As we recap the year gone by, let’s look at the world through the lens of search, SEO, analytics, and content creation.

Source

2022 has been about…

• Looking at your consumers as human beings and not just data sets
• Understanding how your target consumers perceive the world and how they experience life in a digital age
• Tailoring and testing your strategies to meet consumers in their moment of need – all without losing budget (or your sanity!)
• Finding most-effective tools, technologies, and talent to navigate business uncertainty

We present to you the #SEWTop5

A countdown of editor’s picks that the Search Engine Watch community loved and found great value in!

#5. Understanding the three awareness stages of your online audience

Businesses often forget that success metrics aren’t just numbers – they are living, breathing people who are driven by behavior and emotions. As customer journeys continued to remain complex and multifaceted, businesses competed to ensure they were at the finish line when prospects were ready to convert.

Add People’s Content Operations Lead, Jack Bird created a guide on harnessing a content strategy that caters to consumers and their journeys. He detailed the three key awareness stages of online traffic, what type of content fits these stages, and how to audit your existing content.

#4. A must-have web accessibility checklist for digital marketers

Did you know, 98% of US-based websites aren’t accessible? This year web accessibility moved out of the shadows and took center stage as one of Google’s search ranking factors – making the topic itself more accessible to discussions. Marketers could no longer ignore this critical aspect, because –

Stellar user experience >> Positive brand perception >> Greater appeal to value-driven consumers = Good for business

Web design and marketing specialist, Atul Jindal created a must-have web accessibility checklist for digital marketers. It went beyond dispelling “what is web accessibility?” and spoke about its benefits and action points on “how to make your website accessible?”.

#3. Google Analytics 4: drawbacks and limitations—is it worth sticking around?

On July 1, 2023, Universal Analytics properties stopped processing new hits, forcing users to switch to its successor, Google Analytics 4. This transition demanded SEOs and marketers to have a steep learning curve and adaptability since the shift meant losing some historic data.

This article dove into the issues with Google Analytics 4 from a user perspective and a privacy and compliance standpoint. Objective, hard-hitting observations helped inform SEOs and marketers’ decisions before switching platforms.

#2. The not-so-SEO checklist for 2022

While most of the internet focused on “what to do”, we took an offbeat path of “what not to do” that will help your SEO succeed from the get-go.

Best-selling author and SEW Advisory Board Member, Kristopher (Kris) Jones dispelled some major myths surrounding Core Web Vitals (CWV) and Google’s bigger, mainstream 2021 updates.

As an especially interesting, strategy-focused read, this was one SEOs could not miss before designing their 2022 strategy.

#1. Seven Google alerts SEOs need to stay on top of everything!

We as SEOs and marketers often forget that while we focus on consumers and clients, we too are humans – with limited energy (we mean coffee supply), 24 hours (wish we had more), and sleep deprivation (yes we mean sleep deprivation). As burnout crept in and to-do lists climbed, our very own Ann Smarty shared seven Google alerts that aimed at making life easier for SEOs.

These smart ways helped the community get ahead of competition, prevent a reputation crisis, fix a traffic drop, and do much more (without getting overwhelmed).

We hope you enjoyed this! Thank you for being valuable supporters throughout our journey.

Team Search Engine Watch wishes everyone a happy new year! Keep spreading the love and SEO wisdom.

Via GIPHY

*Ranked on target audience engagement, time on page, and bounce rate.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

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The post The Search Engine Watch Top 5! appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• 2022 saw nine confirmed updates (including two core updates,) five unconfirmed instances where volatility was observed in page rankings, and one data outage that caused chaos for 48 hours
• Video and commerce sites were the biggest winners in the May core update, while reference and news sites lost out most, especially outlets without industry specificity
• This theme largely continued and saw ripple effects from the helpful content update
• What were these ebbs and flows, who won, who lost? Let’s find out!
• Joe Dawson takes us through another round-up post that gives you the complete picture of Google’s moves

Only three things are certain in this life – death, taxes, and an industry-wide hubbub whenever Google launches an algorithm update. Like any year, 2022 has seen substantial changes in how the world’s largest search engine manages traffic and page rankings, with some businesses winning and others losing out.

Arguably the most significant change in 2022 is awareness of the rise of AI for content creation, becoming a hot topic in the world of marketing software. “Helpful content” updates have intended to bolster content written by human beings, penned with consumer needs in mind, over auto-generated articles designed to game the SEO system.

Has this been successful, or is the world of online marketing set for a rise of machines in 2023 and beyond? Similar to my last year’s column, let’s review the Google algorithm updates issued in 2022. I hope this helps you decide for yourself and build your business model around the latest developments in page ranking.

Complete list of 2022 Google updates

2022 has seen nine confirmed updates to Google’s algorithms, while an additional five instances of volatility were noticed and discussed by influential content marketing strategists across the year. We also saw one major data outage that caused a short-term panic! Let’s take a look at each of these updates in turn.

1) Unconfirmed, suspected update (January)

The core update of November 2021 was famously volatile, and just as web admins were coming to terms with a new status quo, further fluctuations were noted in early January 2021. Google remained tight-lipped about whether adjustments had been made to the algorithm, but sharp adjustments to SERPs were acknowledged across various industries.

2) Unconfirmed, suspected update (February)

Again, webmasters noticed a sudden temperature shift in page rankings in early February, just as things settled down after the January changes. While again unconfirmed by Google, these adjustments may have been laying the groundwork for the page experience update scheduled for later in the same month.

3) Page experience update (February)

Back in 2021, Google rolled out a page experience update designed to improve the mobile browsing experience. In February 2022, the same update was extended to encompass desktop browsing.

The consequences were not earth-shattering, but a handful of sites that previously enjoyed SERPs at the top of page one found their ranking drop. As with the mobile update, the driving forces behind the page experience update were performance measured against Google’s core web vitals.

4) Unconfirmed, suspected update (March)

Fluxes in page ranking and traffic were detected in mid-March, with enough chatter around the industry that Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search at Google, felt compelled to confirm that he or his colleagues were unaware of any conscious updates.

5) Product reviews update (March)

March saw the first of three product review updates that would unfold throughout the year. As we’ll discuss shortly, ecommerce sites experienced a real shot in the arm throughout 2022 after the core updates, so this would prove to be a significant adjustment.

The fundamental aim of this product review update was to boost sites that offer more than just a template review of consumer goods – especially when linking to affiliates to encourage purchase. Best practice in product reviews following this update includes:

• Detailed specifications beyond those found in a manufacturer description, including pros and cons and comparisons to previous generations of the same item.
• Evidence of personal experience with a product to bolster the authenticity of the review, ideally in the form of a video or audio recording.
• Multiple links to a range of merchants to enhance consumer choice, rather than the popular model of linking to Amazon.
• Comparisons to rival products, explaining how the reviewed product stacks up against the competition – for good or ill.

The product review update did not punish or penalize sites that failed to abide by these policies, preferring to list a selection of items with brief (and arguably thin) copies to discuss their merits. However, sites, that offered more detail in their assessments quickly found themselves rising in the rankings.

6) Core update (May)

The first core update of the year is always a nerve-wracking event in the industry, and as always, there were winners and losers in May’s adjustments.

The most striking outcome of this update was just how many major names benefitted, especially in the realm of ecommerce, much to the delight ecommerce agencies around the world. Sites like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy saw considerable increases in traffic and prominence following the update, perhaps due to the product review update that unfolded two months prior.

Video sites also saw a spike in viewers and positioning following the May update. YouTube videos began outranking text articles while streaming services such as Disney Plus and Hulu rose to the top of many searches. Health sites began to see a slow and steady recovery after the May core update, for the first time since the rollout of 2018’s Medic update.

News and reference sites were the biggest losers in the May core update. News and media outlets suffered the most, especially those with a generic focus, such as the online arm of newspapers. Big hitters like Wikipedia and Dictionary.com were also pushed down the pecking order. Specialist sites that dedicate their reporting to a single area of interest fared a little better, but still took a hit in traffic and visibility.

7) Unconfirmed, suspected update (June)

Minor nips and tucks frequently follow when a major core update concludes. In late June, many webmasters started comparing notes on sharp changes in traffic and page ranking. Google failed to confirm any updates. These may have just been delayed aftershocks in the aftermath of May’s core update, but the industries that saw the biggest adjustments were:

• Property and real estate
• Hobbies and leisure
• Pets and animal care

8) Unconfirmed, suspected update (July)

More websites saw a sharp drop in traffic in late July, especially blogs that lacked a prominent social media presence. SERPs for smaller sites were among the biggest losers in this unconfirmed update.

9) Product reviews update (July)

A minor tweak to March’s product review update was announced and rolled out in July, but caused little impact – while some review sites saw traffic drop, most were untouched, especially in comparison to changes at the start of the year.

10) Data center outage (August)

Not an update but a notable event in the 2022 SEO calendar. In early August, Google Search experienced an overnight outage. This was revealed to be caused by a fire in a data center in Iowa, in which three technicians were injured (thankfully, there were no fatalities.)

This outage caused 48 hours of panic and chaos among web admins, with page rankings undergoing huge, unexpected fluctuations, a failure of newly-uploaded pages to be indexed, and evergreen content disappearing from Google Search.

Normal service was resumed within 48 hours, and these sudden changes were reversed. All the same, it led to a great deal of short-term confusion within the industry.

11) Helpful content update (August)

The first helpful content update of 2022 saw significant changes to the SEO landscape – and may change how many websites operate in the future.

As the name suggests, this update is engineered to ensure that the most helpful, consumer-focused content rises to the top of Google’s search rankings. Some of the elements targeted and penalized during this update were as follows.

12) Core update (September)

The second core update of 2022 unfolded in September, hot on the heels of the helpful content update.

This update repaired some of the damage for reputable reference sites that suffered in May, while those impacted by the unconfirmed update in June continued to see fluctuations in visibility – some enjoyed sharp uptakes, while others continued to hemorrhage traffic.

The biggest ecommerce brands continued to enjoy success following this update, while news and media outlets continued to plummet in visibility. Household names like CNN and the New York Post, for example, were hit very hard.

The fortunes of medical sites also continued to improve, especially those with government domains. Interestingly, the trend for promoting videos over prose was reversed in September – YouTube was the biggest loser overall.

13) Product reviews update (September)

A final tweak was made to the product reviews update in September as part of the core update, and it proved to be unpopular with many smaller sites, which saw a substantial drop in traffic and conversions. As discussed, it seems that 2022’s core updates have benefitted the biggest hitters in the market.

14) Spam update (October)

In October, Google rolled out a 48-hour spam update. This was an extension of the helpful content updates designed to filter out irrelevant and inexpert search results, in addition to sites loaded with malicious malware or phishing schemes.

Sites identified as potential spam during the update were severely penalized in terms of page ranking and, in some cases, removed from Google Search altogether. The most prominent targets of the update were:

• Thin copy irrelevant to the search term, especially if auto-generated
• Hacked websites with malicious or irrelevant redirects and sites that failed to adopt appropriate security protocols
• Hidden links or excessive, unrelated affiliate links and pages
• Artificial, machine-generated traffic

15) Helpful content update (December)

Early in December, Google began rolling out an update to August’s helpful content update. At the time of writing, it’s too early to announce what the impact of this has been. However, it promises to be an interesting time.

The August update faced criticism for being too sedate and failing to crack down hard enough on offending sites, especially those that utilize AI content and black-hat SEO tactics.

Many site owners will be crossing their fingers and toes that this update boosts genuine, human-generated copy created by and for a website’s target audience. The impact will become evident early in 2023.

This concludes the summary of 2022’s Google algorithm updates. It’s been an interesting – and frequently tumultuous – twelve months, and one that may set the tone for the years to come.

Google will always tweak and finesse its policies, and attempting to second-guess what Alphabet will do next is frequently a fool’s errand. All the same, it’s always helpful to check in with Google’s priorities and see which way the wind is blowing.

Joe Dawson is Director of strategic growth agency Creative.onl, based in the UK. He can be found on Twitter @jdwn.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

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The post The ultimate 2022 Google updates round up appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• The present reality is that Google presses the button and updates its algorithm, which in turn can update site rankings
• What if we are entering a world where it is less of Google pressing a button and more of the algorithm automatically updating rankings in “real-time”?
• Advisory Board member and Wix’s Head of SEO Branding, Mordy Oberstein shares his data observations and insights

If you’ve been doing SEO even for a short while, chances are you’re familiar with a Google algorithm update. Every so often, whether we like it or not, Google presses the button and updates its algorithm, which in turn can update our rankings. The key phrase here is “presses the button.” 

But, what if we are entering a world where it’s less of Google pressing a button and more of the algorithm automatically updating rankings in “real-time”? What would that world look like and who would it benefit? 

What do we mean by continuous real-time algorithm updates?

It is obvious that technology is constantly evolving but what needs to be made clear is that this applies to Google’s algorithm as well. As the technology available to Google improves, the search engine can do things like better understand the content and assess websites. However, this technology needs to be interjected into the algorithm. In other words, as new technology becomes available to Google or as the current technology improves (we might refer to this as machine learning “getting smarter”) Google, in order to utilize these advancements, needs to “make them a part” of its algorithms.

Take MUM for example. Google has started to use aspects of MUM in the algorithm. However, (at the time of writing) MUM is not fully implemented. As time goes on and based on Google’s previous announcements, MUM is almost certainly going to be applied to additional algorithmic tasks.  

Of course, once Google introduces new technology or has refined its current capabilities it will likely want to reassess rankings. If Google is better at understanding content or assessing site quality, wouldn’t it want to apply these capabilities to the rankings? When it does so, Google “presses the button” and releases an algorithm update. 

So, say one of Google’s current machine-learning properties has evolved. It’s taken the input over time and has been refined – it’s “smarter” for lack of a better word. Google may elect to “reintroduce” this refined machine learning property into the algorithm and reassess the pages being ranked accordingly.    

These updates are specific and purposeful. Google is “pushing the button.” This is most clearly seen when Google announces something like a core update or product review update or even a spam update. 

In fact, perhaps nothing better concretizes what I’ve been saying here than what Google said about its spam updates: 

“While Google’s automated systems to detect search spam are constantly operating, we occasionally make notable improvements to how they work…. From time to time, we improve that system to make it better at spotting spam and to help ensure it catches new types of spam.” 

In other words, Google was able to develop an improvement to a current machine learning property and released an update so that this improvement could be applied to ranking pages. 

If this process is “manual” (to use a crude word), what then would continuous “real-time” updates be? Let’s take Google’s Product Review Updates. Initially released in April of 2021, Google’s Product Review Updates aim at weeding out product review pages that are thin, unhelpful, and (if we’re going to call a spade a spade) exists essentially to earn affiliate revenue.

To do this, Google is using machine learning in a specific way, looking at specific criteria. With each iteration of the update (such as there was in December 2021, March 2022, etc.) these machine learning apparatuses have the opportunity to recalibrate and refine. Meaning, they can be potentially more effective over time as the machine “learns” – which is kind of the point when it comes to machine learning. 

What I theorize, at this point, is that as these machine learning properties refine themselves, rank fluctuates accordingly. Meaning, Google allows machine learning properties to “recalibrate” and impact the rankings. Google then reviews and analyzes and sees if the changes are to its liking. 

We may know this process as unconfirmed algorithm updates (for the record I am 100% not saying that all unconfirmed updates are as such). It’s why I believe there is such a strong tendency towards rank reversals in between official algorithm updates. 

It’s quite common that the SERP will see a noticeable increase in rank fluctuations that can impact a page’s rankings only to see those rankings reverse back to their original position with the next wave of rank fluctuations (whether that be a few days later or weeks later). In fact, this process can repeat itself multiple times. The net effect is a given page seeing rank changes followed by reversals or a series of reversals.  

A series of rank reversals impacting almost all pages ranking between position 5 and 20 that align with across-the-board heightened rank fluctuations 

This trend, as I see it, is Google allowing its machine learning properties to evolve or recalibrate (or however you’d like to describe it) in real-time. Meaning, no one is pushing a button over at Google but rather the algorithm is adjusting to the continuous “real-time” recalibration of the machine learning properties.

It’s this dynamic that I am referring to when I question if we are heading toward “real-time” or “continuous” algorithmic rank adjustments.

What would a continuous real-time google algorithm mean? 

So what? What if Google adopted a continuous real-time model? What would the practical implications be? 

In a nutshell, it would mean that rank volatility would be far more of a constant. Instead of waiting for Google to push the button on an algorithm update in order to rank to be significantly impacted as a construct, this would simply be the norm. The algorithm would be constantly evaluating pages/sites “on its own” and making adjustments to rank in more real-time. 

Another implication would be a lack of having to wait for the next update for restoration. While not a hard-fast rule, if you are significantly impacted by an official Google update, such as a core update, you generally won’t see rank restoration occur until the release of the next version of the update – whereupon your pages will be evaluated. In a real-time scenario, pages are constantly being evaluated, much the way links are with Penguin 4.0 which was released in 2016. To me, this would be a major change to the current “SERP ecosystem.” 

I would even argue that, to an extent, we already have a continuous “real-time” algorithm. In fact, that we at least partially have a real-time Google algorithm is simply fact. As mentioned, In 2016, Google released Penguin 4.0 which removed the need to wait for another version of the update as this specific algorithm evaluates pages on a constant basis. 

However, outside of Penguin, what do I mean when I say that, to an extent, we already have a continuous real-time algorithm? 

The case for real-time algorithm adjustments

The constant “real-time” rank adjustments that occur in the ecosystem are so significant that they refined the volatility landscape. 

Per Semrush data I pulled, there was a 58% increase in the number of days that reflected high-rank volatility in 2021 as compared to 2020. Similarly, there was a 59% increase in the number of days that reflected either high or very high levels of rank volatility: 

Simply put, there is a significant increase in the number of instances that reflect elevated levels of rank volatility. After studying these trends and looking at the ranking patterns, I believe the aforementioned rank reversals are the cause. Meaning, a large portion of the increased instances in rank volatility are coming from what I believe to be machine learning continually recalibrating in “real-time,” thereby producing unprecedented levels of rank reversals. 

Supporting this is the fact (that along with the increased instances of rank volatility) we did not see increases in how drastic the rank movement is. Meaning, there are more instances of rank volatility but the degree of volatility did not increase. 

In fact, there was a decrease in how dramatic the average rank movement was in 2021 relative to 2020! 

Why? Again, I chalk this up to the recalibration of machine learning properties and their “real-time” impact on rankings. In other words, we’re starting to see more micro-movements that align with the natural evolution of Google’s machine-learning properties. 

When a machine learning property is refined as its intake/learning advances, you’re unlikely to see enormous swings in the rankings. Rather, you will see a refinement in the rankings that align with refinement in the machine learning itself. 

Hence, the rank movement we’re seeing, as a rule, is far more constant yet not as drastic. 

The final step towards continuous real-time algorithm updates

While much of the ranking movement that occurs is continuous in that it is not dependent on specific algorithmic refreshes, we’re not fully there yet. As I mentioned, much of the rank volatility is a series of reversing rank positions. Changes to these ranking patterns, again, are often not solidified until the rollout of an official Google update, most commonly, an official core algorithm update. 

Until the longer-lasting ranking patterns are set without the need to  “press the button” we don’t have a full-on continuous or “real-time” Google algorithm. 

However, I have to wonder if the trend is not heading toward that. For starters, Google’s Helpful Content Update (HCU) does function in real-time. 

Per Google: 

“Our classifier for this update runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly-launched sites and existing ones. As it determines that the unhelpful content has not returned in the long-term, the classification will no longer apply.”

How is this so? The same as what we’ve been saying all along here – Google has allowed its machine learning to have the autonomy it would need to be “real-time” or as Google calls it, “continuous”: 

“This classifier process is entirely automated, using a machine-learning model.” 

For the record, continuous does not mean ever-changing. In the case of the HCU, there’s a logical validation period before restoration. Should we ever see a “truly” continuous real-time algorithm, this may apply in various ways as well. I don’t want to let on that the second you make a change to a page, there will be a ranking response should we ever see a “real-time” algorithm.

At the same time, the “traditional” officially “button-pushed” algorithm update has become less impactful over time. In a study I conducted back in late 2021, I noticed that Semrush data indicated that since 2018’s Medic Update, the core updates being released were becoming significantly less impactful.

Data indicates that Google’s core updates are presenting less rank volatility overall as time goes on

Subsequently, this trend has continued. Per my analysis of the September 2022 Core Update, there was a noticeable drop-off in the volatility seen relative to the May 2022 Core Update. 

Rank volatility change was far less dramatic during the September 2022 Core Update relative to the May 2022 Core Update 

It’s a dual convergence. Google’s core update releases seem to be less impactful overall (obviously, individual sites can get slammed just as hard) while at the same time its latest update (the HCU) is continuous. 

To me, it all points towards Google looking to abandon the traditional algorithm update release model in favor of a more continuous construct. (Further evidence could be in how the release of official updates has changed. If you look back at the various outlets covering these updates, the data will show you that the roll-out now tends to be slower with fewer days of increased volatility and, again, with less overall impact). 

The question is, why would Google want to go to a more continuous real-time model? 

Why a continuous real-time google algorithm is beneficial

A real-time continuous algorithm? Why would Google want that? It’s pretty simple, I think. Having an update that continuously refreshes rankings to reward the appropriate pages and sites is a win for Google (again, I don’t mean instant content revision or optimization resulting in instant rank change).

Which is more beneficial to Google’s users? A continuous-like updating of the best results or periodic updates that can take months to present change? 

The idea of Google continuously analyzing and updating in a more real-time scenario is simply better for users. How does it help a user looking for the best result to have rankings that reset periodically with each new iteration of an official algorithm update? 

Wouldn’t it be better for users if a site, upon seeing its rankings slip, made changes that resulted in some great content, and instead of waiting months to have it rank well, users could access it on the SERP far sooner? 

Continuous algorithmic implementation means that Google can get better content in front of users far faster. 

It’s also better for websites. Do you really enjoy implementing a change in response to ranking loss and then having to wait perhaps months for restoration? 

Also, the fact that Google would so heavily rely on machine learning and trust the adjustments it was making only happens if Google is confident in its ability to understand content, relevancy, authority, etc. SEOs and site owners should want this. It means that Google could rely less on secondary signals and more directly on the primary commodity, content and its relevance, trustworthiness, etc. 

Google being able to more directly assess content, pages, and domains overall is healthy for the web. It also opens the door for niche sites and sites that are not massive super-authorities (think the Amazons and WebMDs of the world). 

Google’s better understanding of content creates more parity. Google moving towards a more real-time model would be a manifestation of that better understanding.

A new way of thinking about google updates

A continuous real-time algorithm would intrinsically change the way we would have to think about Google updates. It would, to a greater or lesser extent, make tracking updates as we now know them essentially obsolete. It would change the way we look at SEO weather tools in that, instead of looking for specific moments of increased rank volatility, we’d pay more attention to overall trends over an extended period of time. 

Based on the ranking trends we already discussed, I’d argue that, to a certain extent, that time has already come. We’re already living in an environment where rankings fluctuate far more than they used to and to an extent has redefined what stable rankings mean in many situations. 

To both conclude and put things simply, edging closer to a continuous real-time algorithm is part and parcel of a new era in ranking organically on Google’s SERP.

Mordy Oberstein is Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Mordy can be found on Twitter @MordyOberstein.

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The post Is Google headed towards a continuous “real-time” algorithm? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• 12 months, several curveballs, and some masterstrokes
• If you missed out, today is a great day to look through the Search Engine Watch lens for the year gone by
• Key themes that were front of mind in 2021 – Google’s updates, cookie death counter-strategies, mastering customer experience elements, trust-building, and alternatives for search marketing and ranking

As the world, people, and of course businesses motored through a year of uncertainties – these crackers of articles gave your strategies an unfair advantage.

#1 – Google Page Experience update is all set to launch in May 2021 – Webmasters, hang in there!

You asked, “What is Page Experience, anyway? Do we really need to have an overflowing to-do list?” – and we answered everything around this enigma. This piece touched upon every aspect, angle, and action point that SEOs needed to know.

#2 – The search dilemma: looking beyond Google’s third-party cookie death

The ad tech and search industry continued to remain precarious that Google will use the cookie deprecation as a new way to establish market dominance to feed its own interests. Google expert, Susan Dolan drew from her rich experience and detailed realities of the search scape. She also shared insights and predicted future key themes that rose out of the 3p cookie death.

#3 – Everything you need to know about the Google MUM update

As the industry bid farewell to BERT, Google’s Multitask Unified Model (MUM) update in June 2021 opened new search experience dimensions. The cranked-up competition for search visibility between businesses and advertisers – left SEO practitioners and agencies with yet another burning question, “How will we win MUM’s good graces?” Joe Dawson’s comprehensive guide left no stone unturned.

#4 – Why killing your content marketing makes the most sense

“Kill your darlings”, yes, we said it! Though it sounded outlandish, this piece held wise and valuable advice from best-selling author Joe Pulizzi on why this could be one of the best business decisions you could’ve made in 2021.

#5 – Quora and Reddit: Powerhouses for SEO and marketing in 2021

Everyone is obsessed with Google, but did you know Reddit is the seventh most popular website in the US while Quora has a DR of 91? This guide shone a light on how your search strategy could take advantage of these platforms with diversification, tap into great brand-building opportunities, and enhance your E-A-T standing.

#6 – Now is the best time to stitch your search marketing loopholes before 2022

The third-party cookie still stands at a crucial intersection between digital marketing, SEO, paid media, web design, and several business tangents. The industry needed to think hard and think differently for a contingency plan. SEO pioneer, serial entrepreneur, and best-selling author, Kris Jones helped weave a tight SEO and search marketing strategy way ahead of 2022. Why? Because a stitch in time saves nine.

#7 – Seven first-party data capturing opportunities your business is missing out on

The internet continued zigging in a privacy-focused direction as a response to consumers’ increasing demand for a transparent, responsible, and ethical outlook towards their data. First-party data became indispensable and consumer trust, invaluable. While the playing field inched closer to the great reset, we revealed some hidden first-party gems every business could use to redesign their search marketing strategies.

#8 – UX: an important SEO ranking factor

The story of SEO and UX began almost 20 years ago with both making a foray into the market in the 1990s. Since then, SEO practitioners saw seasons change and the Page Experience, paired with data analysis finally etched UX as a key ranking factor. Atul Jindal condensed years of his experience working with fortune 500 companies into this SEO guide to help you win at SEO and search experience.

#9 – Cross-channel marketing: why you shouldn’t put all your eggs in the Google basket

The pandemic didn’t let us forget that while every business is unique, budgets too took a hit, making allocation stringent. But why did so many businesses still stick to the “big guns” when allocating spending? Adzooma CEO Rob Wass and Cambridge University’s Akanshaa Khare joined forces to challenge this notion. They produced some truly unique insights that would make stakeholders rethink their media spending habits.

#10 – Core Web Vitals report: 28 Ways to supercharge your site

Everyone remembers the chaos surrounding the Core Web Vitals in early 2021. SEO folks were keen to get ahead on optimizing their site and Twitter threads were full of speculation. Armed with information, we shared a 28-point checklist on action items to spot, optimize, and embrace the inevitable rollout of these new ranking factors.

Thank you for being valuable supporters throughout our journey. Team Search Engine Watch wishes everyone a happy year-end and an adventurous 2022!

*Ranked on page views, time on page, and bounce rate.

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The post Wrapping up 2021 with our top 10! appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• Google’s Multitask Unified Model (MUM) update landed in June 2021, seeking to deliver search results that overcome language and format barriers to deliver an improved search experience
• The Google MUM update uses an innovative solution that accesses a wealth of previously hidden information around a core query, providing more of what we want without having to carry out multiple different searches
• Google MUM can understand and translates 75 different languages, including text and images
• MUM will see us bid farewell to BERT

They say Mum always knows best but can the same be said for Google’s MUM update? Giant search engine, Google, launched their latest update as the answer we have been looking for to make internet searching more intuitive and inclusive.

But what does this mean for website owners, SEO practitioners, and agencies providing marketing services?

What is Google’s MUM update?

The Google Multitask Unified Model (MUM) update, aims to answer modern search demands by using an AI-powered algorithm to improve online search capability. When searching the internet, contradictory to expectations users are faced with multiple searches, geographical, and language barriers due to a lack of intuition on the search engine.

Google’s MUM will remove the need to carry out multiple searches that users currently do in order to compare and gain deeper insights. It has the ability to understand and bring solutions based not just on textual content but also an interpretation of images, videos, and podcasts in a way that was never possible before.

It understands 75 different languages which implies that it can pool and serve results to give users the most holistic and comprehensive search experience, answering even the most complex queries.

Google MUM will redefine search relevance changing the way people accesses and use information across the world wide web. This however, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt that not all content can be trusted and would eventually boil down to user discretion.

The MUM update means searches will serve information that provides helpful, related insights, and will reach further for these sources than any other search engine update before it.

Google believes that the MUM update is the answer.

Although in its early days the algorithm will continue to see iterations but it certainly looks to be an exciting move that Google is committed to build on. How? Google intends to follow these in order to ensure they can make it “the world’s best MUM” and remove any machine learning biases:

• Human feedback from raters using the Search Quality Rater Guidelines will help understand how people find information
• Similar to 2019’s BERT update, MUM too will undergo the same process applied to Google search models
• Applying learnings from their latest research on how to reduce the carbon footprint of large neural network training systems to ensure search continues to function as efficiently as possible

Why MUM matters

MUM interprets meaning in a people-friendly way, breaking down language barriers to provide us with the most comprehensive search engine capability ever.

It’s fast, far-reaching, and thorough as compared to any previous search engine update. This matters in a world where users want detailed, relevant, and accurate answers in seconds – anywhere, anytime.

This will remove silos in search dropping all the veils of language barriers and lack of intuition. It will view user queries, questions and comparison needs from all angles reducing the time we spend trying to find the right answers to elicit what we need.

For a long time, keywords and SEO content have been a critical part of how information is served and how it needs to match intent. Over recent years whilst this has remained important to draw attention to specifics, it has changed slightly to be more phrase friendly, finding keywords used in a more natural context. This certainly benefits the MUM search algorithm. It can provide nuanced answers to questions, using NLP, and in-depth world knowledge to gather additional information supplements by a mix of formats – text, images, or even video and audio in the future.

The benefits of MUM

Its ability to think beyond the question or statement will tap into multiple dimensions of the SERP and SEO as a result. Users, businesses, and content creators are being encouraged to say goodbye to the “exact response days” and tap into the user intent and journey that is layered, complex, and sometimes more generalized.

Google MUM’s AI smarts will be another piece in mastering and understanding user intent and thought processes.

Imagine wanting to travel to a country and the questions you currently have to ask to find all you need to know. Firstly, you might wonder how you get there. Then you may search for where to stay, what’s in the area, for visas or vaccinations required and perhaps a bit about the weather and activities available. The list goes on and so does the time taken to search and sift through results.

We now want more, right away, and Google MUM is the beginning of meeting these needs.

Eliminating language barriers

MUM will find results in other languages, opening up a treasure chest of local and more insightful information than any previous Google search technology has ever offered. It aims to become your very own expert and translator, with the added value that you can expect from an enthusiastic human – succinctly delivered, plentiful detailed, and readily given in a language you understand, just like engaging with a human expert.

Searches are no longer inhibited by the words we choose. People can elicit more specific answers to questions by including an image, video or web page in our search. This ensure greater access to international content that previous search engines would not have recognized.

This breaking down of language barriers will allow users, SEOs, and businesses to see more localized insights and responses. On the SEO and digital marketing front, this also means – more competition! Local people create many reviews on areas or facilities, yet we currently miss what could be the best answer to our review style questions due to language barriers.

Unless users search sufficiently and widely using local terms, spellings or language nuances, they never discover pieces of information that would be an integral part of decision making.

Making multi-modal matter

While MUM will know it all (hopefully) since it uses the T5 text-to-text framework and is 1,000 times more powerful than BERT. We will still see answers to straightforward questions. But the ones that are less simple or don’t have a straight answer will flourish with this multi-modal approach. Imagine, what if the answer lies in an image that could be in Japanese?

AI and the search engine

Search engines have driven the way content is created, focusing heavily on keywords, phrases, intent, and other key factors. So should AI change how businesses, SEOs, and agencies think about attracting visitors and engaging them while ensuring we use the exposure Google MUM can offer? This is a far greater intelligent search algorithm that understands nuances and will bring more relevant and varied content to the fore.

Content that is wrongly pitched will disappear more readily than ever before. This reinstates how important the user experience, content, overall SEO, accessibility, and intent are for success in the age of digital. Content must, therefore, be better than a few placed keywords to make it anywhere in page rankings and it must make optimal use of multimedia formats that Google MUM looks at. End-users are MUM’s focus and that must be at the front of how content marketers work. This is important to remember when considering redesigning your website. We see it reinforcing the need for quality SEO and key phrase content if you want to be noticed.

Google MUM has a far greater ability to answer comparison style questions too.

“Will I find the same weather in Turkey as Egypt?” style questions will bring answers in one go. Previously we would have to dig around the information for each country and compare information ourselves. Not only will one question suffice to elicit temperatures for each, but it will offer added value information on each country that it knows people may have gone on to search. It may include relevant comparisons between the two countries, such as vaccinations or visa information, dress codes or helpful information that its AI capability recognizes as appropriate.

MUM vs BERT

Like every launch, the latest proclaims to be the best. BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) was launched in 2019 and understood searches better than we have ever been able to before. Around this time, keywords became key phrases seeking to provide results based on user intent. In other words, content had to answer common questions.

Numbers tell us that MUM is 1000 times more powerful than BERT, so will MUM always know best? It undoubtedly would seem that this changes the face of search and SEO as we know it in 2021.

What you need to do

• Create content that remains high quality and focused yet opens up the possibilities that tangential linking can bring to comparison and related topics. Content must answer questions and provide the right level of added value, including appropriate use of multimedia formats so that MUM will notice you. Written content, including blog posts and articles, is still a key player in attracting attention. There is increased importance on backing this up with podcasts, images, audio, and video content – this would help when MUM’s new iterations come into play.
• Google MUM will know it is relevant and add it to search results. Your content will now compete amongst the most significant contributions around the world. While it removes language barriers, it would still be wise to have multi-lingual SEO as part of your strategy. This will dramatically affect the regional power of content, so use it to your advantage, ramping up regional relevance, neighborhood interests, or specifics both verbally and visually.
• Produce content that builds brand recognition and loyalty using informative, engaging writing, images, and other media. Remember to add structured data to your page to give clues about the content. Brands and advertisers need to be mindful that this is an AI-centric update and would learn as it goes. We know that whilst Google MUM will widen search answers, there will always be people that know where to look and who to rely on for trusted content, so the expanded pool of SERP competition will not typically minimize your current audience as long as you continue to remain reliable. Bottom line is – Continue to build your expertise and authority in the industry so you can ‘EAT’ your competition.

In all honesty, with fewer tricks to hide behind, what you need to make sure of when creating MUM-friendly content simply translates to quality. If it is interesting, relevant, and valuable to your end user, then it will be seen. It will widen the potential audience and bring more significant competition for visibility, and that is just as likely to be a good thing as bad for many.

Conclusion

Are we genuinely heading to an internet-driven world without barriers? While Google’s MUM seeks to understand more about what we might be looking for than any search engine has ever before, will this open up the search-scape to a truly more worldly experience? We can’t answer all the questions and there are many still to be asked as the rollout gathers pace. Only time will tell us how Google improvise MUM in the future. After all, technology and innovation never stand still for long.

Joe Dawson is Director of strategic growth agency Creative.onl, based in the UK. He can be found on Twitter @jdwn.

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The post Everything you need to know about the Google MUM update appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• Did you know that 53 percent of trackable web traffic is organic?
• A study from BrightEdge revealed that search (organic and paid) still delivers more traffic to websites than any other channels, including social and display
• These statistics prove that the role of SEO in 2021 is elevated across all industries since an organic flow of traffic is now more critical than ever
• Merkle Inc.’s VP Head of SEO, Eryck Dzotsi discusses six key focus areas that leaders across organizations must clearly understand about the role of SEO to drive organic search performance

2020 wasn’t a year that we will soon forget. Life and the way we do business changed forever. Ecommerce grew more last year than it has grown in the past five years combined. As a result, many businesses had to adapt their marketing efforts to these changes. The role of SEO in 2021 is elevated across all industries since an organic flow of traffic is now more critical than ever.

As we navigate this year, leaders across organizations must clearly understand the role of SEO and focus on driving organic search performance. Let’s dive into some key areas of focus:

1. Define the integration of SEO within other channels going forward

Did you know that 53 percent of trackable web traffic is organic? A study from BrightEdge revealed that search (organic and paid) still delivers more traffic to websites than any other channels, including social and display. This statistic alone demonstrates why brands need to realize that organic traffic is not going away, and they need to value SEO in 2021 and beyond. They need to integrate SEO with their other media channels. Organic search is the only channel that has a touchpoint across each stage of the customer journey.

While TV and display are generally associated with awareness, paid search is typically aligned with the mid to lower funnel as customers are making a decision about the product or service and converting. The story is different for organic search.

• When interested in a product or when they have a problem they are trying to solve, users search (often as a result of interacting with an ad)
• When making a decision and comparing options, users search
• When customers are ready to convert, they search again, and often, after the purchase, search is again involved in learning how to use the product, service, and more

SEO is about answering users’ questions and helping them find what they were seeking. As a result, SEO is one of the few channels where the engagement is initiated by the user and the ad does not disrupt the customer journey. This makes SEO the channel that ought to be the point guard to a cross-channel line-up, playing assist to the other channels.

2. Organizations must hold SEO to the same accountability and scrutiny as other channels (ROI)

Organizations need to deploy a clear SEO analytics plan going forward. Often, because SEO does not have an associated cost, marketing prioritization is low, and measurement is laxed. ROI can seem abstract, and teams fail to properly track the measurement of success based on levels of effort, this is not ideal. SEO teams must have a systematic measurement plan and resources in place to make the right level of attribution and adjustments happen.

To start, align your goals with the other media channels – look at the impressions and have a clear understanding of your share of voice within your industry, click-throughs, visits, and conversions as part of the full view – what percent are you gaining compared to the market?

This accountability must be demanded from your SEO team going forward.

3. Organizations must optimize to one search experience by harmonizing SEO and SEM

In the first half of 2020, and throughout some of the social unrest periods that marked the year, many advertisers paused their campaigns. In those instances, this was a real-time experiment in organic vs. paid traffic acquisition. The conclusion many have walked away with is that you need both, but the programs which invested heavily in organic search showed the best results in aggregate.

Since non-branded keywords are becoming increasingly expensive, it is not always efficient to deploy a non-brand campaign in paid search. As a result, many campaigns have been reduced to maximizing visibility on branded terms. So, how do you win in search when you cannot buy your way out with paid campaigns? Organic search is the answer. An analysis should be conducted to properly find the balance between paid and organic so that you are optimizing the total search experience. Organizations that win here will have a clear strategy around leveraging where they are winning and where they have gaps.

4. Marketing teams must align SEO and user experience

Many lessons were gained in terms of reducing friction in the customer journey and optimizing the conversation between customers and brands. As a result, many brands set out to either redesign their websites or migrate to a new platform. When redesigning or overhauling a website, it is vital to involve SEO in the project from the beginning, or you will likely end up adding an extra step when a botched overhaul of content starts to affect performance. Start the project with SEOs involved from the beginning to save time, money, and headaches in this process. Additionally, ranking factors are becoming more aligned with items that are controlled by the UX team. SEO connects your media team to your user experience team, and collaboration between the two is necessary to bridge the gap in 2021 and beyond.

“Page experience” is already a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm and represents a set of aspects considered important in a webpage’s overall UX (mobile-friendliness, security, and the others). There are a couple of things happening this year that are specifically highlighting Google’s continued focus on rewarding websites that provide a great experience. First, Google is finalizing the switch to mobile-first indexing, which means all websites and their content will be crawled, evaluated, and indexed from a mobile device standpoint. Then the Core Web Vitals will be included in the larger page experience ranking factor.

5. Technical priorities for web must include SEO, Core Web Vitals, and user experience

If you ask 1,000 SEOs what the big trend for SEO in 2021 will be, 1,000 will tell you that it will be the year of Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals are a set of aspects that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience. There are several things happening this year that specifically highlight this – the most impactful being Google’s switch to a mobile indexing environment, which is the end of an era as we know it. This means that Google will largely use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. In the past, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query. Many websites have done great work to prepare, but complying with your technical foundation is a non-negotiable going forward.

6. SEO anchors on optimizing content across the entire customer journey

Marketers must create content that caters to the user’s journey – answering the demand and questions they will have across each stage of the funnel. As you plan content, have clear keyword governance to manage your content strategy across the organization, clearly defining each owner. For example, for large financial institutions, which business unit of banking, credit card, and mortgages owns the SEO performance for the keyword “credit score”? It is imperative that copywriters work hand-in-hand with SEO to have a functional content strategy to optimize the journey. You shouldn’t just use SEO to prioritize your content and keywords, but use it to determine the voice and narrative around those keywords.

According to a new Google update on December 3, Google is favoring information and user-focused sites. As a result, there has been a shift in ranking for organizations that are providing value and nurturing their customers. User-focused content across the journey is no longer a nice-to-have for organizations, but a must-have to properly rank.

Organic engagement with customers throughout the customer journey is and will continue to be a key element to marketing success. As the data shows, the channel is healthy. Brands that have invested in an institutionalized approach to SEO have achieved and sustained levels of success that span across other channels. There are many more opportunities for growth, and with ecommerce and customer expectations continue to grow at a rapid pace, the outlook for SEO in 2021 is optimistic.

Eryck Dzotsi is VP Head of SEO at Merkle Inc.

The post SEO in 2021: What your organization’s executives and senior leaders must know appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• The debate still continues in the SEO community on the variation of value from backlinks.
• Google has shifted their position on these links.
• What do we get for our efforts?
• Are nofollow links worth the pain?

Are nofollow links a waste of time?

SEO practitioners have for years been told that nofollow links have zero value. It has become a mantra that has been repeated to the point where it has become a vulgar term to us.

Is this a healthy approach to link building though? Should opportunities for these diminished backlinks be ignored moving forward? Here I’d like to make the case for these lowly search engine signals.

What is a dofollow and a nofollow link?

I will keep this short. There are no dofollow links. All links start out as follows by default for search engines. Google came out many years ago with a new attribute called a nofollow and asked website managers to add them to links in their comments section because unscrupulous spammers were causing havoc on their algorithms. It was an easy way for these black hat SEO types to build lots of links on multiple sites.

Over time, some websites added this attribute to other parts of their content, if not their entire website to dissuade marketers from trying to get links on their websites for SEO purposes only. As a result, many marketers lost a lot of interest in these sites for providing them quality content.

Google with all of its vagaries, updates their position

A little over a year ago, Google came out and told us they had updated the algorithm to consider some nofollow links as hints. The extent of what that means can be open to interpretation.

But it does tell us that Google is paying attention to them. This does not mean I am recommending open season and that your link building strategy should be entirely built on them. But there is definitely more value to them than most people realize.

Nofollow backlinks can still provide authority

The quality rater guidelines published by Google have put a lot of focus on Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T). Going through the verbiage you will find that they place authority on the authors of content being mentioned in news articles and publications. Even Wikipedia is specifically mentioned (which has nofollow links as policy on its entire website).

Forbes, Huffington Post, and Medium are great examples of websites that only provide nofollow links. But I imagine that would have little concern about these quality raters.

In ignoring these publications you could very well be missing out on one of the keys to increasing the authority of your website based upon the assumption that there is a lack of link juice.

Search console consistently provides these links in their reporting

As much data as is available in the Google Search Console, there is quite a bit more information we in the SEO community would like to see that is not readily given in this tool. And yet, Google has consistently provided many nofollow links mixed in with the regular backlinks in the reporting. Why do you think this is?

Google easily knows the difference between them and yet still provides them and has for years. Not only that – they also factor them into the top linking text (anchor text) section which is a big part of this puzzle.

A mixture of the two types has always been considered healthy for a backlink profile for your website. Where nofollows can have a strong impact is providing context. Being able to reinforce brand name and other keyword terms for your site and individual pages.

No one can expect to get exact keyword match anchor text from high authority websites on a regular basis. But mentions in forums, now comments and other places can provide context if not link strength. If you are trying to refine the keyword focus of your pages, this is a worthwhile endeavor.

More direct traffic

Qualified traffic of any kind is valuable. If your entire job is to increase the rankings of your website, then this point does not apply. But being an SEO usually means getting more organic traffic to your website. It would be hard to dispute that visitors from high traffic websites to yours’ based upon the intent of the link, would not count as such.

When visitors to those websites are reading their content on a particular subject and inevitably click a link to your website, that is a win in my book. It is kind of the whole point of your job.

Not to mention that someone who has been researching a topic and ran across your company name mentioned multiple times on industry-specific websites starts to solidify that brand recognition everyone is always talking about.

Summary of nofollow backlinks

For seasoned marketers, much of this is known and sometimes a helpful reminder is welcome. Those that are new to the industry often hear derision regarding the matter and shun these backlinks without having done their research or tested them on their own.

These hints for the search engines can bring a lot of value if utilized with restraint and consideration. Don’t be so willing to discount them out of hand.

Rob Delory is the Founder of QuickSilver Agency. He can be found on Twitter @rdelory.

The post Making the argument for nofollow links in SEO appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• Google plans to update its algorithm in 2021 to include a factor called Page Experience.
• This includes existing Google Search signals such as mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
• It also includes metrics in Google’s Web Vitals to do with a site’s loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
• For site owners and others, understanding these signals and making the necessary changes should be a priority.
• Among the steps to take are optimizing for mobile, improving page speeds, CTAs, and alt text for images.

We’re sure you’ve heard about Google’s announcement this summer. Yes, they’ve made another one. In brief, they said that they’re going to update their algorithm in 2021 to include a factor called Page Experience. This is going to be an important element that has an impact on rankings.

As part of this initiative, they’ve launched Web Vitals – a series of benchmarks essential to measuring and enhancing the user experience on the web.

Hold on. What is Page Experience, anyway? And do you really need to add to your overflowing to-do list? Let’s take a closer look.

The page experience in a nutshell

Page experience includes all aspects of how users interact with a web page and how good or painful it is for them. (In your case, we hope it isn’t the latter!)

This includes existing Google Search signals: mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.

It also includes metrics in Google’s Web Vitals. Currently, the focus is on three facets: loading, interactivity, and visual stability. 

1. Loading, in this context, measures perceived load speed. That’s the point in the page load timeline when the main content is likely to have loaded.
2. Interactivity is the time from when a user first interacts with a page – a click or a tap, for example — to the time when the browser begins processing that interaction.
3. Visual stability has to do with preventing annoying and unexpected movement of page content.

Source

You may already have optimized for some of these factors. According to Google’s own earlier research, as page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases by 123%. Ouch!

Similarly, as the number of elements on a page goes from 400 to 6,000, the probability of conversion drops by as much as 95%.

Now, Google is bringing these and other aspects together under one umbrella that is going to have even more of an impact on organic search results.

Visual indicators of page experience

Google has also stated that by next year, they will introduce a visual indicator to designate those search results that meet all of their page experience specifications. 

They’ve done something like this in the past, too. You must have observed, for example, AMP icons as well as slow and mobile-friendly labels.

If this indicator is displayed prominently in search results, there are good chances that users will prefer these sites over others. 

While Google is yet to announce the shape, size, and position of such indicators, it’s a mark of how seriously they’re taking their forthcoming page experience guidelines. 

This means that all of us should start planning from now itself.

Hold on. Page experience isn’t everything.

Now, you may have read this far and decided that the most important thing is to fix all of the above parameters. And you’ll see your traffic zoom.

That won’t necessarily be the case. (Although we hope it is!) You see, content is still king. Everything starts with that.

As Google themselves point out in their blog,

“Great page experience doesn’t override having great page content.”

However, you can rest assured that when there are many pages that are similar in relevance, your improved page experience will make all the difference in search results.

Why you should pay attention to this algorithm update 

The fact remains that the new page experience metrics should be taken seriously by developers and all those involved in optimization strategies to improve search rankings.

To begin with, if your user experience is seen as being in the top bracket, visual cues will guide consumers and browsers to your page over the others.

Google itself is pretty clear about the increased weightage they’re going to give to page experience. After all, a terrific page experience lets people get more done and increases engagement.

It seems evident that those pages which fall below the new benchmarks are going to be left behind in the rankings. This means a significant drop in traffic.

Google already considers hundreds of aspects to determine rankings. The inclusion of page experience lets them guide people, so they can access information more easily and enjoyably.

For site owners and others, understanding these signals and making the necessary changes should be a priority.

Otherwise, you run the risk of your page being ignored. You wouldn’t want that now, would you?

Let’s start with a bad page experience

Before we get down to understanding how to improve page experience, let’s understand what a bad page experience is.

• Slow page speeds: You know how frustrating it can be to click on a search result and then wait for a page to load. It may be a few seconds, but it feels like an eternity. Chances are, your consumers feel the same way and are put off.
• Bad structure and design: Even if the page loads quickly, there are times when it can be confusing to navigate. This could be because the design is cliched or just puzzling. There could be too many pop-ups. There could be no proper content structure. Looking for information here could be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
• Lack of engagement. Unfortunately, too many websites simply assume that their only purpose is to sell. But today’s consumer wants to be engaged with, wants to be entertained, and wants to be understood. That’s why empathy and likeability are important factors.

The steps you can take

There are more than six months to go before these changes take effect. As a webmaster, you have more than enough time to prepare. And there are no excuses for not being ready.

As a site owner or stakeholder, you can take the advice of Aja Frost, head of content SEO at HubSpot. This is what he says: “I think this gives you good ammunition to go to your web team or your performance team and say, ‘Hey, you know, Google…[is] going to release this in six months, and so we need to focus on it.’”

Here are some things to consider.

• You can start by gaining an understanding of the metrics that Google is going to use. For now, these are LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), and FID (First Input Delay). Google itself provides explanations and standards of measurement, which are useful in gaining mastery of them.
• Based on this, you can then conduct a site audit. Optimize for these new ranking signals, especially factors such as page load speeds, responsiveness, UX, mobile usability, and security. There are a variety of tools that you can use for this. For example, Google’s online mobile-friendly test, as well as Page Speed Insights, which play the role of performance checkers across all devices.
• As you know, it takes several individuals working together to create a high-quality website. It’s time to bring these stakeholders together and discuss how this algorithm update is going to be handled. The SEO, UX design, and IT teams should be in perfect alignment when it comes to future goals and actions. You could start by asking them if they’d prefer coffee or tea, and then get the meeting started.

Expert tips to boost page experience

Until now, you’ve received a broad overview of Google’s announcement, what it means for developers and other stakeholders, and some initial steps you can take to prepare.

This is all very informative, but is there anything you can do right away? Yes, there is.

Here are some granular details as to how you can enhance page experience like a boss.

1. Optimize for mobile search

In Q3 2020, mobile devices generated 50.81% of global website traffic, consistently hovering around the 50% mark since the beginning of 2017.

Source

Clearly, these numbers can’t be ignored. Google’s algorithms, too, primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site.

If you haven’t already, you should get your page mobile-ready by reducing code, leveraging browser caching, and reducing redirects.

The webpage design should be simple and responsive so as to appear attractive on smaller screens. Site structure, too, should be optimized for mobile.

2. Improve page speeds

According to recent research that confirms Google’s findings, a delay of one full second in loading can decrease conversion rates by 70%. Just one second — shorter than the time it’s taken to read this sentence.

There are several ways to not lose out because of frustrating delays. As per Google, the best practice is just three seconds. 

One way to do this is to minimize HTTP requests. That’s because the components on the page, the longer it takes for it to render. You can combine files to overcome this.

Further, asynchronous loading files can speed up pages. When a browser loads a page, it moves from top to bottom, and you can use this to your advantage.

Other aspects include examining the operation of JavaScript loading and server response times. Don’t forget to also check on compression, caching, and, importantly, image file sizes. 

3. Separate CTAs

Optimizing for mobile and improving page speeds are the first steps to take, as they have a huge impact on user experience. However, there are other factors that can further improve interaction, not to mention the conversion rate.

One of these is the Call to Action or CTA. Virtually every site has these in some form or another. Consumers are requested to take specific actions, from subscribing to updates, signing up, asking for an appointment, and, of course, making purchases. (Let’s not forget that.)

Source

The trick is to realize that consumers have different frames of mind at different points so as to be able to customize your CTAs, accordingly.

They should be short, specific, and clear about the action needed. Ideally, they should include a benefit. Think of what the consumer will get out of the interaction. Is it to be enlightened, to succeed, or to solve a problem?

The design of CTA buttons is important, too. Naturally, they should be bright, correctly-shaped, and properly positioned.

Think of that as your own call to action.

4. Use Alt Text for images

We’ve already touched upon image compression as a way of providing an optimal loading experience. But there’s another factor involved when it comes to experience as well as page ranking.

This is called an alt text. It’s used in an HTML code, and it describes the appearance and function of an image on a page.

Such alt tags will be displayed in case the image file isn’t loaded so that users understand the context. Such descriptions are also used by search engine crawlers for indexing, and this helps in rankings.

These alt text descriptions should be short, specific, and ideally with a keyword. This will go a long way in helping your site’s organic search results.

Finally, this can’t be repeated enough: Focus on the content

This is something we’ve touched upon earlier, but it’s so important that we want to remind you once again.

It sometimes happens that people get so caught up in the metrics and technical issues of SEO that the most important element gets pushed to second place.

Quite simply, good content will always play a critical role in determining page rankings. It should be simple, it should answer a need, and it should be unique.

It’s when you have such content, and then optimize it for Google’s algorithm updates, that you’re going to see your ranking zoom to the top.

Aayush Gupta is Sr. Manager, Brand & Marketing at Uplers. He likes to stay on his toes when it comes to marketing and doing things worth risk-taking. He loves traveling and exploring local cuisines. In his free time reading books with coffee is all he wants.

The post Google Page Experience update is all set to launch in May 2021 – Webmasters, hang in there! appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• Natural language processing (NLP) is one factor you’ll need to account for as you do SEO on your website.
• If your content is optimized for NLP, you can expect it to rise to the top of the search rankings and stay there for some time.
• As AI and NLP keep evolving, we may also eventually see machines doing a lot of other SEO-related work, like inserting H1 and image alt tags into HTML code, building backlinks via guest posts, and doing email outreach to other AI-powered content editors.
• While it seems far-fetched right now, it’s exciting to see how SEO, NLP and AI will evolve together.
• Writer.com’s Co-founder and CEO, May Habib discusses in-depth about SEO content and shares top tools to help you through the content creation process.

Modern websites are at the mercy of algorithms, which dictate the content they show in the search results for specific keywords. These algorithms are getting smarter by the day, thanks to a technology called machine learning, also known as artificial intelligence (AI).

If you want your site to rank in search results, you need to know how these algorithms work. They change frequently, so if you continually re-work your SEO to account for these changes, you’ll be in a good position to dominate the rankings. 

Natural language processing (NLP) is one factor you’ll need to account for as you do SEO on your website. If your content is optimized for NLP, you can expect it to rise to the top of the search rankings and stay there for some time.

The evolving role of NLP and AI in content creation & SEO

Before we trace how NLP and AI have increased in influence over content creation and SEO processes, we need to understand what NLP is and how it works. NLP has three main tasks: recognizing text, understanding text, and generating text.

• Recognition: Computers think only in terms of numbers, not text. This means that any NLP solution needs to convert text into numbers so computers can understand them.
• Understanding: Once the text has been converted into numbers, algorithms can then perform statistical analysis to discover the words or topics that appear together most frequently. 
• Generation: The NLP machine can use its findings to ask questions or suggest topics around which a writer can create content. Some of the more advanced machines are already starting to put together content briefs. 

With the help of NLP and artificial intelligence (AI), writers should soon be able to generate content in less time as they will only need to put together keywords and central ideas, then let the machine take care of the rest. However, while an AI is a lot smarter than the proverbial thousand monkeys banging away on a thousand typewriters, it will take some time before we’ll see AI- and NLP-generated content that’s actually readable.

As AI and NLP keep evolving, we may also eventually see machines doing a lot of other SEO-related work, like inserting H1 and image alt tags into HTML code, building backlinks via guest posts, and doing email outreach to other AI-powered content editors. While it seems far-fetched right now, it’s exciting to see how SEO, NLP, and AI will evolve together.

Major impact from Google BERT update

In late 2019, Google announced the launch of its Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm.  BERT helps computers understand human language using a method that mimics human language processing. 

According to Google, the BERT algorithm understands contexts and nuances of words in search strings and matches those searches with results closer to the user’s intent. Google uses BERT to generate the featured snippets for practically all relevant searches. 

One example Google gave was the search query “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa”. The old algorithm would return search results for U.S. citizens who are planning to go to Brazil. BERT, on the other hand, churns out results for Brazilian citizens who are going to the U.S. The key difference between the two algorithms is that BERT recognizes the nuance that the word “to” adds to the search term, which the old algorithm failed to capture. 

Source: Google

Instead of looking at individual keywords, BERT looks at the search string as a whole, which gives it a better sense of user intent than ever before. Users are becoming more specific with the questions they ask and are asking more new questions, and BERT breaks down these questions and generates search results that are more relevant to users.

This is great news for search engine users, but what does it mean for SEO practitioners? While it doesn’t exactly throw long-standing SEO principles out the window, you might have to adjust to accommodate the new algorithm’s intricacies and create more content containing long-tail (longer and more specific) keywords. Let’s move on to the next section to learn more about creating BERT-optimized content.

Developing SEO-friendly content for improved Google

When we perform SEO on our content, we need to consider Google’s intentions in introducing BERT and giving NLP a larger role in determining search rankings. Google uses previous search results for the same keywords to improve its results, but according to the company, 15% of all search queries are used for the first time. The implication here is that Google needs to decipher these new questions by reconstructing them in a way it understands. 

With this in mind, your SEO should factor in the criteria below: 

Core understanding of search intent

While keywords still play an important role in Google searches, BERT also pays close attention to user intent, which just means a user’s desired end goal for performing a search. We may classify user intent into four categories:

• Navigational: The user goes to Google to get to a specific website. Instead of using the address bar, they run a Google search then click on the website link that appears in the search results. It’s possible that these users know where they want to go but have forgotten the exact URL for the page.
• Informational: The user has a specific question or just wants to know more about a topic. The intention here is to become more knowledgeable or to get the correct answer for their question. 
• Commercial: The user might not know what they want at the moment, so they’re just looking around for options. They may or may not make a purchase right away.
• Transactional: The user is ready and willing to make a purchase and is using Google to find the exact product they want.

Unlike old search algorithms, the new Google algorithm captures user intent better because it considers the whole context of the search terms, which may include prepositions such as “of”, “in”, “for”, and “to”, or interrogative words such as “when”, “where”, “what”, “why”, and “how”. Your SEO strategy should produce content that:

• Answers a user’s question or addresses a need right away
• Provides value to the reader
• Is comprehensive and focused 

You might need to conduct more research about ranking sites for your keyword and check out what kind of content gets into the top results. It’s also a good idea to look at the related searches that Google suggests at the bottom of the results page. These will give you a better idea of user intent and help you draw an SEO strategy that addresses these needs.

Term frequency-inverse document frequency

You might not have heard of the term “Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency” (TF-IDF) before, but you’ll be hearing more about it now that Google is starting to use it to determine relevant search results. TF-IDF rises according to the frequency of a search term in a document but decreases by the number of documents that also have it. This means that very common words, such as articles and interrogative words, rank very low. 

TF-IDF is calculated by multiplying the following metrics:

• Term frequency: This may either be a raw count of instances of a keyword, the raw count adjusted for document length, or the raw frequency of the most common word. 
• Inverse document frequency: This may be calculated by taking the total number of documents, dividing it by the number of documents that have the keyword, then getting its algorithm. If the word is very common across different documents, the TF-IDF gets closer to 0. Otherwise, it moves closer to 1. 

When we multiply the metrics above, we get the TF-IDF score of a keyword in a document. The higher the TF-IDF score, the more relevant the keyword is for that specific page. As an end-user, you may use TF-IDF to extract the most relevant keywords for a piece of content. 

Google also uses TF-IDF scores in its NLP engine. Since the metric gauges the relevance of a keyword to the rest of the document, it’s more reliable than simple word counts and helps the search engine avoid showing irrelevant or spammy results.

Sentiment importance

Consumer opinions about brands are everywhere on the internet. If you can find a way to aggregate and analyze these sentiments for your brand, you’ll have some powerful data about overall feelings about your business at your fingertips. 

This process is called sentiment analysis, and it uses AI to help you understand the overall emotional tone of the things your customers say about you. It involves three key activities:

• Knowing where your customers express their opinions about your brand, which might include social media, review sites such as Yelp or the Better Business Bureau, forums, feedback left on your site, and reviews on ecommerce sites such as Amazon.
• Utilizing AI and NLP to pull data from these sites in massive quantities, instead of gathering a random sample consisting of just a few comments from each platform. This gives you a clearer overall picture of customer sentiment.
• Analyzing data and assigning positive or negative values to customer sentiments, based on tone and choice of words.

Crafting an SEO strategy that places importance on customer sentiment addresses common complaints and pain points. We’ve found that dealing with issues head-on, instead of skirting them or denying them, increases a brand’s credibility and improves its image among consumers.

Salience and category

If you want to better understand how natural language processing works, you may start by getting familiar with the concept of salience. 

In a nutshell, salience is concerned with measuring how much of a piece of content is concerned with a specific topic or entity. Entities are things, people, places, or concepts, which may be represented by nouns or names. Google measures salience as it tries to draw relationships between the different entities present in an article. Think of it as Google asking what the page is all about and whether it is a good source of information about a specific search term.

Let’s use a real-life example. Let’s imagine you do a Google search to learn more about how to create great Instagram content during the holidays. You click on an article that claims to be a guide to doing just that but soon discover that the article contains one short paragraph about this topic and ten paragraphs about new Instagram features. 

While the article itself mentions both Instagram and the holidays, it isn’t very relevant to the intent of the search, which is to learn how to document the holidays on Instagram. These are the types of search results Google wanted to avoid when it was rolling out BERT. Instead of trying to game the system to get your content to the top of the search results, you need to consider salience as you produce your online content. 

Five tools that can help you develop SEO-friendly content

Given all the changes that Google has made to its search algorithm, how will you ensure that your content remains SEO-friendly? We’ve gathered six of the most useful tools that will help you create content that ranks high and satisfies user intent.

1. Frase

Frase (frase.io) claims to help SEO specialists create content that is aligned with user intent easily. It streamlines the SEO and content creation processes by offering a comprehensive solution that combines keyword research, content research, content briefs, content creation, and optimization. 

Frase Content, its content creation platform, suggests useful topics, statistics, and news based on the keywords you enter. If you’re working with a team, the Content Briefs feature tells your writers precisely what you need them to produce, reducing the need for revisions and freeing up their time for more projects. 

2. Writer

Writer (writer.com) realizes that we all write for different reasons, and when you sign up, it asks you a few questions about what you intend to use it for. For example, you might be interested in improving your own work, creating a style guide, promoting inclusive language, or unifying your brand voice. 

Writer’s text editor has a built-in grammar checker and gives you useful real-time suggestions focusing on tone, style, and inclusiveness. Writer also offers a reporting tool that lets you track your writers’ progress for a specific period, such as spelling, inclusivity, and writing style.

3. SurferSEO

Surfer (surferseo.com) makes heavy use of data to help you create content that ranks. It analyzes over 500 ranking factors such as text length, responsive web design, keyword density, and referring domains and points out common factors from top pages to give you a better idea of what works for a specific keyword. 

You can see Surfer’s analysis at work when you use its web-based text editor. You will see a dashboard that tracks what the app calls the “content score”. It also gives you useful keyword suggestions.

4. Alli AI

Alli AI (alliAI.com) offers you a quick, painless way to perform SEO on existing content. All you need to do is add a single code snippet to your site, review Alli’s code and recommendations, then approve the changes. Once you approve the changes, Alli implements them in minutes.

Alli does this by finding the easiest links to build. If you prefer to do things manually, the tool also shows you link building and outreach opportunities. If you’re struggling to keep up with all Google’s algorithm changes, Alli claims it can automatically adjust your site’s SEO strategy.

5. Can I Rank?

Can I Rank (canirank.com) compares your site content to other sites in its niche and gives you useful suggestions for growing your site and improving your search rankings. Its user interface is easy to understand and the suggestions are presented as tasks, including the estimated amount of time you will need to spend on them. 

What we like about Can I Rank? is that everything is in plain English, from the menu to the suggestions it gives you. This makes it friendly to those who aren’t technical experts. It also presents data in graph form, which makes it easier to justify SEO-related decisions.

Bottom line

Google changes its search algorithms quite a bit, and getting your page to rank is a constant challenge. Because its latest update, BERT, is heavily influenced by AI and NLP, it makes sense to use SEO tools based on the same technologies.

These tools – such as Frase, Writer, SurferSEO, AlliAI, and Can I Rank? – help you create content that ranks. Some of them check for grammar and SEO usability in real-time, while others crawl through your site and your competitors’ sites and come up with content suggestions. Trying out these tools is the only way for you to know which one(s) work best for you. Stick with it, and you’ll stay ahead of the game and create content that performs well for years to come!

May Habib is Co-founder and CEO at Writer.com.

The post How NLP and AI are revolutionizing SEO-friendly content [Five tools to help you] appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• With Google frequently changing its search engine algorithm in recent times in a bid to reduce the organic reach of most businesses so they can invest more in Ads, what are the options left for your small business in this period?
• According to GoGulf, 46% of all Google searches are of people searching for local information, and 86% of people look up the location of a business on Google Maps.
• If Local SEO is that effective, what is it, and why should your business rely on it?
• In this article, I will examine basic things that still work like adding your business to online directories, building backlinks, developing local content targeted at your local audience, incorporating titles and meta description tags, and the use of targeted keywords.

SEO changes all the time. That’s why you need to update your SEO strategies regularly to remain visible. 

According to this article, 72% of consumers visit a store within 5 miles after doing a local search. This shows how powerful local SEO can be. If you can make your business visible such that your business appears in the search results when a potential customer searches for a product and service, there is a 72% chance they’ll drop by your business.

But what is local SEO? Local SEO involves the optimization of your online presence in order to improve your chances of being discovered by people who make local searches. Think of it as your traditional SEO, but with the inclusion of geography in it. In other words, it’s you trying to attract more business from local searches.

In this article, you’ll learn five local SEO tactics that will help you skyrocket your visibility without breaking the bank. 

1. Be strategic about your title and meta description tags

When you search for something on Google’s search engine, you’ll see millions of results competing for your attention. The only way you can tell if the search result has what you’re looking for is the title and the description you see immediately after the title.

Many business owners take the title of their blog posts and meta descriptions for granted. You need to start seeing the title and the description as a way you can “sell” your page to a potential visitor of your page. 

A useful tool that will help you optimize your title and description is Yoast SEO. It’ll be able to test how good your title and description are. 

Deliberately include the location of your business in your blog post titles. For example, let’s assume you sell wine and your potential client is looking for the best New York wine, you’d be doing yourself a great service by including the words “New York” in the title and the description.

Source: Google Search

2. Optimize your Google My Business account

You know how you’ll search for a pizza place on your phone and Google will show you a list of pizza places near you? That’s made possible by using Google My Business. Google My Business (GMB) is a tool used to manage your online presence across Google, including Google Search and Google Maps.

You’ll find it shocking that 56% of local businesses haven’t claimed their Google My Business listings. So don’t sleep on this tip.

If you haven’t claimed your GMB listing then make sure you do so. But don’t just claim your GMB listing and forget all about it. Optimize your GMB by filling in your Google My Business Profile, choosing the relevant category, and including images. This will not only help your potential customer find you, but it will also give them some information about your business and thus influence their decision to stop by your business.

3. Create local content

According to GoGulf, 46% of all Google searches are of people searching for local information. So how do you harness that attention so as to get your target audience to know about your business?

Creating local content that will be of interest to your target audience makes you the local authority for your industry. By local content, I mean the creation of content that is targeted to your local audience. This will require you to be strategic with keywords.

So as a florist, instead of creating content on the best flowers to give your wife, think of the best flowers your customer can give their wife in Florida. That way you’re specifically addressing those in Florida and those who come across your article see you as the go-to florist in Florida. 

4. Get inbound links to raise the domain authority

As beneficial as it is to create local content for your own website, Moz revealed that link signals are an important local search ranking factor that will help enhance your visibility as shown in the diagram below. 

Link signals include inbound anchor text, linking domain authority, and linking domain quantity. All this helps to raise the domain authority as this helps increase your local search rankings.  

To improve your link signals you should also guest post local content on other websites as well. Create valuable local resources that your target audience will love.

As you guest post and refer people to the blog on your business website, you’re acquiring inbound links to raise your domain authority. Those will help you with your SEO and increase your chances of being visible on Google when the people within your geographical location search for things related to your business. 

5. Add your business to online directories

Why stop at just adding your business on only one directory when there are so many directories out there. Adding your business to as many online directories (especially local ones) as you can possibly find will increase your chances of being found online. It will be time-consuming but it’s worth it. 

Online business directories like Binge Places for Business, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Angie’s List, and Trip Advisor will make you more visible to those who need your services locally. And to add to that, getting listed on these sites will make you earn backlinks from them which will help build your domain authority and increase your ranking on Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERP), therefore increasing your organic reach.

What you need to take note of is that the information on your business on other directories is the same as that on your GMB. This consistency will help with your rankings. 

Ready to maximize local SEO?

Over time Google has tweaked its search engine algorithm to reduce the organic reach of businesses so as to direct their attention to investing in ads. As a small business that has limited resources, investing in ads may seem like a long shot.

If Google’s reducing your ability to organically reach your target audience, then what’s the next available option for you? Local SEO can give you the needed exposure to your target audience organically and at little or no cost.

The good news is that applying the steps above will put you ahead of other local businesses scrambling for their customers’ attention on the most coveted first page of Google search.

Now that you’ve got the tips how did you would you say you’ve fared with your local SEO?

The post Maximizing local SEO: Five tactics to enhance visibility without breaking the bank appeared first on Search Engine Watch.