It's the first Search Marketing Roundup of 2019, welcome back to all. I hope you've had a prosperous start to the year, and kept just a few of your resolutions. Let's explore some of the updates from the search marketing industry in January 2019.
Ranking study by Stone Temple Consulting shows backlinks are still important
A 2019 version of Stone Temple's annual backlink study has shown a very significant correlation between backlinks and ranking position in Google SERPs. For the 27k search query set that was included in the latest study, the results showed a very powerful correlation between backlinks and ranking position. The correlation between different types of search queries (e.g. commercial or informational) in relation to ranking position was analysed in the study; three results demonstrated that informational queries are slightly more correlated with rankings than commercial queries. The conclusion of the new study across different industries and query types was that number of backlinks remains highly correlated with ranking.


Reputation is becoming a major ranking factor in SEO
There have been a number of recent 'Core' algorithm updates over the past 12 months, and these have coincided with Google publishing their Quality Rating Guidelines. Chris Silver Smith points out in SEL that all of these recent Google updates indicate that you can see improving SEO performance as managing the 'reputation' of your website or brand as outlined in the Google Quality Rating Guidelines. Many SEOs have cited those 'quality factors' included in the Google Quality Rating Guidelines have become increasingly important in the SERPs in terms of their weighting. You should therefore pay extra attention to your website or company's digital performance across those 'quality factors' that define an online 'reputation'.
Many SEOs have cited those 'quality factors' included in the Google Quality Rating Guidelines have become increasingly important in the SERPs in terms of their weighting.
Google gives glimpse of how they manage their 7,000 internal websites
Google shared their own internal SEO efforts for the 7,000 websites they manage. The study demonstrates three key insights into effective tactics for SEO from Google's website management:
Small iterative changes make a significant impact Don't fear change, and be prepared to make changes Consolidate website content Google showcased how making numerous iterative changes can have a significant impact on organic visibility. The chart below illustrates the changes Google made and their impact on organic visibility. These changes related to GMB marketing, adding canonicals, adding hreflang to XML and improving Metadata. You can see that each iterative change increased organic visibility. Google also demonstrated to webmasters that by making significant technical changes, you can deliver large increases in organic impressions. Following the fixing of AMP errors, the Think with Google site increased in impressions by 200%. There is much chatter in the SEO community over recent years about consolidation of website content, and Google reinforced this by stated they found a "large number" of near duplicate sites across their properties. For the Google Retail website, they consolidated six historic websites into "one great website" which lead to them doubling CTA click-through rate and a resulted in an organic traffic increase of 64%.

