Google recently made some under-the-radar changes to sitelinks in the organic search results. The first change removed small sitelinks from below regular organic blue links that render for high search volume queries (Google has since fixed this glitch). The second change adjusted the number of large sitelinks being displayed for branded searches (this is most likely a test). Even though it does not look like either of these changes will have a significant impact on traffic, they have caused dramatic fluctuations in impressions and average position in Google Search Console (GSC). If you experienced that moment of panic when you did your last GSC check-in, take a look at this article to better understand: what happened with sitelinks in the search results. what effects the changes had on GSC data. how to check your site for declines. what the changes mean for SEO. What happened to sitelinks? Google made two changes that reduced the number of sitelinks being shown on search engine … [Read more...] about Recent changes to organic sitelinks cause major drops in impressions in Google Search Console
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How to improve your CTR using Google Search Console
Last month I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to use Google Search Console, covering every aspect of what is essentially a giant toolshed full of useful stuff for all webmasters to use. It was exhaustive, and probably exhausting. Don’t read the whole thing in one sitting, just dip in and out when you come across something you’re unsure about. While wading through Search Console’s huge amount of features, I noticed a few elements that deserved to be highlighted, not only because I had no idea they existed or were even accessible to webmasters, but also because they may be able to help raise your click-through rate (CTR) on search engine results pages (SERPs), or at the very least, show you where to improve. The first thing you need to be aware of is this… You can see all the search queries that bring traffic to your site in Search Console. Yeah it was a massive pain when Google encrypted your search terms Google Analytics and replaced them with the ambiguous … [Read more...] about How to improve your CTR using Google Search Console
Google Search Console: a complete overview
The Search Console (or Google Webmaster Tools as it used to be known) is a completely free and indispensably useful service offered by Google to all webmasters. Although you certainly don’t have to be signed up to Search Console in order to be crawled and indexed by Google, it can definitely help with optimising your site and its content for search. Search Console is where you can monitor your site’s performance, identify issues, submit content for crawling, remove content you don’t want indexed, view the search queries that brought visitors to your site, monitor backlinks… there’s lots of good stuff here. Perhaps most importantly though, Search Console is where Google will communicate with you should anything go wrong (crawling errors, manual penalties, increase in 404 pages, malware detected, etc.) If you don’t have a Search Console account, then you should get one now. You may find that you won’t actually need some of the other fancier, … [Read more...] about Google Search Console: a complete overview
10 SEO tips to get your website to the top of Google search
Sure it was only three years ago (almost to the day), but my how the landscape has changed. In 2013, to get to the top of Google it was merely a manner of doing some killer keyword research, ensuring your site had a good and clear structure and making sure you had a ton of high authority backlinks coming your way. And although these are all still very relevant SEO tips today, we also now have to contend with these brand new factors too… Disclaimer: there are hundreds of things you need to do to improve search visibility, this is a list concentrating on the more recent developments. 10 SEO tips to get to the top of Google 1) Optimise for RankBrain RankBrain is Google’s machine-learning AI system, which has been revealed by Google to one of the top three ranking signals in its vast array of contributing factors. Google uses RankBrain to handle ambiguous or unique questions that have never been asked before. Brand new queries make up to 15% of all searches a day – and … [Read more...] about 10 SEO tips to get your website to the top of Google search
Google Search Partner Network: Friend Or Foe?
The Google Search Network gives advertisers the ability to gain additional AdWords traffic and conversions from users across the web, as Google delivers ads on partner websites in much the same way it does on Google.com. To target users searching on these partner sites, advertisers need only check a box in campaign settings to “include search partners.” However, AdWords advertisers have long pined for a bid modifier to adjust bids for Google’s search partners, as the value of this traffic is often very different from that of clicks that come from users searching on Google.com. At the very least, it would be helpful if Google would allow advertisers to exclude specific search partners (as Bing Ads does). While calls for additional functionality haven’t yielded results just yet, it hasn’t kept us from analyzing how these search partners are performing relative to Google.com. We’ve dissected the numbers to understand how performance looks for brand … [Read more...] about Google Search Partner Network: Friend Or Foe?