Solving complex SEO problems require a new ‘discovery’ approach. Most of the time running your site is not a demanding process, but you need to be aware of that there is always a chance of something happening to your site and leaving you puzzled about what the actual problem is. Google’s latest Updates can def do that and if you are looking for Google Latest Update tips, you have come to the right place.

Even if you are cautious, in some cases you won’t be able to prevent your site’s funny behavior. Precisely for that Google released new updates along with diagnostics and tools to get your site back on track. Here are key learnings about how to solve complex SEO problems when standard fixes can’t help you with Google Latest Update Tips:

Google changes and the user discovery experience

Some of the highlighted areas are Google changes and the user discovery experience. One example of what has changed is the appearance of neural matching. For example, 30% of all queries use neural matching.

Moreover, Google is developing into a discovery engine, where the main focus is on discovery than search. This is literally true in the case of the Google feed. Another significant change is the inclusion of the topic layer.

Google increased understanding of entities, and that makes it possible for Google to improve exploring the content that is most important to the user’s query, which means their actual needs. This is not an abuse of links, but an improved methodology for determining relevance.

Analyzing the differing natures of search and discovery

SEOs tend to optimize for search, not discovery, where the entity holds a lot of the value. Considering this, there is a need to start thinking about other ways to approach optimization.

The recommended approach in this new SEO landscape is a three-pronged one:

Technical Excellence
Well-Structured Content
Be the best

Use your technical expertise to estimate your focus.

There can be four causes of failure for audits:

Sporadic implementation
A changing ecosystem
No change control process
Too many people involved

How can you get better audits?

It’s all about your focus. Think about these things:

Being actionable
Prioritize time vs. impact
Understand the individuals involved
Quantify everything

Be smart about your structured content

You need to make it easier for users to find out what they want. Here’s an intelligent way to think about formatting your content:

Basically, the main point (answer the question) needs to be in the first four lines of the content. Elaborate upon that with examples, and then comment on that.

The particular way of how you format the content also matters. Some basic ideas on how to achieve this are:

Avoid large blobs of text and keep paragraphs short
Keep tables clean and stay away from large chunks of text in them
Avoid exaggerated text in bulleted lists, and don’t double space them either
Add structured markup to your content

Be the best in your own area

This is important if you want to succeed in today’s world. However, it doesn’t imply that you must be the best at everything, but secure your space and then make it yours.

This starts by knowing where the user is on their journey when they get to your site. What do they need at the moment when they arrive on your web page? Understand all the possible situations that took the visitors to your page, and then come up with a strategy to approach with the best mix of those situations possible.

Have in mind that Google is focusing on its users, not websites. You also need to focus on your target users.

Learn how to evaluate SEO problems and what tools can help you get back on track

This year was significant for Google latest update tips, and that rapidly brought changes in traffic for many sites.

Look at this summary of the updates that took place:

Big quality Update
Core Quality Update (16 & 30)
Mobile speed update which only affected sites that were already slow.
Quality update focusing on E-A-T aka”Medic”.
Quality update focusing on backlinks.

For some of those sites, the impact of this was quite significant. Once you have combated with significant traffic loss, it’s time for SEO triage. The first step is to detect what caused that.

We lost positions
We lost organic traffic
We lost conversions

Create a timeline:

Once this primary research is complete, it’s time to do some diagnostics. It’s helpful to start by eliminating as many potential causes as possible. You should check some of those things:

Check for manual actions
Check if the symptoms are environmental
Check if the symptoms started presenting themselves
Determine if the symptoms are chronic

If the symptoms are chronic, check historic ranking fluctuations and match them up with GA data.

It’s also helpful to see what’s being affected. Is it the whole site or only a few pages? You should also check to see if your competitors are affected as well.

Further investigation can involve analyzing which queries lost clicks (or rankings). You can also use third-party devices such as SEMRush to check out your diagnosis. Make sure go through the URL inspection reporting in the new GSC to see if Google sees any problems there. Go over to see if the SERPs themselves had some change. You should also check the index coverage report, and search for URLs that are indexed but not in the sitemap.

Review Coverage Reporting:

Reviewing coverage reporting is also a great thought. Some things to research for there include:

Look for large parts of pages moving in or out
Blocked by robots.txt
Excluded by NoIndex tag
Crawled – currently not indexed
Alter page with a proper canonical tag

Use Google Search Console:

Search Console is truly a treasure house of diagnostics, and let me show you some more things you can look into:

Check crawl stats
Check blocked resources report
Check HTML improvements report

Another profitable field of information is your web server logs. Those files are kept by your web hosting company, and they contain much info in search and every single person who visits your website. Things to look for here include:

Weird status codes
Spider traps
Performance issues
Intermittent alternating status codes

Importance of Backlinks:

Don’t forget to check your backlinks, as you may find problems there that impact the entire site. Use a crawler tool like Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl. Find and fix all the issues you encounter there, and look for pages that are not being crawled by your crawler and make out the exact reason. Look Google Updates are hardcore if you are employing shady SEO techniques, so make sure to stay clean.

With given information and updates, you should be able to detect and solve all problems that have affected your site. Always check for new updates and solutions that can help you manage your site correctly, without losing significant rankings. We hope these Google latest update tips have helped you.

Through this article, I will share with you the most significant SEO trends 2019 and help you not oversight anything important.

A new version of Google Search Console (GSC)

Since January the latest version of GSC has been available only in beta, but finally, in September it was promoted out of beta and got new features too. Here are these cool new features of GSC:

Index Coverage

More detailed info, where URLs were given 4 statuses (Errors, Valid, Valid with warnings, and Excluded).

Performance

Similar as Search Analytics report in its previous version, but its data range is expanded; now it is 16 months instead of 3.

Links

The new GSC combines the functionality of ‘’Links to your site’’ and of the ‘’Internal links’’ reports from the previous GSC.

Manual Actions

This one report was shifted to be as one different category.

Report Share function – the latest version lets you share a link to reports with anybody who is logged in Google.
Report filter function – you can have an even more detailed insight into your data by simply obeying the rules (equals/not equals, greater than/smaller than).
Live URL tests – this new inspection tool lets you test URLs in real time. Those tests are not found on the last indexed version of that URL, but on how Google views it in this actual moment. The real plus is that, if you had any problems, and they got fixed on the live version, you can immediately validate your fix, as well as, ask Google to recrawl the page.

Mobile-First Indexing: which mobile way you should choose?

Google knows that there is a global transition towards mobile devices and the transportability of information and it gladly follows that trend. From the beginning of March 2018, many sites became available for mobile devices first. What does that mean?

Googlebot Smartphone will start crawling your website more than the regular Googlebot.
Eventually, the algorithms will use just the mobile versions.
You won’t have the option to turn off the mobile-first indexing.
Google will start using canonical tags (no need to change XML sitemaps)
The migration will be complete in the next few years.

Actionable Tips from Top Rating SEO:

Crawl your site as a mobile bots if you want to understand how search engines see your pages. You can do it in WebSite Auditor. You need to create a project for your site in the tool, then go to Preferences -> Crawler Settings and select Googlebot-Mobile. After that, you should check all the section to see the performance of the site.

Mobile Page Speed Update: Optimization beats Speed

Most users expect from mobile pages to load within approximately 3 seconds, but actually, the truth is that the mobile webpage still needs 15.3 seconds to load. Google’s become obsessed with speeding up the page loading and announced that the mobile page speed would have a ranking factor. Optimizing will be according to the model RAIL – Response, Animation, Idle tasks, Loading.

Once this Update was announced, Google PageSpeed Insights changed its interface and made one new branch — Speed. Speed can be measured by two metrics: First Contentful Paint (FCP) and DOM Content Loaded (DCL).

The part that changes the game is how those metrics are measured. The metrics are collected from millions of real users when they open their sites in Chrome browsers. When the users have a slow internet connection, or maybe slower mobile devices, Google will recognize your website as “Slow”. In addition to that, we can say that Google has fully switched from “lab data” to “field data”, or “Real User” Monitoring.

For now, for SEOs it is more vital to have a high Optimization Score then to have a high-Speed Score.

No matter the Update, which was launched in July, the connection between average Optimization score and ranking is high — 0.97, but on the other hand, there was no connection between Speed score metrics and rankings. So, the conclusion is that even if the site has a low-Speed score it still can keep its rankings, but at the same time, if a site isn’t optimized, it has a decrease in rankings. The safest way for you is to focus on the technical optimization of your site.

Actionable Tips from Top Rating SEO:

It would be best if you analyzed Google’s PageSpeed Insights rules. The truth is that you can’t modify how real users see your site, but you can sort out your real audience using the same data as Google. You are free to explore The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) on Google BigQuery platform. Run WebSite Auditor to see how well your site is optimized after that create a project for your site and go straight to Site Structure > Site Audit. Analyze the audit results and fix all the Warning and Error issues.

JavaScript SEO: how to do it in the right way

Step 1: Choose the right framework. The best ones are Angular v2, React, Ember, and Vue frameworks.

Step 2: Choose the rendering type. If your site uses client-side rendering, it is strongly recommendable prerendering in that case. When rendering like this, JavaScript has to identify the content, so Googlebot or a browser has to process it, which can cause some issues with crawling and indexing. In that way, you need a browser or bot an HTML snapshot with no JavaScript, and at the same time, users get the JavaScript rich version of your page.

Here are some alternatives to prerendering:

Server-rendered content: bots and browsers get a ready HTML; your servers do all rendering work.
Isomorphic JavaScript: all users can use prerendered content on the first request, but interactions are client-side.
Hybrid rendering: first prerendered HTML is sent to users and search engines, and after that, the server adds JS on top of that.
Static sites: all the HTML files already have data before being uploaded to a server. They have increased security and version control and are very fast and cheap to host.

Step 3: Enjoy your traffic.

Actionable Tips from Top Rating SEO:

To learn more about JavaScript SEO, use this and to crawl your JavaScript-based site, use WebSite Auditor. When you want to create a new project, first you should check the Enable expert options box at Step 1, then go to Advanced Options, and tick the Execute JavaScript box. If you have a current project, go to Preferences > Crawler Settings to do the same, and hit Rebuild Project. To review whether your site has any JS resources blocked, go to WebSite Auditor. First of all, test Indexing and crawlability > Resources restricted from indexing in Site Audit. In the end, go through your robots.txt to detect blocked JS and edit it right in the tool.

Site migrations: no need to lose traffic

Site migrations are quite painful for the application, and it continues with the traffic loss as well. There is no need to lose traffic once the site has migrated. Let me show you how to do that.

3 steps to strategic planning:

Step 1: Understand your site by collecting data and planning. Run a thorough tech audit and content analysis with the help of crawling tools and fix any problems found.

When you are more or less satisfied with the site’s health, arrange a list of your top pages, make a duplicate, and place this list in a safe place — you will need it on the staging phase and after the migration.

One more document of no less importance is a redirect mapping file showing which URLs you’ve decided to change.

Finally, have your important data at your hand, such as benchmark keywords driving traffic, organic traffic, number of indexed pages, etc.

Step 2: Pre-launch.

This is the part when you’ll have to make one test site. Once this is finished, compare live crawl vs. test crawl. Then crawl various times as changes are being applied. Get the list with top URLs and crawl them to be sure all of them return a 301 status code. Then, crawl your XML sitemaps for wrong status codes, and make sure you include all relevant URLs.

Don’t wait until launching to grab the structured data and AMP code and validate it in Google Search Console.

Step 3: Launch day and monitoring.

While at this stage, you need to follow this routine:

Create a war room
Monitor server errors in Google Search Console
Assemble a list of 404 errors, go to Excel to understand where most of them come from, and set additional redirects if needed;
Monitor things like status codes, canonical changes, sitemap errors, site performance, etc.;
HTTP to HTTPS traffic: create a property set in Google Search Console to merge both sites in one view.

Tips & Lessons Learned for SEO trends in 2019

Don’t neglect image URLs
Beware of redirect chains and loops
Update internal links by linking them to the final destination;
Make use of Slack bots

Actionable Tips from Top Rating SEO

When migrating, you have to do so much crawling and auditing. For that, try WebSite Auditor. It can be used before and after the launch.

Once you’ve created a project of your site in the tool, go to Site Structure > Site Audit. You can get there results of a complete site’s audit as well as valuable recommendations on how to fix different issues.

In the Content Analysis section, you can look at your content from the tech perspective, detect issues, and fix them. Plus, it’s possible to edit your content right in the tool.

In the Visualization section, you can get an interactive map of your internal site structure. You will immediately see whether you have long redirect chains, redirect loops, orphan pages, and non-working URLs.

In the Pages section, analyze Images to make sure all of them have migrated.

Complex SEO Problems: what to do when typical fixes can’t fix

Here are some procedures in case your site behaves funny in search results:

SEO triage

You need to be aware of that there is a chance of something happening to your site and you not quite understanding what. In that case, try to sort out all the facts that are available to you:

Define the symptoms and when they started.
Create a timeline of your recent actions
Match your symptoms against the timeline.

SEO diagnosis

You need to eliminate as many potential causes of the symptoms as possible.

Rule out the environmental issues:

Check for manual actions in GSC.
Check how volatile the algo is now.
Check how the site handled previous updates.
Check whether these might be normal fluctuations.

Separate affected areas of treatment:

Find out whether the symptoms apply to just a few pages or the whole website;
Check whether that happened only you by looking at your competitors;
Test GSC for Performance, Indexing, URL inspection, etc.
Manually check SERPs if there are any changes;
Check server logs and backlinks;
Crawl and examine your site.

Always be in a precautious state!

Actionable Tips from Top Rating SEO

SEO PowerSuite can help you check everything: site audits, rank fluctuations, backlinks, etc. Also, you can tasks to auto-schedule in any SEO PowerSuite tool. Do this, and you will get regular reports on your site’s present state.

Content Sceptics Age: learn how to make content link-worthy

Everybody knows it’s hard work to get links to your site. To do that, you must create link-worthy content. How to do that?

Understand who the person is:

Who comes to your site?
Why they come?

Content can be linkable when it provides value and also sparks emotion.

So, how to create linkable content?

Choose a linkable content type:

The content of value and no age.
Videos that build trust.
Data

Actionable Tips from Top Rating SEO – SEO trends 2019

In case you need more details on this topic, refer to this guide

Voice Search&Virtual Assistants: learn how to rank for voice

The taboo of using voice is declining fast: people are ok to speak to their phones in restrooms and theaters.

Let me explain you about featured snippets, which are quite impressive regarding voice search. Why?

Featured snippets are useful for traffic.
Featured snippets are pulled to SERPs by various factors. They mostly come from:

Sites with a high domain authority — 68,1%;
Mostly blog posts;
Mostly top 5 positions;
Successful coding techniques;

Basically, we have one assistant available everywhere that knows how to satisfy your every need: scheduling, entertainment, home control, etc.

Another exciting thing is that we refer to voice assistants as real people. Due to that fact, a “gender” of the voice assistant can influence how we percept information. According to the research, people will identify more with the machine voices of their gender. We also tend to attach personalities to the machine voices.

Actionable Tips from Top Rating SEO – SEO trends 2019

Participate in developing personal assistant technologies by building Google Actions.

Content snipped for featured snippets is usually built around questions.

Create a project for your site in the tool, go to Keyword Research > Related Questions. Paste in your keywords and hit Search. Your dashboard will populate with all possible questions.

Here is the guide on how to optimize for voice search.

People often get frustrated and quit voice assistants when their experience is not good, and they cannot accomplish the intended action. To prevent such situations, you have to do the following:

Master the science of customer experience

Laziness is entrenched in human nature. People will go for the least demanding course of action.
Two systems govern out decision-making: Unthinking and Thinking. You would like for your customers to stay in the Unthinking stage.

Apply 4 C’s of customer experience