SEO

With a lot of recent SERP feature changes (including The Great Featured Snippet Shake-Em-Up), and as the market, user needs, and more are changing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, organic traffic is changing all the time. One change that’s gotten lost in the shuffle is the recent developments of Interesting Finds listings in mobile search results pages (SERPs). So far, discussion of Interesting Finds in the SEO community has been pretty limited, save for one article on March 11th from Glenn Gabe, discussing how beneficial Interesting Finds have been for publishers. The same cannot be said for most e-commerce companies, though.

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With the internet and social media constantly joining people together from all around the world, we are now being exposed to all kinds of new places and travel experiences that would have been considered ‘off-the-beaten-path’ until now. According to Travel Mindset, social media has become a new form of a travel guide that not only advises people on where to travel, but actually how to go about traveling to and experiencing a particular destination. But how exactly does any given social media platform actually persuade someone to travel to a specific location around the world? It’s largely done through influencer marketing.

By now, pretty much everyone has heard about influencer marketing. If you haven’t heard about it yet, you can learn more about influencer marketing on our previous blog post by Danielle Rohe. Right now, travel influencer marketing is huge on social media, especially on Instagram where people seem to be living vicariously through influencers’ photos. While a picture can be worth a thousand words, Instagram photos can only be so helpful when it comes to planning your next getaway. Sharing entire travel guides, or e.g. a list of 10 places you must see in a certain country, on Instagram just isn’t the most user-friendly experience. That’s why many social media travel influencers also use a blog to supplement their social media platforms. 

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Well, it happened again: Google went and made new rules, and gave us a startling reminder of how deeply we had dug in on the old ones. On some level, we SEOs go to bed every night believing that the game will be the same tomorrow as it was today, even as we constantly attend and deliver talks about how much it has changed over the years. I don’t know where that disconnect comes from, but it’s probably just an impulse to protect our sanity; if we really took time at the end of each day to reflect on how many times the very definition of our job and our industry has changed since we first got started, who knows how many more tomorrows we could bring ourselves to face.

Featured snippets first arrived in 2014 and sent shockwaves through the content strategy world immediately. The fact that Google had created a special class of search results page that offered an organic position superior to #1, and that access to that position could be (in theory, anyway) attained on content alone, shook up a lot of our old talking points.

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Webmasters are taking web accessibility (websites, tools, and technologies designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them) more seriously, especially since usability has become critically relevant to SEO — browser behavior signals associated with user engagement have become ranking factors. At UpBuild, accessibility has become a priority, which has become reflected in our SEO audits; we now have an entire section of our SEO Audit devoted to this important topic. 

However, making a website accessible is not just for ranking signals. It’s important to make content accessible to a wider range of people, including those with disabilities. People with blindness, low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, etc., all deserve equal access to the web, and focusing on accessibility in design helps make the web a more equal space for everyone. 

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