SEO Specialist, Zoe Clulow, heads up the latest news in the world of search engine optimisation, from an increased demand for SEO to Tiger King Joe Exotic's SEO manipulation.
SEO News: Increase In Sales Has Led To Increased SEO Demand
This week, our SEO round-up takes a look at whether SEO is getting harder, the increased demand for SEO and its link to increased online sales, Google sharing their video optimisation best practice, and Tiger King Joe Exotic's SEO manipulation.
BRIGHTONSEO IS BACK!
Featuring dozens of talks over 2 days (25th-26th March), BrightonSEO Spring 2021 is sure to have an SEO talk that you are interested in. There is always plenty of variety – so whether you’d like to learn more about Technical SEO, Content Marketing, Link Building or even Automation, you can register for free here.
INCREASED INTERNET SALES HAS LED TO INCREASEd DEMAND FOR SEO
With the acceleration of e-commerce since the pandemic hit, companies need to ensure that their websites are performing at their absolute best or they’ll find themselves left behind!
From the above chart we can see how internet sales have boomed since lockdowns were introduced. But what impact has this had on SEO? The below chart shows that more and more people are searching for SEO and helps in realising the importance of ensuring your site can be reached organically through search engines:
GOOGLE SHARE VIDEO SEO BEST PRACTICE
Google has shared their 5 SEO best practices when uploading video content. Before uploading the video content, it is suggested that:
- Make the video public – this sounds obvious but to ensure this they the video need a corresponding web page with a URL that Google can access.
- Use structured data – by identifying and implementing structured data on video content, Google find and understand the videos better. This can also be done for live streams using ‘LIVE’ structured data.
- Provide high quality thumbnails – ensuring that the thumbnail is accessible by Google, if the thumbnail URL is blocked by robots.txt then it won’t be accessible to Google.
- Submit a video sitemap – this can also assist with Google being able to crawl the URL the video is accessible on.
- Accessible video files – video previews are a feature in search results that provide better content than just a static thumbnail.
how the tiger king manipulated seo
We’re going back to last year when many of us turned to Netflix for our lockdown entertainment and we were given the Tiger King.
When you think about it, we can point out a few areas where black cat hat SEO was used by The Tiger King, Joe Exotic. Firstly, Joe Exotic changed his business name to rank in search results and steal traffic from Carol Baskins ‘Big Cat Rescue’.
Joe also listed his Zoo in Florida - where co-star Carol’s was - when actually he was based in Oklahoma. He manipulated the data to appear in the business profile on Google.
IS SEO GETTING HARDER?
60% of SEO professionals say that SEO is harder now than 5 years ago, according to a Twitter poll with over 1,000 respondents.
Screaming Frog have recently highlighted A few areas that have been expressed as becoming increasingly difficult, including:
- Google are constantly enhancing the results page so that to compete successfully, websites need to have low bounce rates and affective SERP features.
- Paid are chipping away at organic placements. As the colour of the As box is green which is the same colour as the URL snippet.
- Link building – to increase outreach opportunities the relationship between PR and SEO is crucial for effective link building!
And with that, we've reached the end of our weekly SEO round-up.
If you would like to discuss any of the stories discussed in this SEO news round-up, get in touch with our experts today.
