Busy summer for SEO as Google rings the changes – what does it mean for your charity?

13 October 2021  |  Alex Cavalli

From Google’s first algorithm updates of 2021 to the imminent launch of MUM, an artificial intelligence powered upgrade, a lot has been happening on the SEO front over the last three months.

This article highlights the four most important changes and what they might mean for your charity’s website.

First core algorithm update rolled out

Six months after its previous algorithm update, Google rolled out a large update, split into two parts, over the summer. These weren’t designed to target any specific ranking factor and so far, websites following good content marketing practice don’t seem to have been adversely affected.

Although some website owners did report volatility in search page position in early June, following rollout of the first part of the update, things seem to have settled down since.

So, probably not too much to worry about for charities at this stage.

Hard deadline for page experience and Core Web Vitals

On the contrary, if you haven’t been paying attention to Google’s focus on user page experience, you need to start doing so.

Why? Because Google have finally put a date on when page experience, quantified by its Core Web Vitals metrics, will become a full ranking factor – and it’s the end of August 2021.

But don’t panic! On first glance, Core Web Vitals may look scarily complex but that’s mainly due to the obscure terminology Google uses. In essence, your web development team or agency needs to ensure the following:

• Your website loads quickly
• On site actions (e.g. link clicks, swipes, etc.) are responsive
• Ads don’t alter the page layout too much

One consequence of the prioritisation of page experience is likely to be the deprecation of accelerated mobile pages (AMPs). Google have recently stopped ranking AMPs above other pages and are expected to be removing the lightning symbol from AMPs soon.

Search Console Insights launched in beta

If you like your search data neatly packaged (and who doesn’t), Search Console Insights could be just what you’ve been looking for. Insights takes the most relevant data from Analytics, Search Console and social media and combines them in one handy dashboard.

Charities can now log in and see, at a glance, how many visitors they have been getting, how their latest content is performing, which pages and search terms have been most popular and which of their social media platforms are working for them.

For those charities who have yet to set up and/or link their Google Analytics and Google Search Console profiles, now is the ideal time to do it (hint: set up Analytics first because it makes it much quicker and easier to set up Search Console).

MUM’s the word at Google I/O 2021

Finally, if your charity has a global audience, the upcoming MUM upgrade could transform your search presence. MUM, which stands for Multitask Unified Model, is an artificial intelligence powered language processing system which will enable Google Search to handle more complex enquiries.

What’s more, MUM is designed to overcome the language barrier and collect results from around the globe before translating them into the visitor’s native language. How cool is that?

And MUM will not stop there. Google will be adding audio and video content into the mix for an extremely rich user experience when searching. If you didn’t already have a good enough reason to create high quality audio-visual content, you do now.

Google are definitely keen to big up their new upgrade, claiming it will be 1000 times more powerful than BERT, the natural language processing model currently powering Google Search.

So, something to keep an eye on over the coming months.