Each year we attend dozens of events and reach thousands of people with our keynotes, talks, and Q&As. We go to conferences and meetups, because we believe that our talks can potentially help online businesses flourish and we get to help people with their search related problems, but sometimes also listen to their success stories. It's really uplifting when we hear that, by following our advice, they achieved something great!

We want people to hear about these success stories, so we're starting a new blog post series that features case studies. They may, for example, help with convincing a boss' boss that investing in SEO or implementing structured data can be good for the business.
In this first blog post we're going to start with the overall basics of investing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and how investing in it helped a company.

We hope you'll find this blog post useful. If you're interested in contributing a case study, submit a talk proposal when signing up for a Webmaster Conference near you and we will consider featuring it. For more case studies and help content, head over to our developer site, help center, or YouTube channel. If you wanna get in touch with us, find us on Twitter.

Posted by Alice Kim and The Gary

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Moon Tae Sung is a SEO Manager at Saramin, one of the largest job platforms in Korea. We had the opportunity to ask him a few questions about the effects of his team's work on Google Search after a presentation he did at a Webmaster Conference in Seoul.

Saramin offers job posting recommendations, company and salary information, AI-based interviews, and AI-based headhunting services. According to Tae Sung, "people come to the Saramin site not only to look for jobs and submit applications, but to also gain a variety of information related to job searches and receive high-quality AI-based services for interview preparation."

Saramin's SEO process started with Google Search Console. In 2015 they verified the site in the tool and spent a year identifying and fixing crawling issues. "The task was simple, but still resulted in a 15% increase in the organic traffic", Tae Sung said. The ROI prompted Saramin to invest more in SEO with the aim of even greater potential success. But first they needed to learn more about what else makes a site search engine friendly so they can better look for help resources. "We studied the Google Search developer’s guide and Help Center articles. These resources continue to provide up-to-date information for issues that we run into", he told us.

SEO is a process that may take time to bear fruit, so they "started following the SEO guidelines more closely and implemented more changes. The goal was to make changes to the site so that Google Search would better understand it", Tae Sung shared. They removed meta tags that were cluttered with unnecessary and unhelpful keywords, they used rel-canonical and removed duplicate content, and they explored the search gallery and applied applicable structured data, starting with Job Posting, Breadcrumb, and Estimated salary. 

In addition, they used various Google tools offered as they worked on improving their site. "Errors on our structured data are dealt with by checking URLs on the Structured Data Testing Tool. Other tools like Mobile Friendly Test, AMP Test, and PageSpeed Insight provide us valuable insights for making improvements and helping us offer a better experience for our users," said Tae Sung.

Over time, Saramin saw the red-colored errors on Search Console’s Index Coverage report gradually turning valid green, and they knew they were headed in the right direction. The incremental changes reached a tipping point and the traffic continued to rise at a more remarkable speed. In the peak hiring season of September 2019, traffic doubled compared to the previous year.


"We are very happy about the traffic increase, but what’s more exciting is it also accompanied improvement in the quality of the traffic. We saw a 93% increase in the number of new sign ups and a 9% increase on the conversion. We believe this means Saramin’s optimization work was found delightful by our users," said Tae Sung.

Saramin continues to invest in achieving their SEO goals. They're trying to enhance their users’ experience by implementing more technologies and features from Google, and Tae Sung is enthusiastic about their work ahead: "This is only the beginning of our story."

As a part of the Webmaster Conference series, last fall we held a Product Summit at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. It was slightly different from our previous events, with a number of product managers and engineers from Google Search taking part. We recorded the talks held there, and are happy to be able to make these available to all of you now.

In the playlist you'll find:

• Web deduplication - How does Google recognize duplicate content across the web? What happens once a duplicate is found? How is a canonical URL selected? How does localization play a role?
• Google Images best practices - Take a look at how Google Images has evolved over the years, and learn about some of the best practices that you can implement on your site when it comes to images.
• Rendering - Find out more about rendering, and what it takes to do rendering of the web at scale. Take a look behind the scenes, and learn about some things a site owner could watch out for with regards to rendering.
• Titles, snippets, and result previews - What's the goal of titles, snippets, and previews in Search? How do Google's systems pick and generate a preview for a page? What are some of the elements that help users decide which page to click in Search?
• Googlebot & web hosting - Starting with a look at the popularity of different web servers, and the growth of HTTPS, you'll find out more about how Google's crawling for Search works, and what you can do to control it.
• Claim your Knowledge Panel - Knowledge Panels are a great way for people and organizations to be visible in Search. Find out more about the ways you can claim and update them for yourself or for your business.
• Improving Search over the years - Are dogs the same as cats? Should pages about New York be shown when searching for York? How could algorithms ever figure this out? How many 😊's does it take to get Google's attention? Google's Paul Haahr takes you on a tour of some changes in Search.

We hope you find these videos insightful, useful, and a bit entertaining! And if you are not subscribed to the Webmasters Youtube channel, here’s your chance!

Posted by John Mueller, Search Advocate, Google Switzerland

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, many organizations and groups are publishing important coronavirus-related announcements that affect our everyday lives.

In response, we're introducing a new way for these special announcements to be highlighted on Google Search. Sites can add SpecialAnnouncement structured data to their web pages or submit a COVID-19 announcement in Search Console.

At first, we’re using this information to highlight announcements in Google Search from health and government agency sites, to cover important updates like school closures or stay-at-home directives.
We are actively developing this feature, and we hope to expand it to include more sites. While we might not immediately show announcements from other types of sites, seeing the markup will help us better understand how to expand this feature.

Please note: beyond special announcements, there are a range of other options that sites can use to highlight information such as canceled events or changes to business hours. You can learn more about these at the end of this post.

How COVID-19 announcements appear in Search 

When SpecialAnnouncement structured data is added to a page, that content can be eligible to appear with a COVID-19 announcement rich result, in addition to the page’s regular snippet description. A COVID-19 announcement rich result can contain a short summary that can be expanded to view more more. Please note that the format may change over time, and you may not see results in Google Search right away.

How to implement your COVID-19 announcements

There are two ways that you can implement your COVID-19 announcements.

RECOMMENDED: Add structured data to your web page

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. We recommend using this method because it is the easiest way for us to take in this information, it enables reporting through Search Console in the future, and enables you to make updates. Learn how to add structured data to COVID-19 announcements.

ALTERNATIVE: Submit announcements in Search Console

If you don't have the technical ability or support to implement structured data, you can submit a COVID-19 announcement in Search Console. This tool is still in beta testing, and you may see changes.

This method is not preferred and is intended only as a short-term solution. With structured data, your announcement highlights can automatically update when your pages change. With the tool, you’ll have to manually update announcements. Also, announcements made this way cannot be monitored through special reporting that will be made available through Search Console in the future.

If you do need to submit this way, you'll need to first be verified in Search Console. Then you can submit a COVID-19 announcement:

More COVID-19 resources for sites from Google Search

Beyond special announcements markup, there are other ways you can highlight other types of activities that may be impacted because of COVID-19:

• Best practices for health and government sites: If you are a representative of a health or government website, and you have important information about coronavirus for the general public, here are some recommendations for how to make this information more visible on Google Search.
• Surface your common FAQs: If your site has common FAQs, adding FAQ markup can help Google Search surface your answers.
• Pausing your business online: See our blog post on how to pause your business online in a way that minimizes impacts with Google Search.
• Business hours & temporary closures: Review the guidance from Google My Business on how to change your business hours or indicate temporary closures or how to create COVID-19 posts.
• Events: If you hold events, look over the new properties for marking them virtual, postponed, or canceled.
• Knowledge Panels: Understand how to recommend changes to your Google knowledge panel (or how to claim it, if you haven’t already).
• Fix an overloaded server: Learn how to determine a server's bottleneck, quickly fix the bottleneck, improve server performance, and prevent regressions.

If you have any questions or comments, please let us know on Twitter.

Posted by Lizzi Harvey, Technical Writer, Search Relations, and Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search