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.
Google search results not fully rendering for many searchers
24/07/2019
There have been reports regarding search results not rendering when some searches are performed in Google. The Google Search team has confirmed that their search pages may not be fully rendering and are looking to resolve the bug. Worth bearing in mind if any clients see an unexpected decrease in search traffic, as this may be affecting search performance.
Prime Day halo effect and 6 other trends to watch for back-to-school search marketing
24/07/2019
SEL looks at how the Amazon Prime Day impacts Google Search; this includes a large growth in impressions across the period creating an opportunity that transcends Amazon, in particular for back to school items, where users may be searching for other retailers offering discounts across the period. This is particularly relevant for electronics and clothing sellers – using paid media as well as having appropriate search landing pages to capitalise on the increased interest over the period.
What’s up with the unconfirmed Google search ranking updates in July?
24/07/2019
There has been significant movement within the SERPs over July, though Google is yet to confirm any major changes around the 11th, 16th and 18th July. Be aware that July saw a large number of fluctuations that may have impacted search traffic across the period.
Five tactics that encourage customer reviews
23/07/2019
SEL reviews five tactics to increase the number of reviews. This includes making sure business pages are claimed (not just GMB) and ready for reviews, ask customers for reviews but don’t push, focus on platforms that your customers are more likely to use, respond to reviews (both positive and negative) and investigate legitimate paid review programs.
Voice trends & statistics: What designers need to know about the new tech boom
23/07/2019
A study by Adobe has revealed that 48% of voice searches are general web queries with most activity on smartphones (85%) and 44% of the activity is daily. Top interactions include driving directions, making a phone call, sending a text and checking the weather, whilst shopping only made up 16% of queries.
Understand the JavaScript SEO basics
18/07/2019
Google has added a Javascript SEO basics section to the Search developer’s guide. This covers a general description of how Google processes JS, in addition to some best practices: describing pages with unique titles and snippets, writing compatible code, using meaningful HTTP status codes, using meta robots tags and fixing lazy images and lazy loaded content.
Google says to keep the same URLs for the long run
23/07/2019
Google’s John Mueller has stated that webmasters should avoid hanging URLs as much as possible, particularly in the long run.
Google says it has restored broken reviews
23/07/3029
Google claims it has reinstated the reviews that disappeared due to technical reasons early in July. However, Google also claims some will not return due to policy violations.
Don’t underestimate the power of video
19/07/2019
According to research by Brightedge, Google is displaying video thumbnails for 26% of search results (for context Quick Answers represents 19%), however, video remains an optional part of most SEO plans. SEW argues search marketers should do more to incorporate video into search strategies, stating that the same SEO principles apply: optimise title, description, tags, transcript and matching these to user intent to improve CTR, surrounding the video with relevant content to tie it together, using videos two minutes long to get the most engagement and ensuring the video image is compelling.
Spying on Google: Five ways to use log file analysis to reveal invaluable SEO insights
22/07/2019
Moz released a guide to using log files to gain insights. This includes; understanding how to open log files, valuable tools to use and how to split the files; understanding the log files and how to reveal crawl budget; identifying crawl issues; diagnosing on-page problems (slow and large pages), and understanding bot behaviour to uncover un-crawled URLs and spambots.
