Good morning, search marketers, sometimes one site's loss can be another's gain.
As often happens after big updates, repercussions from Google's March 2019 core update have been playing out in some earnings reports. The popular automotive marketplace Cars.com noted in its latest earnings release that its "SEO traffic grew 49% year-over-year" in the first quarter of the year. We reached out to get the specifics. The company told us that while it believes it benefitted from its overall SEO strategy, another big factor was that one of its biggest rivals, CarGurus.com, saw organic visibility drop around the time of the update. The lesson? Cars.com says it's sticking to its strategic plan, which currently encompasses roughly 100 SEO projects focused on site performance and content.
In his latest SEO for Developers column, Detlef Johnson discusses how Googlebot can now render and index AJAX-style dynamic content driven by XHR POST. In other words, how more of your dynamic content can now be indexed by Google. Detlef notes the crawl budget implications when Google renders dynamic content driven by the XHR POST request method, which prompted a discussion on Twitter.
Being unable to see conversion data for campaigns is not awesome. If you've kept selecting conversion columns in Google Ads only to see them disappear, you weren't going crazy. Google acknowledged via tweet to Kirk Williams of Zato Marketing yesterday that missing conversion columns in the Google Ads UI were the result of a technical issue: "Our Engineering teams have confirmed a technical issue that caused some advertisers to stop seeing certain conversion columns in their tables, as well as filters, saved reports, and custom columns." Google said the glitch has now been fixed.
"The biggest challenge facing Local SEOs these days is the changing Local SERPs," says Andrew Shotland, who will be among the speakers discussing the Evolving Landscape of Local Search at SMX Advanced. The conference takes place June 3-5 in Seattle. Hope to see you there!
Keep reading for a Pro Tip on five segments to analyze, how to get started with the Bing indexing API and much more.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief