Everyone wants to be the best. Whether you’re rooting for your favorite basketball team, participating in your town’s annual pie-baking contest, or competing for the top sales in your office, aiming for #1 is a natural human impulse. This desire for dominance comes out in full force when businesses are competing to be #1 on …
Mobile-First Indexing Best Practices
When we last discussed mobile-first indexing, it was so fresh on the scene, it hadn’t even gone live yet! At the time it was viewed as an unprecedented shift that reflected searchers’ newfound preference for searching on mobile devices. The updated index would predominantly use the mobile version of a webpage’s content when evaluating the …
Updates to Search Console
You’re making a big mistake if you manage a website without the assistance of Google Search Console. Not only is this handy service free to use, but also it helps you succeed in Google Search by providing tools that allow you to monitor and maintain your search engine optimization (SEO) and repair any issues that arise. …
Myths About BERT, Google’s Latest Algorithm Update
We first introduced bidirectional encoder representations from transformers – a.k.a. BERT, Google’s biggest update in years – at the end of October. Designed to help Google’s algorithm better understand the intent behind search queries, BERT processes words in relation to all the other words in the query, not one-by-one in order. This neural network-based technique for …
Is Google Search Fair? How Humans Interfere with Search Results
After you type a query into Google, you might imagine a digital algorithm sifting through results and churning out the best answers, ranked by relevance and quality. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But despite the fact that Google employees created and refined the search engine’s algorithm, most people assume that Google has taken a “hands-off” …
Meet BERT – Google’s Biggest Update in Years
Have you ever tried to search for something on Google that you didn’t know how to spell? Or struggled to get Google to understand what you were trying to say? With its newest algorithm update – the biggest update since RankBrain was introduced in 2014 – Google is hoping to make it easier than ever …
Paid Search and Organic Traffic on the Rise
There’s been a lot of talk lately about Google hogging search traffic with zero-click searches. According to SearchEngineJournal.com, 34.4 percent of desktop searches and 62.5 percent of mobile searches are zero-click searches. But before you fall on your knees and curse Google for stealing all of your website’s traffic, check out this new study from …
Exploring Google Ranking Factors in 2019
It’s not easy to locate relevant and useful responses to online searchers’ queries in a fraction of a second. To accomplish this, Google’s search algorithms take many factors into account. Known as ranking factors, these characteristics of a website may help – or harm – your website’s ability to rank highly. Since Google won’t reveal all …
Google Guarantee vs. Google Screened
Many people are skeptical of the things they see online – and for good reason! Sometimes photoshopped pictures look more realistic than real life, catfishing (i.e., pretending to be someone else on social media) is so prevalent it spawned a popular tv show, and sophisticated fraudsters can impersonate legitimate credit card companies’ websites to steal …
Why You Need to Learn About On-SERP SEO
You know about on-page SEO and off-page SEO – maybe you thought you knew it all! But now that Google is trying to answer as many user queries as possible on the search engine results page (SERP), there is one more type of SEO that you need to understand: on-SERP SEO. We briefly mentioned it in our …
