Good morning search marketers, I hope you're energized for change after the holiday.
One change that might be on the horizon? The importance of technical SEO may fade or shift over time, Patrick Stox, SEO specialist at IBM, predicted during an Insights session at SMX Advanced last month. "The reason being, the more stuff that Google fixes, the more stuff that Bing fixes on their end, the less things we actually have to worry about or get right. So, a better way to say this might be, 'it'll change over time' — our job roles will change." Stox pointed to several examples of areas SEOs might be best served to let the engines handle. Looking ahead at lazy loading in Chrome 75, Patrick said, "I think they're going to do a lot more with this, probably like preload directives and a bunch of things, but they're going to, in the browser, take the strain off the server, off the websites, and they're just going to be lazy loading images across the web." Have a listen to Patrick's talk here.
Earlier this year, Google announced its plans to sunset the average position metric in Google Ads, saying it doesn't really indicate all that much anymore. Last week, Microsoft Advertising rolled out position-based impression share metrics and retired some competitive share metrics for parity with Google Ads. But there was one exception — it is keeping average reporting, for now, stating it's heard from advertisers that it's still an important metric. We'll see how long it lasts after Google gets rid of it on its end. Are you reporting and relying on average position, or have you made the shift to looking at the impression share metrics only? Let me know: gmarvin@thirddoormedia.com or @ginnymarvin.
There's a lot more below, including a look at why SEOs should care about TF-IDF, Search Shorts and more.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief
