Today is January 18th and I’ll be talking about a potential algorithm update, Reviews in maps, Google My business hours, page experience going to desktop, Travel & Google Ads webinar, Competitive analysis and more!
January 14th and 15th seems to be a lot of movement in the algorithm trackers – was there an update?
Some of my sites that are relatively newer content seems to have jumped up quite a bit in this time, but I think that might just be a coincidence. This podcast’s main site had a jump to about 1400 impressions in Google Search Console compared to its average 50-100 per day. That ended up dropping back down a bit, so if Google was doing something, it might have been temporary if this site was an indicator.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-update-january-14-32762.html
Allie Margeson, the Director of SEO Services at Whitespark noticed review snippets getting visibility on maps. See her tweet.
I think Google may have hit some kind of threshold where they feel they can tell a real review versus a fake one, and they’re going to roll out and utilize reviews even more. This could be a big deal for ecommerce as Amazon is just full of fake reviews and if Google can get a handle on reviews, this could be a big deal.
Colan Nielsen for Sterling Sky writes about Google My Business and when to list your hours as 24/7.
This actually really hits home, my wife works in real estate and often takes calls at completely off hours. She could say she’s 24/7, but really doesn’t want to talk to someone at 2am unless there’s a legitimate urgent issue, or it’s been scheduled with her. She was working with an agency to do some ads and they wanted to limit the hours she’s willing to take calls. It should align with her Google My Business hours. So, the dilemma. Do you say 24/7 because you have your phone next to you, or do you say 8am – 10pm and know that anyone looking for you after hours will find your competition. The article talks about different scenarios, if you are working with lead gen especially for service based businesses with Google My Business as a major driver, definitely read the article.
We mentioned it a couple weeks ago, but Yoast officially launched their Shopify SEO app.
I won’t get into too many details, but if you haven’t worked with Shopify before and you are familiar with Yoast, take a look now as it may be a new area you can work in.
Google has been giving us a heads up on Page Experience rolling out to desktop. Search Console now has a dedicated desktop section in its Page Experience report to help site owners understand Google’s page experience criteria. Google will begin using page experience as part of their desktop ranking systems starting in February 2022 and will be completed by the end of March. The values will stay the same, and I think in general this won’t have a huge impact because we see such vastly better numbers on our desktop scores in general.
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/11/bringing-page-experience-to-desktop
In case you missed it, Google Ads put on the “Travel On Air” with Episode available for on demand viewing. If you are a marketer in the Travel industry (I’m talking to you Louderback and Dylan!) then this may be of interest!
https://adsonair.withgoogle.com/events/travel-on-air-episode-4
SEMRush published an article on their blog about not the ten, but the 12 Best Competitive Intelligence Tools for Market Research. Market research should be a major part of any marketers toolbox, and understanding the newest tools out there may be worth the 8 minute read. There’s a few on there I hadn’t heard of before especially for ecommerce pricing intelligence.
https://www.semrush.com/blog/top-18-competitive-intelligence-tools-advanced-market-research/
And, since we seem to always talk about internationalization, John Mueller answered a question on Reddit asking if Google used the same algorithm for each language.
“Mostly. Search uses lots & lots of algorithms. Some of them apply to content in all languages, some of them are specific to individual languages (for example, some languages don’t use spaces to separate words — which would make things kinda hard to search for if Google assumed that all languages were like English).”
This is very cool stuff, and I’d love to understand more about this, but I think that gets beyond the realm of what Google will let us know. We also know that Google typically rolls out updates in US English first, for example the latest reviews updates, so even different languages are out of sync with Google’s US English algorithms it seems.