SEO News Monthly Roundup: February 2021

Things are changing drastically with Google, its algorithms, and SEO. However, picking up every article filled with SEO updates is one such process that needs a lot of time investment. Hence, I have collected all the important SEO tips and news for you and created an SEO news roundup for February 2021.

My Objective with this post is to help you learn more in less time :)

Google Passage Ranking Is Live in the Us English Results

Source: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-passage-ranking-live-30920.html

Google has released passage ranking in the US English search results, and Google also added that passage ranking would come for more countries in English in the future.

With the help of introduction to passage ranking Google would be able to algorithmically shift the long piece of content and directly reach a conclusion of what the whole query is about.

In case if there are two different queries in the same content, then with the help of the Google Passage ranking tactic, they will not index them separately, but Google will rank them separately.

The Google Passage Ranking update is going to impact more than 7% of search queries, although the update is not globally released. Another thing to keep in mind is, this update is not going to affect SEO-optimized sites. 

Additionally, Google also said that there is no way to look at the passage ranking in the search results, as they don’t want to make the search result snippets look different. 

Key takeaways: 

• Google Passage ranking is live in the US english results and not made an global update. 
• SEO optimized websites are not going to be impacted by this update. 
• Two queries from the same content will be ranked differently. 

Smart Google SEO Tips for 2021

Source: https://moz.com/blog/21-seo-tips-2021

Favicon: is now available on Google’s mobile search results, and a good favicon can actually help you a lot in making a few points difference. Moreover, these favicons look good, so this will surely influence your click-through rate.

Boilerplate: is the part of your title tag that’s going to repeat every time, in short, you should start posting your brand name at the end of every title tag, this helps in getting higher clicks. 

FAQ and how to schema: is amazing, although to start taking advantage of this, how to schema you need to have those FAQs on your pages too. 

Key takeaways: 

• Favicon is going to help you generate higher clicks. 
• Boilerplate is essential, add it in every title tag. 
• Make sure to add FAQs in your pages for generating results through how-to schema. 

Effectiveness of Combining SEO, User Experience, and Accessibility for Better Results

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-ux-accessibility-in-search-results/395357/

Google has recently announced that a new way of checking and ranking your websites is going to be introduced, which is the Core Web Vitals. Under this, Google will precisely have a look at your website’s user experience and based on these results. You would be able to rank your website.

Under Core web vitals, we need to cover the effectiveness of combining SEO, UX, and accessibility for better reach.

With the announcement of this update, most of the SEO experts were saying that, if we do everything Google requires to meet the performance requirements then our website would be able to perform better. 

But it is limited to various web page performance metrics such as largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift. 

Here are a few things that you need to keep in mind while developing the best user experience through your website and those are user interface design, privacy, security, accessibility, and performance. 

Key takeaways: 

• In the coming days, Google will use Core Web Vitals for processes like page ranking. 
• Core Web Vitals is considered as the practice that derives the user experience of a web page. 
• Webpage performance metrics of Core web vitals are the largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift. 

Recommended Read: What Are Core Web Vitals and How to Easily Improve Them?

Put Your Old Content on Reworking

Source: https://www.seoblog.com/guide-to-reworking-old-content/

If you produce evergreen content and think that your previous content will never go old, you are wrong. As if you want your previous content to work, you need to reoptimize it according to the current search intent.

Before heading forward, you need to carry forward a content audit that will help you know which content you need to delete, keep and repurpose.

If you can notice old pages that were getting good traffic, those are the pages you need to re-optimize for better results.

In case if there is a page that isn’t ranking and not even getting a good number of impressions in the search console, then you can consider deleting those pages.

Quick tips that will help you in optimizing your old content are as follows: 

• Make changes in your title, if you have used the previous year 2020 or 2019 in your old content, then update it to 2021. Moreover, don’t make it too long. 
• Try to fetch as much information as possible, and write at least 500 words/page, this is the minimum limit. 
• Update your old images from the content, if they are still relevant then you can keep them unchanged. 
• Make changes in your linking strategy, link your pages with trusted relevant external sources. 
• Don’t go for automatic URL generators, try to customize it and make it short. 

Key takeaways: 

• If old content pages do not bring you any traffic or social shares, then delete it. 
• If old content pages are doing good with then you can reoptimize them for better results. 
• Any of your old content is ranking on the first page of the search engine, then keep them unchanged. 

Enhance Your SEO With EAT

Source: https://www.seobility.net/en/blog/eat/

EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are the part of Google’s quality rater guidelines with the help of which you can improve your performance in searches.

A better EAT profile would be able to give Google a confirmation that your webpage does not consist of any misleading content or you don’t have a fraudulent website.

This will make Google to show people the results that will give them the most reliable and accurate results.

Tips to work on your EAT: 

• While working on the Expertise area you need to write high-level content with the help of which Google can know about how well you know the topic and how easily your visitors can get it. 
• While working on Authority, make sure to create high-quality backlinks, you can even add free tools integration and let your users use them. 
• While working on Trustworthiness, try to create a good quality author bio, optimize your about page.

Key takeaways: 

• Google wants expert, authoritative content written by trustworthy people that’s why they introduced EAT. 
• For building expertise, you need to focus on writing high-level content with as much information as possible. 
• Authority building is possible by creating backlinks from quality websites. 
• Trustworthiness can be built by providing proper information about you and your business. Invest some more time on creating about us pages. 

That’s it for the SEO roundup for February 2021!