Google: Don’t Worry About Bounce Rate For SEO Purposes
Google’s John Mueller said that for SEO purposes you do not need to worry about your site’s bounce rate. John said this on Reddit: “Google doesn’t use that for SEO, so if you’re focused on SEO, you can ignore that.”
Google: It Is About Link Quality Not Link Quantity
It is not about the raw number of links you have to your webpages but rather the quality of those links. Google can and likely does ignore the low quality links, so having a billion low quality links is worthless in many cases. But having one high quality link can be huge for a site. John Mueller of Google said on Twitter that when it comes to links, “I would think more about quality rather than quantity.” John added that “counting links is somewhat futile in any case.”
Google To Move Last Batch Of Sites To Mobile-First Indexing Soon
Google’s John Mueller said in a video hangout on Friday that Google has stopped automatically moving sites to the mobile-first indexing system. Instead, the last batch of sites are being queued up and will all be moved over sometime in the coming month or months. He said the next time Google moves sites to mobile-first indexing, it will likely be the last and then every site served by Google in its search results will be through mobile-first indexing. The sites that will have trouble are sites that have different, less or broken content, links, schema, etc on the mobile version from the desktop version.
2021 digital marketing trends you need to know from 13 marketing experts
- Content marketing
- Companies need to be everywhere (omnichannel traffic)
- Focus on stories
- Repurpose existing video content for social media
- Invest in digital asset management software
- Focus on your own unique data for content marketing
- High quality content enriched with structured data will rule search engines
- Voice search, AI and personalization will be key
- AI will change digital marketing forever in 2021
- Focus on retention
- Continue to nurture and educate your customers
- Predefined personalization in all digital engagement
- Content is king, but the customer is always the main focus
- Trust and credibility are more important than ever
- Use social media for customer and influencer collaboration, not promotion
Over 65% of Web Pages Have No Backlinks
94.3% of pages out of roughly two million pages don’t get a single visitor from Google. 66.31% of pages don’t have even a single backlink. Another 26.29% have links from three websites or less. This was based on data of 1 billion pages in Ahrefs’ Content Explorer.
Google Disputes Zero Click Study, Shares More Data, But It’s Not Enough
Google responded to the zero click study that said 65% of searches end up without a click. Google’s response is that “Google Search sends billions of clicks to websites every day, and we’ve sent more traffic to the open web every year since Google was first created. And beyond just traffic, we also connect people with businesses in a wide variety of ways through Search, such as enabling a phone call to a business.”
Google Page Experience Update Rollout: Slowly Or Abruptly
John Mueller of Google was asked how the rollout will happen and John said he does not know, he said we will have to wait and see. Google did talk about the differences between bold and jarring updates vs. more smooth and gradual updates, and Google said they are preferring the slower paced, more gradual and smooth updates.
Google On Search Rankings With Hyphenated Words
John Mueller of Google was asked about how Google treats words with hyphenation. The answer is, it depends. The truth is, Google learns how to treat different words in different ways, with or without hyphens. Mueller said on Twitter “No, by default we don’t ignore hyphens in words. Sometimes we learn they’re synonyms, sometimes we learn that they’re not.” John did say in 2017 that hyphens in your queries can change the meaning.
5 Big Content Trends You Need to Know Now
1. Next-Level Visuals in Content: we’ll be seeing more marketers taking advantage of dynamic, custom, branded imagery for their content.
2. Video Content & Visual Storytelling: 84% of people have been convinced to buy a product/service through watching a video. YouTube is the second-most-popular search engine (only behind Google).
3. Upping Your E-A-T: Focus on providing expertise, authority, and trust in our content.
4. Better, More Purposeful Content Than Ever Before: Better writing tailored to audiences, with consistency for the brand’s tone and style, along with a better understanding of what the target audience needs from search results for a given keyword.
5. Ultra-Targeted, Customer-First Content: This will be how you win with both audiences and search engines. The very best content that hits the user’s needs in the bullseye is the type that will rank #1 with Google.