Category: SEO

See details of post Bug drops Sitelinks Searchbox from Google search results below

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See details of post SearchCap: Happy birthday Google, EU Google Shopping changes & SEO tips below

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• CSEs will compete head-on with Google Shopping in EU search results
  Sep 27, 2017 by Ginny Marvin

  To provide “equal treatment” in the ad auction, Google Shopping will operate as a separate business unit bidding against Comparison Shopping Engines

• Google’s latest Easter Egg is a video game that shows up with searches for ‘snake’ & ‘play snake’
  Sep 27, 2017 by Amy Gesenhues

  Announced in conjunction with Google’s 19th birthday surprise spinner doodle, the digital game can be played on both desktop and mobile.

• SEO content strategy: How to grow visits by 300% in one year
  Sep 27, 2017 by Andrew Dennis

  Creating great content isn’t enough to achieve great SEO results in and of itself. As columnist Andrew Dennis demonstrates, there is a lot that goes into a truly effective content strategy.

• Google marks its 19th birthday with a ‘Google birthday surprise spinner’ doodle
  Sep 27, 2017 by Amy Gesenhues

  The spinner leads to searches for 19 different Easter egg games and quizzes launched during Google’s 19 years.

• Why going global is essential to your business
  Sep 26, 2017 by Chris Sherman

  There are 7.5 billion people in the world. Are you reaching all of your potential customers with your search marketing campaign?

• Alphabet to create separate business unit in Europe to run Google Shopping
  Sep 26, 2017 by Greg Sterling

  Effort is attempt to comply with European antitrust decision; would force Google to bid against rivals in the AdWords auction as a standalone entity.

• The non-developer’s guide to reducing WordPress load times up to 2 seconds (with data)
  Sep 27, 2017 by Tom Demers

  Wondering where to start with page speed improvements? Columnist Tom Demers shares how he tackled page speed improvements on several WordPress sites without (much) input from a developer.

• Updated for 2017! Enterprise Paid Media Campaign Management Platforms
  Sep 27, 2017 by Digital Marketing Depot

  The paid media marketing landscape has become increasingly complex, as the speed of search engine algorithms and development changes accelerates and marketers demand more integrated channel capabilities. Automating paid media campaign management through an enterprise platform can improve efficiency and productivity. MarTech Today’s “Enterprise Paid Media Campaign Management Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market […]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

Local & Maps

Link Building

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i wish you like this article on More Google Algorithm & Search Results Shuffling

Yea, yea, yea, more of the same. Google is updating their search results, it is in flux, search results are shuffling around. But I only try to report it when the signals all seem to be higher than the normal day to day shuffles. I always see people complaining about changes in Google but when it reaches certain levels, that is when I decide to cover it.

The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has a spike in complaints from webmasters and SEOs about ranking shuffles and the automated tracking tools also show huge changes. Here are some comments from the threads:

This week was the worst week we have seen from google since panda 4. With all other updates we gained traffic but this one hit us with >50%. Sales form google organics, adwords and Shopping ads are off by 95%.

We have seen the same. We’ve grown massively over the past few months and this week we have lost ranking from positions 2/3 to 5/6. Its impacted us dramatically.

I’ve noted some interesting changes in the SERPs this week. Too early to say what’s up, and it’ll have to settle before making a better assessment.

For info sites, I’ve seen recent good results by moving away from keyword structured pages to answer based content. Those pages got a jump in SERP inclusion.

I know a lot of people take these types of tools with a pinch of salt, but Algoroo and moz and showing big movements today in the US. In my experience, the UK usually follows. Hopefully its a reversal of what happened last week – because we’ve definitely been hit with something.

It is hard to say if this is related to the September 20th update or another Google update or unrelated at all. Google has not commented on anything this week, of course.

Here are some charts from the automated tools.

SERPMetrics:

Algoroo:

SEMRush:

Mozcast:

RankRanger:

Accuranker:

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See details of post The non-developer’s guide to reducing WordPress load times up to 2 seconds (with data) below

With Google’s continued focus on user experience and engagement metrics in recent algorithm updates, it’s become even more important for marketers to pay attention to how fast their sites are. Page speed has long been a ranking factor for desktop search results, and it may soon impact mobile rankings as well.

The benefits of improved load times go well beyond their impact on SEO and your site’s organic rankings, however. Consider recent Google data, which shows that “53 percent of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load,” or that “for every second delay in mobile page load, conversions can fall by up to 20 percent.”

So, how do you actually go about speeding up your site? For many non-technical marketers, trying to figure out how to improve page speed can be a daunting task. Which levers should you actually be pulling to generate a result? And how do you get those changes implemented on your site?

I’m not a developer. My company owns and operates a number of different (relatively simple) publishing sites built on WordPress. I set about working to improve load times for these sites without any developer intervention to see what kind of impact could result from some simple tweaks that anyone (even me!) could make. In this post, I’ll walk through each of the optimizations, explain what the impact on our sites was and share actual data around load times, Google Speed scores and more.

Three important points I’ll return to later in the post:

• As I said, these are fairly simple sites built in WordPress, so the plugins and solutions here are all WordPress-specific.
• A more complex site built on a different platform with different functions (e.g., e-commerce sites, more complex publishing sites) will have a lot of additional, more complex concerns and will also respond differently to these tactics than our sites did.
• Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to page speed; developers may tell you that to achieve a pure “best practice” page load time, you need to redesign your site (which may not be practical for your company at the moment). While that may be the case, there’s likely some combination of the tactics outlined below that you can implement to help improve page speed. Help developers to focus on the right metrics (which we’ll outline below) and work to get better.

All of that said, this post (and understanding some of the basic levers available to improving page speed) should help you better understand the potential for speed improvements on your site.

What are you optimizing for? Choosing the right page speed metrics

Like a lot of SEOs starting out, I focused my efforts on page speed, based on Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool recommendations. It’s straight from Google’s mouth, gives very easy-to-understand metrics (a grade, just like school!) and has useful suggestions for speeding up page load times.

The tool can definitely be helpful, but as you dig into page speed, you may recognize that:

• the grading can be a bit wonky. Sometimes you will speed up how quickly your page loads, and your score will drop. Sometimes you’ll do nothing, and the score will move around some. Remember that the holy grail here is to speed up your site for your visitors, so don’t just study for the test!
• it doesn’t appear likely that Google is using this score as a ranking signal so much as load times in Google Chrome relative to other sites within the search results you’re appearing in, as Search Engine Land contributor Daniel Cristo points out.

That bolded bit above about your speed being factored in relative to your SERP competitors is very important; if you have a simple B2B site, you may look at a successful e-commerce site and say, “Their site is way slower than ours and does great! We should be fine!” But the reality is, that’s not who you’re competing with. You want your site to be as fast as it can be, so you should be comparing it to the sites that are ranking in the most important search results for your site.

So, if we’re not using Google’s PageSpeed Insight tool scores as the be-all and end-all for our optimization efforts, what metrics should we be focusing on?

Search Engine Land columnist Chris Liversidge does a great job of breaking this down in further detail in his excellent post on different page speed events, but effectively my focus was on:

• time to first byte (TTFB) — How quickly after a request is made that your server and/or CDN (which we’ll get to in a bit) sends the first byte of data.
• critical render path/start render — Essentially, when your “above the fold” content is rendered.
• full page render — When the entire page is loaded.

Again, we want to focus on the user experience on our site, so making sure that the content above the fold is delivered lightning-quick and that the entire page loads quickly are really the main concerns. The TTFB metric (while imperfect) can be helpful in that it lets us know if our load time issue is a result of server problems.

So these are our metrics. How do we know if our pages are even slow, though?

Page speed measurement tools

First, we’ll need a tool to measure them. Fortunately, there are a lot of great free tools for these purposes. I used Web Page Test, which lays these out pretty simply. Here are the results for Search Engine Land, which are quite good for such a visual home page and a large and complex publishing site:

Where tools are concerned, there are a lot of options to measure speed and get suggestions, including:

And others. For our purposes here, I’ll be using data from Web Page Test.

What are our goals? What’s a ‘good’ page speed?

Again, the page load times will vary significantly from niche to niche and SERP to SERP, so our initial goal should simply be “get better.” That said, let’s look at some general best-practice guidelines around target times for these events:

• TTFB — Ideally under 200 ms (milliseconds), at least under 500 ms (A Moz study from a few years ago found that many top-ranking sites had a TTFB of 350 ms, while lower-ranked sites were frequently closer to 650 ms.)
• Start render — Ideally under 1 second, at least kept under 2 seconds.
• Full-page render — Ideally under 3 seconds, at least kept under 5 seconds. (Google’s John Mueller recommends under 2- to 3-second load times and mentions there that he uses Web Page Test as well.)

Again, if your full page load times are coming in at 15 seconds, and it’s 5 seconds before critical path rendering is complete, don’t just throw up your hands. Start optimizing and work to get those numbers down, even if you may not be able to get them to under a second.

Faster is better!

OK, so what can you actually do to improve page speed?

Let’s say you measure your page speed, and it’s slow; what can you do to make a difference?

The most common suggestions from Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool (and from optimization experts) include:

• reducing server response time.
• enabling compression.
• leveraging browser caching.
• eliminate render blocking code above the fold (CSS and JS).
• minify code.
• compress and resize images.

I’ll walk through here what optimizations I was able to implement on four different WordPress sites, and the before/after load times resulting from those optimizations. Again, these numbers won’t be true for all sites, and not every best practice will have the same impact on every site. But I think that through this process, you’ll see how some simple, quick optimizations can have a major impact on speed.

Please note that while there are some optimizations you can make with a basic understanding of HTML, there are some inflection points where it’s important to get a technical resource to jump in and figure out the best way to improve your site’s load times.

Step 1: Benchmarking our page speed metrics

First, I took a snapshot of each site’s page speed metrics on the site’s home page and a deeper article page. I did this specifically for the purposes of this post. If you’re looking to optimize your site, you’ll ideally want to look at metrics sitewide, or at least on a sampling of your highest-traffic pages and across a typical page for each template on your site.

Compared with some sites, these numbers aren’t terrible — but for simple content sites built on WordPress without a lot of bells and whistles, there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement.

What we did was implement four different commonly recommended page speed optimizations. Below, we’ll see the impact of each optimization as it was implemented, and then the cumulative impact of all of the optimizations.

So let’s dig into the optimizations.

Step 2: Code clean-up

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool recommended we “minify” each of the sites’ CSS, JavaScript and HTML. For this, we used a free WordPress plugin called Autoptimize. It took about 20 minutes to set up across the four sites:

After optimizing HTML, JS and CSS and loading the JS and CSS inline, Google’s tool moved minification and “Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content” into the “Optimizations Found” column:

What was the impact?

As you can see, a majority of the pages saw improvement, and some saw significant 20-percent-plus upgrades. But in some cases, there was very little percentage improvement, or even worse performance. There is some variance from test to test, but what you see is that while these improvements will generally improve page speed, their level of impact varies and is dependent on the site.

Please note: This is the free version of the plugin with a “best guess” at ideal settings. Be careful in making changes to your site’s code, and as I’ll mention later in the post, this is a particular area where you may want to look to a developer for guidance.

Step 3: Browser caching

Next, we wanted to leverage browser caching. Typically, you can use WordPress plugins like WP Super Cache or WP Rocket for this purpose, but these sites were hosted on WP Engine, which has some compatibility issues with some of those plugins. So, we simply enabled the WP Engine object caching:

What was the impact?

As you can see, this had a more dramatic impact than our code cleanup efforts, and for two of the sites we saw dramatic performance improvements of 20 to 30 percent, with just two pages seeing an uptick in start render time.

Step 4: Implement a CDN

Again, WP Engine has its own CDN option, so we enabled that, which is also an extremely simple process in WP Engine:

What was the impact?

This is the first implementation where we actually saw a marked drop-off in performance. A few things to note there:

• A CDN is implemented to improve page speed for users in different parts of the country, so theoretically its (positive) impact should be more for different test cases in different areas around the world.
• Again, this was just one test against a small number of sites — other folks have tested the WP Engine CDN and seen better results, so your mileage may vary there.

The important takeaway here is really more that, once again, not every optimization will have the same impact on every site, and occasionally, some efforts will have minimal or no real impact.

Step 5: Image optimization

Finally, we worked on compressing and resizing images on each of the sites. In some cases, the images on the sites had already been compressed, and the biggest culprit was (as you’ll see) the home page for site four. I find that on sites that have been ignoring it, image optimization is frequently the quickest, easiest and highest-impact page speed win.

To do this, we used an image compression plugin called Optimus. We also compressed and resized each of the images on the pages “by hand” to make sure compression didn’t impact quality and that the files were as small as possible:

There are a number of image optimization plugins for WordPress including, but not limited to:

Whenever you use these kinds of plugins, you do have to be cognizant of potential image quality/rendering issues somewhere on your site if you’re applying them to all of the existing images in your media library. (After some additional testing/recommendations from page speed pros — more on that below — we actually switched over to Short Pixel.)

There are also a number of tools available to compress individual images before you upload them as well, including:

And there are many others as well.

What was the impact?

As you can see from a couple of the home pages, compressing images can lead to some of the biggest page load wins. Best of all, compressing images and replacing the uncompressed versions is a task for which you won’t generally need any kind of development help.

Again, though, the level of improvement is dependent upon the site. Sites where images have already been compressed and resized (or just happened to be smaller) will obviously see little to no gain from this particular step.

So, what was the cumulative impact of our efforts?

As you can see, the results here vary from site to site. But we’ve shaved as much as 2 seconds off of load times by following these steps, and in almost every instance, we improved the speed at which visitors are seeing our above-the-fold content.

But some load times actually got a bit worse for all of our efforts, and it seemed that for a simple site, we should be able to beat a lot of these load times. So, what else can you do?

BONUS STEP: Hire a pro!

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i hope you like this post on Daily Search Forum Recap: September 26, 2017

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See details of post Why going global is essential to your business below

As the world becomes increasingly connected, it’s becoming more vital than ever for virtually all businesses, regardless of size, to have a global online presence. As Search Engine Land columnist Brendan McGonigle rightly notes, if you only advertise in the United States, you’re missing out on billions of potential customers. But taking a one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it.

For example, while Google has a considerable presence in Russia, you won’t want to overlook the SEO and SEM options offered by market leader Yandex. And if you want to venture into China, it’s critical to know the ins and outs of the dominant search platform that serves the country, Baidu.

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i hope you like this post on New Google iOS App Has Related Content Bar

Google announced Tuesday they launched a new update to their iOS search app that has a new content bar. The content bar appears as the user scrolls up on the content, revealing related content and webpages related to the content they are reading.

Google said “suggestions for related content when you pull up the bottom of the page,” there is “no need to type anything into the search box,” Google added.

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See details of post 3 behavioral stats for retailers to supercharge your holiday strategy below

What’s different about the holidays this year? If you’re a marketer, you need to know how your target consumers have changed their needs, wants and shopping habits before you can truly craft your best seasonal strategy. You also had better keep an eye on what your competitors are doing differently.

At the company I work for, Salsify, we analyze aggregate retail search activity, and we’ve discovered it grows more widely distributed during the shopping period leading up to the holidays. We’ve recently conducted research (registration required) on the keywords that shoppers use around the holidays and we’ve identified important opportunities for brands to expand their keyword lists. Leading brands are also dramatically boosting the pace of their product content updates to capitalize on the opportunity throughout the season to win market share.

Let’s run through the top three takeaways from our study:

1. The 2016 holiday season drove a 30 percent increase in the number of top retail search terms — those in the 90th percentile or above in terms of search frequency.

Consumers aren’t just searching more during the holiday season; they are also searching across a much wider variety of terms. An analysis of all retail searches run across several of our company’s retail partners between January and December 2016 showed that the universe of “popular search queries” expands considerably in November and December.

What this means for brands is pretty evident: You need to be responsive to this change in behavior. Just to be found, let alone bought by your target customers, your product content on Amazon, Walmart and other channels needs to reflect relevant, holiday-oriented terms as the season gets under way.

If your product fits the description of a “stocking stuffer” or a “great gift for kids,” for example, it’s vital that you add in language during the month of October or early November — just as consumers are switching into gift-buying mode.

2. Seventy-six percent more product detail page content updates were pushed during an average holiday month versus an average non-holiday month.

Brands are indeed taking a substantially more active role in their product content leading into the holiday season.

We examined six full months of product content pushes and updates across more than 50 large retailers in the apparel, toys, home and garden and associated industries (all of them were our company’s customers). Collectively, the brands included in this sample oversee the management of more than 10 million SKUs.

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See details of post SEO 101: Which URL versions to add to Google Search Console below

Google Search Console serves as an excellent (not to mention free) source of technical data about your website’s organic visibility and performance. To maximize its usefulness, it’s important to properly set up your website in Search Console by adding all versions of your domain as properties that you manage.

Let’s assume the domain name of the website is https://example.com/.

The first step here is to add the following to Google Search Console as a new property:

     example.com

Make sure to verify the domain name, preferably using the a TXT record or CNAME record in the DNS.

Next, add the www version as a property (even if it redirects to the non-www version):

     www.example.com

In this case, both URLs above redirect to the HTTPS version of the website (learn how to move your website to HTTPS). That means that these variations will also need to be added as two separate properties in Google Search Console:

     https://example.com/

     https://www.example.com/

Note that you must specifically include “https://” when adding these two properties, which you did not have to do with the HTTP version. If no protocol is defined when adding a property to Google Search Console, it defaults to the HTTP-protocol.

At this point, the following URLs have been added to Google Search Console as properties, even if the HTTP versions do not serve any content and redirect fully to the HTTPS versions:

     http://example.com/

     http://www.example.com/

     https://example.com/

     https://www.example.com/

To summarize, for any website on its own domain and being served only from the HTTP-protocol, at a bare minimum, two versions of your domain need to be present in Google Search Console. For any website on its own domain and being served from the HTTPS protocol, at a bare minimum, four versions of your domain need to be present in Google Search Console.

Getting more data from Google Search Console

If the website has any subdomains, or language/country/content or otherwise specific subdirectories, it will be beneficial to add these properties separately in Google Search Console. Doing so will allow you to get more data, set geographic targets or define specific site maps. (Note that this also includes subdomains that are not meant for indexing, such as staging servers, or have no data available, such as an admin login subdomain.)

Let’s assume the website has two additional subdomains (blog and news), two language subdirectories (DE and EN), two content-specific subdirectories (product and amp) and a staging subdomain all on the HTTPS-protocol variation. This means that, in addition to the URLs above, the following additional URLs also need to be added as new properties in Google Search Console:

     https://blog.example.com/

     https://news.example.com/

     https://example.com/de/

     https://example.com/en/

     https://example.com/amp/

     https://example.com/product/

     https://staging.example.com/

To be safe, it is best to also add the following as new properties in Google Search Console:

     http://blog.example.com/

     http://news.example.com/

     http://example.com/de/

     http://example.com/en/

     http://example.com/amp/

     http://example.com/product/

     http://staging.example.com/

And to be extra, extra safe, the following (www versions) can also be added as new properties to Google Search Console:

     https://www.example.com/de/

     https://www.example.com/en/

     https://www.example.com/amp/

     https://www.example.com/product/

And

     http://www.example.com/de/

     http://www.example.com/en/

     http://www.example.com/amp/

     http://www.example.com/product/

Now, Google Search Console can provide additional specific and detailed search-related data, such as Search Analytics data, for each subdomain and subdirectory.

Making the data more useful

If all the URL variations mentioned above are added as properties, there are now 24 separate properties in Google Search Console, each one providing specific and valuable insights on how Google “sees” the website. So it may be hard to know which property to check for ranking data in Google Search Console Search Analytics. Luckily, Google added a new feature called “property sets” last year.

Property sets combine the data from several properties and present the data in a unified view. To create a property set, go to the Google Search Console and click “Create a set.” Next, give the set a name and add previously verified Google Search Console properties to the set.

There are various property sets you may find useful in terms of data segmentation; below are my suggestions for grouping properties together.

All data property set

To get one source for all ranking data in Google Search Console for the website, add all 24 properties to one property set (highly recommended):

     http://example.com/

     http://www.example.com/

     https://example.com/

     https://www.example.com/

     https://blog.example.com/

     https://news.example.com/

     https://example.com/de/

     https://example.com/en/

     https://example.com/amp/

     https://example.com/product/

     https://www.example.com/de/

     https://www.example.com/en/

     https://www.example.com/amp/

     https://www.example.com/product/

     https://staging.example.com/

     http://blog.example.com/

     http://news.example.com/

     http://example.com/de/

     http://example.com/en/

     http://example.com/amp/

     http://example.com/product/

     http://www.example.com/de/

     http://www.example.com/en/

     http://www.example.com/amp/

     http://www.example.com/product/

     http://staging.example.com/

English language data

To narrow the ranking data in Google Search Console for the English part of the website, group the following into another property set:

     https://example.com/en/

     https://www.example.com/en/

     http://example.com/en/

     http://www.example.com/en/

German language data

To narrow the ranking data in Google Search Console for the German part of the website, group the following into another property set:

     https://example.com/de/

     https://www.example.com/de/

     http://example.com/de/

     http://www.example.com/de/

News/blog data

To narrow the ranking data in Google Search Console for the news/blog part of the website, group the following into a property set:

     https://blog.example.com/

     http://blog.example.com/

     https://news.example.com/

     http://news.example.com/

Product page data

To narrow the ranking data in Google Search Console for just the product part of the website, group the following into a property set:

     https://example.com/product/

     https://www.example.com/product/

     http://example.com/product/

     http://www.example.com/product/

Keep track of staging URLs

To make sure none of the staging URLs are indexed, add the following to another property set:

     https://staging.example.com/

     http://staging.example.com/

Continue creating new property sets in Google Search Console if it makes sense for your business. Keep in mind that property sets do not show data retroactively — they only start collecting data from the moment they are created, and it can take several days before the first data becomes available for the user. Thus, creating a property set sooner rather than later is in the site owner’s best interest.

Just a start…

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i wish you like this article on Google Dance Tokyo Group Shot

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