SEO Post Roundup for last week of May 2019

Here’s a quick update of some of the better SEO and link building posts that I have read recently.

5 Ways to Use Trending Topics for Link Building (searchenginejournal.com)

Topics: trending topic, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, email outreach, engagement factor, social media management, interesting content topics

• Is there a “gap” in what’s currently being covered?
• What is my audience interested in at this moment?
• What are your competitors talking about?
• What has worked in the past?
• What kind of content is most linkable in your niche?

A guide to voice search and natural language optimisation (link-assistant.com)

Topics: Keyword, featured snippet, Natural language, SERP, voice search, Google, search features, question words

• Taking into account the active adoption (75% of households are to get at least one smart speaker by 2020) and use of voice digital assistants, as well as an increasing interest in smart speakers, voice search is here to stay.
• Given the majority of voice search queries are made using natural language and in the form of a question, it’s quite obvious you need to provide for this.
• Then, if any other page contains a precise answer to a user’s question, it also may, possibly, be chosen as a voice search result.
• Backlinko, in their voice search study , observed that Google prioritized short and concise answers to users’ queries, no more than 30 words long.
• This position is called a featured snippet – a rich search result that contains a direct and concise answer to a user’s query.
• There are some features that appear on the panel and may work well for voice search, as they can give direct answers to user’s questions: Questions and answers .

Cars.com vs. CarGurus.com saga shows the importance of SEO (and the bad side of a Google update) (searchengineland.com)

Topics: core update, Google, Cargurus, Cars.com, total leads, top traffic driver

• For Cars.com, the popular automotive marketplace, the March 2019 core update  was good: the company has seen a 49% increase in search visibility since.
• SEO Director David Greene said he believes a lot of the success has to do with their SEO strategy around content and site performance updates, but there was another factor at play.
• “In the first quarter, our total leads grew 15%,” Cars.com CEO Alex Vetter said in the earnings report.
• “Keep in mind, the most material shift in SEO market share took place just at the end of the first quarter and continues to accelerate into Q2,” he added.
• He is currently running around 100+ SEO projects, which are around building out great content and improving site performance.

SEO: Can E-commerce Sites Win the Answer Box? (practicalecommerce.com)

Topics: Ecommerce, Cars.com, answer boxes, Siftwallet.com, Google, Walmart, branded search queries, brand terms

• The “answer box” is Google’s way of responding to questions directly from the top of the search results page so that searchers don’t need to leave that page to get answers.
• Cars.com’s extensive informational content is suitable for Google’s answer box, as well as ranking for long tail search queries in general.
• Google’s answer box, populated by content from top etailer Cars.com.
• For example, the chart below shows that HomeDepot.com ranks in the top three positions for more than 97,000 search queries that trigger an answer box.