Our round-up of this year's best seaside SEO conference
My trip to BrightonSEO this year was my first (and long overdue) time attending the conference and I can say with 100% confidence that it was worth the time and expense. Not only was there an awful lot of great lessons and insight from the conference but I was lucky enough to be in Brighton during the warmest weekend of the year so far!
One of the main motivations for attending BrightonSEO was my determination to stay up to date with the latest trends and developments. Although I am no longer primarily responsible for SEO in my current role at PepsiCo, being aware of how search is evolving and where it’s likely to go is still an important consideration, as I believe it will be for all types of business and brands in the coming years as I’ll highlight in the sections that…
Chart of the Day: New research reveals that the vast majority of small businesses have only a basic understanding of SEO
A recent survey by Higher Visibility asked over four hundred and twenty small business owners about how well their internal teams understand SEO, and the results paint a rather dire picture for the state of SEO in small enterprises.
180 business owners (over one-third) either didn't know or reported that their team had no understanding of SEO. While over half of respondents said their team only possessed a basic understanding of SEO. In today's competitive SEO landscape, a basic grasp really isn't going to get you very far. If you want to effectively harness the power of organic search then you need to be using the latest techniques and not making any SEO mistakes, which those without a deep knowledge of the subject are likely to make.
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How to optimize your online images for search engines
There's an old phrase that says, 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. This may be true for the rest of world but not for Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines. When their bots crawl an image, for example my picture, they actually can't see the image and but they only see the context of the image from its filename and the Alt Text. Google also pick up the context from any captions and links to the page containing the image so it's important to make web editors aware of these factors too.
The potential commercial importance of getting image optimization right is shown by this example where images are shown 'above the fold' and typically get good clickthrough rates.
This example shows how, for some queries, Google will trigger a "OneBox" featuring…
Chart of the Day: New research shows average Moz Domain Authority across industry
Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz (a provider of SEO tools), which logarithmically ranks websites ability to rank in search engines on a scale from 1 to 100. It's an extremely useful metric for SEOs, because they can judge the value of getting a link from a site based on its domain authority. To calculate domain authority Domain Authority, Moz use over 40 signals from the website and match it to the results of machine learning against Google's algorithm to best model how search engine results are generated.
It is therefore, important to pay attention to domain authority, as it is probably the most accurate metric out there for how likely your site is to be ranking in search engines and drawing in large volumes of organic traffic. Its value as a metric also extends to helping you see…
Chart of the Day: DuckDuckGo searches increase tenfold in five years
For those of us busily involved in the thankless task of getting algorithms to like our content and display it in the SERPs, how we attempt to optimize our content to appear high on results pages depends in large part on which search engines our audience are using. For most of us, this will mean optimizing for Google, which handles the lion's share of search queries in the majority of countries. Some SEOs may also optimise for Bing/Yahoo (they are both powered by Bing's algorithm), AOL if they are American or Baidu if they're in China.
But there is a new player on the block, which although still tiny in comparison to Google, is increasingly eking out an ever larger share of the search market. With over 14 million searches a month and growing rapidly, DuckDuckGo could soon become more than just a bit…
Chart of the Day: 70% of visits to Tripadvisor are from Organic Search but the other channels are playing their part too.
With will over 1 billion visits to its site every year, Tripadvisor has risen to one of the leading websites in the travel industry. Looking for hotels in the lakes? A quick check of the Tripadvisor reviews and you know which Hotels to avoid. A few clicks later and your holiday break could be booked ready for you to pack your bag. Even if you don't end up booking your dream getaway a few minutes (ok maybe hours) reading the reviews is always entertaining. "The beach is too sandy" is personal favorite.
In today's, Chart of the day, we are taking a look at the sources of all that traffic broken down by channel. As with most popular sites, we see that Organic Search has the biggest slice of the pie with 70%, next we…
Key SEO trends to plan for this year
The SEO industry can be treacherous – you never know when Google will roll out its next game-changing update.
For most SEO experts, every few days is another turning point that marks the need to review one’s strategy. But even if you’re that careful, there’s still a chance that you’ll miss one of Google’s 500-600 updates in a year.
There’s no sleeping on the job when it comes to SEO. If you want to secure your rankings, you need to be vigilant, adaptive, and aware of the ongoing trends in the world of search engines.
Based on the updates observed last year, here are some of the trends you can expect to continue for the rest of 2017:
The Rise of Google’s Rich Answers
SEO isn’t just about snagging the top position anymore. Google has a special place on top of SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for content…
How keep your SEO strategy up to date with the latest mobile index changes
We all are living in a mobile world. Most of us pick our phones at the moment we wake up in the morning. Mobile phones have become a part of our daily routine, from reading the daily news to reviewing emails. Now, everyone knows the role that mobile-first and responsive design plays in achieving website rankings and improving traffic. Instagram is one of the best examples of mobile-first design.
Google's desktop indexing has been around since the beginning of Google Search. But, as this Smart Insights post announcing and discussing Google's Mobile First index launch shows, it is now 'abandoned' and pushed to backup status. It's no secret that Google has rolled out its new mobile-first index. Mobile-first search indexing will focus on the mobile version of your web page than that of the desktop version. So in this…
Google has begun penalizing the rankings of mobile sites with "intrusive interstitials" (Pop-up ads or email capture lightboxes)
Continuing their ongoing push for the "perfect" mobile experience Google announced via the Official Webmasters Blog "two upcoming changes to mobile search results that make finding content easier for users". Although their headline doesn't mention pop-ups and the article labels them 'interstitials', that's the change we wanted to alert you to since most marketers and web users know them as pop-ups.
The first change is basically general house-keeping for Google. They're looking to remove the labels they first introduced two years ago as part of the Mobile-friendly update AKA Mobilegeddon, to show which sites were mobile friendly (as shown below). It's likely that you have acted to ensure your site is mobile friendly, but if not, sites that aren't mobile-friendly were penalized on smartphone rankings from April 2015 with the signal increased from May 2016 according…
Chart of the day: Marketers are finding the difficulty of external/internal linking and web page load speed outstrips the effectiveness
In the November 2016 Search Engine Optimization Survey from Ascend2, they found that 57% of the 256 respondents understood that relevant content creation was the most effective tactics to boost their SEO traffic but at the same time it was also the most difficult. I'd suggest that this is mostly due it being time-consuming for marketers to create great content but also the competition to make it unique is high when it seems like everyone is doing inbound marketing.
Interestingly, the two tactics that were marked are more difficult than effective were external linking and web page load speed. Generating links to your site is hard and requires dedication from everyone in the marketing team to create high-quality engaging content that other site/bloggers will want…
