Five of the most interesting search marketing news stories of the week

It’s Friday, and time for our weekly round-up of the week’s news in search marketing. 

Today we have the most expensive AdWords keywords, a new site testing tool from Google, and a look at whether Google factors in anchor text in internal links.

Google’s next mobile update will factor in page speed

Mobile page speed isn’t currently used as a ranking factor by Google, but that will change with the next mobile friendly update.

Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed this at a recent Search Marketing Summit in Sydney. Though he wasn’t giving dates away, it appears this update is a matter of months away.

What are the most expensive keywords in the US?

Our columnist Chris Lake has compiled a list of the most expensive AdWords keywords in the US. (We have the same list from the UK too).

What have we learnt? Well, the US keywords are much more expensive than those in the UK. The top US keyword is upwards of four times more expensive than the equivalent across the Atlantic.

Also, whereas gambling terms dominate in the UK, it’s legal keywords in the States. 78% are legal terms, including nine of the top ten.

A new mobile-friendly testing tool

Google has just launched this tool, based upon the Page Speed Insights tool.

The tool tests and gives a score for these three things:

• Mobile friendliness
• Mobile speed
• Desktop speed

Google will also send you a report detailing the reasons for your scores and suggestions for improvement. Looks like Google needs to work on that desktop score ;)

Does Google count anchor text in internal links?

Shaun Anderson from Hobo Web carried out an interesting experiment looking at whether the anchor text used in internal links is used as a ranking factor by Google.

The answer seems to be yes. Please read Shaun’s blog for the full details, but he essentially linked to a page on his site which didn’t contain the keywords used in the anchor text linking to it.

The page then ranked for that keyword, and stopped ranking when the link was removed.

A useful recap of Google I/O

There was lots to digest from Google I/O and Google has helpfully listed and explained the various announcements on the Webmaster Central Blog.

They are:

• Rich cards
• New Search Console reports
• Real-time indexing
• More detail on Accelerated Mobile Pages
• A new and improved Structured Data Testing Tool
• App Indexing’s migration to Firebase
• App streaming
• A revamp of developer documentation

And finally, the launch of ClickZ Intelligence…

Last week saw the launch of ClickZ Intelligence, a new service providing a range of reports aimed at digital marketing pros.

There’ll be some dedicated SEO and PPC reports further down the line, but for now we have reports on social customer service, ecommerce checkout, customer journeys, mobile ads, AI, and mobile commerce (see Rebecca Sentance’s look at this report from a search perspective).

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