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 showing ‘key moments’ feature on multiple videos in search results
10/03/2020
Google appears to be showing the ‘key moments’ feature for multiple videos in mobile search. The SERP feature lets user skip to key points in a video, enabling them to jump to the part that’s useful to their query. The increased usage of the feature may indicate increased engagement, hence it’s greater prominence in the SERPs.
How Google’s search features impact organic CTR
03/03/2020
A report by Perficient Digital was updated in March and reports on the rise of the ‘no click’ search results and its impact on CTR. The report found that no-click search results are less of a factor when commercial queries are triggered with the appearance of ads, and that there was no overall impact on CTR (poor CTR queries are balanced out by high CTR queries).
Announcing mobile-first indexing for the whole web
05/03/2020
Google has announced that by September 2020, mobile-first indexing will be used across the entire web. Google reports that over 70% of sites shown in their results have already shifted over to mobile-first with most sites ready to switch over now. Ensuring mobile performance is free of any issues will be increasingly important to those sites not yet switched over to mobile-first.
Amazon’s A9 product ranking algorithm: Your guide to Amazon SEO for maximum visibility
05/03/2020
SEL released a guide to Amazon SEO, covering page copy, images, videos, EBC/A+ EMC content, pricing, availability, reviews, ads and fulfilment. With the search engine becoming the number one choice for product searches, optimising for Amazon search is more important than ever.
Google tightens FAQ markup guidelines, disallows repetition of questions and answers
02/03/2020
Google has updated it’s content guidelines regarding FAQ schema, saying that the same question and answer can no longer be marked up with the schema if it appears across multiple pages.
Google’s new treatment of nofollow links has arrived
28/02/2020
Google’s new treatment of nofollow links is now live, which will now use nofollow as a hint for crawling and indexing. For the most part this shouldn’t change anything, however there are now new link attributes to deploy, including for sponsored and user generated content.
We need to talk about Google’s “People Also Ask”: a finance case study
11/03/2020
Moz released a case study detailing the impact of the “People Also Ask” feature in the Google SERPs on finance queries. The study found that in the UK, the feature was dominated by US-based information, even for questions such as “Who is the cheapest car insurance?”, where the results in the content are all but useless to UK based searchers.
Four essential ecommerce site optimisations that drive sales
06/03/2020
SEW details a number of ecommerce optimisations that can help improve conversion rates on-site. This includes how to structure the homepage for optimal sales, simplifying product categories, fixing all errors on site and including a helpful 404 page, how to improve the shopping experience, and a number of ways to tweak the checkout process to improve conversion rates.
