Our March SEO news is absolutely packed with the most recent Google news and actionable tips to help improve your site rankings.
Google news
How Google understands videos
Want to know how Google search understands video content? Danielle Marshak from Google shared some valuable tips in the latest’s Search Off the Record episode:
- Google uses audio from the video file to understand what words are being spoken, and then it tries to slice up those words into meaningful parts or chunks.
- Characters can be extracted from the video. This includes headings throughout the video to understand where sections (important moments) of the video are (for example: Now, we’re going to talk about cats).
- Visual information (such as objects, animals, or motions) is also used to understand what's happening or identify key moments.
- Google relies on structured data and text signals from the page as well.
For more info, read Google’s video best practices.
Is alt text a Google ranking factor?
During SEO office hours, John Mueller confirmed that alt text is only a ranking factor for image search, and it doesn’t add value to a page when it comes to ranking in web search.
The URL Parameters tool is going away
Google will begin to sunset the URL parameters tool and users will no longer have access after April 26, 2022. There's no action required from the current users of the tool.
Universal Analytics is dead (well, kind of)
Google Analytics announced that they’re stopping data collection for Universal Analytics on July 1st, 2023. While there is still a bit of time, we recommend moving to the new setup and getting used to it early. If you need YoY historical data, then you should implement Google Analytics 4 now!
Merchant Center can now be linked to Google Analytics 4
Want to track your conversions from free product listings? Great news, you can now connect Merchant Center and Google Analytics property to measure the direct impact of your product data.
Product review update
The latest Google Product reviews update interests mainly eCommerce sites and affiliate marketers. This update should ensure reviews come from people who demonstrate expert knowledge and first-hand research about products. In short, Google recommends mainly focusing on in-depth, authentic, and high-quality reviews.
Are you worried about how the latest products reviews update will impact your rankings? Remember to focus on the following points:
- Demonstrate your expertise by including helpful in-depth details
- Show how the product is used or how it looks like in real life
- Share unique information like visuals, audio, or link to other content
- Cover comparable products
The update is rolling out in English and Google aims to cover more languages over time.
New highly cited sources label in search results
Google added a new “highly cited” label in search results to recognize original content and direct users to reliable information. The new label will appear in the Top Stories carousel and it will help identify stories that other news organizations have frequently cited.
Google Search Console updates
Google works hard to introduce its new features and tool updates. The Search Console connector now includes Discover and Google News traffic data, similar to the data recently added to the API. They also added more contextual information to the structured data issues reporting in Google Search Console, the Rich Results test, and URL inspection tool.
Google also started a new blog serious about using Search Console with Data Studio. This combination allows you to connect multiple data sources and create fancy dashboards. There are also many useful data visualization tips to make your dashboards shine.
New UTM parameters
Google added new UTM parameters in Google Analytics and here's a quick overview of how you can use them:
- utm_source_platform - to identify the platform where the link was used (e.g. Google ads).
- utm_creative_format - to define which ad format was used to have a better idea of what is working, or not.
- utm_marketing_tactic - to outline which campaign drove the most sales (e.g. remarketing, brand awareness,...).
Do keyword meta tags matter for SEO?
In #AskGooglebot, John Mueller explained how Google Search uses keyword meta tags. In short, Google does NOT use the content of keywords meta tag in web rankings. He also listed common meta tags that Google uses and can help your site to rank higher in search:
- Description meta tag
- Robots meta tag
- Title element
What’s the right title tag length for maximum results?
We found this interesting take on the search results length by Cyrus from Zyppy. And it seems that focus on title tags continues to be more and more valuable. Top takeaways:
- Keeping your title below 600px helps guarantee Google won’t shorten it
- Title tags over 70 characters were rewritten nearly every time.
- Your best bet is to target 51-55 characters.
- There is no penalty for long title tags.
MM TIP: Want to check the length of meta titles in bulk? Use our Content Analysis miner to find out.
Marketing Miner news
We just launched not one, but three new APIs to help you work even faster! Thanks to our APIs, you can now speed up your work and generate custom reports in your own tools.
- Search Visibility API
- Keyword Suggestions API
- Keyword Search Volume API
Find out more information and check out the documentation here: https://help.marketingminer.com/en/cat/data-api-profilers/
