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People who visit a website after clicking on a PPC ad are 50 percent more likely to make a purchase compared to visitors who clicked on an organic search result

<loc> and <lastmod>. These two tags are very important, so make sure you add them to your sitemap!

Google limits that to only 10MB so make sure your file doesn’t have more than 50,000 URLs and 10MB

You can differentiate via the user agent and show an HTML sitemap instead if a real person visits the page.   Yoast SEO already does this. Visiting a /sitemap_index.xml file on a WordPress website will return an HTML sitemap, while hitting CTRL + U to view the source will return the actual XML sitemap.

Automate it on your backend (generate the files based on your local database). That way you can ping sitemap files immediately when something changes, and you have an exact last-modification date. Don't crawl your own site, Google already does that.

Wordpress sitemaps generators tend to do this across the board, since they have access to the site's database directly. There are various of those out there, some of them are integrated into more general plugins too

If you feel the link is a bad link then I'd disavow the link. I'd see if you can see the page linking to you via Google cache or via archive.org

80% of the answers delivered by Google’s voice assistant came from the three top results in search engine results pages.Even more, 60% of the results came from featured snippets and 70% overall came from SERP features.

If you think of optimizing the paragraph for the intent of voice, make sure it’s around 42 words,

SEMrush found schema was indeed in use in the vast majority of results, but 36% of the answers given by the Google Home devices contained no Schema at all.

Private WhoIs information may be a sign of “something to hide”.

consider including just your site name at the beginning or end of each page title, separated from the rest of the title with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren't helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.

Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse. Page-specific data is a good candidate for programmatic generation. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't give users a clear idea of the page's content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.

The WordPress extension WooCommerce lags far behind in last place. Just under half of the WooCommerce shops currently meet the Google specifications. An alarming 26% are actually bad. The self-operated hosting solution with low-performance mass providers is clear here.