14 Feb 2024
- 07 Mar 2018
- 4 Min read
February 2018: SEO News & Google Updates
- by Emily Park
In the world of SEO and digital marketing, there were some huge developments in February 2018. Google released two new tools to highlight the importance of mobile page speed, announced it will be releasing its answer to Snapchat and Instagram Stories, and launched its new People Also Search For feature, while BuzzSumo released its Content Trends Report for 2018.
Read on to find out more about these developments and how you can take advantage of them.
Google released new tools to highlight mobile page speed
As we discussed in our January news bulletin, Google will soon use page speed as a mobile ranking factor, and the search engine is doing everything it can to make sure webmasters understand the importance of ensuring their sites load quickly on smartphones. This is understandable when you consider that, according to Google data from 2016, 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes more than three seconds to load.
As part of their mission to highlight the importance of paying attention to mobile page speed, Google has announced the release of two new tools: the mobile Speed Scorecard, and the Impact Calculator.
The former is “an easy-to-use tool that allows you to compare your mobile speed with other companies'”, while the Impact Calculator can give you an idea of the financial benefits of improving yours. By entering simple information such as your current mobile page speed, the average number of monthly visitors you receive, and the average order value, you can find out how much more money you could make by reducing load time by a second or two.
We’d highly recommend using both to get some valuable insight into your mobile user experience.
BuzzSumo released its Content Trends Report for 2018
After reviewing 100 million articles published in 2017, BuzzSumo has released its 2018 Content Trends Report. This offers facts and figures that can help content creators to take their work in the right direction this year. So, it’s well worth a read if you want to give your content the best chance of performing well. Here are just some of the key findings from the report:
- Social sharing of content has halved since 2015.
- Social traffic referrals have declined, and Google sites now drive twice as many referrals to publishers.
- In this new world of content saturation and falling social shares, the big winners are sites with a strong reputation for original, authoritative content.
- While the majority of content gets no backlinks, authoritative research and reference content continues to get links. Authoritative evergreen content, in particular, consistently gains links and shares over time.
From these points, we can gather that using social media is no longer the most effective tactic for driving traffic to your site — search is now responsible for a larger percentage of visits. This means that, now more than ever, it’s important that you have an effective SEO strategy in place.
Additionally, it’s clear that authoritative evergreen content and original research performs the best when it comes to securing links and shares. So, creating this kind of content could do wonders for your organic search performance.
Here at Glass Digital, we consistently create high-quality, evergreen content for our clients. If this is something you would be interested in us doing for you, check out our content service and get in touch to learn more.
Google released AMP Stories
On 13 February, Google announced that it is developing AMP stories, which “provides content publishers with a mobile-focused format for delivering news and information as visually rich, tap-through stories”. Many are calling this Google’s answer to Snapchat and Instagram Stories, as it does allow companies to present information in a similar way.
AMP Stories will be found in Google SERPs on mobile, and the aim is for these to provide searchers with an engaging slideshow experience, which involves different forms of media including videos, audio, pictures, and text.
To avoid potential canonical and content-consistency issues, the search engine giant is recommending that publishers don’t simply repurpose existing content for their AMP Stories and, instead, create unique content exclusively for this new platform.
So far, AMP Stories has only been rolled out to a number of pre-approved publishers including Wired and CNN, but other sites can apply to join the origin trial. Alternatively, if you decide to wait until it’s rolled out to everyone, it’s well worth getting ready for the upcoming changes. Search Engine Land has a guide to making your first AMP Story, which can help you to do just that.
By embracing this new tool, you’ll be able to offer a new and interesting way for consumers to engage with your brand. And, as it’s likely a lot of companies will begin to use AMP Stories as soon as the feature is fully rolled out, so it’s definitely worth trying it out to see if it’s right for your business.
Google officially launched the People Also Search For box
In February, Google finally launched its People Also Searched For feature which, according to Search Engine Roundtable, they had been testing since at least November. This means that, if you click on a result on Google’s SERPs, find that it doesn’t offer what you’re looking for, and return to the search results, you’ll see a box around your initial choice that offers “people also searched for” suggestions.
For brands and publishers, this means that creating varied content targeting a wide variety of keywords could be even more valuable.
Google has claimed in the past that bounce rate, whereby a user exits a website after viewing just one page, doesn’t affect site rankings. However, this development certainly proves that the search engine is keeping tabs on this kind of user behaviour, so user retention could be more important than ever.
There you have it: four of the most important SEO and digital marketing news stories from February 2018. If you would like more frequent updates, we post on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn daily. So, be sure to give us a follow!
