This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Search Console is Sending Emails for Indexing Issues
A new function in Search Console allows webmasters to receive emails on issues that their site has and how they can fix them. Users will receive an email notification on index coverage that may be negatively affecting Google search results with a link leading you to instructions on fixing it. After making the changes you will receive an email saying, “we’re validating your fixes for Index coverage issues on site,” with a link to see the validation flow progress and to see which URLs failed to validate.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
New Insight Cards on AdWords Overview Page
Google made an addition to the overview page in the new AdWords interface with the inclusion of two new insight cards that share if your ad impressions significantly shift between one devices to another and when there’s a notable change with your ads showing above or below the search results. This update was announced by Google via Google+ and Twitter and should give advertisers a little more insight into any significant changes that occur in their impression metrics.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Bing Introducing Multi-Perspective Answers
Bing’s new Multi-Perspective answers are similar to Google’s featured snippets. Bing will show two different answers side by side, just as Google recently explained that they would. The goal is to give more personalized results that can show multiple perspective answers from two different sources. Bing is incorporating a sentiment analysis to understand if content has a negative or positive sentiment and Google is exploring how to add this analysis to their results.
Source: Bing Blog
Search Ad Call Notifications Added to AdWords Express
A new feature implemented into AdWords Express allows advertisers to rate calls and be notified of missed calls on their search ads. Once a call ends that began from an ad click, advertisers will get a feedback notification on the relevancy of the call. This feedback is then used by Google to improve targeting with the goal of improving call quality over time. If a call is missed, an alert is sent and a business owner can then hit “Call Back” to reach the caller.
Source: Search Engine Land
Google Changed the AMP Image Size Requirements
Google has updated their AMP articles to increase the size of images. Previously, Google asked for images to be a minimum width of 696 pixels and three-hundred-thousand pixels total. The new size is a minimum of twelve hundred pixels wide and eight-hundred-thousand total. This is specific for the markup you use for AMP articles that can appear in the top stories carousel. Additional image guidelines require every page to contain at least one image, URLs must be crawlable and indexable, and images must represent the marked-up content. Google will pick the best image to display in the search results based on the aspect ratio and resolution.
Source: The SEM Post
Analysis
Steps To Grow Your Website Traffic Through Content
Nick Churick from Ahrefs shares tips on bringing more traffic to your site. Find the keywords that your competitors are ranking for and optimize for those, find queries that your target audience is asking and answer them for potential customers using long-tailed keywords, optimize your content around a topic and not a single keyword and revise your old content. Review your analytics on a weekly basis and find pages that are already ranking and see if they can use improvements to grow your traffic. For local pages, make sure to include schema markup.
Source: Ahrefs Blog