Relevance Web Marketing likes to keep its followers up to date on all the latest industry news and developments. Read on to discover July’s top ten articles in the world of SEO, as seen on the renowned Moz Blog.
1. Experiment Shows Up To 60% of « Direct » Traffic is Actually Organic Search
We have long known that unreliable traffic measurements have disguised a significant percentage of organic traffic as undecipherable direct traffic, but finding out how much has been “the bane of all SEOs”. Until now. Groupon’s Project Management team took a brave gamble in the name of SEO. While deindexing your site from web browsers isn’t recommended, a quick read of their subsequent findings certainly is. It makes for fascinating reading.
2. Study: Sponsored Content has a Trust Problem
Contently’s market research on native advertising has led them to draw some interesting conclusions that may surprise some publishers. Although Contently’s surveys showed that less than half of all readers understand the term ‘sponsored content’ correctly, they nonetheless appear to have very strong opinions on it. The fact that only 24% of readers scroll down on native ad content compared to 71% on normal content, may make you rethink your content strategies.
3. Does SEO Boil Down to Site Crawlability and Content Quality?
Rand Fishkin leaps to the defence of SEO in his latest MOZ whiteboard Friday video blog. He claims that modern SEO doesn’t simply boil down to keywords and links. Instead, Rand throws social media, PR, branding, analytics and many other components to marketing strategy into the melting pot. Find out exactly what SEO means.
4. Authorship Badges Removed: Still Worth Setting Up
Bill Slawski of Go Fish Digital discusses Google’s recent changes to the display of author information. He dictates how we should or rather shouldn’t change our approach to applying authorship markup. Despite the loss of author profile photos and other information in search engines, Bill decrees that “there’s still a lot of benefit” in setting up these details online. Find out why.
Picking up where Bill Slawski left off, Wistia’s Casey Henry considers the impact of Google’s changes to video snippet display in search engine results. A 27.8% drop in the number of videos, mean they are an increasingly valuable commodity, but what exactly are the repercussions?
6. Google Rewrites Quality Rating Guide – What SEOs Need To Know
Jennifer Slegg considers Google’s latest changes on the whole. She remarks how Google’s updates in version 5 make far greater use of knowledge graph style results than previously, and she provides a comprehensive guide to Google’s various other changes to ranking parameters, including ‘E-A-T’ (expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness), and of course, on-page advertisements.
7. Consumer Psychology and E-Commerce Checkout
Ever wondered what your customers are thinking when they come across your product? Find out by following this trail of fascinating and factual infographics which dictate the troubles of e-commerce and how they can be combatted. Learn how you can adapt your product design, site speed, and reviews to influence checkout behaviour.
8. TCS Case Study: You Have a Great Strategy but No Content Creators to Execute it
To have a successful content marketing strategy, you must first have successful content. That successful content is built on the foundations of a hard-working and knowledgeable team of content creators. But what exactly is the perfect team to produce perfect content.
9. How to Never Run Out of Great Ideas
Over 409 million people view more than 14 billion pages each month. These people are constantly looking for new content to read. Peter Meyers gave an interesting speech at MozCon to explain how content providers can engage their audiences more effectively and more creatively. Don’t miss his slideshow which puts the business of content creation into perspective.
10. How I Spent My Summer Vacation | An Interactive Matt Cutts Adventure
I’m sure we’ve all got something special planned for summer, but Matt Cutts’s holiday adventures are something more than that. Find out what kind of secret missions Google’s Head of Webspam Division has been up to in this interactive and easy-to-read blog.