Again, another month has gone by and I’ve rounded up the search news and research that I think you can’t miss.

Google (as usual) has made some changes over the last month, they celebrated their 20th year in business, rolled out new features, and have given us a hint of where they are going.

There’s also been some great SEO research released this week. You should check it out.

Google Search Updates

Google has a just rolled out a number of updates coinciding with its 20th birthday. Those features include featured videos, collections, and activity cards.

Here are the details:

Featured Videos

Based on their AI-powered search, Google will show you videos based on your search that will play one after another in the search result. You can tap on the video you like to play the full video.

Activity Cards

Google is focused on displaying search “options” based on your entire search journey They know that searchers look for answers over time and to aid searchers in those journeys, they will be displaying cards at the top of search results, which show the pages you’ve visited, as well as previous queries.

Collections

If you like the content you see in your activity card, you can save it. Based on things you’ve saved and your history, Google will recommend new content for your collections.

Enhancing Topics

Google is working to providing additional information around your queries that help you understand the topic or take action on the information. If you search for “pug,” for example, you’ll see a card where you can find little things to tap, like names, training details and how to buy or adopt a pug.

Discover

Google will now show recommended content based on saved preferences in search (they were already doing this in Google Assistant).

Preferences for Language

Google will now let you select the type of content that you’d like to see by language. For example, if you like recipes in Spanish, it will only show pages with Spanish-language recipes, but if you like your news in English, news articles will be in English.

Image Search

Images will now have tags that will help you sort those items – coming to desktop.

Google Lens

You’ll be able to identify certain objects within an image to view images relating to what you’ve selected.

Pathways

Designed for job seekers, this will allow people to learn new skills related to the job they desire. Training programs and available jobs in your area will be featured here. Google is testing this in Virginia.

To see what these items will look like, here are tweets from Danny Sullivan about the upcoming changes:

Search is a journey, where we know people are picking up over time. New Activity Cards are launching that help you pick up where you left off. pic.twitter.com/ZUDZvhgKJQ

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 24, 2018

Collection cards that group things you've saved will come later in the fall. pic.twitter.com/ob93ZXAFuV

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 24, 2018

A new dynamic way to quickly change results is coming, such as how you can toggle to quickly change about a dog breeds. This is powered by the Topic Layer, a way of leveraging how the Knowledge Graph knows about people, places and things into topics. pic.twitter.com/EgtvKhKS88

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 24, 2018

Google Stories

Google is also rolling out a “stories” feature – aimed at using artificial intelligence to create stories of content that will be housed in search and images.

It’s part of their focus around making search more visual.
Google will be first rolling out stories about people—mainly celebrities and athletes—in what this article says, is to ‘[provide] a glimpse into facts and important moments from their lives in a rich, visual format.”

Google Carousel Snippets

They look like this and allow users to move horizontally through the results:

Here’s the takeaway: There are now 6 times the number of snippets on a search engine result page.

Do you need to rank on page one to be surfaced in these snippets? Here’s the latest from GetStat research on these carousels:

Normally, 97.88 percent of snippets source from the first page, and 29.90 percent typically pull from rank three alone. With bubble snippets, only 36.58 percent of their URLs came from the top 10 ranks. And while the most popular rank position that bubble snippets pulled from was on the first page (also rank three), just under five percent of them did this.

You should check to see if your rank tracking software is tracking these new type of snippets, if not, you might want to consider GetStat.

The next 20 years of Google

https://www.blog.google/products/search/helping-you-along-your-search-journeys/

Google is celebrating its 20th birthday and released a post that highlights its focus on a growth in image search, and query-less searching – powered by their Knowledge Graph, Intent engine patent, AI, and their Natural Language Processing powers.

Side note: to appear in this new query-less searching, you need to help the engine understand your content – writing to searcher’s intent, using structured data markup, and write in a way that the search engine’s NLP can understand. New to structured data? Here’s a great guide. Google also has a new step-by-step tutorial. There’s a great article here by Briggsby that goes into thinking about NLP when creating copy: https://www.briggsby.com/on-page-seo-for-nlp

Google introduces a new search engine for datasets

If you are an organization that has freely available datasets, there’s a new structured data format for you as well as a new Google search just for datasets.

Google Human Rater Guidelines are Google’s Ideal Search Results

‘You can view the rater guidelines as where we want the search algorithm to go,’”They don’t tell you how the algorithm is ranking results, but they fundamentally show what the algorithm should do.”

Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president of search, assistant and news, told CNBC.

Buried in this article is also a mention that Google still uses PageRank in its algorithm (in case you thought that they were not using it anymore).

The Google Chrome team is thinking about killing the URL

Wow. This is something to watch. Article here.

Beyond the security reasons outlined in this article, I would also encourage you to read Mobile Moxie’s three-part series about mobile first indexing and how that will impact URLs.

Be Unique and Better than the Rest

So what do you do if you have a site that is as good as the top 10 in Google, but you’re not breaking through and ranking on page one? That was the question posed during a recent Google Webmaster Hangout, and I think John Mueller’s response is worth reading:

…for a large part it comes across as your site being kind of as good as a lot of the others out there. …I think that’s a good step.

But on the other hand at the same time because it’s kind of as good as all the others, from a user point of view, why do we especially need to have your site in there as well?

If we go to the search engineering teams and say, well the ten search results we’re showing now are pretty good but here is this other one that is just as good. They don’t really have any incentive to say okay we’ll swap out those search results and use this one because it’s just as good as the other one.

So the more you can really kind of take a step back and try to find an angle that significantly sets your site apart from all of the others so that when we go to the engineering team we can say well these ten results are pretty good but this one is the one that should definitely be number one for this kind of query.

Then that’s something they can take into account and say, Oh, yeah you’re right, this is really clearly the best out there and we need to make sure that it’s on top.

We’ll take some time to figure out what is actually happening here in our algorithms to treat this site, this content that it’s producing appropriately.
And those are things of course when you’re in a niche like this that is very competitive, that that’s very hard to do but it’s not impossible.

So I really recommend trying to take a step back and thinking about what you can do to significantly take your site to the next level.
Which might be new content that you produce, new angles that you kind of look into. Maybe less content that’s already out on other sites… all of these things to really kind of make sure that your site is really unique and not just similar to the other ones.

OK enough about Google for a second.

Are you a brand?

Then your biggest opportunity is Amazon.

Amazon has more product searches than Google

Amazon has dethroned Google in product searches with over 54% of all product searches now happening on Amazon instead of Google.

And it turns out that once you get to Amazon, 90% of the product views are actually the result of an Amazon search. And once they get that search result, it turns out that over two-thirds of the clicks are on the first page.

Grab the full details from this whitepaper.

Need to ramp up on Amazon SEO? I would recommend this podcast episode.

New tools and Updates

Lighthouse Reports for Multiple Pages

Dying to run the Chrome Lighthouse Audit tool on more than one page at once? Now you can! Check it out.

ScreamingFrog 10

You can now schedule crawls, crawl headless, how much of your site is indexed and internal PageRank score. There are also cool crawl visualizations. 

Check out this visualization:

Ubersuggest is back

It’s back and it’s free keyword research. Check it out, and let me know what you think.

That’s it for September. Let’s see what October brings!

PS: Thanks for taking the time out to read my post and geek out about SEO with me!  I get my inspiration for post topics from other SEOs and in-house marketers struggling with SEO strategy and implementation questions, so if you like this post, please…

1) Leave a comment

2) Share it with your network

3) Follow me for future posts