Once again we’re back with the top stories in search and SEO from the past couple days. So here they are …
Changes To Local Pack For ‘Best’ Queries
Conrad Saam over at Search Engine Land write about some changes rolling out in Google’s local pack. As illustrated in the image above Google is adding a rating filter. Presently it’s appearing for many queries that include the word ‘best’ but I assume it’ll become the norm for most queries which of course isn’t great for new businesses without reviews or for businesses with lower review scores (I mean – who wouldn’t select the “4.5 and up” option?).
Tackling Fake News
Search Engine Journal’s Matt Southern the announcement by Google in how they’re addressing the issue of fake news in their results. They’re approaching the issue by adjusting their ranking signals, adding areas to their quality raters guidelines to look for it, adding direct feedback tools to the SERPs and becoming more transparent in how users can address the issue themselves.
Google Home Gets Cooking
Google announced yesterday the addition of millions of recipes to what you can now access via your Google Home. I’ve given it a test and it works quite well starting you with the ingredients listed 3 at a time or one by one so you can get them all together and then taking you step-by-step through the creation process.
Measuring Content Marketing Performance
Rob Garner wrote a good article for Search Engine Journal on how how to tell if content marketing strategies work or don’t. In this article he’s outlined 69 questions you should be asking and what you should be looking to during content marketing efforts ranging from the deep-linking ratio to social metrics to your unique pageviews. It’s valuable food for thought.
Paid Search Makes Up 48% Of Digital Spend
Greg Sterling over at Search Engine Land covered the news. IAB’s paid search stats are out for 2016 and it’s vastly different than the year prior. On top of paid search jumping to 48% of total online marketing spend the big news was mobile ad spending jumping 72.5% and surpassing desktop spend for the first time accounting for 53% of all paid search spend.
Google Assistant SDK Launched
Developers can now start working with the Google Assistant SDK to add the assistant to their own hardware prototypes. I’m going to be honest, I understand what it can result in but I couldn’t explain how developers will get it there so let me just close off with Google’s own video and invite you to read about the announcement on their blog. It’s very cool and will revolutionize the way we interact with various technologies.
Google Trips Adds New Features
Google announced yesterday the launch of new features to Google Trips to help “make vacationing easier”. Drawing information from your Inbox they’re collecting all your reservations and putting them in one place now (if you don’t find that kind of creepy it’s very helpful). On top of that they’ve added alerts to last-minute changes and are now providing insight into getting from point A to point B via train and public transportation. There’s more in the updates and I recommend treading their post for screenshots and a full description.
And that’s all we have to today. if you think we missed anything feel free to add it in the comments below.