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.
SEO year in review 2019: Zero-click searches, BERT, local spam and more
26/12/2019
SEL runs through the biggest changes to SEO in 2019. This includes looking at the impact of zero-click searches, BERT, local spam, changes to indexing, advances to Google Assistant, travel vertical changes, the rise of visual search and the impact of anti-trust and privacy laws.
The 2019 search engine patents you need to know about
24/12/2019
SEO By The Sea looks at the top 10 search engine patents across 2019, this covers knowledge based patents, such as those related to user-specific knowledge graphs, local search based patents, such as quality visit scores from in-person store visits to impact local search rankings, and search based patents, such as automatic pattern generation that helps Google extract more information regarding intent of a search.
Pro Tip: Making images accessible to screen readers doesn’t need to be hard
20/12/2019
SEL looks at how to improve the accessibility of images for visually impaired people using simple alt attributes – this can often be overlooked and represents a significant portion of website users.
How to utilize holiday season traffic for 2020’s Q1 growth
27/12/2019
SEW looks at how businesses can leverage the holiday season traffic to improve Q1 growth. This focuses on capturing potential customers that visited but didn’t convert, first-time purchases in Q4 and using ads to target these two groups.
Google Analytics glitch in an ad-filled internet
27/12/2019
SEW released an article analysing how Google Analytics is impacted by ad blockers walling off the tracker. The conclusion is that 24% of visitors are potentially using ad blockers and are therefore invisible, hence tracking absolute KPI metrics may be a cause for concern within GA.
Google’s John Mueller Answers Seven Common SEO Questions Including The Secret To Ranking
24/12/2019
Google’s John Mueller answers 7 common SEO topics: the difference between 301 and 302 , the difference between 404 and 410, the description and title meta tag lengths, whether symbols are valid in titles, are keywords in URLs important and whether to use PHP or HTML endings for pages. He also states that the secret to ranking is that there isn’t one (though a technical sounds site with great content is a good start)!
Four SEO myths to shake off in 2020
23/12/2019
SEW runs through 4 SEO myths that should be ignored going into 2020. This includes XML sitemap automatically improving search rankings, too many keywords leading to poor rankings, having a secure website isn’t important and Google will penalising sites for duplicate content.
