In August, Google announced a new big search ranking algorithm update, named the helpful content update – probably its biggest update in a decade.

What We Know

The helpful content update will target websites with a relatively high amount of unsatisfying or unhelpful content, where the content has been written explicitly for search engines to leverage rankings.

Unlike many Google algorithms that get applied page-by-page, this new helpful content update will be sitewide. That means that if Google determines your site is producing a relatively high amount of unhelpful content, it will impact your whole site.

This reminds us of the early Panda and Penguin update days. Just as a quick reminder – or in case you weren’t working in SEO a decade ago – those updates did a lot of damage back then, and we made significant changes to our SEO strategies to recover and protect our client websites.

Which Sites Were Likely Impacted?

According to Google, this update impacted these types of content the most:

• Online educational materials.
• Arts and entertainment.
• Tech-related.

This is because content written in those areas has historically been written more for search engines than humans.

These are the folks that were hit the hardest:

• Publishers focused on a broad range of topics like CNET, Forbes, etc.
• Sites that collect and monetize organic search traffic without providing unique value.
• Sites that have content created with AI tools like Jasper or Copymatic.
• Sites with SEO doorway pages created for the sole purpose of boosting rankings.
• Sites with spammy content with a very high keyword density.

Our Observations:

We were quick to run a deep ranking audit of more than 3.5K websites, and we are happy to inform you that so far, this update did not have any significant negative impact on our client’s websites. In fact, we have seen good improvement in positions for the sites we are working on. This implies that our content strategy, in conjunction with our other SEO efforts like on-page optimization and link building, is working well and protecting our client’s websites.

Analyze your site to see if it is up to date!

Are your GBP posts getting rejected? Well, that’s because GBP has added more restrictions to its list of guidelines. As stated in their support document under the “Avoid Spam” header, Google warns business owners to avoid uploading duplicate photos, posts, videos, or logos.

Here’s a screenshot of the other guidelines that you should know.

So, using original images & relevant content is the only way to get your posts accepted.

Need help? Get in touch with our technical support team for assistance.

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Recently, it has been discovered that Google Maps is emailing customers who have posted a review for any business when their review is flagged as fake and, therefore, not posted.

It came to light after Lucio Laria – Consultant SEO International raised this issue on the Google Business Profile community. When a help forum titled Legitimate review started getting flagged as “Fake Engagement”, he wrote:

Hello,

I just settled my Google profile and asked my client for a review. Google is filing this review as a fake engagement when this person is a legitimate client of mine.

I’m waiting for this to be fixed before asking other of my clients for their reviews.

Why is this happening, and how can I fix it?

Thanks,

Among the many conjectured reasons and suggestions put forth by knowledgeable forum members are the following:

• It may be related to the review content. See Prohibited and restricted content. Ask the reviewer to delete it and then write a new review.
• It may be due to a problem with the reviewer’s account.
• Because the provider is in France and the client is in Argentina, the distance between them could be the reason.
• Ask the reviewer to try again, leaving a 4-5 sentence review, and add specifics about the services provided and, if pertinent, the location at which they were provided. If that fails, ask them to leave a review from another account.

The reviewer received the email notification about 15 minutes after posting the review. As the forum community pointed out, the review was being “filtered by an algorithm that enforces Google’s content policies”.

Why You Should Pay Attention to This Issue:

As we all know, getting legitimate reviews is not an easy task. It takes a lot of effort to impress a client and even more to convince the client to post a good review. It is disappointing when our sometimes hard-to-get legitimate reviews get taken down for “algorithmic” reasons, as requesting the client to post it again can be a bit awkward.

So, it’s crucial to learn how to get our good reviews to stick the better we can prep our customers and clients to get it right the first time.

Are you getting the best return out of your digital marketing?

Google updates its algorithm frequently. At times, they announce the major updates beforehand, and at times they inform after initiating one. The last update was rolled out on May 25th, and to learn about such updates, we had to wait for tweets & official answers from the team.

Google thought of improving this process and has created a dedicated Google Search ranking updates page. With the help of this page, you can check all the latest and previous updates easily.

If you wish to learn how Google improves the search engine, there are several articles from Google to help you. Also, its blog page has more information related to the updates. This page is definitely important for all site owners and SEO experts.

Need more details? Reach out to our support team for assistance.

Analyze your site to see if it is up to date!

To help businesses grow their eCommerce site, Google developer advocate Alan Kent recently hosted a video that outlines “8 tips” for SEO-optimizing an eCommerce site.

Here are the 8 tips that Alan believes will help you:

Tip 1: Make sure you have the technical basics in place – You need to ensure your URLs and internal links are friendly to crawlers.

Check out Designing a URL structure for E-Commerce Websites on Google Search Central for advice on how to design URLs for your website.

Tip 2: Create content relevant to users at different stages in their shopping journey – To check the breadth and quality of your site, think about likely searches by shoppers at different stages in their shopping journey. Once you have a set of queries, try them out. Does your site come up well-positioned? What about your competitors?

Tip 3: Be sure to mark up your product variant pages correctly – Product variants are when you have multiple colors or sizes of the same product. Informing Google of the relationship between the product pages can help Google better understand your site content.

The URL Inspection tool can also be used to check the status of individual pages.

Tip 4: For sales events that occur regularly, use the same URL across all event occurrences – This can help Google understand and trust the purpose of such pages. To identify problems, check the URL for promotional event pages on your site.

Tip 5: The “performance” of your web pages matters – Performance is important to users as a page that takes too long to load may be abandoned by them. It is also an important Google ranking signal. It can be particularly important if you use the same supplier-provided product description as other sellers online. The PageSpeed Insights report is useful for checking the performance of the web page.

Tip 6: Wait for it – Be patient to see the results. SEO, unfortunately, is a long game. Some ranking signals may take months to change. Worse, there is no guarantee of success. While it may take months to reap the benefits of a content creation strategy, it does not mean there is nothing you can do until then.

Tip 7: Seek professional help for your website – If you have done your best to improve your site but are still not getting the results you want, we’re here to provide expert SEO advice.

Tip 8: It’s all about the user – The ultimate goal for Google Search is to put the best possible content in front of the users. Algorithms change over time, but the ultimate goal does not. It does not mean you should not measure your site’s performance. It is still recommended to use tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics to collect data on your site.

Here is just one of our success stories that shows the importance of SEO! Ready to be our next success story?

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As known to most SEO experts out there, Google renamed Google My Business to Google Business Profile last year while also rolling out more support for managing a business profile.

Going a step further, the search engine giant has now launched another feature that is bound to give small businesses operating out of homes a reason to be happy.

Google Business Profile now features a toggle that will allow businesses to hide their business address from customers if they wish to do so.

The screenshot above shows the businesses can now toggle ‘Show business address to customers’ on and off.

Why Is This Important?

This recently launched support feature is perfect for entrepreneurs operating virtual businesses that aren’t tied to a physical location. It can also prove to be quite helpful for all those home-based service operators who wish to avoid customers visiting.

Are you getting the best return out of your digital marketing?

As we all know, Google launches core updates at least two to three times a year. These updates cause a hassle to all the web developers and SEO specialists because they have to monitor the rankings and make the required changes.

On May 25th, Google announced an update via a tweet.

This core update was further explained on Google Search Central. According to this article, Google makes changes to the ranking process to increase the accuracy of the search results. These improvements are called core updates. The core updates are not specific to certain sites but will certainly generate notable effects. Some sites’ ranking may drop, while others may rank better.

Also, Google said that if any site does experience a drop in its ranking, they don’t have to fix anything. These updates are meant to improve the system, helping under-ranked sites to get better traffic.

So, if your ranking suddenly drops, there’s nothing to worry about. You have not violated any webmaster guidelines. You just have to sit back and wait for the next core update. One last thing you can do is observe the sites that have ranked higher and try to figure out the factors that helped them.

Still have any issues? You can get in touch with our experienced team for assistance.

Analyze your analytics?

Last month Google laid out new, more specific guidelines to help the virtual food brands and delivery-only businesses with their Business Profiles on Google. These guidelines are meant for food businesses that don’t really have a physical location in an area, but they do re-package and deliver the local restaurants’ food.

The guidelines can be found in Google’s Guidelines for representing your business on Google, under the section Guidelines for chains, departments & individual practitioners.

Here’s a look at what these new guidelines have to say:

Final Takeaway

If you own a virtual food business, it is in your best interest to take a look at the new guidelines so that you can create a business profile on Google that isn’t suspended.

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Recently Google’s Dikla Cohen gave a presentation on video indexing, which explains that video indexing does not rely on where and how you host your videos. You can host them yourself or choose from the most popular video hosting platforms and services.

With this, he announced Google is soon launching a new set of reports and tools in Search Console to make video indexing easier to track and diagnose.

With this new launch, the Video Page Indexing report will show a summary of all the pages that Google’s systems find with a video while crawling and indexing your website. At a glance, you can see how many video landing pages were indexed.

Issues will be grouped with a trend line and counts of the affected videos. For example, which videos are missing a thumbnail URL, with reasons – the largest impact ranked on top.

You can click on one of the rows to get more details, such as affected video page URLs. You can also download the list of examples and double-check them. So, you can narrow down the details and understand what is happening and how to resolve issues.

Once your website is updated; and you think you have resolved the issue you were facing, you can go back to the Video Indexing Report, go to that specific issue type, and then use the validate fix button to inform Google.

This way, you can initiate the recrawling of known URLs affected by the issue. And as the pages are being reprocessed, you will be notified if everything is resolved or if there are remaining issues.

But you will have to note that it can take some time to go through all the URLs.

If you wish to check the video indexing status, you can get there by entering the URL of the video landing page at the top of the search console. It will first show you the current status of that URL, as well as the video index status of the page. It will inform you whether Google detects a video on the page. And, if so, did they manage to index it. If a detected video is not indexed, it will list the reasons preventing it from being indexed.

Also, please note that Google indexes only one video per page, even when a page has multiple videos.

To summarize, with the new tools,

• You will be able to see how many video landing pages Google has discovered and how many of them were indexed.
• Examine reasons for unindexed videos on video landing pages.
• You can use the list of affected video page URLs to debug and fix issues.
• You can use the Validate Fix button to initiate recrawling of the known URLs affected by the issue.
• You will be able to check the video indexing status of a specific video using the URL inspection tool.

Are you getting the best return out of your digital marketing?

In a new move, Google has announced the use of the AI approach to update the operation hours for over 20 million businesses around the globe in the next six months. Also, Google’s AI algorithms are busy figuring out if your posted business hours are accurate.

Google said, “We developed a machine learning model that automatically identifies if business hours are likely wrong, then instantly updates them with AI-generated predictions.”

How Does It Work?

The AI considers multiple factors, such as:

• The last time you updated your hours
• What they know about other shops’ hours
• The Popular Times information for your shop determined by location trends

Then, the algorithm analyzes the business hours of other similar shops that are nearby, information from the shop’s website, and Street View images of the shop’s storefront. Also, they will look specifically for business hour signs to determine the most accurate business hour prediction.

Google will take the help of the Google Maps community — including Local Guides and even the business owners themselves through their Google Business Profile — to verify the information they have predicted.

What Do You Need To Do?

All the business owners located in Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, or the United States, should prepare their staff to expect inquiry calls powered by Google’s conversational AI asking about their business hours.

Also, check Google Maps from time to time to ensure that Google has correctly listed the timings, in case they have been changed without your input.

Analyze your analytics?

Google performing random display testings are no longer surprising. This time around, it is Google Maps testing the position of local listing previews.

Recently, one of the users noticed that when a specific listing is clicked on from the Google Maps search results that appear on the left-hand side, the local listing pops up in a new position.

Instead of its original position on the left bar, the local listing preview now hovers in a new position, overlayed on top of the map. So far, this new position testing seems to be limited to the Google Maps interface for the desktop.

Here’s a look at the local listing overlay box:

Normally, there would be no overlay box hovering over the map, and the local listing details would appear in the left bar, pushing the search results to the bottom footer.

See How You Can Improve Your SEO! 

We have highlighted the main steps involved in setting up an e-commerce site & depending on the work required in each step you can determine the price of the project.

Step One –

• Calculate the time required to set up a WordPress site, install plugins, install a WordPress theme, and meet a client’s requirements.

Step Two –

• Calculate the time you need to finalize images. Mostly, it depends on whether you are –
• Using existing images
• Making new images
• Modifying manufacturer’s images

Step Three –

• Determine the number of products or SKUs included in the project.
• Also, make a note of whether you will take the content from an old site, create your own new content, or reword the manufacturer’s website content.
• Lastly, you need to know if you must create custom category pages and the amount of product information that will be provided.

Step Four –

• Customizing a plugin may need about 20-30 mins, so extra features like Shipping Plugins, Invoicing Plugins, & more should be noted down.

After you have a good idea of the level of work required, you can give an estimated price range for the project. If the estimate is approved by the client, you can charge by the hour to ensure you are paid for your work.

Have any questions? Get in touch with our experts for assistance.

Are you getting the best return out of your digital marketing?

Google has rolled out the beta version of the new and improved search console and SEO’s are more than happy, to say the least. The most promising new feature is the access to 16-month-old historical data. It enables year over year comparison which is great from every aspect.

Google has built the new search console from the scratch and not all features are available yet. They are still working on it, and they will keep on adding useful features from the old search console to the new. So as of now,  most of the tools you will click on will have a coming soon message.

However, you do have access to the performance tool which is easy to understand with filtering options like: By device, country, impressions, CTR and more.

The Index coverage report is the perfect blend of old index status & crawl reports errors. It enables you to see how well Google is indexing your site as well to identify and fix any issues.

The new search console will also help you validate newly fixed AMP URLs. The updated AMP status report will provide details into the specific Errors.

As of now, the above-mentioned tools and features are the biggest highlights of the new search console. But it’s still in the beta mode and many tools and features are yet to come, so stay tuned.

We will keep you updated on new features as and when they go live.

FREE INSTANT SEO Audit Of Your Website

Google was testing a new video feature in early January that allowed business owners and customers to add videos, related to the business. Allyson Wright from Google My Business advertiser community announced that they have fully rolled out the video feature and now all the business owners can add videos to their listing. These videos will be visible on Google Maps and local search results.

Some important points to consider:

• Videos up to 30 seconds in length are supported.
• Videos will appear in the overview tab of the GMB Dashboard.
• Customer uploaded videos can be found in the customer tab.
• Merchant uploaded videos can be found in the by owner tab.
• All videos can be viewed together in the videos tab.
• After upload it could take up to 24 hours for the videos to appear.
• Once live, they will display where local photos do.

The process to add videos is same as photos. Go to your GMB dashboard, click photos on the left and instead of adding photos, add the link to the videos.

It’s 2018 and if your web page takes more than 10 seconds to load, then you are far behind! Nobody likes to wait for minutes just for your page to load — they will simply hit the back button. According to a study, 53% of the users will abandon the site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load! So it came as no surprise when Google announced that site speed will be a ranking factor within the mobile search results from July 2018.

However, Google assured that only a small percentage of the sites will be affected by it since the majority of the site loads faster than 10 seconds. Also, there will be exceptions to websites which provide relevant and high-quality content to users. Those websites can still rank well in the search engine result pages because the intent of the search query is still a strong factor.

If you are not sure about your site’s speed, you can use the Google’s “Test My Site” tool. This tool uses a standard 3G connection to replicate what most people are using to surf the web using mobiles. It not only tells you about your site speed but also gives suggestions on how you can improve.

What About AMP?

Google’s announcement stated that it “applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page”, which means AMP gets no special advantage except that by its very nature it will pass all of these speed standards with flying colors. However, that doesn’t mean that you get an automatic pass if you’re using AMP because you need to be sure that everything is set up properly.

FREE INSTANT SEO Audit Of Your Website

If you need any help with mobile optimization, we can assist. Just reach out to us and we will be able assist you further.

• The Dynamic search ads allow you to target the entire website or domain name so that you can target a broad audience. However, Google has made some significant changes to it and the changes will go live soon. To know exactly how it will affect you, click.
• Google allowed the advertiser to spend as much as twice the daily budget simply to get more money from their pocket. But how advertisers are responding to it and does it really changed anything within AdWords … find out.
• Google and Facebook get biggest slice of advertising cake. A recent study revealed that 1/4 (61%) of the global advertising spend goes to Google and Facebook. However, the number may drop soon as people are starting to allocate their ad budget to different platforms.
• Google officially removed the Adwords Review extension and all the performance data will be deleted by Feb 2018.
• Last year we saw shocking reports that YouTube ads were running alongside some inappropriate videos. It scared the advertiser because it would cause more harm than good. Addressing the issue, YouTube has now made it mandatory for the YouTubers to have at least 1000 subscribers and 4000h watch time if they want to monetize their content.
• Re-marketing is one of the best marketing weapons in your arsenal. Here’s a great tutorial on how to utilize it to the fullest.
• What is Doubleclick adoptive re-marketing and how does it work. Find out.
• Manually selecting placements to run display ads may seem like a good option, but it is not the right solution to click frauds. Also, it makes you miss the flexibility of automated placements.

Re-marketing is good but only if done in a balanced manner. Many advertisers overdo it and as a result, annoy the users. Although Google can’t tell advertisers to stop targeting a particular user, they may give the power to the users to block re-marketing ads coming from a specific advertiser.

Recently, YouTube has announced that it will demonetize all the small channels on the platform, as per the site’s new eligibility criteria channels need to have more than 1,000 subscribers, with at least 4,000 hours of watching within the past 12 months.

The decision came after Logan Paul’s ‘suicide video’ incident. According to the company, the decision of demonetizing the small channels is taken in order to, “prevent bad actors from harming the inspiring and original creators around the world who make their living on YouTube.”

The channels that fail to meet these criteria will no longer be able to monetize and will lose access to tools and features associated with the YouTube partner program by next month. If any channel fails to meet the criteria but, later if they manage to pass it, will be automatically re-evaluated in the new criteria. All the new channels joining the platform will have to, manually apply for evaluation.

Though many are criticizing YouTube’s new policy and terming it as “favoritism” for big channels or “penalty” for small channels, it is not a bad decision.

• Firstly, the new policy is not preventing the channels to grow and increase the subscribers. However, they can improve the content and attract more subscribers to the channel. If the creators aim to earn money from the platform, they will work hard on the content and grow the channel.
• There are many creators who do run the channels for a hobby then, for earning money from it and many channels hardly earn money from this. According to YouTube, “99% of those affected channels were making less than $100 per year in the last year, with 90% earning less than $2.50 in the last month.
• And even Before this new policy there a benchmark of 10,000 channel views. The new benchmark will ensure that the content creators are regularly creating videos and they will push them to hold the subscriber base and get regular views, and that’s important and good.

Not generating enough leads online? Call us at 800-379-2829 or submit form to contact us now and we will perform a complete digital marketing analysis for FREE!