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September 20, 2019

Good morning, {FirstName}, what percentage of your traffic comes from search? 

A new study from BrightEdge found that organic search drives 53% and paid search drives 15% of site traffic across the thousands of domains it analyzed. Despite an increase in zero-click searches on Google, the study shows organic traffic share has grown in the five years BrightEdge has conducted this research.  

Overall, the study found that paid and organic search are responsible for “68% of all trackable website traffic.” For B2B sites, it was even higher, with more than 75% of site traffic coming from organic and paid search. Social media referrals have remained flat at roughly 5% of traffic, according to BrightEdge data.

If you’re a Search Ads 360 user, you now have the option of accessing Google Ads Smart Bidding to set auction-time bids in your Google Search campaigns. Whereas a bid strategy in Search Ads 360 analyzes performance for potential bid changes every six hours, auction-time bidding evaluates conversion performance and a number of contextual signals to predict the likelihood of conversion and sets bids with every auction. It’s also now in open beta for Shopping campaigns in Search Ads 360. 

The newest report in Google Search Console can help you debug breadcrumb structured data issues. The Breadcrumbs report is under the Enhancements section of GSC.

Keep reading for a Pro Tip on why you should be running automated tests during site development work for the sake of SEO.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

 
 
 
Pro Tip
 

Use automated tests during development to avoid costly SEO mistakes

“Automated testing is a broad topic, but when it comes to SEO concerns, there are two main types of automated tests we need to learn about: unit tests and end-to-end tests,” explains Hamlet Batista of RankSense. “Developers generally write unit tests to perform individual component and method level checks. The idea is to verify each part of the application works as expected, separately and in isolation. However, while the individual parts can operate correctly, they could fail when put to work together. That is where integration tests (a.k.a. end-to-end tests) come into place. They test that the components can work together too. We should write both types of tests to check for SEO issues during development.”

More On Testing For Errors »

 

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Search Shorts
 

Review Rich Results Google update.

Naming the review rich results update. While some want to name it Starmageddon, Danny Sullivan from Google said Google is calling it the Sept. 2019 Review Rich Results Update.

It’s still rolling out. Oh, and by the way, that reviews rich results update is still rolling out, according to Danny Sullivan.

Boston. Gary Illyes from Google will be in Boston and is open to having coffee with you on September 27th.

 
What we're reading
 

We've curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader

Google Maps Incognito Mode sent to preview group for testing – Android Police

Google Search Ad Shows Emoji In Display URL – Search Engine Roundtable

Google welcomes Rugby World Cup with a QDF, again. – SISTRIX

Google’s phone line lets Indian users talk to Google Assistant without internet access – Android 

Central

Grey Hat SEO Link building Practices – Search Metrics

New voices for your Google Assistant in nine countries – Google Blog

Quick ways to find and manage out of stock products at scale – Builtvisible

Tracking our progress on flood forecasting – Google Blog

 
 
 
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