Each week 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.
The mobile, desktop split may have stabilized at roughly 60% – 40%
16/05/2019
According to the latest annual Internet Advertising Revenue report by Hitwise, the traffic split between mobile and desktop appears to have remained unchanged compared to two years ago with an average of 58.5% of searches happening on mobile, with Food related mobile searches made up 68% whilst Retail only saw a 47% as mobile searches.
Google updates Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines
17/05/2019
Google has updated it’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines with additional guidance on content expertise and interstitial pages. Whilst these guidelines are for human quality raters to evaluate websites and SERPs, their judgements are used to improve the algorithm so content creators, marketers and advertisers should be aware of them.
Google not indexing recent content?
22/05/2019
There’s potentially another Google bug that is preventing Google from indexing recently released content within the hour. Google has confirmed it is aware and is working on it.
Google rolling out mobile search redesign with black “Ad” label, favicons for organic results
22/05/2019
Google is rolling out a new look to the mobile results which includes black “Ad” labels and favicons to the SERPs, which makes the organic listing appear more branded. It would be worth checking site favicons are all correctly displaying to take advantage of the new look.
Nine types of meta descriptions that win more clicks
22/05/2019
SEW looks at different types of meta-descriptions that attract more clicks. This includes clarity focused, USP focused, question focused, purpose focused, CTA focused, offer focused power word focused special character focused and solution focused.
Ecommerce Quarterly Report – More Equals More
17/05/2019
A report by Monetate revealed that when retail site users were exposed to three pages with personalised elements, conversion rates doubled from 1.7% to 3.4% (compared to just exposed to two pages). With 10 personalised page views this rose to 31.6%, with add-to-cart rates at 65.2% and cart abandonment rate dropped to 58.8%. This was based on an analysis of over a million sessions from retail sites.
Ranking Factors 2019
17/05/2019
A report from Searchmetrics found that higher rankings are associated with faster load times and smoother UX on mobile in addition to using next generation image formats and HTTP/2 protocol.
Google Won’t Show Content Hidden Within Tabs In Search Snippets
17/05/2019
Google has explained why content hidden within tabs won’t show in search snippets because users won’t see that content by default. It is still crawled, indexed and ranked however, but if you’re expected it to display in a snippet for some reason, prepare to be disappointed.
