Google Updates in February 2021

Google releases updates all the time and some of them will have a big impact on your website's visibility and its ability to make sales.

To help you, I check out all the updates each month and let you know the details on the most important ones, together with some recommendations and tips so that you can improve your visibility in search and your ability to attract customers. 

Here’s what happened in February...

Google was pretty busy this past month with numerous unconfirmed updates, passage ranking rolling out, the upcoming page experience update and mobile-first indexing and so much more.

Here are three updates that I want to draw your attention to this month: 

1. Google launched passage ranking on February 10th.

In short passage ranking is Google's way of algorithmically sifting through a long piece of content and being able to understand that a specific passage or set of passages is about query X, while another specific passage or set of passages in that same document can be about query Y. Google is able to rank the same piece of content but different passages within that content separately and for different queries. Google is not indexing them separately but ranking them separately.

My recommendation: Make sure that your pages have clear titles, headings, subheadings and have well-structured content so that Google can understand the sections and know when to show it to users.

2. Google Page Experience Update.

Google's Danny Sullivan said to start when the Page Experience Update rolls out, it won't be a massive change. It might grow in terms of importance over the years. Danny said "it shouldn't be the case that overnight, we flip some type of switch and there's a massive change."

As a reminder, this update is launching in May 2021 

My recommendation: Page Experience will become a more important factor over time, so it’s worth taking action now. I’ve written a helpful guide on how you can prepare for the Google Page Experience Update (Aka Core Web Vitals) here: https://www.seo-plus.co.uk/google-page-experience-update/

3. Google My Business

The big news on local SEO is that you can now do messaging now via desktop which can be a huge time saver for some businesses. Google is rolling out the ability to respond to Google My Business messaging through your desktop browser. Previously you were only able to manage it from your mobile phone and before that, through SMS.

If you log in to Google My Business, click on your business and then you may see a "messages" menu item on the left navigation bar, that is where you can manage this. There is a new help document with how to use this and how to manage the messages.

I’m happy this is now available for businesses to manage on a desktop browser as it can make it easier for customer support representatives to manage numerous messages at the same time in one single larger interface.

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Happy optimising and best wishes, Hazel

P.S. My brand new course: “How to Attract Your Ideal Customers and Power Up Your Sales” launched last week and my students are already zooming through the lessons and beginning to make the changes that will attract their ideal customers. I’m so happy for them.

If you’d like to attract more of your ideal customers it’s not too late to join – all the details are here