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Hello there! I’ve been busy with fun new client projects, launching my new Alexa Skill Flash Briefing - Daily SEO Tip.

You can enable it for your Alexa here or just say "Alexa, enable SEO Tips". Once the skill is enabled, simply ask "Alexa, what's in the news?". If you’re not on an Alexa device, you can follow along on my website here.

I’ve also been working on getting guests in line for my new podcast, "Digital Marketing Victories". Sign up to be notified when it launches.

Without further ado, here’s the news from the past month or so that you might find helpful:

Summary of how to combat zero-click searches

If you’ve been following my newsletter, you know that currently, organic search clicks are below 50%

Here are my thoughts on how you can counteract that trend, based on the smart discussions I’ve seen in this Forbes article, and this article.

Key takeaways:

  1. Funnel users into controlled environments. These environments include apps, email, and communities, Slack channels, Facebook groups or subreddits. I specifically encourage my clients to double down on their email list as they own that attention. 

  2. Become a destination before they search as websites that are destination get high repeat visits, direct traffic, and brand searches. You do that by using your domain in all of your advertising and educate your audience to search for brand terms like “National Cancer institute breast cancer”. You should double down on your brand to get them to go to you directly.

  3. Look at optimizing for long-tail search terms as they still are not generating Featured Snippets *yet* (consider using this tool to do that.)

Google Announcements and Updates

 

Google Algorithm update

Here’s some great data on the January 2020 Google algorithm update which illustrates that federal .gov sites don't’ get a free pass and can lose traffic if they are not managing their SEO program. 

Google removes the second URL if you rank for the Featured Snippet

Google has made a large change to Featured Snippets that will impact the traffic to your site and I wanted to let folks know.

Here's the tweet with the announcement:

Original tweet here

It used to show a second URL from your site beneath the Featured Snippet. Now, that URL is going to appear on the top of page 2.

Based on industry research, this is what the click-through was when you got both spots:

And now you're only going to get the click-through for the Featured Snippet slot - so 8.6% clickthrough vs. 28.2% clickthrough.

There's still brand impression value in ranking in the Featured Snippet, as well as the voice search potential, but you will see less traffic to your site. 

Here’s the full summary of what we know about the change. 

I would recommend that you annotate your analytics for Jan 22nd and watch to see how your site might be impacted.

Note, you can block Google from using your content for a Featured Snippet but before you do that you should evaluate the impact.

Here are some great steps for how to do that from @ohgm

Before axing the snippet you can check:

a) is no-one else going to take the snippet when I demote? 

"{query} -you.tld"

b) would I still rank 1st?

"&num=9" @512banque

c) is this true for every query this URL ranks for?

d) is the CTR of a snippet <1st for these queries.

And are you curious as to how overall various industries have been impacted? If so, you’re going to want to check out this article. There’s also Kevin Indig’s analysis of G2 which found negligible impact.

Table schema disappeared?

Google may have dropped the table schema for datasets. It seems as though if you try to find table representations showing up in search, you won’t be able to find them. More here.

Chrome to block website push notifications starting February 2020

Starting this month, Google will begin blocking push notifications by default in Chrome (Chrome 80 to be precise). They are following suit with what Mozilla Firefox has implemented. Goodbye to all those annoying push notifications.

Original tweet here

Bing Announcements and Updates

Bing launches a Google+ type service

Seriously. But they are calling them Bing Pages. 

Here’s Bing’s quote about the feature:

 "Participants who sign up for this program get their own page on Bing to highlight their contact information and social media channels. They can also promote social media posts in relevant search results–at no cost. Businesses can use Bing Pages to customize their Outlook profile with updated contact info, images, and content. These changes also appear in Bing search results."

AND you can promote any social media post on a Bing page and it’s free. Here’s more from Glenn Gabe and his test of the feature:

Original tweet here 

I am 100% convinced that this data would feed into their Knowledge Graph, Assuming this and considering Bing is used as the search default for almost 50% of voice searches, it makes sense to claim your name and update your contact details.

Technical SEO

2019 Tech SEO Boost

The full edited individual videos from 2019 Tech SEO Boost are now available and I’d highly encourage you to check them out. 

E-commerce podcast interview that is a must-listen

I love Experts On The Wire, and in fact, Dan is going to be a guest on my upcoming podcast! But it's this episode that I have listened to and come back to for tips the most.

Structured Data Toolbox for SEOs presentation

An amazing and thorough presentation by Aleyda Solis. Definitely bookmark.

How does Google de-duplicate pages?

What’s surprising is that Google does not use canonical tags as the first signal. Here’s what was shared at the Google Webmaster Conference:

1st: Determine ownership/avoid hijacking

2nd: UX, speed, security

3rd: SEO signals, 301s, canonicals, sitemaps

How hackers wreak havoc

This is a great article to review if you ever get pulled into conversations with potential clients who need you to troubleshoot what seems like a website hack. He also covers other shady Internet behavior that SEOs should be aware of. 

Wayback Machine’s API

I LOVE using the Wayback Machine when diagnosing traffic decreases on sites. It's just SO helpful to see what a website looked like and how its navigation functioned prior to redesigns, etc. It turns out you can get to that insight faster (and for an entire folder) by modifying the URL as so:

Other ways to improve page speed

This post with four out of the box ideas for improving page speed is awesome and highlighted new tips I was not aware of like: 

  • You can flip icons to SVG format, compress them, and then serve them inline (in the HTML code) which eliminates round trips to the server to download them...BIG timesaver!

  • You can also inline .pngs.

  • You can create a dropdown box without JS and CSS - in native HTML with the HTML datalist element more here.

  • Read more” can also be implemented with native HTML

I am totally adding these to my client speed recommendations...


Google Says Schema Markup Not Going To Get Any Easier 

Yes,really. More complicated. 

Here’s the quote from John Mueller:

 "I think in the future, at least in a near-term future, we will have more types of structured data markup and it will continue to get more complicated probably...But purely from a markup point of view, I don't see this getting any easier, unfortunately."

If this seems overwhelming to you, I’d recommend getting started with this schema.org guide by Yoast.

Widgets might be dying

Based on this recent feedback from John Mueller, I’m not sure if there’s a way you can engineer them to *not* look spammy:

See the full tweet story here

Content

Google Top Stories are selected by importance scores

Google made an announcement about how they select the top news stories and how they are going to be powered more by machine learning and in this post, Bill Slawski digs into a related patent that hints at Google picks the top stories in search based on clustering topically related news stories, and pulling out quotes and opinion pieces in that top news carousel. This is personalized to the user and the patent outlines the following criteria that might be used to select the top story (the bolding below is my addition):

  • A number of articles written about a news story

  • A cumulative number of clicks on articles about a news story

  • A cumulative number of social actions (shares, likes, etc.)

  • A cumulative number of queries received from user devices for which articles for a news story are responsive are selected, or both

  • A rate of change of a metric for a news story (when the metric may be clicks, queries, social actions)

  • A time, recency or freshness of publication related to a news story

  • The expertise of a publisher in a certain news topic or geographic area 

  • A historical click rate on articles from the publisher

  • Citations made to the article and/or publisher

  • The relevance of the article to the news story

I think this is another signal of Google being able to determine the expertise of your site (from a content perspective) AND a sign that they are using user engagement signals to determine how your site performs in search. 

Why does long-form content perform better?

This research from SEMRush was not surprising to me as the longer guides on my site have always gotten more traffic, but in case you need to convince a client, there are interesting takeaways from this SEMRush research.

  • Long pages/posts of 3000+ words get 3x more traffic, 4x more shares, and 3.5x more backlinks than articles of average length (901-1200 words) and conversely shorter articles (under 900 words) more likely have 0 social shares. 

  • Articles with long headlines (14+ words) get 2x more traffic, 2x more shares, and 5x more backlinks than articles with short headlines (7-10 words).

  • Articles with list headlines get 2x more traffic and 2x more social shares than other types, followed by guides and “how-to” articles. This is similar to research I saw years ago from Outbrain related to click-through rate. 

  • 36% of articles with H2+H3 tags have higher performance in terms of traffic, shares, and backlinks. I think this might be due to Google’s increased understanding of the text, and potentially the articles ranking for Fraggles (Google lifting chunks of text from the article and ranking it independently in search).

Most of this is the same outcome as similar research studies carried out by Brian Dean and HubSpot, that longer posts usually perform better on every level, 3000-word content gets 77.2% more links compared to 1000 words, and articles with a word count over 2,500 get shared the most on social media.

The bottom-line takeaway: If your article contains less than 3,000 word,s it seems like there is only a 50-50 chance that you’ll get any social media shares. This is also why over 90% of all content gets NO traffic from organic search.

Even e-commerce sites need informational content

An interesting case study from an SEO where the client decided to delete the only 25 informational content pages on its e-commerce site and LOST traffic. It adds support to the notion that e-commerce sites NEED informational content to have a robust organic traffic strategy. I’ve always looked at REI’s approach on how to do informational content well. 

See the full tweet story here

Voice SEO

New Google Assistant monthly data reports

Finally! We have updated numbers from Google and it turns out there are 500 million monthly active Google Assistant users. Also, Google Assistant is going to start reading webpages. This is the time to implement the speakable schema.org markup as it will use that first when reading your content back to users (see the next note below). 

Speakable markup is no longer restricted to just news sites

This is something that I predicted for my clients and with very little fanfare - there you go! You can add the speakable markup to your site to be used by Google Assistant and the Google Go apps.

See the full tweet story here

AlsoAsked.com now has .csv exports

If you’re running keyword research on popular questions for your voice search campaign, you should check out this tool - now with export abilities!

Using voice commands to drive your car

It has been reported that Apple is seeking a patent for “a new technology that would allow you to use voice commands to tell your self-driving car where you want to go, with the car doing the navigation, driving, and parking for you.” This system described in the patent application would be connected to your vehicle controls. Frankly, after testing the voice results for a client across Alexa and Google Home, the lack of accuracy concerns me if it's used to drive a car, but we’ll see. 

Local SEO

FYI, BrightLocal is now tracking local Knowledge Panels, which is great as having one for a local business takes up quite a bit of real estate. If you are curious as to how to get a Knowledge Panel, check out my guide.

Original tweet here

Audio SEO

In case you’ve missed the guide, please read this month's blogpost on optimizing audio assets!

SEO Measurement

Google Search Console data with better filters in Google Data Studio

 
Here’s another great Google Data Studio template to add to your arsenal. 


Changes in Google Search Console’s Indexed Pages report

Starting on December 15, 2019, the Index Coverage report was updated to more accurately report on indexed pages. You might see that some pages that were "Crawled - currently not indexed" are now known to be indexed. Here’s the tweet announcing the update:

Original tweet here

Avast is shutting down Jumpshot.

This is shocking as Jumpshot was the data used by Rand Fishkin to illustrate the declining organic clickthrough rate (and Google’s dominance). Also, there was some concern about which SEO tools used Jumpshot for their click-through rate data in their keyword tools. I was worried that SEMRush and Ahrefs have the same issues, but here’s the quote from Ahrefs related to how this shutdown impact their product: 

 “Over the last 3 years, many SEO tools started using clickstream data to power keyword research features, estimate search volumes and calculate some other metrics. SEMrush invested in relationships with multiple data vendors and many of these vendors work exclusively with us. So SEMrush products won’t be impacted by this in any way. From what we know some other leading SEO companies worked only with Jumpshot. While it’s too early to say, we might be the only source of reliable keyword data in the near future among key SEO players.”

And it seems like Moz has an alternative data source. But as of February 3, 2020, we are still waiting for Ahrefs to release an official statement on the matter (unfortunately). Stay tuned...

3rd party cookies being phased out in Chrome

Google to ‘phase out’ third-party cookies in Chrome, but not for two years' - The Verge

If you have been using cross-site cookies (say to track traffic across the multiple domains your brand owns), you need to make changes. Check out this blog post for more of the 411. 


Google Sheets Formulas

I’m bookmarking this one. Not sure where it’s been all my life. Along with this one that is an Excel formula cheat sheet.


New Tools/Resources:

Track your presence in the Knowledge Graph

If you want to track your presence in the Knowledge Graph, you can try this tool: https://tools.kalicube.pro/add-brand

And you can also use the Knowledge Graph API via this easy search interface to search the Knowledge Graph: https://carlhendy.com/knowledge-graph-search/


Pinterest Trends

Love Google Trends, but want the same research for Pinterest? I have a tool for you! Pinterest Trends gives you the search volume of a keyword on a relative scale of 0-100. It also shows you related terms to the ones you searched for.

What does my site cost?

This is a neat visualization tool that will put a dollar figure on how much your site costs a user to run on their mobile phone based on your slow load speeds.

Tame the Bots

A new to me fetch and render tool that also simultaneously runs lighthouse audit reports. Check it out!

The hardest marketing skill - SEO! 

Based on a Microsoft study, SEO tops the list as one of the most challenging “hard” skills to master. Read more below about the soft skills you should have in your arsenal too, as you can’t be successful in SEO unless you can persuade people.

Hard skills:

  • SEO

  • Data analysis

  • Copywriting

  • Behavioral analysis

  • Automation

Soft skills:

  • Creativity

  • Humility

  • Empathy

  • Adaptability

  • Transparency

Stay tuned for the Digital Marketing Victories podcast as we are going to focus on how to acquire those soft skills to make you more successful!

That’s it from me this month. Follow along with my daily SEO tips or keep your eye out for next month’s newsletter!

Best,
Katherine

Katherine Watier Ong
WO Strategies LLC
www.wostrategies.com

Copyright © 2020 WO Strategies, All rights reserved.


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