The days of title tag tweaks, meta keywords, and SERPs of ten blue links are long gone. SEO is one of the fastest-evolving aspects of the digital realm… and gaining visibility (not to mention quality traffic) is more complex and challenging than ever before.

If you want to stay ahead of the competition and at the top of the SERPs, it’s time to level up your SEO skills: Attend your choice of SMX Master Class – online March 8-9 – to take the first step on that critical journey.

This spring, we’re offering seven exclusive Master Classes, four of which are designed specifically for SEOs. (Not focused on SEO? Check out the complete Master Class lineup, featuring deep dives on Google Ads, Google Analytics 4, and more.)

• Advanced SEO training with Bruce Clay is perfect for seasoned SEO professionals craving next-level knowledge, tactics, and best practices that boost visibility, traffic, and revenue.
• Advanced technical SEO training with Eric Enge dives head-first into sophisticated, technical SEO topics and tactics, including Schema, page experience, Core Web Vitals, and more.
• SEO-friendly content marketing training with Michael Brenner focuses on the crucial role content plays in SEO, and how you can effectively leverage it to support a cohesive site-wide strategy.
• SEO for developers training with Detlef Johnson explores how SEOs can implement technical tactics to boost visibility… and how developers can take a more SEO-friendly approach to coding.

At just $199 each, the SMX Master Classes pack a ton of value: Six focused hours of live, expert-led training that deliver actionable tactics you can implement immediately to drive measurable results – and intimate Q&A opportunities with industry legends that address your specific queries and curiosities. Plus, 100% virtual means you can tune in from anywhere – no plane ticket, hotel reservation, or travel risks required.

Ready to register? Smart move. Secure your spot at one of these exclusive Master Classes for just $199!

The post Calling all search marketers! Check out these exclusive Master Classes appeared first on Search Engine Land.

With the upcoming Google page experience update coming to desktop, today Google launched a new page experience report for desktop in Google Search Console. “To support the upcoming rollout of page experience ranking to desktop, Search Console now has a dedicated desktop section in its Page Experience report to help site owners understand Google’s ‘good page experience’ criteria,” Google wrote.

How to access. You can access the report by clicking here or by going to Google Search Console, and clicking on the Page Experience link under the experience tab.

What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of this report for one of my sites:

More details. Google first launched the page experience report in April 2021 before the launch of the page experience update. The new Google Page Experience report offers metrics, such as the percentage of URLs with good page experience and search impressions over time, enabling you to quickly evaluate performance. You can also drill into specific pages to see what improvements need to be made.

Why we care. You can use this report to make the necessary adjustments to the desktop versions of your pages before Google rolls out the desktop version of the page experience update. As a reminder, we do not expect there to be a huge ranking change due to this update, but it may impact sites more if their stories show in the top stories section, since a solid page experience score is required to show in the top stories carousel.

The post Google Search Console launches desktop page experience report appeared first on Search Engine Land.

The US housing market had an epic 2021, with an estimated 6 million homes purchased last year. However, benefitting from these sales depended on whether one was the buyer or the seller.

According to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, home prices increased by nearly 20%. And, in some hot markets, homeowners saw double those profits. Homes were flying off the market soon after they were listed. Even homes with significant damage (such as flooding or fire) had offers well over their asking price. As you can imagine, sellers saw some awesome gains.

But this wasn’t the case for homebuyers. 

While mortgage rates were at record lows for most of the year, finding a home was still challenging. Inventory reached an all-time low, and competition was fierce, forcing prospective buyers out of the market without a home to call their own. 

No doubt, last year’s housing market was one to remember. Here’s what to expect in 2022.

2022 Housing Market Outlook

Record low mortgage rates are over.

While last year began with the lowest rates on record, they didn’t last long. By spring, they reached the year’s peak of 3.18%. Rates have fluctuated since, but we can expect interest rates to increase in 2022.

Also, the Federal Reserve has hinted that the pandemic monetary policy will end to help curb inflation –ultimately pushing interest rates upward.

While the revised policy won’t financially benefit those looking to purchase a home within the next few months, it’s still a good idea to encourage them to do so. Experts predict rates will hover around the low 3% range through the first quarter of 2022 but will likely increase by up to half a percentage point as we near the end of the first quarter and enter the second. 

Chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, Lawrence Yun, expects the 30-year fixed to inch up to 3.7% by the end of 2022. While notably higher than pandemic rates, this higher one will still be lower than the 2020 rate, around 4%.

Lower-priced and median-priced home buyers will feel this the most as increased rates coupled with inflation will strain their already tight budget. 

Inventory will remain a challenge.

Inventory will remain tight even with properties becoming available in the spring 2022 homebuying season. Realtor.com predicts property availability to increase only by about 0.3% in 2022 –encouraging some extreme buying tactics in some areas of the country. Offers that include buying the seller’s next home or bidding $100k over the asking price have been seen in particularly aggressive markets. 

This brings us to our next prediction.

Home prices continue rising.

Home prices went up in nearly every part of the country last year, up about 13% –or 19% for new constructions. While we won’t see these double-digit gains this year, prices will continue the rising trend in 2022, though at a slightly more moderate pace.

As for the National Association of Realtors, they estimate that this increase will be by 5.7%. They also expect the housing market and broader economy to normalize somewhat in 2022 as the Feds try to tame inflation.

First-time buyers will continue to struggle.

Few available homes, skyrocketing prices, and competing with all-cash offers pushed many first-time buyers out of the market last year. Despite the “excess savings” that many Americans accumulated in 2020-21, it seems like it’s still not enough. “People don’t feel like they are participating in what they consider to be American life through homeownership,” said Yun. “All their work to build up savings can feel less meaningful in the face of rising prices.”

Furthermore, mortgage types favored by new homebuyers, like FHA and VA loans, were often declined in favor of all-cash deals or conventional loans.

Despite the seemingly grey cast over the market, many homebuyers remain optimistic, aiming to make their homebuying goals happen come spring 2022. 

Over the past couple of weeks there have been complaints from some Shopify site owners that Google was showing a (1) in the title name for their pages in the Google search results page. The issue turned out to be related to a chat feature activated on those Shopify sites, the chat feature fixed the issue and the Google search results should soon no longer show (1) in the title name.

What it looked like. I found a screenshot of this happening for a site in the Shopify forums dating back a couple of weeks ago, here is that screenshot showing the (1) at the beginning of the title name in Google Search.

What it looks like now. The issue was resolved and Google recrawled and processed this specific URL, so the (1) is no longer there:

It will take time. If you still see a (1) before your title name in the Google Search results, give it more time. Google has to recrawl and reprocess all of the URLs that were impacted and that can take time. If you want to expedite it, you can use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console and submit that URL to the index manually. But again, the issue will resolve itself over time.

Google’s statement. Google published a statement on this issue in the Google forums, basically saying it was an issue with the chat feature dynamically embedding (1) in the title attributes of these pages and thus Googlebot picked up on it and indexed it. Google’s Caio Barros wrote:

Why we care. If you see (1) in your titles in the Google or Bing search results, it was likely due to this chat feature in Shopify. Again, the chat feature fixed the issue and the search engines will eventually recrawl and reprocess those titles and show them correctly in the search results. It is a widespread issue, not a Google bug, but it was related to a feature in Shopify that had this unintended consequence in search.

The post Shopify chat bug leads to titles with (1) in Google’s search results appeared first on Search Engine Land.

“There are roughly three and a half billion Google searches made every day,” said Craig Dunham, CEO of enterprise SEO platform Deepcrawl, at our recent MarTech conference. “According to research from Moz, 84% of people use Google at least three times a day, and about half of all product searches start with Google. The way that consumers are engaging with brands is changing, and it’s doing so rapidly.”

He added, “Consumers begin their journey with the tool that many of us use hundreds of times a day. Thus, the connection to revenue becomes clear — it starts with search.”

The concept of digital transformation has been around for years, but it’s taken a whole new form in the wake of recent societal shifts. New technologies and the 2020 pandemic have led to a “greater focus on the need to drive optimal digital experiences for our customers,” says Dunham.

A brand’s website is often the first, and most lasting, impression customers will have of your organization. Here are some strategic actions he recommends marketers take to ensure their online properties are optimized for the search-first age.

Educate your team and higher-ups about the necessity of organic search

“The website is a shared responsibility and it requires proper strategic leadership,” Dunham said. “The first step is to take some time and educate yourself, your leadership, your board and your organization so they more broadly promote organic KPIs as business-wide objectives.”

“There’s great data out there on the impact of the efficiency of SEO as a low-cost acquisition channel,” he added.

Aside from sharing communication from Google on the importance of search from a business perspective, marketers can look for case studies from reputable organizations to encourage search prioritization. This can help higher-ups start seeing organic traffic as a key business metric.

“I was in a meeting recently and I had a digital leader say to me that you know website performance should not be an SEO metric — it has to be a business metric,” he said.

Create a cross-functional search ops task force

“Much of the data and insight generated by CEOs and their tools today are rarely utilized to their full potential,” Dunham said. “This is in part due to SEO not being seen as a business priority. As a result, it’s been siloed — pulling in teams from across the organization breaks down those silos.”

The more team members are involved with search processes, the more they’ll see its impact. People from each department will have more opportunities to contribute to growing online visibility using their unique skillsets.

“We know that businesses that are able to implement these organizational-wide search operations systems and practices — connecting a range of perspectives and search activities that are happening — are going to be the ones that will have a competitive advantage,” said Dunham.

Apply SEO testing automation

More and more brands are turning to automation tools to streamline tasks. According to Dunham, these solutions can be used for search-related activities as well.

“Automation can be well-deployed within web development processes,” Dunham said. “Until recently, this technology didn’t exist.”

Brands now have access to a wide variety of automation tools to streamline SEO-related tasks. The key is to pick solutions that align with your organization’s goals and give you full control over their deployment: “There are additional risk mechanisms that can be put in place to ensure you don’t release bad code that will result in large traffic losses, ultimately driving down revenue across your critical web pages,” said Dunham.

If brands can optimize their internal process, teams and tools around organic search, they’ll increase their chances of achieving long-term success in the search-first digital landscape.

The post How to build a long-term, search-first marketing strategy appeared first on Search Engine Land.

DuckDuckGo, the privacy focused search engine, announced it has surpassed 100 billion searches – all time. It posted this announcement on Twitter.

100 billion searches. Here is the announcement on Twitter:

A year ago, the search company announced it was hitting over a 100 million searches per day. Now if you look at its public traffic statistics page, it shows all time searches passed 100,024,437,307 and the highest daily number of queries it saw to date was 110,439,133, that record was this past Monday. DuckDuckGo continues to grow on a daily basis.

Why we care. Pressure over consumer privacy has prompted Apple and Google to block third-party cookies from tracking users across the web. That same focus on privacy has also helped propel DuckDuckGo past 100 billion searches all-time. Its success, while modest, may provide new or existing search engines with a roadmap to chipping away at Google’s dominance or avoiding it altogether by concentrating on an underserved base of users.

It is still miles behind Google, but DuckDuckGo is gradually closing in on Yahoo! and Bing, so a future in which it is as much a part of the conversation as Bing may not be that far off. Nevertheless, optimizing specifically for any non-Google search engine remains highly unlikely.

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