Here’s the latest instalment of Digital Marketing Reads, a roundup of some of the more interesting articles we’ve read lately in the digital marketing world.
H1 Headings For SEO – Why They Matter
This article clears the air on where we stand today, in late 2020, with regards to the importance of headings in keyword rankings.
It’s long been said by many an SEO agency that it’s necessary not only to use, but to optimise headings as much as possible throughout a website in order to have a better chance of ranking for desired keywords. What’s more, it’s commonly assumed that an h1 tag holds more weight than h2, h3, and so on.
However, this article dispels the myth and asserts that, in actuality, headings have no impact on SEO and exist mainly to help both Google and readers better understand what the page is about. It doesn’t matter how many headings you have, or what order they’re in, or how many keywords you’ve managed to stuff into them – headings won’t help your website to rank any higher.
Google Updates Search Console Crawl Stats Report
The Crawl Stats Report has recently been updated in Google Search Console to include some new features as well as more detailed reporting.
It offers “a 90 day accounting of all files that Googlebot has downloaded, including CSS, JavaScript, PDFs and images”. This is useful data to have, so you can see whether Google is continually crawling your website as it should be. Generally, you want to see an increase in crawling over time.
The new features in the Crawl Stats Report include additional information on host status, exact URLs of where requests were made, and total number of requests grouped by various categories.
Photo via JetRank.
Google Guaranteed badge starting to appear on Google Maps listings
If you’ve noticed a green checkmark with a GOOGLE GUARANTEED stamped on a Google Maps listing recently, you’re not seeing things – this is something Google is trialing right now that they may or may not adopt full-time, depending on how many businesses start using it.
Having this “upgraded profile” on Google Maps comes at a price of $50/month. It’s unclear whether the price is worth it as of yet, but it could prove valuable for businesses if it results in more clicks on their local listing. Personally, we think it’s just another way for Google to get more money out of people, so we wouldn’t recommend making this investment just yet. It’ll be interesting to see over time how many businesses do end up signing up for the Google Guaranteed badge and whether they see any long-term benefits.