Laying the foundations of good SEO: the most important tasks (part 2)
It is imperative to lay the foundations of good SEO by accomplishing time-tested tasks that both beginner and advanced SEOs usually follow in their daily routines. Sergey Grybniak shares his SEO priorities.
Keyword stuffing is terrible for your SEO. Here’s what to do instead
Once-upon-a-time, keyword stuffing was a relatively successful SEO strategy. However, today stuffing a keyword into your content too many times can actually knock the stuffing out of your search rankings, or even cause your content to be removed from search listings entirely. Kim Kosaka explains.
How to organize your keyword lists
Keyword research is a fundamental tactic that can completely transform the overall marketing strategies of those who take it seriously. Ann Smarty explains
Video and search: YouTube, Google, the alternatives and the future
When it comes to being visible online, video content is increasingly proving its worth as a way to grab attention and – crucially – to engage meaningfully with internet users. Luke Richards takes a look at the rise of video, alternatives to YouTube, social and what it all means for search marketers.
Introducing the Indexing API for job posting URLs
Last June we launched a job search experience that has since connected tens of millions of job seekers around the world with relevant job opportunities from third party providers across the web. Timely indexing of new job content is critical because m…
Rise in voice search for local businesses brings new opportunities and challenges
Voice search is growing exponentially, and when something becomes this prominent it behoves the major search engines to make changes to the ways they work to make these experiences more fluid and enjoyable for the end user. Jamie Pitman reviews consumers’ current use of voice search with regard to local search and how you can optimize for future growth
Laying the foundations of good SEO: the most important tasks (part 1)
Nobody ever said SEO was easy, and with constant algorithm updates and new technologies to consider, it’s a continuous work in progress. Sergey Grybniak shares his SEO priorities to lay the foundations of success.
How to transfer insights from search to social campaigns
Sana Ansari shares some of the easiest ways to gather learnings from search engine marketing and leverage them in paid social.
Eight steps for a bulletproof local search strategy
Local search takes a lot of hard work and is competitive, but get it right and the pay-off can be huge. Manish Dudharejia shares his eight fundamental actions to get you started.
Google’s ‘More Results’ button: a search marketer’s POV
Google is continually making its SERPs richer, more feature-led, and increasingly intuitive on desktop, but how the SERPs are being displayed across mobile devices deserves special attention from marketers. It’s a space that presents its own challenges and opportunities, writes Luke Richards.
SEW Interview: Clark Boyd on visual search
Visual search is still quite an abstract concept for most of us, but it is already impacting our marketing and SEO strategies in a huge way. We sat down with Clark Boyd to pick his brains on the developments and how he recommends approaching them.
Where we’re going, we won’t need websites
As voice becomes dominant in search, and users turn to social media, apps and news aggregators for their content – and not to mention the rise in virtual reality – Kevin Gibbons asks whether we will still need websites in future.
Tools to assist your SEO check-up
Whether you are new to SEO and looking for a litmus test of your website’s health, or have an ongoing campaign that may need a little refreshing, it’s always a good idea to perform regular check-ups or audits. Simon Ensor reviews some of the tools you can use to provide indicators of success, or areas for improvement.
How to expand marketing reach in the slow season, part 3: Yahoo Gemini
Yahoo Gemini can be an excellent source of reach, new users, and even direct response with its retargeting options. It’s worth investing your time in as you hit your slow season and are looking for incremental volume, writes Sana Ansari.
The 12 most important elements of a technical SEO audit
There are a number of technical SEO elements you can check during your next SEO audit. From XML Sitemaps to duplicate content, being proactive about optimization on-page and off is a must, writes Marcela De Vivo
An introduction to innovation in consumer search optimization
The digital retail space has seen a huge number of disruptive innovations over the years, from artificial intelligence (AI) offering tailored recommendations to smart chatbots transforming and streamlining customer service and the new additions of drone deliveries and augmented reality. Despite these leaps, most search technologies still used by modern retailers and brands are lagging behind. Markus Stripf explains
SEO strategies and keyword rankings: mobile versus desktop
Tracking your keywords on mobile and desktop is absolutely essential for both reporting accuracy and for supporting SEO strategies. Jessie Moore explains why you should separate your keyword strategies for each device, and shares quick tips for consideration
We updated our job posting guidelines
Last year, we launched job search on Google to connect more people with jobs. When you provide Job Posting structured data, it helps drive more relevant traffic to your page by connecting job seekers with your content. To ensure that job seekers are getting the best possible experience, it’s important to follow our Job Posting guidelines.
We’ve recently made some changes to our Job Posting guidelines to help improve the job seeker experience.
- Remove expired jobs
- Place structured data on the job’s detail page
- Make sure all job details are present in the job description
Remove expired jobs
When job seekers put in effort to find a job and apply, it can be very discouraging to discover that the job that they wanted is no longer available. Sometimes, job seekers only discover that the job posting is expired after deciding to apply for the job. Removing expired jobs from your site may drive more traffic because job seekers are more confident when jobs that they visit on your site are still open for application. For more information on how to remove a job posting, see Remove a job posting.
Place structured data on the job’s detail page
Job seekers find it confusing when they land on a list of jobs instead of the specific job’s detail page. To fix this, put structured data on the most detailed leaf page possible. Don’t add structured data to pages intended to present a list of jobs (for example, search result pages) and only add it to the most specific page describing a single job with its relevant details.
Make sure all job details are present in the job description
We’ve also noticed that some sites include information in the JobPosting structured data that is not present anywhere in the job posting. Job seekers are confused when the job details they see in Google Search don’t match the job description page. Make sure that the information in the JobPosting structured data always matches what’s on the job posting page. Here are some examples:
- If you add salary information to the structured data, then also add it to the job posting. Both salary figures should match.
- The location in the structured data should match the location in the job posting.
Providing structured data content that is consistent with the content of the job posting pages not only helps job seekers find the exact job that they were looking for, but may also drive more relevant traffic to your job postings and therefore increase the chances of finding the right candidates for your jobs.
If your site violates the Job Posting guidelines (including the guidelines in this blog post), we may take manual action against your site and it may not be eligible for display in the jobs experience on Google Search. You can submit a reconsideration request to let us know that you have fixed the problem(s) identified in the manual action notification. If your request is approved, the manual action will be removed from your site or page.
For more information, visit our Job Posting developer documentation and our JobPosting FAQ.
Posted by Anouar Bendahou, Trust & Safety Search Team
Using page speed in mobile search ranking
People want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible — studies show that people really care about the speed of a page. Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches. Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.
The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.
We encourage developers to think broadly how about performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics. Although there is no tool that directly indicates whether a page is affected by this new ranking factor, here are some resources that can be used to evaluate a page’s performance.
- Chrome User Experience Report, a public dataset of key user experience metrics for popular destinations on the web, as experienced by Chrome users under real-world conditions
- Lighthouse, an automated tool and a part of Chrome Developer Tools for auditing the quality (performance, accessibility, and more) of web pages
- PageSpeed Insights, a tool that indicates how well a page performs on the Chrome UX Report and suggests performance optimizations
As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please visit our webmaster forums.
Posted by Zhiheng Wang and Doantam Phan
Using page speed in mobile search ranking
People want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible — studies show that people really care about the speed of a page. Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches. Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.
The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.
We encourage developers to think broadly how about performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics. Although there is no tool that directly indicates whether a page is affected by this new ranking factor, here are some resources that can be used to evaluate a page’s performance.
- Chrome User Experience Report, a public dataset of key user experience metrics for popular destinations on the web, as experienced by Chrome users under real-world conditions
- Lighthouse, an automated tool and a part of Chrome Developer Tools for auditing the quality (performance, accessibility, and more) of web pages
- PageSpeed Insights, a tool that indicates how well a page performs on the Chrome UX Report and suggests performance optimizations
As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please visit our webmaster forums.
Posted by Zhiheng Wang and Doantam Phan