The SEO Newsletter: Volume 1

Rounding up the happenings of a few days in the SEO world with this Roundup!

1. Google is now rolling out the BERT update to over 70 languages worldwide. Click Here

Want a refresher for BERT? Here’s a detailed Guide on BERT

You can read more about BERT in Google’s own words: Click Here

Also this amazing deep dive into Google BERT and the backstory: Click here

Takeaway:

• Keep an eye on Long-tail keywords: Analyze shifts and Optimize content for them
• Focus on a keyword to page targeting: If a page JUST ranks because of the virtue of authority, it can change if it isn’t matching the intent

2. If You Haven’t Optimized Your Website for Voice Search Yet, You’re OK: Click Here

“By 2020, 50% of all searches will be conducted via voice”. – So where does the most popular prediction come from?

Several sources referring to other sources, that are, in turn referring to other sources that finally reference ComScore.

But on ComScore’s study “The Future of Voice”, Susan Engleson never mentions a statistic like that!!

Takeaway:

• While Voice Search might be big in the future. It still hasn’t grown to the level that it needs to be part of an immediate Digital Marketing Strategy.
• Having said that, Google is pushing towards this vision with updates around BERT, neural, etc.

3. Podcast: Google’s MARTIN SPLITT ON RENDERING, CRAWL BUDGET, JS SEO, TREE SHAKINGTREESHAKING & MORE: Click Here

I loved this.

Takeaway:

• Google doesn’t fetch the Analytics scripts (it avoid them) as it tries to ‘save bandwidth’
• Stripping unused code is helpful for Google as well as users [Load it faster]
• Treeshaking: Throw away everything that is NOT needed. Combining different separate functionalities into ONE (or few)
• Time taken for queued resources to arrive for a render itself is high according to Google. Less delay in render for even JS! Most often it is a crawling delay than a rendering issue.
• Google de-indexing is fast. When doing a site: content on Google, when URLs show up (which were marked no-index recently) doesn’t necessarily mean they are being served to users.

[There are a whole lot of details and lots of tech learning. Worth investing your time]

4. Google Explains the Difference Between Neural Matching and RankBrain: Click Here

Google, via Twitter, tried to explain how Neural Matching (related to the November Local Search Update) works. They’ve advised using the existing best practices (Link) in place for Local Search.

Now, What is Neural Matching anyway?

This example by Danny Sullivan (Don’t know him? You should!) explains how it works. It’s about context.

This is a look back at a big change in search but which continues to be important: understanding synonyms. How people search is often different from information that people write solutions about. pic.twitter.com/sBcR4tR4eT

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 24, 2018

Takeaway:

• This is in line with Google’s push to understand search queries beyond just keywords by adding context
• While this isn’t new and is in news because of the Local Search Update, it helps us understand how we should also focus on context!
• While traditional ranking factors still hold, concepts like Neural will help improve the search experience by ensuring relevance is matched!

5. SEMRUSH Conference: Link to all slides ? [Click Here]

We attended the SEMrush Conference on 5^th December in Bangalore, India! There were quite a few good sessions on SEO.

Here are few which I attended and found them useful:

• Aleyda Solis- Youtube Optimization
• Shahid Nezami- Why should Marketers kill the funnel and focus on Flywheel
• Lucas Zezezny- Become a Bahubali of Modern organic Marketing [He also took the effort to personalize content for Indian audiences ?]
• Shaina Meru- Unlocking CRO for customers

However, the best session (IMO) was from Ravi Bhusan. While SEMrush missed sending that out. Here’s a twitter thread he had shared summarizing it all [Click here]