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.
Yoast SEO 11.3 lets you add an image of a person to its structured data graph
28/05/2019
The latest Yoast SEO plugin update allows webmasters to include an image, avatar or logo in structured data in addition to adding functionality to disable link indexation. The update also reminded users that it will be pulling support for WordPress 5.2 when 5.3 is released.
Mobile-First Indexing by default for new domains
28/05/2019
From 1st July, all new sites will be indexed using Google’s mobile-first index as default, meaning all news sites will have to be built to work well on mobile. However, older sites will only be moved when they are deemed ready to be moved to mobile-first indexing.
Google has fixed the indexing issue from Thursday night
26/05/2019
A Google indexing bug was causing newly released content to not be indexed, however whilst it is now fixed, it was present for 2.5 days (starting from the evening of 23/05). Sites that rely on traffic from breaking news, fresh content or required old URLs refreshed over the period may have been impacted.
Google moves hotel pricing chart into the SERP
24/05/2019
Google appears to have started showing price charts within the SERPs for hotel related searches – this allows users to view price trends and find the lowest price deals from within Google.
What’s for dinner? Order it with Google
23/05/2019
Google announced that it is bringing end-to-end food ordering to Search, Maps and Google Assistant, bypassing the need for users to access the food delivery partners website. This will also be available in voice via Assistant with the ability to quickly reorder from previous food deliveries.
How crawl budget has changed in the last 2 years
23/05/2019
SEL runs through how crawl budget has changed in the past few years and what it means for optimisation. This includes a description of what it is and why it matters, then what’s stayed the same (don’t block important pages, stick to HTML, fix redirect chains, tell Googlebot about URL parameters, correct HTTP errors, keep the sitemap up to date, use canonical tags to avoid duplicate content and hreflang tags to indicate country/language) and what’s changed; it’s no longer recommended to use RSS feeds and link development is potentially less important to crawl budget than it used to be.
The State of UK Retail Customer Experience Infographic 2019
24/05/2019
New research from Eptica indicates that UK retailers are not delivering proper customer service on social media. This analysis was conducted across the top 20 UK retailers looking at accuracy and speed at answering routine queries. It found just 38% were answered down from 50% in 2017 on Twitter, and 50% of Facebook messages were answered, up from 28% in 2017. The study also found that 59% of customers ranked giving satisfactory and consistent answers as a top three factor for trustworthiness, with 89% saying they’d stop buying from brands they don’t trust.
Why do brands abandon high-intent customers at the point of purchase?
24/05/2019
A study by iAdvize found that 83% of UK shoppers abandon online purchases due to too much choice. In addition, 58% of shoppers felt there wasn’t enough product information available to help them make their purchase, whilst 55% said fears around making the right decision also caused abandonment.
