By Beth Guide
5
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The podcast currently has 92 episodes available.
Unexpectedly, the SEO community was gifted a leak. Just as everyone was wringing their hands and lamenting SEO is dead (it’s not), here came a blueprint for SEOs.
I have just begun soaking in all the information contained in this document. By way of background, Rand Fiskin, founder of MOZ, was contacted about the Google API being accidentally uploaded. But as I read through this, in many ways, it’s not telling me things I didn’t already know, but I feel very vindicated because it backs a lot of what I think but could never prove.
So why should you trust my insights as an SEO Expert? The Google leak, in many ways, validates things I’ve been saying for years. I’ve always maintained that Google lies and misleads SEO companies, and this leak seems to confirm that. But let me define why I am an SEO expert so you can evaluate the podcast, video, and this post. I have 28 years of experience in SEO. My company was formed seven months before Google. Since my very first client, I have been navigating the ever-changing landscape of SERPs.
Back in those days, it was easy. How much keyword stuffing is needed? How many pop culture references can I add to my title tag? Or, best of all, I could type in the same color of the background and feed the search engine but not making apparent to the visitor. There were a lot of these ‘tricks’ back in the day. Do them now and do so at your peril. This is not a thing anymore and hasn’t been for many years.
Our SEO journey began when the search was still rudimentary before there were 14,000 data points. As the industry evolved, we adapted and built our knowledge. In a nutshell, we have been a part of every change Google has ever made, giving us a unique skill set and vantage point. While there are others like me, we are few and far between. Some, like Danny Sullivan, have even gone to work for Google. But others, like myself or Bill Hartzer, continue to fight the good (Google) fight in the trenches.
It all starts with the algorithm and the quest to understand it. The Google algorithm has always been as complex as it is simple. For those who don’t know for sure what an algorithm is, let me define it for you. An algorithm is a set of mathematical computations that solve a problem. In the case of Google, it’s the equivalent of a scoring system ‘grades’ web pages (and websites) and then putting them in numerical order, with the best page being listed in the first position. For years, I said there were 29,000 ‘things’ we had to know to get a page to work/rank within the Google algorithm. The number is 14,040. But what’s a few thousand data points between friends?
What we don’t know is the value of each of the items we are going to discuss below. What is the amount each item adds or subtracts from the score? Some may argue that predicting the outcome without those values is hard. But this is where the SEO expert part comes in. I believe I can tell with pretty good accuracy what is more important than other things. It is probably a companion piece I need to write that puts them in order and assigns the BG (Beth Guide) scale of Google Values to them.
So, what IS the Google Algorithm based on?
What have we learned from this Google data leak? Learned is subjective in this application. Me, I haven’t learned much. It’s all the stuff I already knew. For me, I used the word validated and vindicated. The first thing I’ve long said is that it is my opinion that Google lies to and tries to mislead SEO companies. I mean, why would they tell everyone how to game their system? It makes perfect sense. I have to say that I laugh when people tell me about the Google raters guidelines as if they are gospel. I have long said follow it to the letter and see how far you get.
It’s 2024, and I’m about to type the word Page Rank for those of you who have not been around for the last decade. When Google first arrived, it had a delimiter called page rank. It lived in the Google toolbar, and you could always see how Google ranked your website. From my SEO perspective, it was always time for a party when you increased page rank. How do you move up in page rank? Links links and more links. For several years now, coming out of Google links were no longer relevant. Surprise! They are still relevant. Color me shocked. At least up until the time of this leak, which is arguably as early as Sept 2023 and could be as late as March 2024, links are important. (10:34)
So what is a small business to do? Links really are important. Well, some of these things your business should be doing already. You should be participating in your community. You should be helping others. And you should learn how to identify situations that may gain you a link. There are other reasons to do this, and I’ll talk about branding and authorship in a minute. But for now, you have to learn how to identify an opportunity. (18:56)
Every year, the expression is that there is nothing free in this life. As you know, everything about Google is accessible to the end user. Chrome and Gmail, to name a few. Why is that? Is Google possibly using that data to scrap and feed into their algorithm? Gmail helps with trends and what people are talking about. It’s not that it says anything specific about Gmail in the code anywhere. What it does say, however, is it talks about what is a good click and what is a bad click. I feel compelled to insert a pithy WOZ reference here, but I won’t. However, it could be argued that Glenda and Google sound somewhat similar.
Part of the page you are reading is one of the ways we send signals to Google. I don’t know if you are reading down this far or started watching the video but in either case you have had to be on this page for a while, making this into a good click. People stay on the pages associated with the Houston Internet Marketing Clinic Class. So, I am, in effect, sending a signal to Google. And I am not forcibly holding you back from the page, which is good.
We all know what spam is. Nigerian Princes, Russian Brides. But Google is ever vigilant against spam. They define pages that could be better written, not well sources and sometimes just keywords stuffed and stuffed. Now I agree that keyword stuffing and the pages written over and over again just to simply say the same thing in hopes of moving a needle on a secondary keyword. But are all things spam? Or is the person just not a good writer? Is there the use of AI content?
The absolute truth is to act as an expert in your field, so yes, I am an SEO expert. I am a local SEO Expert. I would put my knowledge up against anyone out there and feel confident. Yes, I have my own opinions, and I’ve also been fortunate enough to grow up in this industry, so on-page and technical SEO to me are the same thing in many, many ways. I can fix technical SEO issues. I can fix semantic SEO issues. I know how to gain natural links for my website rather than resorting to buying them, as many others do.
But most of all, Google knows that I do not spam because when they see my name, I have built my name as part of our brand, and they know it’s a name that can be trusted. Just as when they see my company name they know it too can be trusted. They know I have been involved in SEO and Web Design for nearly three decades now. In addition, they see my involvement with organizations like SCORE, HCC, and the SBDC as a validation of my credibility. These relationships are extremely important to your overall success. So, what are you doing to increase your credibility? In a nutshell, they are grading my website based on my relationships and affiliations.
So How do Small Company’s Keep Up with SEO
The tenants of all of this are still the same. Good quality content will always win the day and is the fundamental building block. But how does a small business owner keep up or even get these ideas? Every time I open my email there is a treasure trove of content ideas. For example, how do you decide to use medical device or medical plastics. What is the right term, and what are the steps necessary to determine which is correct? What do you need to tell someone to get an SEO quote? (0:35)
Is there a Google Sandbox? So, this one is interesting because, in 2024, the answer is No-ish. In the truest sense of the word and using the historical application, no, not really. There was a hardcore sandbox back in the early 2000s. I don’t care what you did with a new domain; it was not going to rank for at least a year. But in the modern era, it’s not as arduous, but domains that are newly registered will usually sit for a year or two with low traffic. You will get some traffic. But not a lot. Now, most businesses won’t notice this because they will have localized traffic and weren’t expecting much. But if you are looking for SERP wins, and your domain is new, you have a distinct problem.
So what is the remedy to this? There are domains that are after-market, and those domains seem to be impervious to any restriction unless the domain has been completely banned (yes, they ban domains). My experience tells me that there are a few break points in this, meaning the older the domain the less issues you will have. In my opinion any domain that has maintained a continuous since the early 2000 is much less likely to be sandboxed. I’m not going to see it. I’ve never seen an old site have trouble, but I think I can count it on two fingers over the last 28 years. (40:46).
SEO Isn’t Magical Voodoo
I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard the terms voodoo or magic when describing SEO. It really is not. We now know that 14,000+ data points are strung together to help derive the best possible answer. I’m not a magician; I just understand how Google thinks. Doing that makes your site far more likely to rank on a given term. I can see the mistakes people make with their own sites, but most of all, I feel vindicated by this data dump because up until this all came out, everything we always said was theoretical.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a crucial aspect of digital marketing, and understanding how to navigate it can significantly impact the online visibility of your business. In this class we will explore the basics of SEO so that you can compete in this world and understand the do’s and don’ts and if you’re paying someone you can understand that they’re doing what they need to do.
Google’s relationship with SEO is constant and ever-changing so it’s important to stay on top of their updates and requirements as they roll out. Since September of 2023 Google started the “Helpful Content Update” and has been aggressively rolling out new fixes in an attempt to combat the use of AI for content creation. In March of 2024, the latest roll out will alleviate 40% of the content that is currently sitting on the internet, because google reads it as written with AI. This is also designed to go after marketers using tactics to gain Google’s System.
What does this mean for business owners? For business owners and content writers, this update means that they will have to ensure that no content used is created with any AI tool. Content must be written by a human, as organically as possible, and with as much helpful information as possible. If you’re not being helpful, they’re not ranking your website.
Getting fancy with your words has its uses in marketing, but when it comes to your website and its content the messaging must be clear and concise. Google operates on a set of signals that help it understand the content and relevance of web pages. These signals are crucial for ensuring that your website ranks well in search results. One important aspect to note is that Google is literal and specific, how you communicate information on your website needs to align with how Google interprets it. Using the right keywords and structuring your content effectively are essential for signaling to Google what your website is about. A reoccurring issue with some websites and their signals, is that a website will change, which causes the signal to break.
Keywords play a pivotal role in SEO as they help Google identify the relevance of your content to user queries. It is significant to understand your business’s keywords and how to find them and use them effectively. Using plug in tools like Keywords Everywhere can provide valuable insights into search volume, competition, and the potential value of specific keywords. The search volume of a keyword is how many people are looking up this or adjacent terms. The competition is how many other people are attempting to rank using that same keyword. Remember, higher competition keywords may be harder to rank for, so it’s essential to prioritize and strategize accordingly. The potential value of the term is how much it would be for you to purchase specific search terms, but this won’t be necessary to start.
An interesting trend highlighted is the growing importance of local SEO, especially with terms like “near me.” Google’s algorithms are increasingly favoring localized search results, making it crucial for businesses to optimize their online presence for local searches. Incorporating location-specific keywords and ensuring consistency across online directories and platforms can greatly improve your visibility to local customers.
In some instances, your business name can be a keyword, but often the business name is a more abstract concept than what your business does, so it’s good to ensure your support keywords are strong enough. For example, if your business name is “TreeCutting.com”, Tree Cutting would be a keyword because it would be something someone googles. But if you’re business name is something abstract like “Jose’sCutters.com” you would then have to set up a good amount of keywords in your website like “tree cutters” and variations such as “tree cutting” “landscaping” and many more.
Using the suggested tools you can verify the value of these keywords and in turn find other keywords that may be more valuable than what you may already be using. Remember it is important to be specific and clear but not so specific that you become too niche and not easily found.
SEO is essential for improving online visibility for your business. With the basics provided in this class and understanding Google’s updates and staying on top of them, there is a great starting point to begin implementing these improvements.
Remember, it is essential that the messaging remains clear and concise, with effective keyword usage for Google to pick it up and rank. Use the available tools, like Keywords Everywhere, to optimize your strategy by identifying valuable keywords.
By applying these principles and techniques, you can enhance your website’s visibility and drive more traffic, ensuring your content meets both user needs and search engine criteria.
Fall is upon us, which means the holidays are soon to follow. For business owners, this time of the year is filled with opportunity – opportunities to develop your brand and capture a new wave of customers in the process.
Of course, the competition is fierce during the holidays, especially as we near Black Friday and Christmas. That means SMB owners and online retailers must be ready to optimize their web presence to the extent they can. By strengthening your website, ad marketing, e-mail marketing and social media marketing channels, you’ll give your business a fighting chance to rise above the holiday noise this year.
Here, we’ll address how to do just that.
Whether your business operates globally or locally, optimizing your Google Business Profile (GBP) is a strong – and simple – first step. For local SMBs, it’s unavoidable – your company needs a locally optimized GBP to garner traction with Google.
Start by making sure your company’s name and address are accurate. Put up a photo of your company’s building. Fill out as much of your profile as you can – posts, reviews, events – all of these signals add up to let Google know where your business is located. And ensuring your business is properly geolocated by Google is a must-do to achieve any degree of local SEO success. Use geo-specific keywords in your company’s description and posts. Publish photos and videos (that you or someone within the company has taken) regularly. Just make sure that the company’s profile is active and frequently updated.
Take a few minutes and integrate Google Analytics (widely termed GA4) into the website, too. It’s quick and easy to do so, and it provides valuable insight into how your site is performing from a traffic and lead-capturing standpoint. Users, sessions, page views, conversions, bounce rate, engagement time – there’s a lot of data here, but you don’t need to be a digital marketing expert to extract value out of it.
As the holiday season approaches, consumers start gearing up to buy. That means it’s time to get your brand in front of them. With so much online noise competing for our attention these days, consistent (but not obnoxious) touch points are needed to drive leads to your company.
A proven way to do this is with e-mail marketing – Mailchimp is our preferred tech for automating many e-mail marketing functions, but you’ll need to provide the content.
Ideally, this content will provide valuable information that’s designed to “hook” the user toward your website. At the least, taking a spot in their inbox will bring your brand to the front of their mind – the first step toward making a conversion.
Don’t be afraid to regularly send out these e-mail blasts – a couple times a week is considered optimal – and make an effort to capture user e-mails when they visit your site or make a purchase through your business. It’s easier to sell to current customers than new ones, and that means you’ll need an updated e-mail list.
Customer reviews are weighted heavily by Google for SEO purposes. They are, therefore, a high-value target for brands. E-mail marketing can also support this goal by (politely) reminding users to leave a review. Many buyers have no problem doing this, they just need to be asked.
Don’t overthink it. A week after a customer buys something from your site, automate your e-mail marketing platform to send out a review request/reminder. It’s a no-risk, high-reward approach to building your brand’s reputation.
Chances are, you’ve seen plenty of small ads served through Google’s Display Network (GDN). The GDN is one of Google’s many, and often confusing, advertising platforms that allow companies to reach customers wherever they go. You’ll find GDN ads everywhere – on search engine results pages, e-commerce pages, forums, blogs and so on.
Brands have some control over where their GDN ads are published, but the real advantage here is the sheer volume of impressions companies can capture through GDN ads. There are millions of websites participating in the network, so your ads could potentially be seen by many, many people. It’s also inexpensive for the potential return, so for SMBs that need to drum up some quick brand awareness, it’s a no-brainer for the holiday season.
Let’s introduce artificial intelligence into this conversation. AI writing tools – ChatGPT best known among them – have added another dimension to content creation. At first glance, AI looks like a perfect way to quickly develop a ton of content, saving business owners the time and challenge that often comes with writing.
But while AI can help support better and more efficient writing, it’s no replacement for a true, human expert.
That’s because Google wants unique, expert level content, not just keyword-rich and topic-relevant content. AI can generate a ton of words, but those words are “scraped” from the internet. Put another way, AI writes by pulling from existing content all over the web. It’s fast and achieves a base level of competence, but AI cannot insert unique experiences or bits of expert insight that only an industry veteran can offer.
Unfortunately, Google is adept at tracking this, so it can identify websites filled with AI content. And though the search engine juggernaut’s opinion on AI content is still in flux – Google is developing its own AI search assistant, after all – sites that depend on AI are being penalized on the SERPs.
The best approach for business owners is to take on a subject matter expert (SME) role within their industry. If you own a business in the field, you’re an expert in the field. And as an industry expert, you are capable of bringing that uniqueness to your site’s content.
Currently, we draw the AI writing line at blogs and permanent website content (landing page stuff, mainly). These should be heavily human-written given their critical importance to the site’s SEO and user experience. Product pages, sales letters, social media posts – these are better suited to ChatGPT and similar tools.
If you’re starting off on a blog or piece of site content, here’s one way to bring in ChatGPT as your AI assistant:
At this point, you’ve got the skeleton of a page, content ideas that you can use to help develop it further and a list of high-value terms that will help Google understand what the content is about. As the SME, you’ll need to ensure the content’s accuracy (AI will confidently generate the occasional error), “humanize” it with unique turns of phrase and sentence structure, and add important pieces of industry expertise to charge it with value.
We’re mere weeks away from peak purchasing season among consumers, so it’s time for business owners to tighten up their online marketing. If you have a website, but don’t know where to begin with optimizing it for search engines, the above steps will give your brand an extra push – and some extra customers, likely. If you’d like to further your impact, contracting a firm experienced in digital marketing can be the best decision for your business success.
Developing a business website is difficult work. To be frank, it’s a job that most small business owners aren’t prepared to handle on their own. The job is only getting tougher, too, as Google is constantly raising the bar on what constitutes a high quality, trustworthy site. And every business owner should want a website that Google considers trustworthy because those are the sites that secure top ranking spots.
If your site isn’t performing as well as it should, the problem (or problems) may be basic. With so many elements to optimize on modern websites, it’s practically impossible for small business owners to catch everything. That’s why we’ve put together this quick guide to business site basics. Follow these rules, and your site will be off to a good start.
Before diving into those rules, though, we need to address a question that comes up all the time:
“Can I build a business site with Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, etc.?”
The answer is yes, you could, but business owners should avoid doing so at all costs. Site builder platforms are easy to use and inexpensive, but the website they crank out are impossible to market and optimize. That’s a deal breaker for any business owner that plans on using their site as a lead and sales generator.
Websites build on one of the above platforms are essentially invisible to Google. They spit out bloated code that Google has trouble recognizing and interpreting. They give site owners insufficient latitude to make major technical changes. They do not allow site owners to choose their own host and you’re trapped inside the platform’s ecosystem. If the platform goes under, so does your website, permanently.
Given all of this, we cannot in good conscious recommend site builders. What we do recommend is WordPress – the standalone version, not WP’s own platform and hosting service. WordPress remains the gold standard for marketability, customizability and performance, so every business owner’s first choice should be WordPress.
That out of the way, on to the rules:
Every page should be paired with a title tag – it’s the single most important element in helping Google understand what the page’s content is about. This title is identified using a title tag – something you may hear referred to as an H1. H1 (or H2, H3, H4 and so on) tags are designated in the page’s HTML code and are used to identify a title or header. Titles and header are important for Google and users, and generally for the same reason – they help the reader understand what the page’s content is about. This is obviously important for users, as their decision to consume the content or move on has to do with the content’s title.
It’s also crucial for SEO purposes because Google isn’t going to rank a page that it doesn’t understand or isn’t properly titled. Properly-formatted and written headers help Google with this. Proper format means using the right H tag – only one title tag (H1) per page, and headers should be organized in a hierarchical format. That means using an H1 with the top header, H2s for content section headers, H3s for subheads inside those content sections and so on down the line.
If Google doesn’t know what your business sells, it will probably not rank the page. At best, your site will be improperly categorized in the wrong product or service area. The result of this? Users ending up on your site after searching for something completely unrelated to your business. That’s exactly the kind of traffic business owners don’t want.
To ensure Google places your site in the right category and serves it to the right users, reinforce what your company does in the site’s most important navigation elements. Specifically, this means placing your top-level product and service categories up in the top nav menu. One of the first elements Google checks when crawling a page is the navigation. Put your product and service categories up here – don’t be afraid to get rid of generic nav entries like “about us” – and your site is far more likely to be served to the right users.
For Google to properly categorize and locate your company – important for local businesses – the search engine will use content clues to determine where to place you. For obvious reasons, it’s important that Google identify what your business does and where it’s located as precisely as possible. If search engines have this information, they’ll be more likely to list your website on local search results pages relevant to your area. In other words, it will be easier for potential customers in your service area to find your business.
Again, content clues are key here. The writing and photos on your website should address what your business does and where it operates, as directly as possible. Google has difficulty discerning between certain terms (a painter, for example, could be a house painter or an artist – Google can confuse them), so don’t be clever or coy with what your business does. No long-winded personal story about what inspired you, the business owner, to start the company. No personal anecdotes or attempts at humor. Just keep it direct and professional.
This approach extends to the use of location-specific keywords.
Depending on its size and function, your website may have hundreds or thousands of pages and URLs – with thousands of links connecting all of it together. That’s a lot of online infrastructure to maintain, and it’s common for the occasional technical issue to emerge – like a broken link, a bad redirect, a missing piece of content, a duplicate page and so on.
Each of these issues has the potential to damage your brand online. It’s like walking into a brick-and-mortar business and finding out the restroom is out of order. While it may not have a direct impact on the business’s operation, it’s a bad look all the same.
The same is true online. If users click on a product page but are instead taken to a generic 404 page, there’s a good chance they’ll leave the site altogether – removing your chances of converting them into a customer and dinging your user experience metrics in the process.
The goal, then, is to identify and resolve the myriad, minor technical glitches that can impact how users respond to your site. You may need to bring in a web development or digital marketing expert to address this, as it may involve running various technical audits (targeting indexing errors, duplicate pages and the like), diagnosing the offending issues and correcting them.
Every business website is a custom-built, complex piece of software that serves multiple purposes. It’s a lead generator, a 24/7 salesperson, a brand ambassador and a showcase for your company’s knowledge and expertise.
That’s several important roles your website must fill for it to be an effective investment. And with online competition as fierce as ever, there’s no room for basic mistakes.
Hopefully, this guide revealed some of the most common, fundamental problems that small business owners run into with their sites. If any of the above apply to your site, an experienced web development and digital marketing firm can help correct them and get your site back on the right track.
WordPress is one of the internet’s most powerful engines, as something like 40 percent of all sites run on WP. Millions of those sites are professional or e-commerce in nature, and from the get-go, they must be configured properly to succeed.
That means integrating the right tools into WordPress during and following the initial WP install. If you’re partnered with a reputable web hosting company, these tools may be included with your install package – a major convenience for site owners who don’t know where to begin.
Here, we’ve got a list of every important tool to consider for site owners just getting started with WordPress, along with some helpful information about WP management fundamentals.
If you haven’t launched a site yet, build it in WordPress. If you’ve already launched a site that’s not in WordPress, prepare to move it to WP. And if you’ve already launched a WordPress site, congratulations – you’re on the right track.
The truth is, there’s no good reason whatsoever for business owners to pick anything other than WordPress for their online presence. WP is the gold standard for several reasons, including:
In short, WP’s feature-rich, SEO-compatible code makes it the undisputed leader among site creation engines.
The first hurdle business owners may run into when getting started with WordPress is whether to publish through WordPress.com or WordPress.org. We strongly recommend going with WordPress.org, but here’s a quick guide to both:
Now that the site’s installation is underway, it’s time to establish its layout and general design.
With a fresh WP installation in place, site owners have the equivalent of a blank canvas to work with. From here, the first step is to select a theme, as this will set the course for the site’s design and layout.
Themes are available through the WP dashboard, along with thousands of other plugins and tools. There are plenty of themes to pick from, but we recommend (and include) Astra for every new install. Astra is a versatile, lightweight option that provides a superior combination of usability and performance.
Whether it’s Astra or another theme, users can customize the theme’s universal settings (such as typeface and top image) to quickly establish a consistent style across all pages.
Ah, but we’re not done selecting the top-level design details. Inside every theme are dozens, sometimes hundreds of design templates to choose from. Each one is like a pre-built website with the layout and blocks (text and image elements) already placed.
We recommend picking a template that’s close to what you’re looking for design-wise and working from there. Most have filler text and images already included, and these can be easily switched out for your own content. Don’t be afraid to experiment and see which one inspires.
WordPress was originally developed to be a blogging platform, and so the distinction between “pages” and “posts” remains. When publishing a new piece of content, users can choose to publish it as a page or post. Here’s the difference:
WordPress makes it pretty simple to start building a new page, and Elementor makes the actual designing even simpler. Over the years, multiple WP page builders have had their time in the sun. For example, WP Bakery was a popular page layout plugin for a long time, but when Google pushed over its Core Vitals update about 18 months ago – a performance-based update – sites built in WP Bakery were no longer fast enough for Google.
Elementor is the new king of WordPress page design, partly because it works well with Google, partly because it creates pages that perform quickly, and partly because it’s easy to use.
It’s also a block-based, drag-and-drop builder that requires no coding knowledge to fully utilize. Users can start from scratch or from their chosen template. And in both cases, Elementor allows people to make detailed, quick adjustments, so they can nail that perfect look without spending hours on a single page.
Some site owners think of web hosting like it’s a commodity, but it’s absolutely not. A reputable web host works hard to remain in good standing with search engines. Further, the quality of your web host will influence the site’s reliability and performance, so choose wisely.
And if your web hosting service has experience with business clients, they may assist with installing WordPress and providing a “starter kit” with important plugins included. This head start can save site owners a lot of time and confusion.
What should a site starter kit include? Here’s 20 plugins your web host should include in their hosting packages:
The default page and post editing box on WordPress’s backend is threadbare and lacks some of the common features we’ve all come to expect from a word processing function.
The Advanced Editor Tools plugin corrects this and adds in the standard word processing features (text attributes, formatting, etc.) that you would find in a Word-like piece of software.
Without some form of spam protection on your website, it won’t be long before random spam comments start piling up. Akismet Anti-Spam protects against this, as it can detect spam comments as they are submitted and block them.
It wasn’t too long ago that sites benefitted from any activity – including spam comments – on their pages and posts. Unsurprisingly, the internet took advantage of this and spawned an army of spambots. Now, those spam comments will damage a site’s ranking, so an anti-spam plugin is recommended.
BackupBuddy makes it simple for site owners to back up their site’s content and quickly restore everything should something disastrous happen. Ideally, your site is backed up in multiple locations (another advantage to picking a reputable web host), including a physical backup on your computer. If the site isn’t backed up and it’s lost, you’ll have to build it all over again.
BackupBuddy prevents this from happening and is extremely user friendly, as well.
Every now and then, you’ll need to update or replace a term on the site. This could involve changes to hundreds of pages, so the Better Search Replace plugin is recommended. With it, site owners can make those changes across all of their site’s pages at once.
We recommend pushing every blog to all social media channels when it’s published. Blog2Social greatly streamlines this process, simultaneously pushing out the post to every linked social media account. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Medium and a ton of other, lesser-known social media platforms.
There are a number of social media plugin options that provide similar functionality, but we like Blog2Social because it does an admirable job of avoiding issues with Facebook and others, ensuring posts aren’t demoted as soon as they’re posted.
CMS Tree Page View gives site owners a visual representation of their site’s page and how they’re organized from a hierarchy standpoint. It’s critical for websites to establish a content hierarchy, with the home page up top, category pages sitting just below it and a cascade of subcategory and product pages descending below those.
With CMS Tree Page View, you’ll know exactly where every page sits in this hierarchy, so it’s clear what changes (if any) need to be made to develop it.
By default, WordPress creates URLs using gibberish that doesn’t help users or Google understand what’s on the page. That’s an SEO problem.
The Custom Permalinks plugin allows site owners to create their own URL slugs, preferably formatted and written so users and Google understand where they’re located on the site.
Sometimes, it’s easier to duplicate an existing page and work from that, rather than starting a new page from scratch. The Duplicate Page plugin allows site owners to do this instantly.
There are numerous form plugins that make it simple to create custom text fields, polls and more. Gravity Forms is one example and the one we prefer for its usability and security. The free version is sufficient for most site owners, too.
Just like every site needs a forms plugin, every business site absolutely requires a security plugin. The iThemes Security Pro plugin is our choice, as it detects suspicious activity, blocks attacks and can take additional measures on its own, like identifying attacking IP addresses and rejecting them. The Pro version adds several more features, like implementing reCAPTCHA and recognizing trusted devices.
Jetpack is a versatile plugin that adds in a bunch of fundamental features that every site can benefit from. Examples include a contact info widget, social media widgets, a related posts feature, some image optimization functions and a WordPress plugin management dashboard, which makes it easier for people who have multiple WP sites to manage.
While Apache remains the market leader for web server software, we recommend Litespeed as an alternative, as Litespeed servers are faster and therefore more likely to meet Google’s Core Vitals standards.
Litespeed Cache is a plugin that fully leverages Litespeed’s velocity with several features. Some examples include lazy loading, utilizing CDNs, minifying CSS and JS files, image optimization and database optimization. As soon as Litespeed Cache is enabled, it will provide an out-of-the-box speed boost to sites on Litespeed servers.
MailOptin is a lead generation and e-mail automation plugin that streamlines many e-mail related tasks that business owners are expected to engage in.
On the lead generation side, MailOptin can be used to deliver calls-to-action in one of several formats, such as a lightbox popup or slide-in box. These have become extremely popular for e-commerce sites, as they start the communication between site and user.
MailOptin can also be used to automate e-mails and newsletters when certain events are triggered. For example, when a new blog is published, MailOptin automatically sends an e-mail alert to everyone signed up for the brand’s newsletter or mailing list. This saves site owners a ton of time.
By default, WordPress does not categorize pages like it does blogs. With the Page Categorization plugin, though, it’s possible to add this function for published pages. It’s a simple addition, but one that can add a slight SEO edge to the site’s permanent content.
SEO plugins are worth their weight in code and allow site owners much better control over SEO-related tasks. There’s been a few worth considering over the years, and currently Rank Math is our favorite.
Rank Math is a warehouse of SEO-friendly features. The top-line feature is the Rank Math’s AI assistant, which points out where SEO improvements can be made to each page. For digital marketing experts, some of these suggestions are a bit superfluous, but for those who are unfamiliar with SEO, they can be valuable.
Rank Math also automatically generates schema, integrates Google Analytics, tracks keyword rankings and does a whole lot more. It’s our go-to SEO plugin.
Google’s Site Kit is a WP-focused plugin designed to get WordPress sites fully integrated with the search engine’s analytical tools. Available for free through Google and simple to set up, Site Kit is a must-have first stop plugin for WP site owners who intend to keep an eye on their site’s Google analytics – a must for anyone who’s serious about SEO.
Every post should include an author box at the bottom of the blog. Google considers this to be an important piece of authoritativeness – a vital part of the E-E-A-T content quality standard.
Starbox allows site owners to quickly customize their own author box and add it to all published posts.
WP Rocket is another optimization-focused plugin that offers many of the same functions as Litespeed Cache. However, it can also be used with Apache server software.
Some of WP Rocket’s features include browser and page caching, GZIP compression, file minification, cache preloading, lazy loading and excellent compatibility with e-commerce pages. For sites running on Apache or non-Litespeed server software, WP Rocket is a popular, proven optimization plugin.
WP Staging also offers backup functionality, but what really makes the plugin valuable is its ability to create a backup copy that can be used for staging purposes. It’s highly, highly recommended that site owners never make changes to the live version of their site. If something goes wrong while doing this, it may break something that wrecks the site’s rankings.
WP Staging allows site owners to make their changes to a staging site. Once those changes are made, they can be pushed to the live version of the site.
There are several related posts plugins worth considering, such as Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. A related post plugin is valuable and simple to use. They take whatever post the user is currently reading and use it to identify other blogs on the site that share the topic. These are placed in a special block at the bottom, so users can quickly jump to another post.
Related posts plugins improve the user experience (UX) and boost your site’s UX metrics at the same time – an important SEO consideration for Google and other search engines.
WordPress is the internet’s leading website creation engine, especially for business and e-commerce sites. It’s powerful, reliable and accessible, though it may not feel that way at first.
That’s why reputable web hosting and web services companies work to simplify the process for their clients. One way to do that is to provide site owners with the plugins, themes and other tools they need to get started. Few web hosting companies are willing to do this, but it’s a gesture that business owners should look for from their web host. It could save months of WordPress research and ensure the site is built for future digital marketing and SEO efforts.
Blogging, it’s not why most people get into business, but written communication remains an important part of customer acquisition. And online, that means writing high quality blogs, articles and landing page content to help send the signals to Google that will equal long term SEO success.
With today’s tech-based, always-online economy, the value of good writing may not be obvious. That’s where we’ll start before addressing how to write a more effective piece of website content.
Without a website, companies are passing up on 30 percent of their potential business. Even when no one is at the office or manning the phones, the company’s website is there representing the brand. In this way, an effective website is like a salesman who never takes a break. Publishing high quality content is like giving that salesman the best possible sales pitch – with it, they’ll represent your company well and earn more customers as a result.
In the end, as the company’s owner and resident expert, you have complete control over your brand’s messaging through the power of blogging.
The first hurdle for business owners to get over is a psychological one. “I can’t write,” said just about every business owner ever, but as an expert in your industry, your insight has value to Google and to users. That’s true even if you can’t write like Shakespeare.
If you’re willing to practice writing and get better, you’ll eventually develop your spoken voice into an effective written voice. For many niche subjects, all that’s needed is clear, direct writing with some expert insight or examples sprinkled in.
Looking for a good blog angle? Pay attention to what customers are concerned about. These could be your customers or a competitor’s customers, wherever they provide feedback. This could be a question asked in an e-mail, a comment in a product review or a complaint on social media. Whatever it is, there’s probably a blog angle in there somewhere, as long as you’re looking for it.
Although some of the ChatGPT mania has died down, there is still plenty of conversation regarding what it, and other AI writers, can do for website owners.
ChatGPT can help with some writing-related tasks, but it cannot replace the expertise needed for the content writing itself. It’s not a cut-and-paste job. You’ll have to do some extra work to get the page to a publishable level.
Google is on the record saying that it’s okay with some AI content as long as it meets the search engine’s quality standards. Unfortunately, AI content doesn’t. When AI “writes,” it’s actually scraping content from tons of existing pages, pulling out information and reordering it to create the semblance of an original article.
But nothing in the AI page is original – just an amalgamation of the pages it pulled from. Google doesn’t like that because users don’t like that. Users don’t want an internet full of same-sounding, no-value junk, and so Google doesn’t want to fill its SERPs with same-sounding, no-value junk.
As such, search engines will penalize sites that rely too much on AI for their blogging and website content. And yes, Google can easily detect AI writing.
To summarize so far – don’t take what the AI writer gives you, then turn around and publish it on your website. That’s a no-can-do, but what can you do with ChatGPT and similar AI generators?
And you can ask ChatGPT to provide those keywords. Writing a page about what to look for during a home inspection?
“Hey ChatGPT, give me a set of keywords for an article about home inspections.”
And the AI will immediately spit out the terms to include in your page, for SEO purposes. Simple.
“Hey ChatGPT, give me 10 article ideas related to choosing or maintaining sports equipment.”
That’s just one example, but no matter what the overarching topic is, if you ask for blog ideas for it, ChatGPT will provide several potential starting spots. Many won’t be good enough to make the first cut, but they can at least provide inspiration to get going.
“Hey ChatGPT, what should be included in a blog about important family vehicle features?”
This can be used with any topic idea and will give you an idea about what to cover in your blog post. It’s likely that ChatGPT will list out its suggestions – each one can serve as a subsection on your page, so using this approach, writers can flesh out a proper outline that descends in hierarchy as each section is expanded on.
If you need to go deeper into a particular section, you can ask ChatGPT to expand on its “thinking.” For example, ChatGPT may list additional airbags as an important safety feature for family vehicles. In response, you could ask ChatGPT to list the kinds of airbags that might be included in a family vehicle. This information can be included in a section dedicated to “airbags” or “safety features.”
As this example illustrates, there’s no limit to how deep you can go with an outline using ChatGPT in this way.
“ChatGPT, write a blog about how to prepare a home for the winter. It should be about 2,000 words long and include tips on how to reduce heating costs.”
Again, just another example, but any topic and important details can be included in your prompt.
Again, you cannot take this rough draft and publish it as original content. If you do, Google will eventually penalize your site. Instead, take the draft, ensure it is factually correct, add in relevant expertise and examples, remove any unusual transitions or turns of phrase (AI parrots a lot of cliches and unprofessional sounding language in its copy) and format it so that it reads well for users. Now, and only now, is the blog worth considering for publication.
Any successful business owner knows that communication is key to winning new customers. Online, that communication is managed through blogs, articles and other forms of written content.
And the better that written content, the more effective your website will be at earning better search engine rankings and more customers. ChatGPT and similar AI writers can be of assistance here, but they cannot replace a human writer entirely – especially one with expert-level insight and experience.
That means site owners now need to write better blogs (which can be done with ChatGPT’s help) or, at the least, bring in someone who can write to Google’s increasing content quality standards.
If you’ve just launched a business website – or are about to launch one – your work is just beginning as the site’s owner. With millions of e-commerce and professional sites already online, it’s a real fight to get new websites noticed. In fact, it’s impossible to gain traction online without an effective SEO plan in place. That’s because search engines are picky when determining which pages to rank – those with better SEO fundamentals are much more likely to snag those coveted top spots.
https://youtu.be/w7Bdz9JOqVg
But that only raises another question – how can business owners get started with effective SEO? That’s what we’re addressing this time. With these following tips, any business owner in any industry can get a competitive start with SEO and build a steady stream of traffic.
If you already have a website, it is hopefully built in WordPress. If it’s not, we’ve got some bad news – you’ll likely need to migrate it to WP. That includes sites built in Squarespace, Wix, Weebly and other stripped-down website builders. If you haven’t built a site yet, WordPress is the engine of choice.
Why? Compared to site building platforms, WP’s backend is far more compatible with Google’s site discovery and indexing process. In other words, Google understands WordPress sites better than others, so it’s more likely to fully crawl, index and properly categorize a website. In general, the more confused Google’s spiders are when crawling a website, the less likely that site will rank. WP ensures minimal confusion between the website and Google.
Every page on your website has to explain itself to Google, and title tags and headers are an important part of that mission. Each page gets one title tag (an H1), and you should treat it like a proper title – it should explain the content’s primary focus. And for Google, every title tag should also include relevant keywords that send the right content signals to search engines. These keywords are essentially clues that tell Google how to judge, locate and categorize the content.
It is extremely important to locate the most relevant keywords (i.e., the product you’re selling) as high up on each page as possible. This will maximize the chances that Google’s spiders will find them.
Additional headers are used with content subsections, and they act just like title tags. Each section header should describe what’s in the following section while including high-relevance keywords for Google.
Most small businesses have a tight service area that’s near their operating facilities. It’s this area that your SEO should be targeted toward.
Local SEO is the branch of digital marketing focused on targeting users in a particular service area, and it’s a slightly different game than general, national SEO. When users punch in a local search query (“Houston Mexican restaurants,” for example), Google returns a local SERP in response. This local SERP includes additional high-value spots like the map pack, so engaging local SEO comes with additional rewards.
But local SEO also takes a slightly different approach. One part of this approach is to localize the content on your site’s pages, so Google understands where your business is located and what areas it serves.
In practice, that means mentioning where the company is located in titles, headers and inside the body copy. The city it’s located in, the neighborhoods or regions it services, the names of nearby landmarks and major roads – these are all useful clues for Google.
It goes further than that, too. Every image published on your website has metadata associated with it. This metadata includes where the photo was taken, so consider taking your own photos and publishing them with that metadata intact. It will be yet another signal for Google to utilize.
How your site’s content is organized is also of interest to Google, and therefore an SEO consideration. Ideally, it’s organized in a hierarchical fashion, with major content sections coming off the home page, and content subsections coming off of those, all the way down to your individual product pages. If you were to visualize this structure, it would like a cascade flow chart, with the home page at the top and the product pages at the bottom.
Each one of these content sections can act like a standalone site within your primary website. For example, if your site sells clothing, then each content section could be dedicated to “winter clothing,” “summer clothing,” “shoes,” “accessories” and so on. Each of these sections has a top level content page that links right off the home page and includes links to all of the subsections that are categorized below it.
This approach offers two major advantages to site owners. One, it helps Google interpret the site’s structure and navigation, so it can better understand where to place each page – and your site in general. Two, by reinforcing the primary content pages in each section, Google is more likely to rank those pages for relevant queries. When a user clicks on one of those listings, instead of being taken to your home page (which may be too far away from where the user wants to be), they’re linked directly to the right sections on your website. It’s far easier to convert users into customers if they don’t have to push through your website to find what they’re looking for.
Every business, no matter its industry or size, should have a blog on its website. Blogs are a primary means of publishing fresh content, and Google will look at what’s published on your blog (and how often) as part of its crawling and indexing process.
As an irreplaceable content marketing tool, your blog cannot be neglected. It should link right off the home page, should be featured in the top navigation menu and should be updated at least once every couple weeks, though once a week is better.
Gone are the days of launching a website and waiting for customers to roll in. That just doesn’t happen in today’s hyper competitive world of e-commerce. The most successful online businesses tend to be the ones most invested in their digital marketing initiatives, but doesn’t always mean capital investment.
Time is also a valuable resource in this regard. The more time you spend on creating high quality content and organizing the site’s structure, the better your site’s SEO impact will be. And that’s the not-so-secret secret to online success – the more effort you put into digital marketing and content creation, the more visibility your site is likely to attain.
For anyone who has been around the Internet Marketing Clinic for a while, knows we always try to stay ahead of where the road goes. AI tools have turned 2023 on its ear, and it is not even March. In this episode of the IMCH, we are taking an in-depth look at how to balance AI tools like ChatGPT and your website, content or SEO efforts. There is a lot of very dangerous misguided implementations ideas so we wanted try and stay ahead of it and let you know what we think you should be doing and how to used this very powerful tool, but do it in a manner that you don’t blow yourself up.
Before you run off to ChatGPT and generate your entire website from scratch – stop. In our practice, we’ve already seen business owners attempt this with disastrous results. And that is what I keep seeing and hearing. It feels like, right or wrong everyone things they found the secret to creating mass pages to place on their website and that is just not true.
Google has upped the useful content penalty possibly taking aim at cut-and-paste AI-generated content, and the search engine is getting better and better at detecting it. There are hundreds of AI writers out there, but it’s unlikely that any of them could evade Google’s AI detection for long.
Why is Google seeking and destroying AI-generated pages? Because AI can’t produce a page that’s as well-written, organized and detailed as a human expert-created page. At least for now, human experts provide more value with their writing than ChatGPT or other AI tools.
This is because AI content generators work by scraping and distilling what’s already on the internet. Google doesn’t want a web full of copycat content – it wants originality. And it wants original thinking because that’s what users want. From Google’s perspective, AI content generators have the potential to pollute the internet with identical pages and damage the user experience.
On the other hand Google also is okay with AI content if they add to the web. If there is solid new information it more than likely won’t get dinged. But you have to committed to making sure the information is not just spun and put out on the website.
There are a few more problems with AI content generation, that you need to be aware of to avoid a penalty.
It may not be long before these kinks are hammered out, but for now, the above should give business owners pause before they go all-in on AI. Doing so could wipe out your traffic now or in the future, when Google retroactively applies penalties for AI content-generation methods.
Everything in this article could become obsolete overnight – thus is the nature of AI development. The technology is evolving extremely fast and no one (not even industry experts) knows how Google intends to leverage AI for search ranking purposes.
What we do know is that Google has its own AI in development named Bard, and it’s planned for release “soon.” In Google parlance, “soon” could mean months from now or minutes from now. When it is released, it will likely shake up the digital marketing industry even more.
Okay, now that we’ve laid out the risks of AI content, we’ll address how to minimize those risks and make the technology work for business owners. After all, while Google doesn’t want AI cut-and-paste jobs, it has admitted that it’s okay with AI content, as long as it provides value and meets the search engine’s content standards.
Getting AI content up to that standard, though, that’s the trick.
We’ve experimented a bit with ChatGPT and AI content writers like Jasper, and there’s an opportunity here to create high quality, expert level content using both. Specifically, ChatGPT can be used to develop outlines for your content pages, while Jasper can do some of the actual writing. The emphasis is on the word “some,” however. At this point, we recommend an 80/20 mix between human-created and AI-created writing on any particular page.
So there’s room for AI in your content generation processes, but you’ll need to be careful. First, we’ll create an article outline in ChatGPT. Here’s how to do that:
Once you have this outline in hand, you can stop here with the AI and start writing your page. For many, the outline is the tough part, and just getting that worked out can speed things along. However, if you want, you can take this outline and develop it into content.=
You’ll need a high quality AI writing tool to begin with. We recommend Jasper because it’s the best we’ve found, but it can be expensive for small business owners. If you do invest in Jasper, you can use it like ChatGPT by entering a prompt.
Using the example from above, you could enter “write about the differences between accrual account and cash-based accounting.” Jasper will immediately generate an answer, which could be several paragraphs long.
Don’t take this copy and paste it into your website!
Your job, as the subject matter expert, is to review the content and do the following:
My page on Google Penalty Repair is a great example of how to mix the balance or mix mentioned above, and we recommend starting and ending the page with from-scratch content that you write. In effect, you’re “massaging” the content so that it doesn’t read like an AI wrote it, or flow like an AI thought it up. Your voice as the writer and expert should still clearly come through. The article I produced was 80/20 in favor of human touch despite using AI to build the entire page.
All of this is still developing in real time, and it’s possible that this article will be completely off the mark by the end of the year. For now, though, the above practices are what we consider to be the best practices for using AI in your content marketing.
If the AI picture changes, and boy will it, we’ll record our findings and report them here. Check in with us throughout the year to ensure your content remains in lockstep with Google’s standards.
Buckle up 2023 is going to be one for the ages. Every year brings a new set of challenges for the digital marketing industry, but 2023 may bring more upheaval than normal. Multiple content-related updates in late 2022 appear to be targeted at identifying and deranking pages with low quality (potentially AI) content. Google has also made recent updates to its Search Rater Quality Guidelines – with added emphasis on communicating expertise and experience in content.
Additionally both Google and Bing are rolling out chat modules for search that have the potential to upend digital marketing, especially for small businesses. Over this year as this rolls out we will address and work to find strategies that will work inside that framework. It may be a big deal. It may be a fad, no one knows yet. It’s in part why I have been running these classes since 2007.
Google is clearly raising the bar on what constitutes a high-ranking website. Quality content, quality performance, quality navigation and linking – there’s no more cutting corners for business website owners.
That’s why we’re focusing on cleanup this week. The little things matter more than ever for digital marketing, and so we’re addressing some of the little things you can do to improve your standing on Google.
First, if your site isn’t on WordPress, move it to the WP ecosystem. More than 40 percent of the internet is built on WordPress, so Google thoroughly understands it – and prefers it. If your site is built on any other platform – Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, etc. – then you’re at a major SEO disadvantage from the start.
Assuming your site is built on WP, there is a plenty of plugin available. Many of these are useful for optimization purposes, whether performance or search engine optimization.
A favorite of ours is Rank Math. Rank Math is an SEO plugin for WordPress that provides broad functionality. It offers deep insights, like tracking your position history for a particular keyword. It also integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics 4 and offers centralized control over many SEO functions, like configuring headers or metadata.
And if you’re wondering just how entangled Google and WordPress are – Google has an official WP plugin called Google Site Kit. With Site Kit, your Google Analytics are available through your WP backend and through a single dashboard.
Google uses your company’s location for local SEO purposes, which can be a problem if your actual location doesn’t match Google’s own data. It’s a problem that a lot of businesses have.
If your company’s address or phone number have ever changed, there’s a good chance that your older addresses or numbers are listed somewhere on the internet. If there are many such outdated NAP citations out there, Google may place your business in a different market.
The goal is to monitor your NAP citations and correct any that are inaccurate. Our clients have a tool to make these easy – one available through Yext. With Yext’s Optimize Location tool, business owners can get a status update on all of their NAP citations scattered around the web. This includes Google itself, along with Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Yelp and a score of directory sites. If there are any NAP inaccuracies, it’s made obvious here, so website owners can correct the citation.
To do that, you’ll need access to the account associated with the citing website. Businesses are in a constant state of flux, so it’s common for brands to lose control of certain accounts as employees are turned over and changes are made. If you do lose access to a citing account, you may able to correct the citation by submitting your company’s information to a major data aggregator like Acxiom or Localeze.
Google is overhauling its analytics platform and releasing a new version in July. Termed Google Analytics 4 – or GA4 – the new platform will use AI to provide advanced reporting. For example, GA4 will notice when certain products are in greater demand, or predict when a customer is likely to churn. This is another example of Google’s reliance on machine learning. Over time, the platform will “learn” customer behavior based on previous actions.
That’s a major departure from the current system, which will be sunset in July. If you haven’t migrated to GA4 or integrated it into your website, now is the time. We recommend you run Google Universal Analytics until it’s discontinued, but bring on GA4 now so you can start building data for your website. If you wait until Universal is shut down, you’ll have zero recent historical data to make digital marketing decisions from. You’ll be in the dark for months regarding your site’s performance.
Before your site can grow in a productive direction, you’ll first need your bearings. In other words, how does your company compare with its competitors online? This is a critical piece of information, because if you target the right competitors, you can leapfrog them with better content. If you target the wrong competitors, you’ll either grow your business slower or not at all.
One way to do this is through Semrush. Semrush has a deep digital marketing toolkit, including a helpful organic research tool that can be used to analyze potential competitors. Using Semrush’s organic research tool, you can reference a company’s website and get a list of all the keywords they rank for and where they rank.
You can use this tool to determine which of your competitors are positioned better on Google. The ones that are just ahead of you in important keywords – those are your targets. Once you have your competitors sized up, you can visit their content pages and determine how you could make a better version of what they’ve produced.
That doesn’t mean copying and pasting. It means taking their blog topic and writing it in your own words, using your own expertise. Write longer on the subject, with additional examples and discussion that reveals your authority on the matter. This is what Google is looking for with its push for helpful content – an internet that’s constantly producing (better and better) answers to every possible query. If you take on this mission by producing content in your own niche, Google will be more likely to rank your site higher for more valuable keywords.
There are a lot of digital marketing unknowns as we head deeper into 2023. To what extent will Google roll out additional AI functionality? Just how high is the content bar going to go this year? How will business owners prepare for the changes to come?
We’re have answers soon enough, but one thing that business owners can do now is lock down their site’s fundamentals. NAP citations, updating WordPress, integrating useful plugins and getting ready for GA4 – all of these little things add up to a more effective online presence.
Google has always prioritized content in its rankings, but in the second half of 2022 and into 2023, the search engine giant has gone all-in on content updates. In the past several months, Google has pushed over at least three significant content updates, and its latest includes major work to its search engine content guidelines.
We’ll take a closer look at this latest update and what website owners will need to do in response.
The bulk of the newest update concerns Google’s E-E-A-T (formerly E-A-T) standard. Before we dive into that, though, here’s a couple other notable changes from the update:
Many more changes to the content quality guidelines were made, but the above are of relevance to business website owners. And another major update to be aware of is E-E-A-T, which we’ll address next.
While the above changes are noteworthy, it’s the E-A-T rework that’s getting the most attention. E-A-T has been around for years as a guide for quality content, and there’s an extra E to account for now. What was E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness and trust) is now E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust).
Google developed E-E-A-T to define what end users (the page’s visitors) are looking for when assessing content. As it turns out, users prioritize experience, expertise and authoritativeness when consuming content.
As the website’s owner, it’s your job to ensure your experience, expertise and authoritativeness come through in your site’s content. This is what generates the most important letter in the E-E-A-T acronym – trust.
How can site owners do that? Here’s how Google defines each part of the E-E-A-T formula:
Experience: Does the content creator have direct experience with the subject?
Experience is the new addition to E-A-T, and at first glance, it’s unclear where the line between experience and expertise exists.
Regarding experience, Google wants to know if the content’s author has first-hand experience with what they’re writing about. For many topics, first-hand experience is the most valuable thing the writer bring to the page. Here are some examples:
As you can see, there isn’t expertise involved here – these are subjects anyone could write on without special knowledge. What’s important is experience.
Some topics require years of industry experience, education, training or skill to competently discuss. Technical, scientific, legal, medical, financial, industrial – if you need some kind of professional background to speak on it, then expertise is important.
To develop expertise, your content should go deeper than the typical article written on your subject. It should be specific with technical details and definitions. It should offer original context that non-experts wouldn’t include.
Examples of pages that require high levels of expertise include:
With the above examples, you can see the division between expertise and experience.
Authoritativeness is expertise, experience and communication all rolled into one. If the content creator has an established professional reputation in the topic they’re writing about, Google is more likely to consider them an authority.
What are some ways to add authority to your website?
If you stick to the above, you’ll build authority over time, especially if you can earn backlinks to your content. Google considers backlinks as markers of trust. Speaking of which:
Developing trust – from Google and from customers – is a top goal of any business owner. Your content should convince potential customers that your business can be trusted to do what it says.
Google attempts to capture this sentiment by prioritizing certain things on your site. It pays close attention to what’s on your About Us page and any company profile pages. It looks for any evidence on your site that backs your company’s claims (testimonials, case studies, white papers, etc.). The search engine also pays attention to what others are saying about your business, through customer reviews and by assessing your backlink profile.
Why is Google focusing so much on content quality?
With so many content-centric updates and additions, the question is – why? Why is the search engine double and tripling down?
It’s possible that Google is putting in guardrails against AI-generated content. With the emergence of chatbots and AI generated content, there’s a concern that AI users could flood the internet with low quality information. As sophisticated as AI is becoming, it cannot replace an expert human in terms of developing contextually-appropriate content. AI writing has trouble staying on topic, in other words.
Google’s AI-detection methods are superior and the search engine has little trouble flagging AI content when it spots it. You could think of these new content guidelines as a warning, then, against using AI to spin up content pages.
Google is defining its vision for the future of content – can your site keep up?
The SEO game has always relied on content first and Google is reinforcing that message with several recent updates. If you’ve already made expert content a priority for your website, you’re on the right track. If you haven’t prioritized content quality, it will become increasingly difficult to get that first page rank on Google
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