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.
FAQ: Google’s Popular Products and how to increase your organic product visibility
15/04/2020
Google’s Popular Products launched on mobile back in January 2020 – an attempt by Google to claw back some ground lost to Amazon in terms of product search. Search Engine Land details how to make products eligible to appear as well as optimisation to improve their chances of showing up in the section.
TikTok 101: A primer for brands
10/04/2020
Search Engine Land takes a deeper look at TikTok and how brands can benefit from using the platform, which is largely used by Gen Z. This covers advertising, social commerce and sponsored hashtag challenges, as well as providing some examples of what some brands are doing on the platform.
16-straight days of rankings volatility: SEOs dig into the COVID-19 effects on search
10/04/2020
There has been some volatility in the rankings over the past 16 days, with a large number of sites seeing fluctuations in search performance across the period. Search Engine Land provides a deeper dive into some of the reasons why this occurred.
This includes:
- Google having different algorithms for each industry, meaning a change in search behaviour caused by the pandemic caused the algorithm to provide different results
- A huge number of website updated content across the period e.g. adding or removing products, as well as showing products as out of stock, which would have impacted how those pages displayed in the SERPs
- Google’s focus on YMYL would have caused authoritative sites to bounce to the top of the SERPs for the influx of health related queries
- Machine learning reacting to the change in search behaviour may have caused SERPs to drastically change based on our change in behaviour
- Google introducing its “Help and information” box, COVID-19 Alert sidebar and statistics panel pushing the listing down.
Google reviews coming out of quarantine
09/04/2020
Google has reintroduced review replies and has said that new user reviews, new user photos, new short names and Q&As will return gradually by country and business category.
Some Featured Snippets may not appear as the top organic result
06/04/2020
With the recent introduction of the knowledge panel into the main search listings, it appears that some Featured Snippets may not appear as the top organic result – these all share features similar to the Knowledge Panel and trigger for a small number of queries however.
Generate structured data with JavaScript
03/04/2020
Google has released new advice on generating structured data with JavaScript, this includes both custom JS and Google Tag Manager – if either of these are being used it would be worth checking out the new advice as it provides more direction to developers and SEOs.
Google ends support for data-vocabulary.org structured data in rich results
03/04/2020
In January 2020, Google announced it would be withdrawing support for data-vocabulary.org by 6th April 2020. If a site is still using the mark up with a rich result it will now disappear; in order to maintain the rich result switch to Schema.org.
Driving conversions: No other method is more effective than video marketing
14/04/2020
SEW looks at how to use video marketing to drive conversion rate increases. This includes why video has a higher conversion rate and an overview how to use video without sinking a large budget into it.
