Google is not putting its foot on the break as we head into the festive season – indeed, it is doing quite the opposite. Let’s take a look at some of the changes they have made this month and how these impact SEO:

Google News

  • Google is working on a giant AI language model to support the world’s 1000 most spoken languages. Despite being a little bit academic, this is a big deal. The most interesting thing about this is that they don’t have specific functionality in mind, such as a plan to use it to translate YouTube. Instead, Google is trying to build a single solution for all languages. This is a big deal if many of your customers don’t speak the language your website is written in, as it seems to be a model that will help you market to customers all over the world regardless of their language—one to keep an eye on. 
  • New Lighthouse categories have been added to the PageSpeed Insights tool, including Accessibility (can all users access content and navigate your site effectively), Best Practices (Follow Google best practices to improve the code health of your web pages) and SEO (how well can search engines understand your content). 
  • Google has also significantly changed the Google.com homepage on desktop this month, which doesn’t happen often. The change was the addition of a small Google Lens icon. It might only be a minor tweak, but it is huge in terms of Google saying that image search and the role that images have to play in search is ever-increasing. This ties in with their discussion on multi-mobile search, where they envision that users will take photos with their mobile phones and add a keyword in the future – this type of combined context is a new type of search behaviour. From a practical SEO strategy, investment in visual assets is critical – high-quality, engaging, valuable images that might help people to search. 
  • Carrying on with the theme of quality and user experience, there has been a lot of discussion in the SEO world around Google targeting AI-generated content after Google’s Helpful Content update recently. Google came out and said they can detect the difference between human-generated and machine-generated content, which made people nervous about using AI-generated content. Google has now clarified and said that using AI-generated content is not bad as long as the content is helpful, reliable and people-first. “Helpful” is a bit of a vague word, but Google wants content to be interesting, to add value, and to have a unique perspective. You can do this with AI content, but you will need it edited afterwards – which is easier with a human.  
  • Google has also added a new section to the Google Search Console report this month about the Shopping tab. This is where retailers can feature their products in Google Shopping – something that Google is encouraging more and more as they are now starting to show Google Shopping results in the main search results. This shortcut in GSC allows retailers to verify and list their sites in Google Merchant Centre. The exciting thing about this is once your eCommerce site has been added, Google will read the structured data on your site and use this to understand your stock availability, pricing and so on without you having to do this manually through the Merchant Centre. Less admin, less friction.  

Social Media News

  • This month’s big news is around Elon Musk buying Twitter and then going crazy. He has already laid off 50% of its staff, closed the offices (temporarily), and many other staff members are quitting due to the chaos there. This is important from an SEO perspective as Twitter is quite a prominent player in the SEO ecosystem, as it is one of the places where content gets shared and discovered. From this point of view, we will need to keep an eye on what will happen with Twitter.
  • TikTok continues to hugely influence how people discover and consume information, which determines whether your brand is recognised and preferred when making purchase decisions. All the social media platforms are currently trying to launch more eCommerce features and monetise more, and TikTok is no exception. It has now rolled out the ability for merchants to sell products directly through TikTok on videos, Lives and the product showcase tab. Again, this is important from an SEO point of view as it shows that short-form video is here to stay. 

SEO News Round-Up for November 2022

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Google is not putting its foot on the break as we head into the festive season – indeed, it is doing quite the opposite. Let’s take a look at some of the changes they have made this month and how these impact SEO:

Google News

  • Google is working on a giant AI language model to support the world’s 1000 most spoken languages. Despite being a little bit academic, this is a big deal. The most interesting thing about this is that they don’t have specific functionality in mind, such as a plan to use it to translate YouTube. Instead, Google is trying to build a single solution for all languages. This is a big deal if many of your customers don’t speak the language your website is written in, as it seems to be a model that will help you market to customers all over the world regardless of their language—one to keep an eye on. 
  • New Lighthouse categories have been added to the PageSpeed Insights tool, including Accessibility (can all users access content and navigate your site effectively), Best Practices (Follow Google best practices to improve the code health of your web pages) and SEO (how well can search engines understand your content). 
  • Google has also significantly changed the Google.com homepage on desktop this month, which doesn’t happen often. The change was the addition of a small Google Lens icon. It might only be a minor tweak, but it is huge in terms of Google saying that image search and the role that images have to play in search is ever-increasing. This ties in with their discussion on multi-mobile search, where they envision that users will take photos with their mobile phones and add a keyword in the future – this type of combined context is a new type of search behaviour. From a practical SEO strategy, investment in visual assets is critical – high-quality, engaging, valuable images that might help people to search. 
  • Carrying on with the theme of quality and user experience, there has been a lot of discussion in the SEO world around Google targeting AI-generated content after Google’s Helpful Content update recently. Google came out and said they can detect the difference between human-generated and machine-generated content, which made people nervous about using AI-generated content. Google has now clarified and said that using AI-generated content is not bad as long as the content is helpful, reliable and people-first. “Helpful” is a bit of a vague word, but Google wants content to be interesting, to add value, and to have a unique perspective. You can do this with AI content, but you will need it edited afterwards – which is easier with a human.  
  • Google has also added a new section to the Google Search Console report this month about the Shopping tab. This is where retailers can feature their products in Google Shopping – something that Google is encouraging more and more as they are now starting to show Google Shopping results in the main search results. This shortcut in GSC allows retailers to verify and list their sites in Google Merchant Centre. The exciting thing about this is once your eCommerce site has been added, Google will read the structured data on your site and use this to understand your stock availability, pricing and so on without you having to do this manually through the Merchant Centre. Less admin, less friction.  

Social Media News

  • This month’s big news is around Elon Musk buying Twitter and then going crazy. He has already laid off 50% of its staff, closed the offices (temporarily), and many other staff members are quitting due to the chaos there. This is important from an SEO perspective as Twitter is quite a prominent player in the SEO ecosystem, as it is one of the places where content gets shared and discovered. From this point of view, we will need to keep an eye on what will happen with Twitter.
  • TikTok continues to hugely influence how people discover and consume information, which determines whether your brand is recognised and preferred when making purchase decisions. All the social media platforms are currently trying to launch more eCommerce features and monetise more, and TikTok is no exception. It has now rolled out the ability for merchants to sell products directly through TikTok on videos, Lives and the product showcase tab. Again, this is important from an SEO point of view as it shows that short-form video is here to stay.