If you don’t start your day by checking the Google Search Console, don’t read this article.
In a world where fashions change, pandemics rage and economies fluctuate, digital publishers are left with only one certainty: reverence for Google’s search engine. For those who already aspired to the much-coveted career change from SEO specialist to social media manager or even influencer, the change will have to wait: 15 percent of daily searches on the Google search engine are totally new. In this post, I will share some of the key innovations announced at this year’s Google I/O:
1. If you’ve chosen to work in SEO and aspire to sleep at night, ask yourself two questions
Even if you think you’re average at your job, you don’t think you’re going to the beach without a laptop. Mark Zuckerberg did this once in early February 2022 and lost 50% of the stock price in one day. To keep us all awake, the Search Analytics API has been updated with new data and reports, for example, analytics from Google Discover (which now generates more traffic than all other traffic sources combined) and Google News.
Aside from tracking clicks, impressions, rankings and more, the most interesting new feature in my opinion is the introduction of the Google Site Kit Plugin for WordPress, a tool that consolidates all of Google’s main dashboards within a single interface (Search Console, Analytics, Adsense, PageSpeed Insights, Tag Manager, Optimizer). The plugin is particularly interesting considering that more than 80 percent of Italian publishers work on WordPress CMS.
2. Video searches continue their triumphant gallop.
For years now, the growth of video has raged across all major digital distribution channels-TikTok, YT, Instagram, Facebook, SnapChat, Twitch. Those who think the same trend does not apply to the Google search engine understand SEO as Pellé shoots penalty kicks.
To best index video content on the search engine, it is essential to provide complete structured data. This means inclusion of the URL, title, cover image, description and more. From Search Console, video content indexing reports can be extracted so that publishers can understand what content is being indexed or not and why. For changes that may be needed to the video content, additional crawling of the content within the Search Console can be requested from Google.
The most important thing for publishers to know is that the platform on which they host their video content for now is NOT a ranking factor. I can already imagine saber rattling at the papete to celebrate the news.
3. Search Analytics and Google Analytics data may not match (surprise?).
If you already know this, you have confirmation. The two platforms are different and designed to measure different things. Search Analytics aims to measure user behavior on Google search pages while Google Analytics measures user behavior within the site. As a personal note, I would add not to worry in case the behavior of Google Analytics has puzzled you in recent months, since Google announced the launch of Analytics 4, the legacy product has unilaterally decided to stop working. C’est la vie.
Google also pointed out that the introduction of new features within Search Console will lead to possible new discrepancies with Google Analytics metrics. Simply put, prepare to understand even less than you do now.
The summary of planned improvements within the Search Console are greater detail on page performance as search engine ranking factors, in an effort to give better support to publishers in preventing and resolving SEO issues.
The impact of URLs on site ranking is more visible
As we all know, site performance depends on a number of factors, some of which are outside the scope of content such as URLs. The introduction of Google URL’s Inspection API allows publishers to monitor the impact of URLs on the search engine and check for structured data optimization, performance on mobile devices, indexing status, and a host of small details that can improve search engine rankings.
An interesting new feature is the Lost Impressions Check feature that allows publishers to monitor pages that have lost traction on the search engine. It is a good idea to check pages that have lost indexing or impressions to prevent and fix potential problems the before an asteroid hits.
For more info, this is the link to the Google I/O video!
