We recently included a guest post on GrowTraffic and we tagged up the outgoing links with them fairly new link attribute rel=”ugc”. This triggered an email from the author asking for my thoughts on the use of the new link attributes. Read more
Why Digital Marketing Agencies Should Lead The Way To Work Local
Over the last few months, we’ve seen a huge section of the economy move to a homeworking model as part of the COVID-19 lockdown and we’ve seen it can work. But for most people, it’s just a temporary working pattern and many don’t necessarily want to work from home fulltime, but still want to enjoy some of the benefits they’ve experienced. I believe a halfway house between full homeworking-for-all and city-centre working can be found in the Work Local movement and I believe the digital industry is ideally placed to champion the work local movement. Read more
From An SEO Perspective Should We Migrate Our Website From A .co Domain To A .io Domain?
Many technology companies are starting to migrate from the traditional top-level domains (TLDs) to more specialist technology domains, with .io being the options thats increasingly being used. Read more
Why SEO Consultants And SEO Agencies Are Going To Have To Get More Technical Again And Stop Acting Like Content Marketing Agencies
I’ve been around SEO for a long time now and I’ve seen trends come and go. As such I’ve seen SEO consultants come and go, and SEO agencies rise and fall. These changes tend to occur when the SEOs are unable to adapt. And we are moving into a new phase of SEO and we’ll see all those SEOs who focus on content marketing start to struggle more, whilst those SEOs who are good at technical SEO are going to get a good bounce in the coming year or two. Read more
Why Digital And Green Has To Be The Legacy Of COVID-19
There has been a clamouring consensus in recent years that we’re getting closer and closer to the climate’s point of no return, but the green revolution has begun. We’ve also been living through an ever-encompassing technological revolution, driven by digital technology. COVID-19 shut down the world in a way that has never happened before but this provides a great opportunity to restart the economy with a new focus on both the digital and green sectors. Read more
Google Update June 2020
There is currently a lot of talk in the SEO community of a June 2020 Google Update rolling out. Although this has yet to be confirmed by Google – who have been getting much better at confirming these things these days. Read more
What We Know About The May Core Update
Smack bang in the middle of the Coronavirus Crisis, just when we thought the world couldn’t get much more bananas, something big happened at Google. The second Core Update of 2020 rolls out at the start of May and now we’re just over a month from that happening it’s time to have a little look at what we know about the update and what we’re going to do about it. Read more
How Should Businesses Show Black Lives Matter To Them?
The death of African American George Floyd under the knee of a white police officer in the US has triggered rounds of protests throughout the USA and in other parts of the world. Brands around the world are trying to find their voice in this issue and there has been some painful missteps and too much awkward silence from some of the worlds’ biggest brands. Read more
Are There Going To Be Lots Of Redundancies In Marketing After The Lockdown?
We all know when there’s a downturn, marketing should be the thing businesses redouble their efforts on, so they build-out of the downturn. I say “we all know it” because in reality for many businesses marketing is the first thing to go. And that got me wondering if there are going to be lots of redundancies in marketing after the lockdown. Read more
Google Is Introducing Page Experience As A Ranking Factor
In a blog post today (28th May 2020), Google has announced they will be rolling out the use of page experience as a ranking factor.
Google cites internal studies and industry research that demonstrates users prefer websites that have ‘great page experience.’
Page experience isn’t anything new in the realms of SEO. I remember when working at UKFast in 2008/2009 we ran a campaign called “Google Love” that talked about how hosting a website on a really fast server would help you rank better in Google. And for years SEO consultants have been using the PageSpeed Tool from Google to work out whether Google is going to mark a site down or not based on page speed.
As smartphones became more and more important for web traffic, Google slowly began to move towards a mobile-first index and introduced mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor.
Google has therefore given us a bit of a sneak peek into the soon-to-be changes to search rankings and how page metrics will be part of that mix.
An important announcement was also made earlier this month in which Google said the Core Web Vitals helps site owners to measure user experience.
The update will include page experience metrics as ranking factors. Interestingly that whilst they are still supporting AMP they are removing AMP requirements for Top Stories eligibility.
This announcement is about giving website owners enough time to get their heads around using these kinds of metrics for SEO purposes. Google says they’ll only be rolling it out in 2021.
Google went on to say:
“The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.
“Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience. They measure dimensions of web usability such as load time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads (so you don’t accidentally tap that button when it shifts under your finger – how annoying!).”
“We’re combining the signals derived from Core Web Vitals with our existing Search signals for page experience, including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines, to provide a holistic picture of page experience.”
But whilst AMP is no longer going to be first and foremost for Top Stories, pages must meet the Google News content policies to be eligible.
The first three ranking factors they’re likely to be covering are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how quickly the page’s “main content” loads — the bulk of the text or image the page is serving up
- First Input Delay (FID) measures how quickly the page reacts when you first click on something on the page
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures when stuff jumps around on the page — for instance, if ads rearrange the text you’re trying to read
Overall, this has to be a great addition to Google’s ranking factors. This is another great step forward in helping make sure the internet is cleaned up, removing all that old broken content and we can’t wait to get stuck into seeing how this impacts our clients’ rankings.