The Stack is a weekly podcast where we share and discuss the latest trends, news, and content from the world of marketing, sales, and tech. In each episode, Sean, Tim, and Ryan sit down to chat about the hard-hitting questions related to sales, marketing, and tech. You can subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Google Play Music.

In this episode, we talk through a DeepCrawl article that does a great job summing up everything marketers should know about from the Google IO Conference. We would love to hear your thoughts so make sure to comment or tweet us at @Sylvestrer1, @SeanHenri, and @Tendrecroppes or @PepperlandMKTG.

The State of The Union Google Search

The State of the Union Google Search is the go-to session to get an update on all the new things coming to search. Martin Splitt and John Muller break down everything you need to know about Google’s new crawler, structured data, and much more.

Key Takeaways:

  • Mobile-First indexing has been used for a long time now, and more than half of sites are being crawled using Googlebot smartphone. The Google team says that websites should be built using responsive designs rather than building out two separate sites i.e. one for search and one for mobile.
  • Google image search will become more robust with future updates. Image searches will soon favor high-resolution images and Google will be prioritizing these websites.
  • Google ‘s crawler will now be able to recognize Intersection Observer or “lazy loading” for all web pages with their crawling update.
  • Structured data markup is being pushed by the Google team and Google’s very own John Muller suggests using JSON-LD to implement any structured data changes.

Building Better Websites

Aanchal Bahadur for Google’s Product Partnership

Accessibility and speed are the name of the game when it comes to building a better website. Implementing new structured data, PWA’s, AMP pages, lazy loading, and others that make it easier and faster for people to find information is the big thing Google wants to convey in this session.

Key Takeaways:

  • This presentation put a big focus on accessibility. Making sure that people all across the world can access the information and content on your site.
  • Google is going to be rewarding websites that try and take advantage of the new formats they are putting in place such as AMP pages, structured data, lazy loading, and PWA’s. All of these things are going to play a role in improving how users interact with your site and consequently, how you rank in search results.

Google Search and Javascript Sites

Martin Splitt & Zoe Clifford for Google

Modern javascript is no longer a blocker for SEO with the release of the new Evergreen Googlebot. The new Googlebot will now support newer JavaScript language, IntersectionObserver which will assist with lazy-loading and other web API’s.

Key Takeaways:

  • Google will be continuing to improve their crawlers to understand JavaScript
  • New Googlebot will continuously update and improve over time instead of having updates rolled out randomly

Demystifying Speed Tooling

Paul Irish and Elizabeth Sweeny for Google

For those who attended Google IO 2019, they had a sneak peek at the new Page Speed Report coming to Google Search Console. The updates being made to the way browsers load JavaScript, the use of portals, and new Googlebot all point to speed being a major factor.

This new report seems like a no brainer but could be a huge win for people that plan on implementing all of these new API’s and scripts to their site. People who sign up for the beta will be able to get a breakdown of pages they should be focusing on for JS, CSS, and image compression.

Key Takeaways:

  • Google performed a study to see what portion or aspects of a website have the biggest impact on user experience. This study showed that 75% of users said the time a page takes to load is the biggest factor when visiting a website.
  • Unlike other marketing efforts that might take a long time to see the ROI of, improving your site speed WILL have a serious impact on your visit, session, and business goals.
  • Paul and Elizabeth break down their performance blueprint into a 15 step process which includes understanding your current performance, record changes, and measure impact, set goals, start diagnosing specific aspects of your site, check the competition, and much more.

App Of The Week

Solo Learn

Solo Learn is an online workspace for people to practice code. You can visit your “Code Playground” to test out something you have learned or try something new. You can sign up and learn a ton of different coding languages like JavaScript, CSS, HTML, PHP, and C++.

Use Cases:

  • Use this online software to help you learn to code to implement new things for your website. You can learn new languages and get help from other members of the community.
  • Classes are free to get started so you can round out a lot of your skills before ever pulling out the credit card.

The Lightning Round: What We’re Reading This Week

In this section, we quickly run through some other updates that we didn’t have enough time to deep-dive on, but we still felt were noteworthy.

  1. Google Ads App Can Now Create More Types of Ads On-the-Go
  2. Podcast episodes in Search Results
  3. Google Lens will soon show 3D and Augmented Reality Images
  4. 100 Things announced at Google IO 2019
  5. The New Google News

Listen or watch for new episodes each Friday, or check out the archives to watch past episodes on-demand. Like what you hear? Leave us a review or let us know in the comments!

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