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doing things like adding “pizzeria near me” as a title of your pages on your website probably doesn’t make that much sense because we would try to figure out like what is actually near the user.

put your address on your website and to mark that up appropriately with structured data so that we understand where your location is.  The other is to set up a Google My Business local listing

Another clear trend resulting from this update seems to be Google favoring websites, particularly when users are searching for sensitive YMYL keywords, that are able to provide a higher level of trust. The main beneficiaries of this focus are websites with a strong brand profile and a broad topical focus. On the flipside, this has meant that niche websites dealing with these topics have seen their rankings fall.

An analysis conducted by Malte Landwehr, VP Product at Searchmetrics, suggests that Google’s algorithm has increased its weighting of user signals when calculating rankings. The results show that domains that improved their SEO Visibility following the Google Core Update have higher values for time on site and page views per visit, and lower bounce rates than their online competitors.

Site Speed’s Impact on SEO Site speed is a ranking factor and an even larger ranking factor for mobile pages. Google is rolling out a Mobile First index moving forward, which will officially take effect in July 2018, meaning now is the time to optimize for mobile site speed so you’re not on the losing team when it officially rolls out. With that being said, we have already seen the direct impact that site speed has on our clients’ websites’ SEO rankings and organic traffic. The reason why site speed is a ranking factor is that it is, first and foremost, a sign of quality user experience. A fast site speed will result in a better user experience, while a slow site speed will result in a poor user experience. A user is typically staying on a site longer if the site speed is faster and they also convert better and bounce less. For those reasons, Google has made it a ranking factor. Related: Improve Website Speed with these 5 Quick Tips We view three to four seconds or less as a good page load time. This varies slightly based on the type of site and industry but typically if your web pages load in under three to four seconds, you’re doing well. Once you exceed that load time, we start to see less optimal rankings as well as a poorer user experience. Conversely, if we brought this page speed down to sub-three to four seconds we would likely see better rankings. We have seen the effects of this first-hand with a client. We implemented site speed optimizations on a client’s website and the client’s developer accidentally removed the work we had done. The website with the site speed optimizations went from a four-second load time to a 12-second load time after the optimizations were removed, which caused rankings to plummet. We went back in and updated the site with the proper site speed optimizations again and got the website back to a four-second load time and rankings went back up. This illustrated in real-time that site speed has a direct link to SEO and keyword rankings. This is rare, as almost nothing happens in real-time for SEO, it’s a slow and steady wins the race scenario, but we saw the ranking impact in just a few days when site speed optimizations were stripped and then re-implemented. It was a great experiment because we already knew site speed made an impact on SEO, but this really showed the emphasis Google is placing on it for mobile and desktop from a search perspective. The benefits of site speed on user experience impact other digital channels as well, like paid search.

If you have images in your design that are purely there for design reasons, you’re doing it wrong, as those images should be in your CSS and not in your HTML. If you really can’t change these images, give them an empty alt attribute, like so:

Each image should have an alt text,

title attribute is not required. It can be useful but in most cases, leaving it out shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

When this business claimed its Google My Business listing, it severely reduced the company’s sales. It turned out that once the business was verified, Google thought that the customers were located in the Chicago area. Google verified the company’s local listing via postcard, and Google began to list the business in the Google Maps listings.

for online businesses with primarily nationwide or international customers that do not buy at physical locations, it makes no sense to claim local listings.

Do you have a brick-and-mortar location(s) that shoppers visit? If so, claim your local business listings. Do you visit your customers at their location? This could be, for example, a service business, such as carpet cleaning. If so, claim your local listings. Do the search queries (keywords) from visitors to your website typically include a city name? If yes, you should claim your local listings.

Certain categories of businesses will have the option to add a link to a menu.  If you’re lucky enough to be in one of these categories, I highly recommend adding this link, as it gives Google an additional set of keywords that your business for which should be considered relevant.

Focusing too much or solely on organic will present long-term growth roadblocks as local organic real estate continues to disappear and become more volatile

A typical unified local SERP campaign will include: Optimized GMB listing

Online reputation strategy (responding to reviews is just as important as gaining new ones) Google Local Services Ads (if applicable) Geo-focused PPC strategy (see below – use PPC to supplement organic visibility) Retargeting (GDN, YouTube, social channels) Local link building (referral traffic is going to be the new DA) Aggregated reporting Citations and NAP consistency

there are a couple of tools that will actually let you see results based on geo coordinates, which is really cool and very accurate. Those tools include the Local Falcon, and there is a Chrome extension which is 100% free, that you can put in your browser, called GS Location Changer.

these two levels, depending on what industry you are working in, it's really important to know which level you need to be looking at. If you work with lawyers, for example, zip code level is usually good enough.

if you work with dentists or restaurants, let's say, you really need to be looking at geo coordinate levels. We have seen lots of cases where we will scan a specific keyword using these two tools, and depending on where in that zip code we are, we see completely different three-packs

I am in the medical sector with user generated content (seems to be evil for G). Some hospital, goverment and pharmacy pages rank me out for keywords they dont have on the site.

Affiliate sites that did not properly disclose their affiliate links may have been affected.Truly excellent content appears to have been rewarded.Several elements of trust, as outlined in the Quality Raters’ Guidelines (QRG) were possibly reassessed.

A lot of ultra-spammy content may have been deindexed.

we believe that if something is outlined in the QRG, it means that Google is either measuring this algorithmically, or they want to be able to measure it algorithmically.

it was easier for us to gain featured snippets from our blog or our glossary pages

“Is” seemed to be the big trigger word for winning featured snippets.

Our on-page copy would have the H2 with the keyword (e.g. What is Employee Orientation?) and then the paragraph copy would answer that question.

How to influence the organic product carouselIn Google’s blog post, they detailed three factors that are key inputs: Structured Data on your website, providing real-time product information via Merchant Center, along with providing additional information through Manufacturer Center.This section of the article will explore Google’s guidance, along with some commentary of what I’ve noticed based on my own experiences.

Make sure your product markup is validatedThe key here is to make sure Product Markup with Structured Data on your page adheres to Google’s guidelines and is validated.

Submit your product feed to Google via Merchant CenterThis is where it starts to get interesting. By using Google’s Merchant Center, U.S. product feeds are now given the option to submit data via a new destination.The difference here for Google is that retailers are able to provide more up-to-date information about their products, rather than waiting for Google to crawl your site (what happens in step 1).Checking the box for “Surfaces across Google” gives you the ability to grant access to your websites product feed, allowing your products to be eligible in areas such as Search and Google Images.For the purpose of this study we are most interested in Search, with the Organic Product Carousel in mind. “Relevance” of information is the deciding factor of this feature.Google states that in order for this feature of Search to operate, you are not required to have a Google Ads campaign. Just create an account, then upload a product data feed.Commentary by PPC Expert Kirk Williams:“Setting up a feed in Google Merchant Center has become even more simple over time since Google wants to guarantee that they have the right access, and that retailers can get products into ads! You do need to make sure you add all the business information and shipping/tax info at the account level, and then you can set up a feed fairly easily with your dev team, a third party provider like Feedonomics, or with Google Sheets. As I note in my “Beginner’s Guide to Shopping Ads”, be aware that the feed can take up to 72 hours to process, and even longer to begin showing in SERPs. Patience is the key here if just creating a new Merchant Center… and make sure to stay up on those disapprovals as Google prefers a clean GMC account and will apply more aggressive product disapproval filters to accounts with more disapprovals. ”– Kirk WilliamsFor a client I’m working with, completing this step resulted in several of their products being added to the top 10 of the PP carousel. 1 of which is in the top 5, being visible when the SERP first loads.This meant that, in this specific scenario, the product Structured Data that Google was regularly crawling and indexing in the US wasn’t enough on it’s own to be considered for the Organic Product Carousel.Note: the products that were added to the carousel were already considered “popular” but Google just hadn’t added them in. It is not guaranteed that your products will be added just because this step was completed. it really comes down to the prominence of your product and relevance to the query (same as any other page that ranks).

The service area does not currently impact ranking for SAB’s. This means that you need to get creative to grow your business with GMB outside of your physical city. Ranking factors are in a constant state of change so this all may change one day

If moving isn’t an option, I would focus on optimizing the website, and the GMB landing page in particular, for long-tail search terms. Onsite optimization has a direct impact on local pack/finder rankings and long-tail keywords, which are less competitive.

Google said in September 2018 that neural matching impacts about 30 percent of all queries. We asked Google if that has increased, but have not received an update.What is RankBrain? Isn’t it similar? Google told us in 2016 that RankBrain (see our RankBrain FAQ) is also an AI, machine learning-based system that helps Google understand queries.Google said a good way to think about RankBrain is as an AI-based system it began using in 2016 primarily to understand how words are related to concepts.So what’s the difference between Neural matching and RankBrain? Google put it this way:RankBrain helps Google better relate pages to concepts.Neural matching helps Google better relate words to searches

Why it matters. The truth is, there isn’t much a search marketer can do to better optimize for RankBrain, as we said in 2016. The same seems to apply for neural matching, there doesn’t seem like you can do anything special to do better here. This is more about Google understanding queries and content on a page better than it currently does right now.That said, it seems to indicate that search marketers need to worry a bit less about making sure specific keywords are on their pages because Google is getting smarter at figuring out the words you use naturally on your pages and matching them to queries.We asked Google if it has additional recommendations around neural matching and RankBrain and were told its advice has not changed: Simply “create useful, high quality content.”

Google’s neural matching versus RankBrain: How Google uses each in searchNeural matching helps Google better relate words to searches, while RankBrain helps Google better relate pages to concepts.

If the competitor bidding on your brand name is of similar size to you or smaller, it’s potentially not worth getting involved in a war here – you’ll likely struggle with ever-rising CPC’s and CPA’s and not be able to make this run profitably.

if you’re the smaller brand you’re likely in really good stead to start bidding on the competition and pulling in some cheap traffic with little to no downside.

If you’re a bigger brand or are looking at going against a brand that’s more evenly matched with you in terms of size, it can be a very expensive game and will not always lead to profit. If you’re still opting to run with competitor bidding, make sure to keep on top of your cost per acquisition and profitability metrics within the business to make sure you’re not burning cash on competitor keywords in an unprofitable pursuit!

If a query contains more than one word, Google will try to return search results that consist of all the pages that contain the union of all of the words found in a query.

a page with a query term in a more important place on the page, such as the page title, may rank higher than if the query term was in paragraph-based content on the page.

Another Google patent tells us about a different inverted index of the web for complete and meaningful phrases used with phrase-based indexing. This means that Google keeps track of frequently co-occurring phrases on pages of the web (unlike LSI Keywords).

Posting about a single topic looks much better than having a long post that lists all your services.

we have not found that the content used in the Google Post has any impact on ranking, (for example: posting about “dog bites” doesn’t make you rank higher for “dog bite lawyer) so I would suggest focusing your posts on keywords you’re already ranking for that could use a boost in click-through-rate.

Meanwhile, in China – which is home to the world’s largest internet population – the inverse is taking place as web search engines fall steadily out of favour due to a vastly different internet landscape and differing search habits.

2018 Mid-Year Mobile Research Round-Up studied the differences in search results for queries carried out on mobile versus desktop, and found that a full 76% of keywords already produced a different result on mobile.

When analysing the top 20 ranked search results for any given query, BrightEdge found that 47% differed between mobile and desktop. And 32% of the time, the first page that ranked for a domain on any given query differed between desktop and mobile.

Google uses proximity to deliver local results and does not use zip codes. All searches are affected by the proximity factor, but businesses with more dense competition will be affected the most. Organic results are affected by proximity but much less than Google Maps rankings. Checking rankings by zip code center does not always provide a complete or meaningful picture to base optimization decisions on.

Google could care less about what zip code you are in when performing a search, it only cares about distances when it comes to local businesses.

In order to deal with this distance factor, rank trackers have adapted and are now scanning with many points instead of one. A grid is laid out according to distance and each point reflects a different result.This gives a much better picture of what the rankings look like around a business as it takes into account the granularity that the algorithm actually produces.