SEO insight #1 - Zero-click search is becoming more common – time to adapt!
Scary SEO insight #2 - For exceptional SEO performance your attention needs to be on all channels
A Google leak revealed that brand mentions across high authority sites including media sites had been used by Google in their Useful Content update - at the expense of strong backlinks and some other factors. This proves that Google are looking at any digital content that can establish credibility of particular organisations and proven fit with the searches that users are performing.
Speakers at the event gave good evidence of natural search position 1 being achieved in periods of intense online pr around particular products and topics. So pure SERPs based strategies are unlikely to cut it. Time to join up all of your digital channel activity and get new conversations and tracking to look at all things digital at once. Get your paid experts and your SEO experts talking or if its all you - have a new kind of conversation with yourself!
Scary SEO insight #3 - AI generated content could get you a Google 'Manual Action' Penalty
Have you heard the one about the company that laid off its SEO team and replaced the strategy with one using 100% developers and AI? Well we did at this event. This resulted in a Google Manual Action which is when a human being at Google delisted a load of content and required extensive amends with evidence before it could be re-listed.
Actually in this case Google made it clear that they don't have an issue with AI generated content 'per se' - but this content was both rubbish and completely lacked uniqueness. Google's primary focus is value to end users so watch out before you unleash AI generated content without proper interventions and 'checks and balances' Oh and you'll be pleased to know - the SEO team were re-recruited to manage a strategy using AI tools but with proper governance!
Get real SEO insight #1 - target positions 1-3 in Google like you used to target page 1
So with the progression towards 'zero click' in scary insight #1, there is a way to get real on this. The first 3 natural search positions have always been hugely important in terms of grabbing most of the natural search traffic. However now you can focus your whole strategy on positions 1-3 instead.
What are the listings that might give you that uplift to position 1, 2 or 3? What content has achieved that position and how can we promote it and re-purpose it elsewhere? Where is the keyword difficulty quite low, such that some real effort on the content might give a big jump up to position 1,2 or 3?
Get real SEO insight #2 - Longer tail and low volume searches could be your new SEO strategy
One area where you might be getting 1-3 listings is for longer tail but lower volume searches. Maybe these haven't even been on your target keyword list but perhaps its time to really embrace them and find a whole load more. Most SEO professionals are going through the same process - what words and questions are really relevant to us and have highest volume?
Time to turn this on its head. Why not find all the 20-100 searches per target country that show good intent? Longer tail searches can have much higher CTR (click-through-rate) and up to 40% more conversion on your site so lets find them and create content for them.
Get real SEO insight #3 - adapt your SEO efforts to where your audience is
Google might still own 92% of search engine traffic, but the reality is that it is being massively overtaken by other channels in certain areas. TikTok, Instagram, Spotify and ChatGPT are the 'go to' options for huge numbers of users in particular demographics and looking for particular types of content. Sure Google are fighting hard against this with YouTube and vs ChatGPT and Gen AI with SGE and 'AI Overview but...
...in the mean time you might want to have a good look at what content, engagement and audiences you can find in different channels that relates to your topics, product or services. If you are in an area where people are bypassing Google search or only searching in Google once they see something they want, then should your strategy be creating new content in these channels? Should you be putting all of your article content in LinkedIn rather than just posting to mention something that is on your website? What would be your success metric for visitors from a piece of content re-worked for another channel vs the 3 Google natural search visitors you got last month? A little bird told us that TikTok are trialling links to web pages as something you can pay for - hmm #gamechanger?
P.S. On the subject of non Google channels Microsoft own a share of ChatGPT so don't be surprised if some content you have that ranks well in Bing starts being used by ChatGPT - "now how to I support and track listings in Bing again?", I hear you ask.
Progressive SEO insight #1 - Think 'topics' not pages and learn from what Google really wants from 'evergreen' content
Think outside the page vs query 'box' a little. A lot of the experts and software at the event were focusing more on 'topics' and 'clusters' rather than just single keywords and queries. If you take general topic areas and clusters of keywords as a whole you could be making a much stronger association with your site and a whole area of expertise. Google is keen to know what your site is 'mostly' about and by looking at the bigger topic picture you can find your strengths but also your gaps vs competitors.
Chris Meabe's analysis of what Google saw as the best 'evergreen' articles showed some interesting patterns and features:
- at least 10 links out, mixing internal AND external
- updated at least annually but on the same URL (84% did this)
- 76% started with the words 'what is...'
- great length of introduction, with 1200 to 3000 words in total
- establishing expertise with stats, expert profiles, experience
Progressive SEO insight #2 - Use Gen AI more where it performs and less where it's still developing
One expert in trialling Gen AI came up with an interesting sequence of where to use it more or less - and the outcome may surprise you! Here were the areas where GenAI was adding most value - in order:
- optimising human generated content
- data categorisation
- ideation and research
- creation
With all the talk of Gen AI starting the process it was really interesting to see this turned on its head, and to see data categorisation and ideation and research in the mix in this way. Maybe it's time to pump some of your information into Gen AI tool and use some new prompts to get the value back? In other talks speakers were highlighting how NMT (machine translation) models are still outperforming AI tools for international translation and SEO strategies.
Progressive SEO Insight #3 - Do better when Google 'scrutinises' your organisation and your authors
Another key takeaway from the 5 minute chat I had with Google's John Mueller was when he said that my clients need to be ready for 'scrutiny' from Google across all of the digital channels that they can access and crawl. This was particularly based on the fact that I mentioned that Appius has clients in healthcare and financial services and John made it clear that content owners in these industries would have more scrutiny before they got good listings. Also John was clear that 'AI overviews' would be used less where content had health and financial implications.
So its time to look through your content in all of your channels - does it identify the authority of the author and your brand? If Google were to be crawling LinkedIn and other channels what would the author profile be telling them about the trustworthiness of this content provider, and who they work for or represent? Can this person be confirmed as the expert in a particular area from multiple channels - how will Google know that it is 'that' person or expert and not another person with the same name. Are there other positive trust signals being transmitted about this identity and their content?
Progressive SEO insight #4 - Combine all of your natural search data sources to work smarter
Let's finish with something techie and geeky for you or your team to get stuck into. So you are looking at data in Google Search Console, and GA4 and even log files. What do all of these have in common? this is the internet so you guessed it - URLs!!!!
BigQuery, Excel and other data stores can be used to combine all of these data sources. Why not create a 'single page view' that blends key pieces of information from all of these sources - and with Google Search console you can be combining the 'crawl', 'index', 'clicks' 'query' based view of the world with your GA4 and log file based info. If you can associated revenue to landing pages in the form of sales or enquiries why not throw that in the pot for an even richer recipe. By mixing your own SEO data pot you can also exclude and group things as you need to.
Here are some of the questions you could answer with this search data hotpot:
- how is the number of pages crawled changing over time / YOY?
- how is the number of pages indexed changing over time / YOY?
- what are the volume of clicks from google for non branded terms over time / YOY?
- what pages are the non branded searches landing on?
- what key events are happening for users landing from non branded searches?
- which pages on the site don't get any organic traffic from Google? what is this as a %
- which of the pages getting non branded natural search clicks have search positions outside of the top 3, and what are the queries associated with the traffic = key SEO optimisation targets
- what are the lower volume, longer tail and high intent queries that are providing visitors to pages on the site and what is the value of the outcome - where will I get the next wins in this space?
Appius have been successfully delivering SEO strategies for clients since 1998. SEO is part of our digital marketing services, delivered by our Experience & Engagement team who are part of a full service digital agency offering.
If some of this isn't totally clear we can translate as needed, add our own experience in these areas and provide more detail on request if you contact us.
Outside of the takeaways we would love to understand your SEO training and execution needs - contact us for more information or to set up an informal chat with our SEO and digital marketing experts.
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