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 starts new Search Console training series on YouTube
13/11/2019
Google has started a new series of videos aimed at training users to get the most out of Search Console. This will run through the basics to more advanced features aimed at improving how searchers find the site on Google search.
Google did several search algorithmic updates; somewhat confirming update rumors
12/11/2019
Google confirmed a number of updates to the search algorithm, though this was prefaced by saying they do this every week. An update over the weekend however impacted some sites leading to a 30-50% movement up or down in terms of traffic. This is worth bearing in mind when analysing traffic over the past week.
Here’s what you need to know about Google’s newest local algorithm update
12/11/2019
There was chatter in the local SEO community last week regarding a potential update to Google Maps, which led to fluctuations in rankings across a number of GMB listings. SEL reviews the potential impact of these changes which appears to be geared towards placing more weighting on user location, though this appears to have benefited spam sites.
New SERP feature truncates title tag in favor of location
12/11/2019
A new Google SERP feature appears to truncate the title tag in favour of adding locations to the title tags, which favours more location based sites. This may impact those sites using longer title titles tags by cutting the tag to a point where it reduces overall CTR.
The silent killers of loading time and how to fix them
13/11/2019
SEW looks at common page speed issues and how to fix them. With page speed not only being a search engine ranking factor, it is also frustrating for users to have slow loading pages, so ensuring speed is as fast as possible will lead to better online success.
Want to reduce your bounce rate, but what does that actually mean?
08/11/2019
SEW runs through what bounces rate actually represents within Google Analytics and what it means for a website. This is a good beginner article in helping understand something that can be quite confusing at first.
What is BERT? – Whiteboard Friday
08/11/2019
Moz’s latest Whiteboard Friday, runs through what we know so far about BERT, how it works, why it matters to SEOs and whether or not you can optimise for it (tl;dr you can’t!).
Google Search tests grouping results from the same domain in a single box
12/11/2019
Google appears to be testing grouping multiple domain listings into one box to indicate to the users that they’re from the same site. This may have the effect of pushing the user to scroll down past the grouping to the next result, though this doesn’t significantly change real estate on the page.
