Synup Office Hour #7 - 30th April 2024 | Discussing SEO updates, AdWords Strategies and AI's impact on search engines

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Am I audible? Yes, Steve, perfectly audible. Okay, great. Thank you, everyone, for joining us for another office hour.

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This is the seventh office hour that we are hosting this year. So let's jump right into it with industry updates. So as per Google, as we all know, there was this WHO-HCU helpful content update and Google Smart Core updates have been going on since September of last year.

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So Google just mentioned that they've concluded the updates on April 19th. So I have a feeling that helpful content will be part of the Core or Gotham update, and they are still trying to fix things. Search is still broken a little less than what it was a few months ago.

And honestly, I've not seen a single website that got hit by a helpful content update last September recovering from it. I think the worst hit this time were the content-based websites that were trying to make a living through affiliate marketing and ads. And none of the ones that we have been following have managed to recover from what has been going on when they were first hits in September.

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Most of you will not face this problem. I don't believe many local businesses have been manipulating content the way large websites do at scale. So we are kind of safe in that aspect.

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But it's good to keep in touch with the realities and what's going on in the industry, but that will form the base of more algorithm updates in the near future. Okay, next one. We were revising our own AdWords campaign earlier this month, and then I was helping a couple of clients as well who have been running AdWords campaigns.

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The reason for doing this was there is something called search terms within your AdWords campaign. So if you're running AdWords campaign for yourself or for clients, I think you should keep a tab on the search terms report because we found a lot of terms that are not related to or associated with the actual keywords we are bidding on and ads were being displayed for the search terms. So, I don't know why Google keeps displaying ads for a number of unrelated terms that users are not even bidding on, which results in a lot of wasted spends.

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So keep a track on this on a weekly or a bi-weekly basis and if you do not have the time, at least do it on a monthly basis. Use that information to create a list of terms that are not related to you or do not provide you good business or conversion or leads or the leads are of low quality from those terms and try adding them to the negative keyword list within your Google account. We are doing the same.

We are just compiling the information, enhancing our keyword list, the negative keyword list on Google AdWords directly. Okay, there's something that has been going on for the past for more than a year now since ChatGPT was launched and made public and then came all the corpse chasers who started saying, oh SEO is dead, AI is taking over, all our jobs are gone, everyone is going to move to AI searches, people are no longer going to use Google. Even Gartner, I believe, came up with a statement last year saying that they are predicting that 25% drop in traditional search traffic by 2026 due to the rise of AI chatbots and virtual agents, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, however, there was a recent study done by SparkToro along with the data provided by Datos. We will provide you the link, but there's a detailed post that they have done that you can go through. Link will be included in the deck that we send out tomorrow for today's call along with the notes.

So what does the report say? What does the study say? The reality of it, recent search data from 2020, since 2023 shows no significant decline in traditional search volumes despite a rise in AI-assisted search usage. There are a bunch of them. Google is working on one, Bing has already launched theirs.

There was some user engagement spike initial days. There was an increase in user engagement with AI search tools that were noted particularly on Bing and ChargBD's OpenAI, which can be attributed to the novelty effect. It was new.

Everybody wanted to get into it, get a piece of the pie and understand what's going on, what everybody's talking about. So despite the initial interest, usage tends to drop off sharply after the first few interactions. That's exactly what has happened.

Again, it's a novelty versus trend. The increase in AI search tool usage appears to be a novelty factor primarily. Consistent behavior change following the novelty period is not evident.

So people are not really getting hooked and continue using them. Some people are, but most are not doing it. So this kind of raises questions about the sustainability of this trend about everything moving to AI.

AI is part of our everyday life right now. Enhancing your workflow, finding flaws, doing research, there are 10,000 ways you can use it. But data states otherwise in terms of pure search volume data, especially for all of us who are so dependent on Google searches for ourselves and our customers.

So traditional search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are still effective at driving referral traffic. AI platforms struggle effectively referring users to the right websites, which is crucial for user retention and utility. I don't know how they're going to bridge the gap.

And the more things change, I think the more things remain the same. I keep saying this to my team because AI, there was this tool that everybody was going gaga over like perplexity.ai. Oh, this is a great research tool. It's going to replace Google.

They announced themselves as Google. They're going to take over Google. But somebody recently did a study as well and figured out that most of the content that they are blurting out to users are primarily from the top 10 results of Google.

So those links that you're building for your customers are still going to be important. This content that you're creating with the users in mind is still going to be relevant because you still need to rank those clients for them to show up in different search results for AI to be able to pull up the data. AI is here to stay.

I'm not saying that discard it completely, but don't give importance to rumors about how it's going to take over everything. It's not going to take over everything overnight because human behavior takes time to adopt and adapt to new technology. It takes a lot of time.

Research consumer needs. Conduct surveys or focus groups to understand how search optimization including AI can improve customer engagement and your satisfaction. That still remains true to us, especially every one of us who are in the search business.

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Need to develop a balanced optimization strategy. I would suggest consider a tiered approach. Use AI for quick answers related to your topic that you are searching for in behalf of your client or for yourself or your own website or for your business.

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Then use traditional search for effective routing going to websites. People will land on the website to get first-hand information about a brand once they complete their initial inquiry and research. You have to keep an eye on AI's integration with search engines.

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There were rumors about Google launching a paid version of ad-free search engine. I don't know how true it is going to be. Do not take investment decisions based on rumors like this.

I would be very cautious about over-investing in AI for search initially. Observe the market. Use your experience to check the pulse of how it's going.

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Then try and look at technological advancements to determine the right time for investment in this. Just be patient and watchful about it because search is not going away anywhere anytime soon. If you ask me honestly.

So there is a nice little graph over here that how and what is driving search results. This data is data source uses clickstream planner. So you can take a look at this.

There was a minor spike in searches on Bing. You can test out Bing ads if you're running ads for your customers. See if you get better interaction from them.

There's no harm in investing a certain amount to check if it works well for you in driving the right kind of results. That's all for the industry updates for this week. Tips of the week.

Not sure how many of you are aware of the fact that Google actually provides an agency account. Google business profile agency account. Most of the people I know talk to have a generic GVP account.

Agency accounts provide you better control in the layered or structured approach to organizations and groups and business groups. So it might be fruitful for you and help your workflow better. If you open up an agency account, I'll provide the link over here.

You can just go to business.google.com slash agency Synup. Okay. Now there are a few things you need to keep in mind before you do that.

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Most of the time it will throw an error. If you just open up a new email, you cannot use an email address that already has access to business profiles at the moment. I tried doing it.

It failed. Then it said, okay, you need to start with a new account, Google account. We created a new Google account and tried it with that.

It did not work. It kept throwing errors. It's not available at the moment.

Then what we did was we purchased a completely new domain, created a new email on the domain and tried with that and it worked, which tells me you actually need an absolutely new domain to start with it. Okay. So try it out.

As far as the structure is concerned, I would recommend, I always recommend to everyone, if you are dealing with both service area businesses and brick and mortar stores, basically non-service area businesses, I would recommend you keep the service area businesses in one account. They are more prone to suspension and penalization from Google because of various reasons. So keep them away from the brick and mortar location-based businesses.

You can open two accounts or you can keep the existing Android GPP account for one of those groups and use your agency account for another group. It's very beneficial for agencies who handle hundreds and thousands of business locations or profiles with the GPP. If you do not have them, you do not need that structured approach.

You are not working with a lot of multi-location clients, then I don't think it's worth going through the pain. Second tip. Okay.

There was this interesting thread that I was reading. Then I started doing a few searches myself. Not sure if you can see my screen properly.

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Let me see if I can blow it up. Okay. Apparently Google has started displaying for a while now, Google has started displaying separate profile images based on the search query.

So for example, this one, someone searched for Pitchburg truck accident lawyer. It showed them a relevant image that they had in the GPP account that was displayed as a profile picture for the same business. Then when they switched the query to something like Fitchburg car accident lawyer, it shows a picture that is relevant to a car accident, more descriptive images.

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Then they search for a Pitchburg construction accident lawyer. It actually showed a person who might have had an accident, a construction worker. Google can read images, basically understand the context of the images.

This is not picking up information from some metadata or something, I believe. Neither is it from any other part of it because we just can upload an image. What I would recommend is find relevant images based on the queries that you're trying to optimize for.

Make sure the queries are relevant to the business type and try uploading those images. Just make sure that you follow optimized naming conventions without stopping keywords. I'm sure there are tools through which you can identify what kind of images work well for what kind of queries.

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I may try to get something like that later on. But take a handful of businesses that you work with, especially the ones who can provide you with a ton of images, and then see if you can optimize this. If this works, I'm sure Google is doing that to improve relevancy and click-through rate from your business profile, which is a good thing.

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Additionally, what I would suggest is while you are doing it with the normal business profile, now if you have customers who have products, who sell products, Google Business Profile has a section for product updates. Try and upload relevant images to that section as well. Do not spam, do not upload 100 images right away.

Try with a handful of top queries that you're trying to run for and see if it works for you. I'll keep testing as well. I'll have my team test this out with customers as well and see if this helps.

I will link you to the Twitter thread or X thread that I came across about this. That's kind of it for the tips of the week. Helpful tools.

There were a couple of tools that I came across because I was trying to do some keyword optimization and coming up with new content ideas and keyword clustering, etc. There is a new tool that I came across. I think the keyword clustering tool is free.

Yeah, this is true. They have this tool called Topic Clusters. I think you can open a free account over here.

There's a free starter and you can create a one-time cluster for up to 500 keywords. What I did was I went through one of our secondary websites, I went through that we host local SEO checklists. It's a tool that we built ages ago.

It kind of helps you track your project. It's kind of a project management tool for local SEOs with pre-created tasks that you can add your project to and use it. I went to one of the pages and I filtered it for the last six months.

You can do this for the last 12 months if you want. I went to one of the internal pages. Then I started looking for queries the pages are getting impressions for, but not a lot of clicks.

These are the kind of queries that you can have. If you go to the homepage of this, you'll probably get a lot more queries than just a handful. If I pick for the last 12 months, just for the homepage, there's a few hundred keywords over here.

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What you can do is make a list of the relevant ones, put them on an Excel sheet or download them in a CSV format and plug them into this tool. It will automatically create clusters for you and you can use that to create content. Either you create content or you identify existing content that can be optimized with these keywords and improve relevancy.

I would suggest looking at existing content first, see if they are ranking in the top 20 positions. If they are and they are not in the top five or top six, target them first, update them with the keywords and more relevant information, and then tackle creating new content. It's a neat little tool that I found, so I thought of sharing.

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They have other features as well. It's a server analyzer that will basically, if you plug in a content piece, they will let you know what kind of queries and for which, what kind of pages are ranking, what their content, how much content they have, etc. We'll take a look at competition in terms of search.

The second tool, it's not a tool actually. We are always on the lookout for, we use Notion a lot. Notion is our go-to project management and task trapping tool.

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We are always looking for stuff that I can get for free. Rebecca Edwards recently shared her list of Notion templates that you can use. There's Clara's client dashboard, there's analytics dashboard, the content strategy dashboard, website audit template, etc.

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I found it is really neat, the way they have laid out things and the way they are optimizing processes and workflows with these. I'll send you the link. It's completely free.

We don't get paid anything for referring to them or anything. I don't think Rebecca knows that we are talking about it on the spot. So give her a follow, give her a follow on LinkedIn.

It's a free resource that you can use to optimize your projects or if you have a project, just try using some of them. I found their website audit template really helpful, even the analytics dashboard were fairly helpful. I'm always looking for new stuff related to content briefs.

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There's a full content brief, then you can have a template that will ease your workflow. That's it. We'll send over the link.

Let me know what you think. That's all from me today. I'm open to questions if you have any.

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Thanks, Neel. If anyone has any questions, they can send it over in the chat or to me directly. I've only received one question so far.

I think this is related to the Google agency accounts. The question was, can an agency have two or more agency accounts on Google? I don't believe so. If you open up with two different domain names, then it's okay.

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I think the entire purpose is for you to consolidate everything under one account, then just provide access to the account managers on a specific group of locations that they manage. All right. Anything else? Does anyone have any follow-up questions? Okay.

I think we can wrap up for today, Neel. Okay. Great.

Thank you so much for joining again. I'll probably see you again next week with new stuff. Just feel free to reach out.

You can email us at support.synup.com if you have any questions. If you want to reach the marketing directly, just shoot us an email at followup.synup.com. We track it on a daily basis and we will respond to ny questions that you may have. Have a lovely rest of the week.

Bye-bye, everyone. Bye. Thank you.

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