It’s almost time for summer vacation and all you can think about are beaches, forested mountains and cold beverages. But, there are also events in the digital marketing world you’ll want to think about before you hit the trails.
What’s new in SEO?
The search space has been lately engaged in an algorithm updates race.
On April 21st Google hit mobile search with its long-awaited Google Mobile-Friendly Update and only the mice in the fields remain ignorant of this. The experts from Google pointed that Mobilegeddon was even larger than Penguin or Panda: twice as many non-mobile friendly pages lost rankings as gained after the Mobile Update. If you have not yet re-optimized your website to meet mobile-friendly guidelines, you’d better start working on it before you take that vacation.
Here is the Mobile SEO Issues Checklist you will need to check your website pages for in order to gain the rankings you may perhaps have lost.
But this is not the last Mobile-Friendly Update that comes into our view. At SMX Sydney, Garry Illyes (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) just said there will be another update called Platypus targeting slow page speed and app download interstitials usage.
In addition to all this noise, Google has confirmed that it is now official that there are more searches on mobile devices than on desktops. This is big news and, if you want to dominate on Google search, then the mobile search optimization strategy is in your first-rate priority do-to list.
On May 6th, Google officially updated and renamed the Search Queries report in its Webmaster Tools. Now, in your Webmaster Tools you can find the Search Analytics report with more accurate data and filtering options.
On May 20th, Google Webmaster Tools was rebranded into Google Search Console. Google decided to changes the ten year old name of the tool to a more universal because it is used not only by webmasters but also by website owners, SEO experts, marketing specialists, designers, web developers etc.
At the beginning of June, the Google team announced that they are going to rework the Penguin algorithm so it runs on a permanent basis. It means that there won’t be any manual actions toward ranking changes because the data will be refreshed all the time. It doesn’t mean that you can sit and relax because individual websites can still be hit with huge overnight ranking losses. This means that you will need to work towards keeping your backlink profile ever clean and genuine in the eyes of Google.
According to Search Engine Land this year the SEO Success Factors Table has been immensely updated and complemented by new factors such as the availability of Vertical Search, HTTPS and Direct Answers results. Greater Importance has been given to Mobile Friendliness and Structured Data etc.
To keeping up with Google’s updates, use WebCEO’s Online SEO tools to analyze your site’s SEO performance and ensure it aligns with the latest Google algorithms.
What is new in Social Media?
The fact that Social and Search have become more integrated and interlinked is proven by the latest Google-Twitter deal. Starting on May 19, users in the U.S. can see relevant and real-time tweets in their search results when using the Google search app on iOS and Android. That’s good news for search giants, users and for brands. Twitter promises to bring its real-time content on to desktop search and to more countries in the upcoming months.
Unlike with Twitter, Facebook doesn’t want to rely on Google and decided to build its own in-app search engine. Thanks to its own search team, Facebook is already testing the ability to crawl and return content for users without the need for them to search Google directly.
At the beginning of June, Instagram announced plans to launch InstaAds which will be labeled as “Sponsored.”
We wish you a happy summer and be sure to enjoy nature and the little extras summer brings.