Daily Archives: April 13, 2020

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Google has published the first in what will be a series of blog posts dedicated to SEO case studies.

The aim of this series is to share success stories that demonstrate the value of SEO.

Google says the intended audience for these case studies are people who may need some extra convincing that SEO is a good investment.

We want people to hear about these success stories, so were starting a new blog post series that features case studies.

They may, for example, help with convincing a boss boss that investing in SEO or implementing structured data can be good for the business.

Googles inaugural blog post in this series focuses on the basics of investing in SEO and how it has been utilized to help a company.

The first case study in this series was shared by none other than Googles Gary Illyes.

Illyes spoke to an SEO manager named Moon Tae Sung following a presentation at a Google Webmaster Conference in Seoul.

Tae Sung manages SEO for Saramin, which is one of the largest job platforms in Korea.

Saramin offers services such as:

People go to Saramins site to look for jobs, submit applications, and access information related to job searches.

Saramins SEO efforts date back to 2015 using nothing but Google Search Console.

An entire year was dedicated to finding and fixing crawling errors identified by Search Console.

This alone lead to a 15% increase in organic search traffic.

Satisfied with their early success, Saramin decided to invest more into SEO.

The next step in the process was studying the Google Search developers guide and help center articles.

Illyes acknowledges that SEO is a process that may take time to bear fruit.

To that end, Saramin focused on implementing gradual changes such as:

This process of making these changes also involved the use of additional Google tools.

Saramin relied on the Structured Data Testing Tool, Mobile Friendly Test, AMP Test, and PageSpeed Insights.

Eventually, the errors in Search Consoles Index Coverage report turned from red to green.

Even more than, Saramin saw an accelerated increase in organic traffic.

The incremental changes reached a tipping point and the traffic continued to rise at a more remarkable speed.

In the peak hiring season of September 2019, traffic doubled compared to the previous year.

Along with the increase in organic traffic, the quality of traffic also went up.

Saramin achieved a 93% increase in the number of new sign ups and a 9% increase in conversions.

The work doesnt end there, however, as Saramins SEO manager says this is only the beginning of our story.

If you have an interesting case study you want to share, and potentially get featured in an upcoming blog post, Google is accepting submissions.

You can contribute a case study by signing up for a Google Webmaster Conference near you and submitting a talk proposal.

Source: Google Webmaster Central Blog

Read more here:

Google Launches a Series of Blog Posts Highlighting the Value of SEO - Search Engine Journal

Since February, weve been tracking a redesign of Google Assistant settings on Android that greatly simplifies how to manage the sprawling, cross-device service. Its now in testing for some users on the latest Google app beta.

The new Assistant settings can be accessed on Android via the Google app or Home client. Once launched, users are presented with an interface thats similar to Settings on Android 10.

There is a full-width bar to Search settings up top that interestingly queries all device/system preferences. Your profile avatar, name, and email address appear below with shortcuts to Manage your Google Account and Your data in the Assistant.

Options related to Assistant were previously grouped under four tabs. There is now one master list, but Google does highlight five frequent preferences above the dropdown: Routines, Music, Basic info, Languages, and Voice Match. There are also two large cards for You and Devices.

Current

The Devices experience has been completely revamped with each featuring generic imagery of a Smart Display or speaker. Some items that appear in the list are currently unidentified, suggesting this is not fully baked. There is also no Phone device that unifies all related commands. That said, all those controls are still available in individual menus, but this could be added back later.

Meanwhile, theres a View More button below that expands to show all other Assistant settings in alphabetical order. There are some new ones, with General housing controls that were previously under Phone, like Use screen context and Donate screen captures. The same situation applies to Personal results.

The revamped Assistant settings for Android are appearing with the latest Google app beta (version 11.4) on some of our devices. However, its not yet widely rolled out, even to those on the beta program.

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Google starts testing redesigned Assistant settings on Android - 9to5Google

Cloud Bigtable has long been Google Clouds fully managed NoSQL database for massive, petabyte-sized analytical and operational workloads. At $0.65 per hour and node, it was never a cheap service to run, especially because Google Cloud enforced a minimum of three nodes per cluster for production workloads. Today, however, it is changing that, and you can now run Bigtable production workloads on just a single node.

We want Bigtable to be an excellent home for all of your key-value and wide-column use-cases, both large and small, Google Cloud Bigtable product manager Sandy Ghai said in todays announcement. Thats true whether youre a developer just getting started, or an established enterprise looking for a landing place for your self-managed HBase or Cassandra clusters.

With this, Google Cloud is now also enabling the ability to use replication for higher availability for these small clusters, as well as the ability to easily switch a one-node development instance to a one-node production instance as needed. In addition, the services SLA now also covers all Bigtable instances, no matter their size.

Its interesting to see Google Cloud make this push for bringing smaller workloads onto Bigtable, especially given the organizations current focus on large enterprise customers and their specific needs. But the company that only needs a single node today could easily be the one that needs massive clusters in the future and Bigtables minimums have always represented somewhat of a barrier to entry for smaller companies and once a company places its bets on a given database service, its not likely to switch anytime time.

More:

Google Cloud makes it cheaper to run smaller workloads on Bigtable - TechCrunch