What changed this week in SEO? (Hint: The answer is always "too much!") From AI content updates to Trusted Store Badges, let’s take a look at all the latest SEO updates and how they might impact your site traffic and business growth.
The News
A recent Forrester report found that annual global marketing spend will increase to $4.7 trillion by 2025, an increase of $1.1 trillion from 2021. The pandemic bounce is real, and as digital marketers, we find ourselves in a healthy and growing industry... Keep it up.
Google AI can now update the business hours listed in Google Maps and Search, so keep an eye on your GMB and map listings to make sure they’re accurate. Thanks robots!
The Trusted Store Badge is now live in Google Shopping. To receive the badge, you need to deliver high-quality shipping and returns to your customers. Google will compare your performance on shipping speeds, return costs and return windows and compare it to competitors to see if you can earn the badge. Early data indicates the badge drives a significant click through boost. Even more incentive for focusing on your customer service.
March 2022 product reviews update has finished rolling out, impacting websites with product review content. Primarily focused on rewarding high-quality reviews from reviewers that have actually used the product they are writing about.
Google’s webmaster guidelines have been updated around automatically generated content. The new addition explains that auto-generated content designed to manipulate search rankings is against webmaster guidelines. This language has always been in the documentation, but it's been recently upgraded to the main guidelines document, indicating this is most likely increased in importance with the rise of AI content tools. I find it much more interesting that Google recently said that, “AI content is still not good enough for search,” I’ve had more than a few clients ask me about spinning up websites with AI content. It’s nice to finally have some backup for my inevitable “NO” screamed into the cosmos.
Google Search Console will show links from a redirect domain. Useful to know if you ever pull up the links report in GSC after moving a site.
YouTube is launching a new search insights tool at the end of April (some may have access already). This new feature will allow you to look at search volume across all users on YouTube and among your viewers. This is an awesome new research tool to help understand the value of search queries that you want to target for YouTube optimization. Previously, I used the Ahrefs YouTube keyword research tool, which wasn’t great, or I just tried to connect Google organic search data to YouTube, which was a pretty large data gap.
Ranking Factors
