Megan Hannay says, “Just last October at the Street Fight Summit, many marketers ranked voice search as the most “over-hyped” marketing tactic of the year. I think this is because many of them aren’t seeing the full scope of the technology. We’re putting on our consumer brains and thinking about the current awkwardness of speaking to Siri in public, not of a future inside self-driving cars or those moments when we just don’t want to get up from the couch. Currently, most voice searches happen on mobile phones. But within the next few years, it seems likely that devices with... [...]

Antony Maina says, “Over the years, there has been so much debate about how links, both outbound and inbound, can affect a website’s Google ranking. So it’s not surprising that recently another question has been making the rounds. What’s the SEO Impact of Linking to Wikipedia Pages? Recently, Jon Tromans, a Twitter user, asked webmaster trends analyst at Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) John Mueller whether websites can be penalized for linking to Wikipedia, the well-known online, community edited encyclopedia. While some people might not think that Troman’s concern is a valid one, remember... [...]

Tom Capper says, “A little over two weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at SearchLove San Diego. My presentation, Does Google Still Need Links, looked at the available evidence on how and to what extent Google is using links as a ranking factor in 2017, including the piece of research that I’m sharing here today. One of the main points of my presentation was to argue that while links still do represent a useful source of information for Google’s ranking algorithm, Google now has many other sources, most of which they would never have dreamed of back when PageRank was conceived as... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Since yesterday morning, the SEO industry has been watching an unconfirmed Google ranking update that seems to target more of the link quality aspects of the overall algorithm. Many are calling this the Fred Update, a name we’re also adopting. That came from Google’s Gary Illyes, who has jokingly suggested that all updates be named “Fred.” It’s sticking with this one. We’ve seen more chatter and reports of changes from within the “black hat” SEO community, which generally means that this is a spam algorithm update around links. Last time we reported... [...]

Jody Resnick says, “For owners and managers of SMBs, taking time to understand the intricacies of search engine optimization (SEO) can seem unnecessary.  However, leveraging the latest digital marketing tactics is important to your bottom line. Here are five relatively simple SEO tactics that can help you achieve your revenue goals. 1. Write original content You’ve probably heard this before, but it’s certainly worth reiterating:  make sure your website content is original and well written. Duplicating someone else’s content is not only unethical, it will hurt your Google rankings.... [...]

Sarah Lively says, “TL;DR Keyword-level data isn’t gone, it’s just harder to get to. By using Google Sheets to marry the data from Search Console and Google Analytics into a sheet, you’ll have your top keywords and landing page engagement metrics together (for free!). It’s not perfect keyword-level data, but in 7 steps you can see the keywords that drove clicks to a page and the organic engagement metrics for that page, all together in one place. The Google Analytics Add-on for Google Sheets will pull organic landing page engagement metrics, and the Search Analytics for Sheets Add-on... [...]

MOZ team says, “What’s the secret to earning site traffic from competitive keywords with decent search volume? The answer could be as easy as 1, 2, 3 — or more precisely, 2, 0, 1, 7. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand lets you in on a relatively straightforward tactic that can help you compete in a tough space using very fresh content”. The Keyword + Year Content/Rankings Hack MOZ  [...]

Bryson Meunier says, “Hopefully, all of you learned from “Mobilegeddon” in 2015 and “Mobilegeddon 2” in 2016 that the updates Google makes to improve the smartphone user experience for the majority of Google searchers are not the end of the world. Not even close, in fact. Still, I have seen a lot of articles focused on this topic in relation to Google’s new mobile-first index, which will be launching finally this year — almost two years after Google’s Gary Illyes referenced it at SMX West. Here’s what you need to remember in order to fully take advantage of the opportunity... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “A new Google search rankings factors study released by Searchmetrics today shares that while content relevance is gaining in importance with Google, backlinks are a declining ranking signal. The full study can be downloaded over here, but here are the key takeaways from the study: The URLs with the highest content relevance are those on positions 3 to 6. Desktop content is around a third longer than mobile content. In 2016, just 53 percent of the top 20 URLs included the keyword in their title. The Time on Site for the top 10 URLs is 3 minutes and 10 seconds. The average... [...]

Danny Sullivan says, “One of the biggest disadvantages for publishers in using AMP — the accelerated mobile pages format — is that Google will not show a publisher’s actual URL when displaying AMP pages. Google says this is so AMP pages load quickly. However, using a publisher’s URL might hardly slow a page down. In fact, using Google’s URL might actually cause AMP pages to load more slowly. The Google cache: why AMP at Google uses Google URLs To understand the issue, consider this search for “google tag manager amp” on Google. You’ll see a Marketing Land article that appears,... [...]