October’19 Digital Marketing News & Updates
Welcome to the first episode of digital marketing news that Converged SEO Consultant Cemre Yildiz summarized. It’s for you to read the October’19 updates that are mostly about SEO in a bundle. Hope you’ll enjoy it in a blink.
Search in 2020
Tom Anthony from Distilled shared his “Search in 2020” presentation deck on SlideShare. It’s not easy to summarize a 133 slides-long presentation but let me try my best. He takes us through the browser changes that possibly will impact SEO next year.
Googlebot is now evergreen meaning that it is working in parallel with Chrome 74. So it stopped following Google Chrome 33 versions behind. There is a bunch of new features, but the most exciting one may include the “modern” Javascript features. Let’s not get too excited though. Tom underlined that Javascript still can be problematic as they’ve run some tests regarding this issue.
Check out SlideShare for Tom Anthony’s full presentation deck
Guide to Web Image and Animation Optimization
If you haven’t seen how images can affect page load times yet, consider yourself lucky. It’s actually very easy to fix, yet again you can find huge images being downloaded each time you visit a webpage.
Marcin Gorcyzca shares easy ways to make images smaller without changing quality, resolution or format. Image optimization is key to success in the mobile era we are living in. Mobile screens are smaller and the internet connection is definitely not the same as you are accustomed to desktops.
He shares the best tip: Know your audience. Go into your Google Analytics account and check for the Screen Resolution report to find out who’s visiting your website.
Check out Onely Blog for Marcin Gorcyzca’s article
YouTube Optimization Tips
Aleyda Solis also shared her SMX presentation deck on SlideShare. She presented her YouTube optimization tips. Again, this will be hard to cover in a nutshell, she has 154 slides.
She bought Camtasia to record herself and her screen. Then she started uploading to YouTube and announced her YouTube channel. She discovered many useful things along the way: that many people watch YouTube on their TV sets, not laptops or PCs. Or how most users discover new videos, spoiler alert, not by YouTube search. 70% of the videos are discovered by YouTube recommendations. In short, you have to optimize for relevance, retention and engagement if you want to get discovered in YouTube platform.
Check out SlideShare for Aleyda’s full presentation deck
Custom Extraction Using an SEO Crawler for CRO and UX Insights
We included this video transcript from Luke Carthy to our news & updates for October’19 edition not for everybody to enjoy, but for people who are interested specifically in SEO and UX combination. Consider watching this video which takes up only 7 minutes of your time if you are interested in both topics combined.
Check out Moz Blog for Luke Carthy’s video
UX will not make you Uber, but it’s still important
Speaking of UX, here’s an article which is written by Nils Andersson Wimby. As our brains’ usually tend to choose the outcast one, being different and unique as a business creates a huge advantage.
He shares two different competition strategies: blue ocean and red ocean which is already summarized in the table above. According to his point of view, we are prone to seeing things through the “Blue Ocean” glasses.
Check out Econsultancy for Nils’ article
Social Media Marketing Trends 2020
Since 2019 is coming to end in about two months, we’ve been seeing many blogs and writers taking 2020 as the headline. Joanna Carter shared social media marketing trends for 2020 that we also think you might consider great tips.
“It is more important than ever before for marketers to understand and stay ahead of the curve when it comes to social media.” she states. It’s vital to notice how people are moving away from social media or limiting how much time they spend on social media platforms which is unlikely the case for previous years.
Check out Smart Insights for Joanna Carter’s article
How To Turn Your FAQ Into Evergreen Content
“The best time to answer questions is before people ask them” Jonathan Greene points out.
Most of the digital marketers do what other businesses do exactly when it comes to FAQ. FAQ section is actually a section where you can promote your business’ values or underline your strength very easily.
Check out Medium for Jonathan Greene’s article
No More Mixed Messages About HTTPS
To improve user privacy and security on the web and present a clearer browser security UX to users, Google announced there will not be any mixed messages about HTTPS on Google Chrome.
Check out Google Blog for the announcement
The User is the Query – The Rise of Predictive Proactive Search
Dawn Anderson shares the struggle to race up with the programmatic solutions that are spraying content and information almost in every platform. She also shares great info such as almost 98% of visits are people window shopping where only 2% is the average e-commerce conversion.
In addition to that, 15% of queries on Google, on a daily basis, are completely new. That’s where predictive proactive search welcomes us.
Check out SlideShare for Dawn Anderson’s full presentation deck
SearchLove London 2019: The Great Big Round-Up
SearchLove takes place in London every year and 2019 is just over. Sally Poundall from Distilled put all the presentation decks and speeches together and shares important details with us.
You can find practical tips for improving E-A-T, how to use qualitative data to make human-centred decisions, integrating organic search, paid search & performance content, and many more topics are covered.
Check out Distilled for SearchLove London 2019 Round Up
Extract the crawl graph data from search console
This is really quick to implement. It’s from Dominic Woodman. It would take 5 minutes of time to extract the crawl graph data from Google Search Console, max! He shares the steps through a GIF image.
Welcome BERT: Google’s latest search algorithm to better understand natural language
There is no single day that Google algorithm does not change. However, there is a number of updates that has a big impact, such as RankBrain. In October, we had one of these huge updates and it’s called BERT. As Barry Schwartz shared on Search Engine Land, BERT will impact 1 in 10 of all search queries. This is the biggest change in search since Google released RankBrain.
BERT is Google’s neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.
Check out Search Engine Land for BERT Update
Testing redirects before and after a website migration
Website migrations are the times you have to plan ahead and should be careful by watching your steps. Eoghan Henn shares how to test redirects before and after a website migration. Especially be careful and make sure you remember to move your redirect rules to the old domain before your new website goes live if you are switching domains. Hopefully you’ll also avoid redirect chains.
Check out Searchviu for Eoghan Henn’s article
What Does It Mean to Have Good E-A-T?
For the past year or so, it seems the SEO community can’t stop talking about E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. But it should not be limited to the SEO community. Every website owner who is in the Your-Money-Your-Life niches should know about E-A-T. Lily Ray puts it together for what E-A-T is and what it’s not.
Check out Searchviu for Eoghan Henn’s article
Google’s New Customizable Search Snippets Begin Rolling Out In October’19
First of all, please be cool. It is not designed to affect the search rankings of sites that utilize the new markup. The new markup will only affect how snippets from the site are displayed in search results.
It’s Google’s new markup, which lets site owners only to customize how their search snippets are displayed.
Check out Search Engine Journal for Matt Southern’s article
An Introduction to Python for Technical SEO
We have been hearing about Python a lot more nowadays. Ruth Everett shares how it can help automate SEO tasks. If you are not a data scientist or you don’t have a computer science background, don’t be shy to skim through this article.
Did you know that you can generate text from images with Python? She shares ready to be used scripts in this article that you can simply copy and use.
Check out Search Engine Journal for Ruth’s article
Basic SEO Data Analysis With Python
Speaking of Python, it would be a waste if we neglect Hulya Coban’s article on the very basic SEO data analysis with Python. She released it at the end of September’19, so think of this as a bonus in the October’19 news & updates.
Why would you use Python for the basic stuff, you might as yourself when there are Excel and Google Sheets right under your hand. Well, they won’t do well in the long run when your data sets are growing day by day. So if you are working with huge websites with millions of pages, Python would make a great BFF.
Check out Zeo Blog for Hulya Coban’s article
