November & December’19 Digital Marketing News & Updates
Welcome to the second episode of digital marketing news that Converged SEO Consultant Cemre Yildiz summarized. It’s for you to read the November and December’19 updates that are mostly about SEO in a bundle. Hope you’ll enjoy it in a blink.
November ‘19
Advanced Google Chrome Bookmarklets for SEOs
Glen Allsopp shares the Google Chrome bookmarks that save him time in his day to day SEO activities. First, he shows how to create them. With these bookmarks, you can easily find common site issues with just a single click. Let’s say you want to find indexed pages that you think they should not be indexed or you want to open multiple queried tabs such as Google Trends, UberSuggest and Wordtracker. There you go, he shares the codes for you to create some special bookmarks that can do this kind of things. If interested, you should check this out.
Check out Detailed Website for Glen Allsopp’s bookmarks
SEO Audits that Maximize Growth
Aleyda Solis presented this deck at SMXL19. You might have done audits to your websites. You might have done technical, content, link audits with detailed checklists. Even though you have the list of recommendations and necessary actions, you might not finish them all. And let’s be honest, you might postpone some of them until you see a traffic decline. And this happens quite often. She states that SEO audits should cover the most important and urgent items based on the project goal and business.
Check out SlideShare for Aleyda Solis’ presentation deck
A Journey Through SEO Testing with ODN
Talk to a UX person and whatever you ask, s/he’ll tell you that you should test that out first. Guessing is foolish for UX people. Yet, for many companies, SEO has no testing at all. Brew a fresh cup of tea or coffee while you enjoy Dominic Woodman’s presentation video which takes around 40 minutes. He takes us through what is needed for SEO tests.
Check out Distilled for Dominic Woodman’s article
The Effect of Title Length on Upvotes
Did you ever wonder about the title length and upvotes correlation? It might not be the ultimate lifesaver, but it’s nice to know how long the title is needed for posts in order to get more upvotes. More upvotes, more visibility.
What Google Says vs What SEOs Believe
Rand Fishkin and Eric Enge analyzed survey results. Maybe you missed it on Twitter. They rolled out a survey to see what SEOs believe. During the webinar, they discussed about the areas including page speed, AMP, content accuracy, etc. You can either watch the 40-minutes video or skim through the video transcript. 1584 professionals in the search marketing space around the world contributed to this survey, so it’s kind of a big deal for us.
There is a bunch of interesting discussion items. Let me share just one of them so you can go check for yourself:
Page speed. Most of the SEOs ranked that as the top important parameter. However, Rand Fishkin points out they still see slow websites that rank quite well on Google SERP and Eric Enge asks a simple question: “If that’s the case, why do SEOs or website owners do so little about it?”
Check out Perficient Digital for Rand Fishkin and Eric Enge
What are YouTube Tags and Which Ones Should You Add?
If you are on YouTube as a brand and looking for a simple process for adding tags to your YouTube videos, you should definitely check this one out. You’ll find answers to the following questions:
- What are YouTube tags?
- Why are YouTube tags important?
- How to add tags
- What are the best practices?
- What is the optimal length for the keyword tag?
Check out Ahrefs Blog for Joshua Hardwick’s article
Google Chrome Dev Summit 2019 Recap: What SEOs Need to Know
On 11th and 12th of November, Google hosted its annual Chrome Dev Summit where many Googlers took to the stage to share their advice for developers on how to build more performant websites. It’s not just for SEOs though. Anyone who has spare 29 minutes of time can easily read and understand the recap.
Check out DeepCrawl Blog for Ruth Everett’s recap
Understanding searches better than ever before
Last year, Google introduced and open-sourced a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, or as they call it–BERT, for short. In a nutshell, this technology enables anyone to train their own state-of-art question answering system.
Google also shares an example showing the difference between the SERP before and after BERT.
Check out Google Blog for details
A deep dive into BERT: How BERT launched a rocket into natural language understanding
As we talk about BERT, it would be a waste if we skip Dawn Anderson’s article on the subject. It’s a 30-minute read where you’ll learn the backstory and nuances of BERT’s evolution, how the algorithm works to improve human language understanding for machines and what it means for SEO and the work we do every day.
Check out Search Engine Land for Dawn Anderson’s article
How Much Content is Not Indexed in Google in 2019?
Bartosz Goralewicz’s talk covers Google’s indexing issues, how SEOs need to change their understanding of what a JavaScript website is, Onely’s new toolset, and lots more. As for those who may not know Bartosz Goralewicz yet, he is a well-known name when it comes to JavaScript and SEO. He underlines that JavaScript is not evil as some SEOs shout out, it’s just very complex.
Check out Onely Website for Bartosz Goralewicz’s session at SIXT SEO Wiesn
November’19 was full of great articles, so let me drop a few additional links without a wrap up for you to discover in your free time:
- Quora Marketing on Ahrefs Blog
- Accidentally Deindexing Your Site on Moz Blog
- Some Thoughts on Website Boundaries on Bing Blog
- How to Write a Blog Post on Orbitmedia Blog
- How to Calculate SEO ROI on The Inbounder Blog
December ‘19
The State of Mobile: Insights into Emerging Behaviours on Mobile Devices
Comscore’s 2019 Global State of Mobile report looks at the global mobile ecosystem to highlight trends and emerging opportunities. Behaviours related to mobile gaming, mobile commerce, ride-sharing and food ordering are explored in greater detail. Feel free to download this whitepaper if your business includes mobile strategy.
Check out Comscore for Jansen Bek’s article
If You Haven’t Optimized Your Website for Voice Search Yet, You’re OK
All the ‘optimise for voice‘ recommendations are questionable and in many cases, if not all, you can ignore them. Most of the information is misleading, uses the wrong data, the wrong sources and is even presented by sources that are confused about what Voice Search is. Despite this, the misinformation still spreads. Long story short, Voice Search isn’t changing SEO for most cases.
Check out Sistrix Blog for Juan Gonzalez’s article
20+ Google Analytics Reports, Metrics, & Tips for Measuring Your Blog’s Performance
In this guide that Elise Dopson shares, 90+ marketers share the Google Analytics reports, metrics, and best tips for measuring the performance of their blogs. You can learn about session quality, acquisition traffic, which metrics to use to Google Analytics to track, queries report, behaviour flow, content drilldown, and many more items.
Check out Databox Website for Elise Dopson’s article
JavaScript Indexing Delays Are Still an Issue for Google
Well, the title itself is the summary here. With Googlebot running on the most recent version of Chrome and JavaScript content being indexed faster than ever, it’s apparent that Google is getting better at indexing JavaScript. JavaScript indexing delays are still a massive issue as Tomek Rudzki underlines. “How long are those delays?” you might be wondering. You’ll be surprised when you see the results.
Check out Search Engine Journal for Tomek Rudzki’s article
Creating content that doesn’t compete with your eCommerce pages
This one is not relevant if you don’t own or manage an eCommerce website. So kindly skip this one.
For eCommerce sites, editorial content can be a fantastic way to attract new customers, build loyalty and showcase your product offerings in exciting ways. One common challenge that can quickly crop up though, is that of duplicate content where blog posts and product pages start targeting the same terms.
Planning and creating well thought out, unique content will mitigate your chances of duplication and benefit your rankings as a result.
Check out Builtvisible Blog for Carla Thomas’ article
Case Study: A Correlation Between Website Traffic and Google Broad Core Algorithm Updates
Mats Tolander shares a case study on an eCommerce website. That website got hit instantly on March 12th, 2019 by a Google Broad Core Algorithm Update. They witnessed a 30% traffic loss. Then they managed to get back up by the following Google Broad Core Algorithm Update on September 24, 2019. What they have done and the actions they have taken are tremendously easy to implement.
Check out Perficient Digital Blog for Mats Tolander’s article
Content Distribution Plan
“Publishing content can only take you so far; a content distribution plan makes sure that content is seen by the world.” as Ross Simmonds states. Producing content is one thing—distributing it is another. You can also watch the 10-minute video where he takes us through the article.
Check out Foundation Inc Website for Ross Simmonds’ article
How SEO for News can help all websites
Do you have a news website? If not, that’s OK as well for you to learn from this article since Google’s search ecosystem is vast and interconnected. A specific tactic that works in one area of SEO may contain valuable insights for other areas of SEO.
Google has an HTML File Size Limit? Where exactly that limit is, we are not sure. According to this article, it lies somewhere between 100 KB and 450 KB.
Check out Polemic Digital Website for the article
ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-Supervised Learning of Language Representations
You have seen the BERT update in November’19 updates. So I skip the general “What is BERT?” concept for everybody’s own sake. Google upgraded BERT on the 20th of December, just recently. ALBERT is being released as an open-source implementation on top of TensorFlow and includes a number of ready-to-use ALBERT pre-trained language representation models. When trained on the same larger dataset as XLNet and RoBERTa, ALBERT significantly outperforms all other approaches to date, and establishes a new state-of-the-art score at 89.4. The score was 72.0 for BERT. To get more advances in the NLP area, Google just announced that they are open-sourcing ALBERT to the research community.
Check out Google AI Blog for the article
The SEO’s Introduction to Rendering
As Jamie Alberico states “Rendering is the process where Googlebot retrieves your pages, runs your code, and assesses your content to understand the layout or structure of your site.” So rendering happens between the initial HTML and the rendered HTML. To see the initial HTML for yourself, simply view the page source. Rendered HTML is known as the DOM, a shorter way to say “Document Object Model”. She shouts out to us all: “Google can’t index what it can’t render.”
Check out Search Engine Journal for Jamie Alberico’s article
December’19 was also full of interesting news and free online courses, so let me drop a few additional links for you to discover in your free time:
