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🔍 Wayback Machine gets cooler | Case study in localized SEO

Good morning search marketers, let's hear it for the Internet Archive.

Who doesn't love the Wayback Machine? Now it's getting even cooler with a beta feature called "Changes" that highlights the depth of content changes made to a page in a calendar view. You can then click on two days to compare what the page looked like on those dates side-by-side. It's definitely still in beta, so you might hit some snags with it, but it was working well for me yesterday afternoon. The calendar view's color scales indicate the amount of change that occurred between the archived snapshots, making it much easier to figure out when significant changes were made to a page — very handy for SEOs.

Coinciding with International Small Business Day, Google launched a site Thursday designed to help small businesses figure out where to start with its suite of free and paid products. After a series of prompt questions, Google's suggestions might include setting up a GMB listing or downloading the GMB app, starting an ad campaign or trialing the G Suite — and every time I tried it, the suggestions included YouTube. This is the latest in a series of efforts Google has launched to make its products easier to navigate for small businesses stretched for resources. Recent GMB updates, as well as Local Services ads and Smart Campaigns, built on the AdWords Express technology, are other examples. 

If you or your client are looking to expand into new markets and are looking at organic search to fuel international growth, you might pick up a tip or two from Wolfgang Digital's campaign strategy and tactics for the Digital Marketing Institute. The Search Engine Land Award SEO agency of the year spearheaded a mixed of localization efforts to help the DMI expand beyond the UK. The team used a host of tools, including SEOmonitor, Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, SEMRush and BuzzSumo to manage and inform the campaign. In seven months, the SEO effort drove a 75% increase in organic traffic globally and found a new top market in the U.S. 

Read on for a Pro Tip from Lily Ray on voice search, Ask The Editors and more. |

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

 
 
 
Pro Tip
 

How much should we care about voice search? It depends on target audience.

"We conducted a 600–plus person survey that attempted to answer the SEO question of the year: Is voice search optimization really a crucial marketing strategy, or just a big nothingburger?" Lily Ray of Path Interactive shared her agency's voice search study that uncovered some useful, age-based data for marketers.

"The majority of respondents – 70% – report using voice search at least a few times per week. 27% of respondents use voice search 1-3 times per day. Layering on the age of the respondents reveals some interesting trends. The age group with the heaviest voice search usage is the oldest group, ages 65-plus. 88% of respondents aged 65 or older use voice search at least a few times a week. 50% of users ages 65-plus claim to use voice search 1-3 times per day. For companies targeting this age group, voice search should absolutely find its way into their marketing mix."

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Create Landing Pages That Convert

Sponsored by Sharpspring

If you're looking to gather leads for your business, you need to have a landing-page strategy. This guide is written for any marketer looking to initiate or improve their landing-page strategy. It will guide you through the entire process of creating and optimizing landing pages, highlighting key points along the way.

Read More »

 
Ask The Editors
 

Your questions answered: Periodic Table of SEO Factors

Last week, we held a webinar on our 2019 Periodic Table of SEO Factors and weren't able to address all the questions. Search Engine Land editors Barry Schwartz and Detlef Johnson will be answering many of them here in the days ahead.

Why can't we develop a single page that addresses multiple questions of the same theme? Is it beneficial to have a single page topic with short content?

You can certainly do this if the user benefits from this style of information presentation versus when it's all split into separate pages. There is a balance that you want to strike. You can separate topics, but keep questions of the same topic together on one page (unless there are literally hundreds of questions).

FAQs should probably be on one page, if you have a ton of FAQs you can break up the FAQs into category-based FAQ pages. The old technique of building out long tail targeted keyword landing pages do not work as well as it did back in the pre-Panda days. Consolidated content works much better in general these days.

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Search Shorts
 

Everything is fine, nothing to see here...

Google search is broken. Some searchers trying to find answers on Google will be left out in the cold. There is a bug impacting some users where Google won't return search results to them. Google is investigating this in the Google web search forums.

Google Search Console query email alerts. Google is sending some webmasters email notifications about their top queries placement changes in Google Search Console.

How Google search works. Google has been busy updating its developer documents around how search works – so check it out.

Monster case study. Google published a case study from Monster India on how job schema has helped it realize a 94% increase in organic traffic on job details pages.

 
What we're reading
 

We've curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader

The Two Videos You Need to Watch to Get Started with Google Data Studio – Adalysis

150k Small Business Website Teardown 2019 – Fresh Chalk

3 ways to improve video viewability and grow revenue – Google Blog

Abortion clinic ads in Australia blocked in error, Google says – The Guardian

CTR Impact from Recent Google Ad Label Change Still Unclear – Merkle

Google Possibly Testing Stackable People Also Search For Buttons – Search Engine Roundtable

Disciplined? How www.dailymail.co.uk got placed amongst peers – SISTRIX

Google accused of inappropriate access to medical data in potential class-action lawsuit – The Verge

Google Scholar: Indexation & Ranking – Distilled

 
 
 
Join Us
 

Unlock actionable SEO & SEM tactics to accelerate your campaign's success. Attend SMX East in NYC!

Attend the only conference in the East Coast entirely devoted to search marketing: Search Engine Land's SMX East, November 13-14, 2019. Join us for a deep dive into SEO and SEM tactics, networking, and top amenities including WiFi, delicious meals, and snacks. You'll come away with at least one tactic that you can immediately put to use… we guarantee it. View rates and register today!