Good morning search marketers, do you believe in coincidences?
The search traffic split between mobile and desktop may have stabilized, with roughly 60% of all queries originating from a mobile device, according to a report from the IAB. Whether by coincidence or as a response to those numbers, the ad revenue roughly reflects that split with mobile accounting for 65% and desktop making up the remainder. Meanwhile, desktop ad spend has been flat and mobile is still seeing significant growth. Although mobile search volumes grew 3% over the past two and a half years, the data does suggest that we're at some sort of homeostasis. FWIW, Google told us this week that it's still seeing growth in mobile queries.
It appears Yoast SEO really is all-in on structured data implementation. Its latest 11.2 update lets webmasters customize their schema output by adding to (or removing data from) the graph that Yoast shows search engines. The update also enables you to add or remove social profiles and will even automatically select your first image to include in its schema graph (if you haven't set a featured image). If you missed it, the 11.0 update first introduced a revamped, more approachable schema implementation and the 11.1 update added video and image schema to the mix.
Microsoft is giving back to the developer community by making its Space Partition Tree And Graph Tag (SPTAG) vector search algorithm available to all via Github. SPTAG (just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?) uses vectors to assign numerical representations to words, image pixels or other data points. By translating that information into data and applying deep learning models to associate it with other terms, Microsoft says it can get a better idea of search intent and return more relevant results that are based on more than the keywords used in the query. Github is a subsidiary of Microsoft, and this offering seems to be another romantic move in their courtship of the developer community. By open-sourcing the algorithm, independent developers can use it to push the capabilities of traditional, audio and visual search to new limits.
The good stuff doesn't end here — head on down to your daily Pro Tip and Search Shorts for some actionable, Google-related insights.
George Nguyen,
Associate Editor
