🇪🇺

​To comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Google is set to change European search results to show comparison sites and some vertical search units such as Google Flights will no longer show.

⭕

​Google unveiled "Circle to search", a new way to search from your Android phone by using a gesture. By circling, gesturing or scribbling over a part of a photo, Google can identify what you're interested in and serve results.

📱

​Google has announced their multisearch, which allows you to search with images that they launched in 2022 has been updated to show AI-powered insights that go just behind visual matches.

🧪

​A Google announcement around their Search Generative Experience (SGE) that says "we'll continue to offer SGE in Labs as a testbed for bold new ideas" has many SEOs thinking we won't see an SGE rollout anytime soon.

👎

​A new study by German researchers has suggested that Google search result quality may have gotten worse over the last few years, with Google struggling with "dynamic adversarial spam".

🛒

​Google has been testing showing one more product in the search product grid layout. Increasing the real estate these results take up would mean e-commerce businesses need to focus even more on feed optimisation.

⛓️‍💥

​Thousands more websites have seen a spike in Google Search Console '404' errors which appear to be been caused by incoming links from a spam network. Google advises these links and 404 errors can be ignored.

🤖

​Bing gained less than 1% market share in the year since adding Bing Chat (AKA CoPilot) according to StatCounter with Microsoft’s search engine ending 2023 with 3.4% of the global search market.

📲

​Microsoft will however be bringing Copilot Pro, the premium $20/month version of its AI search features to native apps on both iOS and Android, with both currently in their submission process.

💎

​Lily Ray has continued to highlight issues with spammers exploiting UGC sections of major websites and Google search returning these, possibly due to the impact of their hidden gems update.

Don't spend long on meta descriptions

I’ve posted the image above which has caused some people to leap the defence of optimising meta descriptions, but Google have just updated their documentation to confirm their primary signal for a search snippet is not the meta description, it is on-page content.

🥈 Essentially, the meta description is only there as a fallback in case Google can’t find relevant details on the page (which means you probably have bigger problems!).

🗣 To quote Google: “Snippets are primarily created from the page content itself. However, Google sometimes uses the meta description HTML element if it might give users a more accurate description of the page than content taken directly from the page.”

🖋 Google is rewriting meta descriptions ~80%+ of the time because it has access to the context of the query, which you don’t.

⏰ For most pages, there are better things to spend your time on, rather than meta descriptions.

How to explain why SEO results aren't fast

When a potential client/boss says "We've done everything right, why aren't we seeing immediate results?" - you can say ⬇
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Think about when you meet someone new for the first time. Even if they do “everything right" and seem super nice, you're not going to trust them until they consistently behave in this way.
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Search engines work on a similar principle with signals shifting gradually over time. Consistent validation of these signals and "doing the right thing" is what leads to search engines trusting your site and ranking you competitively.

Spend less time forecasting and more time doing

In almost all cases trying to accurately forecast SEO performance is a complete waste of time, it's tea leaf reading at best. There are far too many things outside of your control:
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🔧 You don't know how Google's search features may change and impact your traffic, whether it's SGE, FAQ results or new ad formats.
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👨‍🔬 While you can align a long-term strategy with Google's, algorithm updates can adversely impact you (as many sites did with HCU).
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🏇 One of the most overlooked: Competitors! I don't see forecasts that adjust for "what will happen when we knock competitor off position 1". You can't predict accurately how competitors old or new will respond and what they will do during the year.
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🔢 Your data is wrong. Nobody has accurate keyword data. 15% of searches that happen are new, 70%+ of searches that happen are longtail and have little/no search volume.
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🤯 If you build a best/expected/worst case scenario, you'll see these variables compound and your range will be useless: in the millions at the high end and in the tens at the low end.
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What can you do when execs are insisting on forecasts? 🤔
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🏆 A 'size of prize' is easy and useful. How much do we have vs. how much can we realistically get?
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💰 How much is x% worth to us? Based on historic data (effort + growth), does this make it worth it?
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Justifying investment is important - but not at the expense of action. The people getting results are those doing more of the latter and less of the former.

Leverage internal search data for SEO

Using your internal site search data can be a powerful research tool for your SEO, especially for hashtag#ecommerce sites. You can ask yourself:

🛒 Do we have a page that matches the intent of the searches? For instance, you might sell wooden tables, but users are searching for "dining tables", do we have a category/PLP that matches this?

🔗 What page are these searches happening from? Are there opportunities for better internal linking so users don't need to search?

🔃 Are there particular facets users are searching for? Size, colour, gender etc?

Content velocity alone is not a great spam indicator

I’ve seen a couple of predictions this morning on Twitter and LinkedIn that Google is going to release a “content velocity” update to tackle AI spam. In my opinion, that is 100% not going to happen. The speed at which sites publish content (on its own) is not a good indicator of spam. Let’s think this through:

💡 Firstly, Google doesn’t actually know when you have published content. It can only go by when it first discovers a page and what you tell it about when that page was published.

📺 YouTube grows by around 4,000,000 pages per day. Is Google going to apply a “content velocity” penalty to itself? I don’t think so. Same with major news sites publishing hundreds of new pages a day.

🚧 What about the new site I’m publishing that has 50,000 SKUs all going up at once? Is Google going to penalise that? Or do product pages not count in a “content velocity” update?

💰 My client just bought a business and we are going to integrate their content onto our site, it’s 5,000 pages and they are all going live in one day. Are we going to get caught by “content velocity”?

👴 This isn’t a new “footprint” that is unique to AI, spam sites have always pumped out content lots of URLs and “content velocity” has never been a good way to catch them.

There might be some other ML-based way Google can catch sites that are using AI to abuse the SERPs, but there are dozens of reasons that immediately come to mind why "content velocity" isn't the answer.

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Thanks for reading the newsletter, we're just getting started! If you have any feedback, I'd always love to hear it - just hit reply and I'll be sure to read it.

~Mark Williams-Cook