October 2019 – SEO and marketing news

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Oct 28, 2019 / by
October 2019 – SEO and marketing news

October is the month where the last traces of summer start to vanish and we’re left with a long slow crawl towards Christmas, with only Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night to still the monotony.

We’ve made the executive decision, this month, to steer clear of the dreaded ‘b word’. After all, until the final cards are dealt, how are we to know exactly what it’s all going to mean?

Whichever way the cookie crumbles (if it crumbles at all), the world of SEO and marketing will continue ticking on and in that spirit of keeping calm and carrying on, let’s delve into this month’s most exciting developments.

Of course we’ll be checking in on Google, but we’ll also examine how the great search engine behemoth might be slowly losing its crown to the ‘other’ tech giant (no, not Apple, the ‘other’ other one) and exploring a new product that could spell the end of traditional SEO as we know it. But probably not. Either way, it’s certainly an interesting read.

Amazon chipping away at Google search dominance in the US

Google might be the monopoly player in the search advertising game, but Amazon appears to be slowly eroding that lead. Amazon’s share of the search advertising market is expected to grow over the next two years, according to estimates released by research firm eMarketer.

This year, eMarketer forecasts Amazon’s paid search revenues in the US will increase nearly 30% over last year to $7.09 billion. Its share is expected to grow from 12.9% in 2019 to 15.9% by 2021.

Of course, Google is showing no signs of shrinking into second place just yet, currently claiming 73.1% of the market share, but it’s slowly dwindling (expected to drop to 70.5% in 2021) and leaving space for Amazon and Microsoft.

Google tests search results without URLs

Google appears to be testing the complete removal of URLs from its search results, displaying only the website name instead.

Google has slowly been moving away from showing full URLs since the introduction of breadcrumbs a few months ago. Now it seems Google is testing the impact of removing URLs altogether, to the extent of not even revealing the domain name.

Perhaps the greatest concern here is how the legitimacy of the website being shown in search results would be ascertained. If this ends up negatively impacting websites in terms of click-through rate then it’s unlikely Google will make it a permanent, widespread change. Though that will be determined through further testing.

Moz launches free Domain Analysis tool for SEO metrics

Domain Analysis, a free tool from search marketing analytics company Moz, launched last week. The domain analysis website provides an overview of SEO metrics for any domain. The free tool doesn’t offer the depth of data available in the paid versions of Moz tools but you’ll get a high-level look at a range of SEO metrics for your site. That includes beyond-the-basics data such as, “Top questions mined from People Also Ask boxes for relevant keywords” and “Top Featured Snippets.”

The tool also offers metrics that Moz is calling “experimental” that aren’t available in the paid versions. For example, Keywords by Estimate Clicks uses ranking position, search volume, and estimated click-through rate (CTR) to estimate the number of search clicks a keyword drives to the website.

Bing tests content submission API

Bing announced a pilot programme for a content submission API. This takes things a step further than Bing’s previous efforts to have you just submit URLs for crawling and indexing. Instead, this is you feeding Bing not just your URL but also all of its content, HTML, images, etc – so Bing doesn’t need to crawl the page at all.

Earlier this year, Bing was asking webmasters to submit URLs they wanted them to crawl and index. Bing doesn’t want to do the discovery process, it is expensive and also impacts your servers.

But this is a level up – where Bing is asking you not just to save them on the discovery portion but also on any page crawling at all. I assume Bing still crawls the page but it doesn’t have to.

BrightEdge promises self-driving SEO

BrightEdge is likening its new Autopilot SEO product to a self-driving car. The product was created over a decade after analysing billions of webpages and petabytes of data. The result, according to BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu, is that they were able to determine what common SEO tasks were capable of automation.

The idea is that the Autopilot product will automate the repetitive aspects of SEO in order to free up the time and resources of marketers.

Yu said the product has already been deployed across 1,000 BrightEdge customer sites and has resulted in a 60% increase in page views and twice the amount of conversions. Could this be the moment that SEO finally goes fully automatic? That remains to be seen, but it’s certainly a development we’ll be keeping our eye on.

To check out what was big in the world of SEO, digital marketing and the digital realm in general last month, click here for more news.

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