases, improving them can require significant work for technical teams. While Google has made it clear what they consider to be a positive page experience, and it’s easy to show thresholds, SEOs need to demonstrate the cost of underperforming content to translate this technical need into real business impact. One way to do that is to go beyond Google’s benchmarks and demonstrate how competitors are performing for keywords you need to win. Translate this volume as a direct opportunity cost. This takes the story from being a theoretical best practice to quantifying the cost of poor Core Web Vitals.    

Reduce Manual Work 

The biggest barrier for most SEO execution is the volume of manual work. Even in Fortune 500 companies, SEO teams tend to be lean – sometimes consisting of only one or two people. There are countless SEO tools that help with the work, but most tools handle only one very specific piece of workflow. That reality paired with the fact that SEOs spend an average of four hours each day on research, reporting and analysis means SEOs are often limited not by a lack of sound strategy, but by an inability to scale the execution to meet the opportunity. 

Automation and uninterrupted workflows are key to scaling SEO.   

Examples of ways you can reduce manual work include:  

• Eliminating manually-produced PowerPoints where possible and moving teams to dashboards that can be rendered automatically at regular intervals in a CRM system or platform like BrightEdge 
• Leveraging task systems like Jira to manage workflow and integrating them with platforms like BrightEdge to automate work assignment and documentation 
• Automating drumbeat SEO tasks such as internal linking with platforms like BrightEdge Autopilot 

Simplify Communication 

When we talked about telling the right story, we talked about how competing for resources extends beyond getting initial buy-in. It includes ongoing communication about SEO results and effectiveness. For just about anyone outside of the practice, however, SEO reporting can seem overwhelming at best and inscrutable at worst. Especially damning for a lot of SEO reporting: it often does not make clear, easy-to grasp connections to the metrics each audience is interested in.  

An easy way to simplify communication is to automate dashboards. You can design these for unique teams so each dashboard tells the necessary stories for each and then automatically distribute them before meetings with that team. This not only saves the SEO team the trouble of creating a unique report or readout for each meeting, but it centralizes the data sources teams are looking at creating a single source of truth for the organization. This ensures the dimensions, cuts of data and the nomenclature across teams are consistent, making it easy to move in the same direction. As teams engage more readily with the reporting, organizational consensus and support for SEO initiatives becomes more solidified.    

Practice Flexible and Agile Execution 

SEO does not happen in a vacuum. Its success depends on the changing tastes and behaviors of search users. Updates to the search engine’s algorithm can suddenly and dramatically tank high ranking pages. Changes to the website orchestrated outside of SEO can change SEO fortunes overnight. It’s important, then, to treat SEO strategy as a living, breathing thing. This begins with robust monitoring including anomaly detection and it requires a mindset that not only expects surprises but prepares for them and builds in procedures to handle whatever course changes arise. 

A recent instance where this could have been critical is reacting to Google’s Vicinity Update in November.  We know from the output of that update that locations that heavily featured keywords in the title tags, especially locations that weren’t actually as close to the person as others, lost visibility.  This update helped Google eliminate spam from the results, which is beneficial to the user, but if a company lost visibility in results due to this, they need to be ready to pivot quickly to the changing landscape. This may include a change in the paid strategy to run air cover against these losses or a pivot in strategy to rebuild that visibility in regular web listings.  Regardless, being flexible and agile enough to shift like that requires teams all looking at the same data and seeing the impacts in a similar fashion to develop a winning next play.  

Key Takeaways 

Certainly getting the strategy right is the first important step in SEO, but execution is central to seeing the strategy succeed. Coming up short with any of the imperatives threatens that success. Sometimes this means an initiative never moves forward, but just as commonly the initiative progresses but is hobbled in some way either with an inability to properly scale, a cut-rate budget or limited access to needed internal resources. 

WATCH THE WEBINAR ON DEMAND NOW

tvura

M Posted 4 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

Judging by efforts both official and experimental, Google seems to be placing increased emphasis on local search. We have seen indications of this emphasis in different ways in our own research. When we looked at the e-commerce sector recently, we found steady incremental growth in local 3-pack results, for example, from 23% of e-commerce results in 2019 to 26% of results in 2021:

Local 3-pack results are one of the indicators BrightEdge uses to define what Google calls “I-Want-To-Go” moments. Altogether, BrightEdge classifies search intent broadly under one of four similar mindsets (note, searches can span multiple mindsets):

1. I-Want-To-Know - Research-oriented searches
2. I-Want-To-Go - Local sourcing, travel and hospitality searches
3. I-Want-To-Do - Instructional resource searches
4. I-Want-To-Buy - Commerce-minded searches

From the same research study and worth noting is the growing share of voice among publishers in search. Publishers support all mindsets with varying content and search results are beginning to better reflect that. Even in our study of e-commerce where the main focus is on I-Want-To-Buy moments, publishers (represented by grey bars in the chart below) gained measurable share of voice in most commerce categories:

With this growth in share of voice for both local and publisher search results, it’s not surprising that Google cites a threefold increase in searches for “news near me” over the last 5 years. To better support the growing interest in local news, at the end of 2021 Google launched new tools and features to support local news.

Better, More Integrated Local News Search Results

As more users search for local news, Google is responding with four key improvements to how it surfaces and presents local news in the search engine results pages:

1. Local news carousel – Early in the pandemic, Google launched a carousel to surface useful information related to COVID searches. The carousel has now been expanded to return local news results when relevant.


2. Integration with national sources – Users will now more often see authoritative local news sources alongside content from national publications.


3. Local news in finer detail – When visitors search for broad topics, Google will pair the search with location signals, which tell Google your location, to also return results on narrower or locally relevant subtopics. The example Google offers is a search for “sports.” When a user searches “sports” Google will now be able to show results for football games, on the national, collegiate and local high school levels when relevant content and location indicators allow.


4. Newsworthy local tweets – Finally, Google now surfaces relevant tweets from authoritative local sources and individuals.

Taken together, these improvements provide an opportunity for local news publishers to increase their visibility among potential readers.

Tools and Resources for Journalists

To better enable local news storytelling, Google also announced two new resources for journalists and publishers:

1. Census Mapper – Part of what makes news local is the people and communities affected or involved in a story. The better a journalist can describe the audience, the more easily a reader can understand, relate or empathize. Google’s Census Mapper makes it easier for reporters to sift through complex census data and present visualizations of the data.


2. Common Knowledge Project – Google announced improvements to its Common Knowledge Project, which it describes as a data explorer and visualization project that enables journalists to explore local data. Improvements include geographic comparisons and new charts and visuals.

Key Takeaways for Publishers

While it will take some time to understand completely what local news content benefits most from the changes, Google’s efforts are a boon for local news publishers. The best advice at this point is to follow basic principles of content optimization. For example, Google’s announcement makes repeated usage of the word “authoritative” to describe the content and sources it will favor, which points to the basic SEO principle of building E-A-T: expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Journalists and publishers should also take advantage of the resources Google announced, something Google may look favorably on when evaluating E-A-T.

We’ll be monitoring the effectiveness and impact of these updates and where trends emerge, we will offer relevant advice on how to optimize content to appear in local news search results.

Learn how the BrightEdge platform helps tailor your SEO strategy to distinct local markets.