SEO
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Don’t panic: ‘Algorithm updates’ aren’t the end of the world for SEO managers
Every time there is a rumor of a Google algorithm update, a general panic ripples through the SEO community. There is a collective holding of breath while the numbers are analyzed and then a sigh of relief (hopefully) when they survive the algorithm update unscathed.
After the update is released, and especially if it is confirmed by Google, a slew of articles and pundit analyses attempt to dissect what Google changed and how to win in the new paradigm.
I believe all this angst is entirely misplaced.
The Google algorithm is made out to be some sort of mystical secret recipe cooked up in a lab designed to simultaneously rob and reward sites at the whims of a magical, all-knowing wizard. In this outdated schema, the goal of every SEO and webmaster is to dupe this wizard and come out on the winning side of every update.
Join us on Thursday, June 10 at 12:30 p.m. PDT/3:30 p.m. EDT for a Twitter Spaces chat with author Eli Schwartz.
We’ll discuss SEO and growth marketing, so bring your questions!
This idea is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of what happens in a Google algorithm update — and a fundamental misunderstanding of Google. The reality is, algorithms are not your enemy. They are designed to help create a better, more accurate user experience. Here are a few pieces of perspective that should help reframe your relationship with algorithms.
Google’s algorithms are extensive and complex software programs that constantly need to be updated based on real scenarios.
Google is just trying to help
First, let’s establish this: Google is only trying to help. The company wants to ensure a pleasurable, high-quality user experience for the searcher. Nothing more, nothing less. It is not a wizard, and its system is not meant to rob and reward sites arbitrarily.
Keep that in mind as we continue.
Google’s algorithms are extensive and complex software programs that constantly need to be updated based on real scenarios. Otherwise, they would be totally arbitrary. Just as bugs are reported and fixed in a software program, search engines must discover what’s not working and create solutions.
Google, like any other software company, releases updates with big leaps forward to its products and services. However, in Google’s case, they are called “major algorithm updates” instead of just product updates.
You are now armed with the knowledge of exactly what a Google algorithm update is. Is it not, then, gratifying to know there is never a reason to panic?
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A drop in search traffic isn’t necessarily hurting you
If a site experiences a drop in search traffic after a major algorithm update, it is rarely because the entire site was targeted. Typically, while one collection of URLs may be demoted in search rankings, other pages likely improved.
Seeing the improved pages requires taking a deep dive into Google Search Console to drill into which URLs saw drops in traffic and which witnessed gains. While a site can certainly see a steep drop off after an update, it is usually because they had more losers than winners.
Any drop is most definitely not because the algorithm punished the site.
If you see a drop, in many cases, your site might not have even lost real traffic; often, the losses represent only lost impressions already not converting into clicks. With a recent update, Google removed the organic listing of sites that had a featured snippet ranking. I saw steep drops in impressions, but the clicks were virtually unchanged. Gather and study your granular data for a clearer rendering of information rather than assuming the site has become a winner or loser after an update.
Focus on a great user experience, just like Google
Websites that focus on providing an amazing and high-quality experience for users shouldn’t fear algorithm updates. In fact, updates can provide the needed impetus to excel. The only websites that have something to fear are those that should not have had high search visibility in the first place because of a poor user experience.
If your website provides a great experience for users, updates are actually likely to help you because they winnow those poorer quality sites out of the running.
If you focus on a good user experience, there will be pages that may lose some traffic in algorithm updates, but in aggregate, the site will typically gain traffic in most scenarios. Digging into the granular data of what changed will likely support the idea that websites do not suffer or benefit from algorithm updates — only specific URLs do.
Updates are a fact of search life
Google will, and should, continuously update its algorithms. Google’s primary motivation is to have an evolving product that will continue to please and retain its users.
Consider that if Google leaves its algorithm alone, it risks being overrun by spammers that take advantage of loopholes. A search function that provides too many spammy results will soon go the way of AOL, Excite, Yahoo and every other search engine that is functionally no longer in existence. Google stays relevant by updating algorithms.
Updates are a part of search life.
Chase the user, not the algorithm
Instead of chasing the algorithm, which will inevitably change, I believe that every website that relies on organic search should train its focus somewhere more important: on the user experience.
The user is the ultimate customer of search. If your site serves the user, it will be immunized from algorithm updates designed to protect the search experience. There is no algorithm wizard — only SEO masters who have figured out how to apply best processes, best procedures and actions for your website.
Algorithms and updates have only one purpose: help a user find exactly what they seek. Period. If you are helpful to the user, you have nothing to fear.
This post is an excerpt from “Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy.”
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Earn the best backlinks with high-quality content and digital PR
Amanda Milligan is the marketing director at Fractl, a prominent growth marketing agency that’s helped Fortune 500 companies and boutique businesses alike earn quality media coverage, backlinks, awareness and authority.
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A lot is debated in the SEO world, but nearly everyone can agree that links are and will continue to be vitally important to the health and rankability of a website.
Luckily, link building and brand awareness goals can be built into your content marketing strategy, which can be vastly elevated by combining your efforts with digital PR.
I’ll walk through how creating high-quality content and pitching it correctly to top publishers can earn you the valuable backlinks you’ve always wanted (and if you employ this strategy on an ongoing basis, the increase in organic traffic you’ve always wanted, too).
Choosing the right content idea
I have to start by saying that the most important thing about being cited in news sources is that you have to be newsworthy. Now that might go without saying, but what we as marketers might consider newsworthy about our brands isn’t necessarily newsworthy to a writer or to the greater public.
Content ideation tip #1: The best way to ensure your newsworthiness is to gather and analyze data. Even if the data set already exists, if it hasn’t been analyzed and presented in a straightforward, applicable, easy-to-understand way, your illustration of the data could be considered new and valuable.
I’ll touch on this again in a moment. But first, let’s dive into the content example I’ll be using throughout this piece.
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What startup names are most effective?
Adam Zelcer founded the advertising company Adboy.com.
Entrepreneurs take a long journey when naming their brainchild, comparable to a parent naming their own flesh and blood.
There are many reasons behind naming – one untalked-of and probably the most important. This is, how to choose a name that gets you more business.
Technology changes how we do business. So, when developing a business name, putting some thought into how people are going to find you and what you want them to do after they find you could go a long way.
Ignoring this could do just the opposite and result in being harder to find, getting less return from your advertising and having your competitors capitalize off your brand.
Businesses have been using things like alphabetical order, call to action, keywords and more to shape business names for optimized discovery, recall and responsiveness since the phone book.
When looking for a business, I’m sure you’ve seen at least one of these two business name optimizations frequently used in the past for discovery:
1. Optimizing for discovery in phone books
Pre-internet, a listing in the phone book was key to getting your business discovered – but how did businesses get to the top of the list in their category? Piece of cake. Free listings in the white pages were categorized by business type and ordered alphabetically. Many companies ended their name with a describing word of their category and started it with something like “AAA” “AA”, “AA1” and “A AAA” to be one of the first listings in their category. You will still find thousands of these business names in different locations by typing “AAA” into yellowpages.com.
2. And a similar strategy was used for search-engine discovery
Prior to 2012, search engine algorithms gave weight in their rankings to sites that included keywords in their domain, otherwise known as exact-match domains. So, Google was more likely to rank “accountantsmelbourne-dot-com” higher than “abc-partners-dot-com” if a user searched for “Accountants Melbourne” because the keywords matched the search with similar words in its domain.
Over time, domain names and business names alike grew longer. Many were purposefully packed with every major keyword applicable to their niche.
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How to see another company’s growth tactics and try them yourself
Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing agency that trains you to become a marketing professional. He also writes at Julian.com.
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Every company’s online acquisition strategy is out in the open. If you know where to look.
This post shows you exactly where to look, and how to reverse engineer their growth tactics.
Why is this important? Competitive analysis de-risks your own growth experiments: You find the best growth ideas to adopt and the worst ones to avoid.
First, a warning: Your goal is not to repurpose another company’s hard work. That makes you a thief. Your goal is to identify other companies who face the same growth challenges as you, then to study their approaches for solutions to draw from.
As I walk through uncovering a competitor’s tactics, keep in mind which competitors are worth looking at: For instance, you should rarely over-analyze early-stage companies. They’re unlikely to be methodical at growth.
Meaning, if you blindly copy their site and their ads, it’s possible you’ll be copying tactics that are not actually responsible for their growth. Their success may instead be from network effects or other hidden factors.
Instead, it’s safest to get inspiration from companies who’ve sustained high growth rates for a long time, and who face the same growth challenges as you. They’re likely to have sophisticated growth operations worth studying deeply. Examples include:
- Airbnb
- Amazon
- Uber
If these aren’t your direct competitors, don’t worry. You don’t need to audit a direct competitor’s tactics to get incredibly valuable insights.
You can look past direct competitors.
You’ll gain useful insights from auditing the user acquisition funnel of any company who has a similar audience and business model.
Examples of audiences:
- Wealthy consumers
- Enterprise businesses
- Middle-class adults who use Chrome
- Dog owners
- And so on
Audiences matter because their behaviors and needs differ wildly. Each requires its own growth strategy. You want to audit a company whose audiences is similar to yours.
You also want to ensure the company shares your business model. Examples include:
- A high-touch sales process with multiple phone calls
- A consumer ecommerce site with easy checkout
- A self-serve SaaS signup with a freemium plan
- A pay-to-play mobile game
- And so on
Each model may necessitate different ads, landing pages, automated emails, and sales collateral.
The process
Never implement another company’s tactics blindly.
There’s an effective process for growth analysis, and it looks like this:
- Source potential growth ideas.
- Prioritize them.
- A/B test them.
- Measure if an A/B variant significantly outperformed its baseline and whether the cost of implementing the winner would be worthwhile.
- Only then should you implement it.
An example
Here’s a brief example before we dive into tactics.
Let’s pretend we’re a SaaS company offering consumer banking tools, and that we’re struggling to get users to onboard our app. Our hypothesis is that visitors are bouncing because they don’t trust us with their sensitive information.
Our first step is to define both our audience and our business model:
- Audience: Tech-savvy, adult consumers.
Business model: SaaS freemium funnel.
Our next step is to look for companies who share those two aspects. (We can find them on Crunchbase.)
Once we have a few in hand, we look for how they handle customers’ sensitive information throughout their funnel. Specifically, we audit their:
- Ads
- Content marketing / SEO
- Landing pages
- A/B tests
- Signup flow
- Automated (“drip”) emails
It’s time to learn how we audit all that. I’ll share how our marketer training program teaches marketers to do this on the job.
Tactic #1: How to see a company’s A/B tests
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How startups can use Amazon’s SEO best practices to dominate new shopping verticals
Eli Schwartz is currently a growth advisor and the former Director of Growth at SurveyMonkey where he led the SEO strategy. Eli has been a columnist on the Huffington Post, the Y Combinator blog, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and numerous other publications.
Amazon dominates the top ranking positions of Google for tens of thousands of ecommerce queries, but there are plenty of products in newer shopping categories where Amazon has not yet achieved SEO supremacy. Retailers in nascent verticals have an opportunity to follow Amazon’s SEO playbook and become the default ranking ecommerce website.
Achieving this success can be done purely by focusing on on-page SEO without the need to build a brand and a backlink portfolio that rivals Amazon.
For those unfamiliar with mechanisms of SEO, there are essentially two streams of SEO tactics
- On-page SEO – This is anything to do with optimizing an actual page or website for maximum SEO visibility. Within this bucket will fall efforts such as the content of a page, metadata, internal links, URL/folder names, and even things like images.
- Off-page SEO – A key component of Google’s algorithm is the quality and sometimes quantity of the links from external sites that point to a page or website. At a high level the better backlinks a page or website has the more authority the page has to rank in search.
On-page SEO teardown
Delving into just their on-page SEO, their tactics can be divided into four distinct areas which we will go through in detail.
If you are following along with this process, make sure to log out of your Amazon account or open up an incognito window. Google only views the logged out version of the site, so all of Amazon’s SEO efforts are focused there.
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Keyword research in 2019: Modern tactics for growing targeted search traffic
Glen Allsopp
Contributor
Contributor
Glen Allsopp is the founder of Detailed.com, an SEO consultancy and newsletter focused on actionable tactics to grow search traffic. He also tracks successful online startups at Gaps.com.
In 2019, it’s estimated that every minute there are 150 new websites coming online. While many of these won’t be long-term ventures, a large percentage will eventually find themselves looking to organic search engine traffic to grow their reach.
This invariably leads people to the task of keyword research; uncovering the search terms most likely to result in prospective customers.
With increased competition it’s imperative you don’t just focus on the traditional sources of keyword inspiration that every other business uses.
In the past year alone I’ve personally helped hundreds of business owners grow search engine traffic to their websites. This responsibility drives me to succeed in one key area: Finding relevant search terms to target that their competitors have likely missed.
In this article, I will highlight some of the most overlooked ideas and sources of data to reveal words and phrases relevant to your business that are high in intent but lacking in competition.
If you can find the keywords your audience are searching for, but your competitors haven’t found, you can leverage a huge advantage to increase traffic and engagement on your content.
Table of Contents
- Be Open to Talking About Your ‘Best’ Competition
- Use [Brand Alternatives] Search Terms to Gain Visibility
- Find Content Opportunities in the ‘People Also Ask’ Box
- Use Public Wikipedia Stats to See If a Term Is Worth Targeting
- Quora’s Ad Platform Reveals Popular Search Terms Without Spending a Penny
- Wikihow’s Public View Counts Are Great for Tutorial-Based Content Inspiration
- Bonus Tip: ProductHunt Dominate ‘Alternatives’ Keywords: Make Sure You Have a Listing There
- To Recap
1. Be Open to Talking About Your ‘Best’ Competition
Google is constantly improving their ability to understand searcher intent. That is, they know what people are looking for and the results that will satisfy those searches.
When it comes to any industry that offers products or services, one of the most common search queries is often some variation of “best [industry] [services / products]”.
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RankScience closes $1.8M seed — and now only wants to replace human SEO staff if you don’t have any
A couple of years ago YC-backed RankScience, which offers AI-enhanced SEO split-testing, put a few SEO experts’ noses out of joint when the fledgling startup brashly talked about replacing human expertise with automation.
Two years on its pitch has mellowed, with the team saying their self-service platform is “augmenting human SEO ability rather than replacing them”.
The startup has also — finally — closed a seed round, announcing $1.8M led by Initialized Capital, along with Adam D’Angelo, Michael Seibel, BoxGroup, Liquid2 Ventures, FundersClub, and Jenny 8 Lee participating.
The new roster of investors join a list of prior backers that includes Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Christina Cacioppo, and Jack Groetzinger.
So what took them so long? Founder Ryan Bednar tells TechCrunch they wanted to take their time with the seed, rather than raise more money than they needed — a position that was possible thanks to already being profitable at YC Demo Day.
“I admit that this is unusual,” he says of the slow seed, though he also says they did raise a “small amount” after demo day, before filling out the rest this month.
“I saw many YC batchmates raising massive rounds pre product-market-fit, which can end up being a mistake,” he adds. “We probably could have raised a few million at Demo Day but ultimately didn’t feel we were ready for it. I didn’t know what I would spend the money on, and we were growing without it, so we chose not to. I wanted to raise capital when I felt we were ready to use it for growth, and now’s that time.”
Bednar also says he is “selective” when it comes to investors — and “specifically” wanted to work with Initialized, saying he’s “known Garry and Alexis personally for years, and trust that they would support us in building a long-term scalable business”.
Commenting on the funding to TechCrunch, Initialized Capital’s Alexis Ohanian tells us: “Even though so many businesses depend on traffic from search, it’s a challenge for them to be data-driven about SEO. RankScience makes it easy to test changes to your website that can lift search traffic. They also automate a growing number of technical SEO tasks, which otherwise would take engineers away from building product and infrastructure, which is really exciting.”
RankScience plans to use the fresh funding to hire more AI and machine learning engineers, with headcount growth targeted at its SF office.
While the founders have stepped back from pronouncing ‘the death of the SEO expert’, they are still touting the power of automation AI for SEO — noting how, after crawling a customer’s site/s, the software automatically proposes “SEO enhancements and experiments” to customers — for “one-click [human] approval”.
It also includes what Bednar bills as a “self-driving car mode” — where the tech will deploy the touted “enhancements and experiments” without customer approval. But he concedes it’s not for all RankScience users.
“For about half of our customers, we’re their only SEO vendor so we automate SEO services 100% for them, and for the other half, our software augments human SEO ability, either from in-house marketers or agencies,” he says, explaining how the team has evolved their thinking on automation vs human agency and expertise.
“When we launched we didn’t think hard enough about what sorts of controls SEO managers at larger websites would want, and we tried to automate everything without giving marketers enough control. This was a mistake and we’ve worked hard on correcting it.
“This should have been obvious but it turns out that SEO managers are highly selective about what sorts of HTML changes our software might make to their webpages. So we’ve spent the past year building tools to give SEO marketers complete control over everything our software does, and also advanced editors and tools so they can create their own SEO enhancements and run SEO split tests through the platform.”
For those who make use of RankScience’s ‘Self-Driving Car Mode’ the software is replacing SEO staff “completely”, but he adds: “This works especially well for startups and medium size businesses. But SEO is such a multifaceted problem, we want to give larger companies with marketing teams complete control over our platform, and so we work with both types of customers.”
As well as (finally) closing out its seed round now, RankScience is also launching a new self-service platform for startups and SMEs — touting greater controls.
On the customer front, Bednar says they have “hundreds” of sites on the platform now — and are serving “hundreds of millions of page views per month”. Cumulatively he says they’ve deployed “millions” of SEO split tests at this point.
“Our customers run the gamut from startups just getting started with SEO to publicly-traded companies,” he continues. “Our best industries are SaaS, ecommerce, marketplaces, healthcare, publishing, and location-based sites.
“We’ve recently been working with more consumer goods brands, and we’ve also launched a partnership program so that we can work with SEO and Digital Marketing Agencies and independent consultants.”
He says the vast majority of RankScience users are based in the US at this stage but adds that Europe is a “growing market”.
In terms of competition, Bednar name-checks the likes of Moz, Conductor (acquired this year by WeWork), BloomReach and BrightEdge — so it is swimming in a pool with some very big fish.
“Most of these products are more akin to advanced SEO analytics suites, and we differ in that RankScience is 100% focused on data-driven SEO automation,” he says, fleshing out the differences and RankScience’s edge, as he sees it. “Our software doesn’t just tell you what changes to make to your site to increase search traffic, it actually makes the changes for you. (Now with more controls!)”
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Conductor’s new mobile app helps businesses understand what customers are searching for
Conductor is launching a new mobile app that co-founder and CEO Seth Besmertnik described as a way to get quick access to “the voice of the customer.” The New York-based company started with a focus on search engine optimization before broadening to offer a broader range of marketing tools. Now, Besmertnik said, “The core of what we do is understand your customers and… Read More
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Botify is an SEO crawler that helps your website optimize for Googlebot
Most businesses live or die on Google search rankings. If you can’t crack the top few results, it’s almost impossible to consistently drive organic traffic to your site. But how does Google decide which sites appear at the top of the results list? It uses Googlebot, a proprietary automated software script to “crawl” every website on the Internet and create an index… Read More
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SEO Doesn’t Have To Be A Shot In The Dark
To many startups, search engine optimization (SEO) is a task that sits on their company’s back burner. With features to launch and customers to support, the idea of spending time fiddling with your title tags can seem like a fool’s errand. That’s especially true when there’s no guarantee that your hard work will result in a single additional visitor from Google. Read More
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