In the latest episode of Canonical Chronicle, we discuss:
Ross: 00:00 Ever since I was a young boy, I played the silver ball.
Ross: 00:03 From Soho down to Brighton, I must’ve played them all.
Ross: 00:06 Welcome to The Canonical Chronical, Episode Two Million and Six.
Ross: 00:10 Let’s get into it.
Ross: 00:20 A couple of eagle-eyed SEOs have spotted Google Testing.
Ross: 00:24 highlighting content in featured snippets and putting them straight into.
Ross: 00:28 that bit inside your content.
Ross: 00:32 So Google are now kind of like…
Speaker 2: 00:34 Hey! Hey! Hey! Look over here! Look at that!
Ross: 00:38 It’s only a test, so no big deal, but if it is rolled out,
Ross: 00:42 you may need to significantly change the way you optimize for conversions,
Ross: 00:47 because now people are going to be steaming past all that perfectly written,
Ross: 00:50 and curated content that you’ve got. So maybe your conversion rate team might be like…
Speaker 3: 00:56 Where did Hannah go?
Ross: 01:00 Oh-
Ross: 01:00 So AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, are a very polarizing subject.
Ross: 01:05 Some SEOs love them, and some SEOs are a little bit like…
Ross: 01:14 But the good news is that you can now use JavaScript on AMP pages.
Ross: 01:18 This is really good news for developers that want their AMP pages to be a bit more interactive.
Ross: 01:24 So some things you should know. It’s compatible with React,
Ross: 01:28 Preact, Angular, Vue.js, jQuery and D3 frameworks,
Ross: 01:33 and the script must be less than 150 kilobytes.
Ross: 01:36 So the next time you’re speaking to a dev, just drop in that little bit.
Ross: 01:40 of knowledge and maybe they’ll stop taking tech support calls like this…
Speaker 4: 01:44 Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Ross: 01:50 Google now wants to run background checks on.
Ross: 01:52 local business owners to route out cowboy traders.
Ross: 01:57 Have you ever heard that big brother is watching you?
Ross: 01:59 Well, it appears that big brother is in fact watching you, and they’re called Google.
Speaker 5: 02:05 There’s what I call the “creepy line”, and the Google policy about
Ross: 02:08 a lot of these things is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it.
Ross: 02:12 Whatever, dude.
Ross: 02:13 You guys do more surveillance than an actual surveillance company.
Ross: 02:17 However, the new Google Guaranteed Program actually
Ross: 02:20 might be quite useful.
Ross: 02:22 Essentially, it does background checks on businesses to see if
Ross: 02:25 certain professional qualifications have been met by the business.
Ross: 02:29 It’s going to apply to service businesses like locksmiths,
Ross: 02:32 cleaners, landscapers, et cetera, and it guarantees
Ross: 02:35 a $2,000 refund if something doesn’t go well.
Ross: 02:39 It’s kind of cool and will hopefully reduce the amount of cowboy traders out there.
Speaker 6: 02:43 Look at this tiling here, madam.
Speaker 6: 02:46 Look, just come off in me hand.
Ross: 02:53 So, if you’re an eCommerce business you no doubt have lots.
Ross: 02:56 of images of your lovely products, and you’re probably getting
Ross: 03:00 a bunch of custom images done to tell everyone about it.
Ross: 03:03 Your new organic duck down chaise lounge, imperial wall throws with unicorn fibers.
Ross: 03:09 But as far as you’re concerned, your customers are like…
Speaker 7: 03:13 You only work in a shop, you know. You can drop the attitude.
Ross: 03:16 But fear not.
Ross: 03:17 Now you can see the traffic and adoration your product images
Ross: 03:21 are getting inside Search Console.
Ross: 03:24 Simply go to the performance report,
Ross: 03:26 and under filters you can now filter by Google image traffic.
Ross: 03:31 Now you can optimize your product image much more effectively
Ross: 03:35 and you can know what traffic each images are getting,
Ross: 03:38 and then your customers will eventually be like…
Speaker 8: 03:41 You can never have enough hats, gloves, and shoes.
Ross: 03:44 That’s everything for this week’s Canonical Chronicle.
Ross: 03:46 We hope you’ve liked it.
Ross: 03:47 If you have, please do follow us on social, and until next time.
Ross: 03:50 we will see you later.
