It’s been two very strange years since I wrote the last Backlink Breaker. I think it’s time to come back.
Our little agency has more than doubled, both in team size and clients, and it’s getting to the point where we might not be able to label ourselves as “small” much longer. Weird.
But what’s going on in the SEO world? Much like the outside world over the last two years (and right now) the word “chaos” certainly comes to mind. It’s been challenging and frustrating and wonderful and stressful—and everything in between!
I’m glad to be back, and getting back to commentary and coverage on the latest SEO and Content Marketing trends.
The News
Google will deprecate the follow and welcome offer features for local business listings. No clear date, but “soon” was the helpful answer from Google. Follow allowed people to get updates directly from businesses and the welcome offer allowed you to receive special offers if you followed the business. If you used this feature you probably care. If you didn’t… this isn’t a big deal.
Google is now testing questions and answer features in Google Maps. It’s important to keep tabs on all the areas people can publicly interact with your business. Questions and Answers features allow anyone to ask a question publicly about your business, and you have the chance to answer. This isn't rolled out yet, but it’s important to understand where business interactions may occur.
Facebook’s News Feed is now just The Feed. Cool guys.
Google launched an API for pulling call history from your Google Business Profile. This is a nice feature that allows you to programmatically pull call history without awkward manual data pulls. Very useful if you have high-call volume and a long history of calls to dig through. Additionally, this makes CRM connection opportunities more fluid — meaning you could feed “Google Search + GMB” call sources into your acquisition and relationship management tools!
Google is currently rolling out the page experience updates for desktop. Google indicated that we shouldn’t expect drastic changes from this launch, so if you see any ranking shifts, it likely has nothing to do with desktop page experience launch.
Where is technical SEO going in 2022? Moz has some predictions.
Ranking Factors
