Every fortnight the Croud SEO team collate the latest news from relevant sources around the web so you don’t have to. Read through the top SEO news stories for this week below and follow us on Twitter or sign up to our newsletter.
Google Assistant’s ‘confirm with voice match’ gives new meaning to ‘contactless payments’
26/05/2020
Google has introduced a new feature to Google Assistant that allows payments to be confirmed using voice. Whilst voice devices have seen widespread purchase, there has been comparatively little ecommerce carried out using them; this may help funnel more transactions through the devices in the future and improve retail performance.
Blogging for Shopify: A unique SEO approach
26/05/2020
SEL looks at how to improve blogging on the Shopify platform to increase search traffic. This includes how to identify keyword intent for Shopify, finding blog opportunities and how to create blog for content gaps.
AI at scale in Bing
19/05/2020
Bing now provides simple “Yes” or “No” answers to certain queries, in addition to a carousel with related information – this is based on Natural Language Representation modelling to improve the quality of the SERPs.
Shopify SEO Guide: How to increase organic traffic to your store
21/05/2020
SEL also looked at how to optimise Shopify for search, to further increase traffic to the site. This covers how to optimise the basics, as well as technical issues to watch out for, in addition to how to expand content out on the site to improve ranking.
Google Search Console adds new guided recipes reports
19/05/2020
Google has launched a new report in Search Console for Guided Recipes, in both an Enhancement report and Rich Results tests. These tools can help webmasters ensure that their recipe schema markups are error free as well as monitor their performance in the SERPs.
Google May 2020 core update is done rolling out
18/05/2020
The Google core update stopped rolling out on Monday 18th May 2020 (starting on the 4th May 2020) – this was announced by Google via Twitter and appears to have been a rather large update that has affected many SERPs.
Data anomalies in Search Console
18/05/2020
Google has reported that there have been anomalies with Search Console Performance reports, which show a significant decline in the period of May 12-15 for Google Discover. Bear this in mind if pulling together reports that cover this period for Google Discover.
How Google crawls and indexes: a non-technical explanation
27/05/2020
Google’s Martin Splitt has explained how Google crawls and indexes, in a non-technical manner, which may be useful in explaining to clients and those without a background in search how that element of Google Search works.
Core Web Vitals report replaces Speed report in Google Search Console: What you need to know
27/05/2020
Google has switched out the Speed report in Search Console and replaced it with a Core Web Vitals report. SEL runs through the changes and what it means for users; the biggest being the changes to the metrics being reported.
