enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 6 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

Google announced today that a core update will go live on the afternoon of 9/24. While they have not released information regarding what precisely this update will target, it is possible that sites will see some shake ups in the rankings of their pages. This could result in an increase or a decrease in rankings for particular pieces of content.

When we saw the alert about the impending core update, we wanted to bring it to the attention of our community and discuss what this update means for them and their content.

Don’t panic. In a recent post, we pointed out that after core updates there are often adjustments and rollbacks if Google sees sites move more than intended.

What is a core update?

Google reports that they make minor adjustments to their algorithms on a regular basis– nearly daily–as they work to improve their ability to rank websites and serve their users. Often these smaller updates do not attract much notice. A few times a year, however, they release larger updates. These updates often do attract attention as a number of sites see rises and falls in their rankings across multiple pages. They also likely see the corresponding traffic increases and drops as the updates go live.

Google generally acknowledges these core updates, as they want to give site owners more targeted information about what they should focus on improving. For this particular core update, Google has also specifically gone out of their way to point out that sometimes nothing is expressly ‘wrong’ with content that has lost a few positions as a result of a core update. The purpose of the update is not necessarily to penalize content, but rather to find content that has been better written and developed and will be more trustworthy for users. Sometimes this means that content that follows all of the Webmaster’s Guidelines, may still see a drop.

What should I do as we wait for Google’s core update to roll out?

We recommend that our community carefully monitors their sites through the BrightEdge platform. You can set alerts for any key pages within your site so that you receive notifications if they drop too low in the rankings.

Remember to not only watch for site drops, but also keep an eye on any site ranking boosts. Monitoring how different pages rise and fall in the rankings can offer important clues into how this core updates impacts sites, which then provides valuable insight into how rankings can be regained following this drop.

What should I do if my content drops after Google’s core update?

If you notice a drop in your content as this core update rolls out, take a careful look at what specifically dropped and by how much. Keep in mind that Google is not necessarily penalizing your content, it could instead be a reward for another site that has produced strong content. This means there might not be a concrete criteria that needs to be ‘fixed’ to regain the rankings.

Instead, you will want to carefully evaluate the content that fell alongside any content that rose. You also want to look at the material that now ranks higher than yours and try and detect what might have made Google prefer this content over yours. This will be your key to help you determine how to correct your content and improve your site moving forward.

How should site owners try to improve their content if they drop in rankings?

Site owners should pay close attention to Google’s strategy for ranking content. Specifically, their algorithm attempts to identify the Expertise (E), Authoritativeness (A), and Trustworthiness (T) of content. They also instruct their team of search quality raters to score search results based on this criteria. Keep in mind that these raters can not actually impact search results. Instead, their ratings are used to determine the effectiveness of the search algorithms.

If you notice a drop in your rankings, you should carefully evaluate your content based on these criteria. Look at the originality of your content: do you produce any original information or research for your customer? Consider also your own expertise and why people should trust you. Do you give them a good reason to believe what you have to say? Does your site and page layout help to support your expertise? Do you regularly cite sources within your content and otherwise support what you have to say?

Google wants you to focus on producing content that offers high value for your users. Your content should have something that your competitors do not have if you want your piece to rank highly.

Google continues to update their algorithm, and this includes rolling out core updates that have the potential to impact the rankings of large numbers of sites. The search engine giant has given us the heads up regarding this upcoming update and went out of their way to remind site owners that a loss in rankings does not automatically mean that best practices or webmaster’s guidelines have been violated. Instead, the focus lies on content that embodies the E.A.T. criteria to better serve the users. Keep a close eye on your site through the BrightEdge platform and let us know how the update impacts you.

So if your traffic drop was due to an algorithm change and does not revert, what can you do?

Remember, organic search is a long play game, so make your plans, adjust a bit, and keep producing and optimizing relevant and valuable content. We’ll repeat our guidance from our last algo update post for your convenience:

1. Increase your content production cadence of blogs, pages, FAQs, glossary, and videos to try to offset the lost traffic
2. Continue to focus on high-quality content
3. Be authoritative, deep, and relevant, target over 1000 words per piece and preferably over 2000 words
4. Be original, fresh, accurate, and current
5. Build multiple pieces in a content silo and internally link them together
6. Be well liked and linked to internally, externally, and socially
7. Work on page load speed until you get to 95 score
8. Reduce the bounce rate of people landing on your site
9. Provide an excellent customer experience and site performance
10. Consider using schema markup, which Google has been promoting since 2011 and people are starting to report positive rank and traffic impact from schema

gregalbuto

M Posted 6 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

A content strategy provides you with a clear outline of what type of content you need, the content you produce, and how you will deliver and promote the material. A successful content strategy does not refer only to written text, but it also incorporates the images and videos you create to support your material.

A content strategy requires you to have an intimate knowledge of precisely who you want to target. You need to know their pain points, what they want to see from you, and how you can best persuade them to make a purchase. You cannot build a trusting relationship with your readers or a strong content strategy without this insight.

Your content strategy will help you determine the type of content to create for your target buyers throughout the buyer’s journey. The better you understand what their buyer’s journeys look like and what they want to see at each stage, the more capably you can create effective content and promotional material. This explains why brands that have a documented strategy see greater success than those who do not.

If you have prepared yourself by outlining your customer personas and their buyer journeys, here is what you need to know to build an effective content strategy.

How should you find topics for your content strategy?

To uncover the topics and keywords you will need for your content strategy, you need to lay out your buyer’s journeys along with your target personas. You want to know the types of questions that arise for each persona at different phases of the journey.

Interviewing and speaking directly with your customers can help break down this information. Have your sales team interview incoming and existing customers. Ask them what mattered the most to them as they moved closer to a purchase. Learn more about their obstacles and considerations as part of your content strategy efforts.

Look also at the typical phases people experience as they move through your journey maps. For example, as people move into the consideration stage, they tend to focus more on comparing you to your competitors. Therefore, keywords that focus on gauging your performance compared to others in the sector will play a large role in helping your content strategy.

Take your insight about your customers and their journeys to the Data Cube. Use the information on the rate of competition for different keywords and the traffic to start creating lists of keywords for the different phases of the journey. You can also use the Data Cube to dive deeply into the material produced by your competitors to get a better idea of the keywords that they rank highly for but you do not. This can help you add more keywords to the list.

Once you have your list of topics and keywords, you will be ready to start determining how to create the content strategy that will help your organization.

How do you create content for your content strategy?

Remember that content for your content strategy does not only involve written text. You also want to think about alternate types of content such as videos, images, social media, and infographics. You need to know the type of material that will fit best with your target keyword and topic along with your customer and where they are on the buyer’s journey.

Data Cube can help again with this. When you search for a keyword on Data Cube, you will learn the types of content that appear in the Google SERP for that particular query. For example, you will see if the Google SERP displays images, videos, or Quick Answers. Content creators write what most benefits your content strategy.

As you create content for this particular query, make sure you go through the process to properly optimize your material. This includes using the keyword correctly and naturally throughout the piece.

Remember to also organize the content properly so that it is easy to read. People browsing material online today tend to scan the content. They do not read every word you have written. Therefore, to make the content more friendly for these readers and your content strategy more effective, you want to make sure you regularly use sub-headlines and bullet points to help people easily digest the material.

How do you promote the content for your content strategy?

Now that the content has been produced, you need to promote it at this stage of your content strategy to get it in front of the intended audience. This is a big step in your content strategy and will require careful consideration of who the content has been created for and where they are on the buyer’s journey.

If you want to reach new prospects through your content strategy, then organic search may be a top priority. If you want to nurture existing leads, then you will want to coordinate with those who produce the email lists so that you can send the material to those targeted leads.

You will also want to work with your sales team and customer support team. Both of these teams will be able to help with content intended for those towards the end of the buyer’s journey as well as existing customers. Remember that the full buyer’s journey incorporates existing customers as well, convincing them to buy again and become brand advocates. Producing content for these customers to help them get the most out of their purchase can help them feel more loyal to your organization, and therefore more likely to purchase from you again in the future.

How do you measure the success of your content strategy?

Now that you have created and promoted your content, you need to measure your progress and success rates. You want to watch how your site traffic improves with the publication of your content. Remember that not only will your content need to attract new visitors to your site, but you will also need to make sure that your content strategy effectively engages your existing leads. This means you will want to pay close attention to your conversion rates at each stage of your funnel as well. See if you can do a better job of nurturing leads as they move from one stage to the next.

Similarly, track your response rates to your email campaigns. See how many click-throughs you get and how well this traffic engages with the rest of your site. Keep track of the types of the content and emails that see the best results.

Finally, remain in regular communication with your sales teams and your customer support team to see how well your content helps them do their jobs. Although this data might be harder to quantify, understanding how people seem to respond to your end-of-funnel content strategy can help you better understand your ability to engage users throughout the buyer’s journey.

Your content strategy will help you prioritize the material you make, know what your prospective customers want to read, and how to nurture people through the buyer’s journey. As you develop a concrete strategy, you will see greater success moving forward.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 6 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

SEO share of organic traffic up from prior years

Released as part of its annual Share Conference, BrightEdge Research found that Organic and Paid Search dominate websites’ traffic in 2019 - 68% of all trackable website traffic is sourced from organic traffic and Paid Search, vastly exceeding all other channels, including Display and Social Media. The Organic Search figure at 53% is up from the 51% found in the 2014 research, the first year that BrightEdge Research conducted the analysis.

Organic Search remains the dominant source of trackable web traffic and in the dominant position as a channel. Paid Search continues to grow. Organic Social Media is flat since 2014 at 5%, and though ubiquitous, contributes on average 1/3 as much traffic as Paid Search and just 1/11 as much as Organic Search.

B2B Combined Search Organic Traffic Is 76% of Trackable Traffic

Despite several seismic shifts in consumer behavior, the rise of mobile search, and the dramatic changes to the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) layouts, including Local 3-Pack, Knowledge Graphs, Videos, and Quick Answers, which push more organic searches below the fold, Organic Search is the channel that delivers the most organic traffic to web sites by a wide margin.

Why did organic share grow?

Over the last 5 years Google has invested significantly in enhancing the user experience by providing increasingly accurate and relevant search results and at the same eliminating from the SERPs distracting intermediaries using techniques that attempt to game the Google algorithm.

With the advent of Google’s RankBrain, its ability to map Internet content to search query intent has improved even further. As a result, consumers trust Google and rely on it even more and are using at a rate that exceeds the growth of display and organic social.

Download the full channel share report to learn more about the findings and review the data in tables and graphs.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 6 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

What does this no indexing mean for you? And what you should do next on NoIndex and NoFollow?

This week Google announced that they will change how they respond to the popular rel=”nofollow” tags. These no indexing tags, once considered an important part of SEO, had helped to signal to Google when you did not want your site to particularly endorse another domain you linked to. Cutting down on comment spam--where people could link back to their own sites from the comment section of popular websites--was an important motivation for the initial development of the no indexing rel=”nofollow” tag.

Now Google has announced changes to how they will look at these no indexing tags as well as announcing the introduction of two new tags that we believe our community should pay attention to. Here is what you need to know about these latest no indexing changes from Google.

What will change about how Google uses ‘nofollow’ links?

Google has said that they will now view the rel=”nofollow” tags as a hint or suggestion. This no indexing change is scheduled to begin on March 1, 2020.

What new no index tags does Google recommend? Introducing rel="ugc" and rel="sponsored"

Now, in addition to the no indexing rel=”nofollow” tag, Google has also introduced two new tags that can be used to signal to Google additional information about the content on your site.

If the content comes from visitor comments, forum posts, or other material that is generated directly by the user, you will want to mark it as rel=”ugc”, signifying ‘user-generated content’.

If the content comes from ads or other types of sponsorship or paid content, then the proper tag will be rel=”sponsored”.

The idea behind these two new tags is to make the type of no indexing content that would have been marked as ‘nofollow’ in the past, clearer to Google. The search engine hopes that this additional information will help them better understand how websites relate to each other and that it will help them uncover information about the context of the material posted on your domain.

What should I do with my existing rel=”nofollow” tags and how will this impact my site?

Google has specifically instructed site owners not to worry about their existing no indexing rel=”nofollow” tags as these tags will still function as a suggestion or hint for the search engine spiders. This means that you do not have to worry about going back and editing your pages you have already published with new no index tags.

Google also reports that they do not expect to see large shake ups in the rankings from these changes, particularly since they will still take the rel=”nofollow” tags into account. 

What may be interesting, however, is to see if the changes in how Google interprets the “nofollow” tag impacts links coming from large sites that typically “nofollow” all of their outbound links as a rule, such as Wikipedia. If, in the future, Google starts to recognize more of these links, then the sites with backlinks from these large sites could see a lift.

Google’s decision to change how they regard rel=”nofollow” tags will likely not have an immediate impact on websites and rankings. For now, we recommend that our community do their best to implement Google’s new no index tag suggestions. Although the search engine has specified that brands should start using no index tags “at their convenience,” conforming to the latest changes in Google’s recommendations and policies does tend to set brands up for the greatest chances for success.

Learn more about how to adapt to Google's algo changes with BrightEdge.