Why We ❤️ Google's Helpful Content Update w/Steve Wiideman

Steve

Part 2.

‍

Madeleine

Part 2. Going to a screen near you soon?

‍

Steve

There you go.

‍

Madeleine

Yeah, yeah, I'd love to. While we're talking about customer sentiment, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I guess this was a while ago now an Internet month, but yeah, your take on Google's helpful content update.

‍

Steve

Full content update because it reinforces how important user behavior signals are. It was the first time that I've actually seen them write things like, does the person who found your page have to search again to find the information that they're looking for? Right there? They said, you know, they've always said content links, content links, content links, right? That's how we rank pages. They never talk about the search behavior signals because they don't want people manipulating them. Yet there's hundreds of networks. 

‍

Of thousands of individual users who are searching and clicking on things for a few pennies per click as a job, right? They're in a mobile home somewhere, you know, and watching TV and just clicking on things all day to make money. It's silly, but that's just what they do because they know they figured out that search behavior signals are important. 

‍

Back in 2006 when I was trying to rank for SEO expert, right, it was the keyword I had to rank before I got to the first page and my boss said Disney wasn't impressed. And I said, well, I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna get people to search. And then anyone who clicked on my listing, I'm gonna say thank you. You just helped me move up in the search results and it worked. I got to the top by people choosing me more than the competition, you know, I didn't know it was going to be blacklisted from the industry for being a bragger, for being number one for SEO experts. So thank God I got rid of that listing. But I did feel good. It did feel good walking in with the boombox. And everyone's like, what's up with Weidman? Oh, he just beat Brad. Fallen for SEO experts. Like, get out the way, you know, ludicrous. That's amazing, but yeah, I finally got rid of it. But it was that user behavior signal that moved me up from that ninth position to the first position by people who were searching, clicking, and choosing me as the final destination. You know, if their query. So when we think about things like this helpful content update, they've said at least twice that in one way or another that behavior signals are going to play a role in your keyword rankings. So now we can advocate for the rich. Results more schema.org more entity work where we take an entity and tie it into the schema of the thing, whether it's about or mentioned so that Google knows explicitly. When we use the word pancake we're talking about wikipedia.org.org/pancake. So it gives us a little bit more power as SEO's I think to have more knowledge graph related effort. It gives us more power to try to get richer results instead of just a blue link and a black text. And black text in there, I think. I think it gives us a lot more. Um. It's the word I want to use Arsenal you know to go after better content and it reinforces taxonomy. You know when we think about wanting to rank for a broad keyword like we said earlier you can have a page or you can have a whole section of content. The site with the section of content has all those great breadcrumb links. You know internal links that are going back to that parent page that give that parent page more authority. Now you've got when Google is crawling your site it says hey I found. A lot of your links on your website point to these pages, these pages must be important because you're linking to them very often and by building a taxonomy and building a silo, you're basically making it really easy. The more pages, subpages you create under that parent page, the higher that parent page is going to rank. So I think the helpful content updates give us a little bit more power to persuade clients who are on a flat taxonomy to organize their content more intuitively to create more internal links. Through Breadcrumb schema and so forth. So I'm a huge fan of the update because it does give us a lot more arsenal when clients kick back your ideas because they think they know SEO better than the company they're hiring to do their SEO.

‍

Madeleine

Funny how that works. Yeah, yeah. I definitely think it's great that Google. Google is moving towards being less coy, I guess I would say being kind of more outright because obviously there are a lot of great SEO experts around and they know. Kind of the INS and outs of this is what you do, this is what you shape should prioritize when you're building your website, when you're linking to pages, when you're setting up your listings, all of this. And yeah, a lot of people, as you said, unfortunately sometimes have their own ideas. So yeah, when Google's kind of forthright about this information, that's, you know, already kind of universally known, I'll say.

‍

Steve

I just, I wish, I wish. So John Mueller has made it clear that he believes that they've disavowed a lot of websites. Altogether as being not credible, not helping search rankings and and it's it's a little frustrating to those of us who work really hard to do the right things. You know my favorite quote is by Jim Rohn. Jim Rohn says you don't have to do extraordinary things to be successful. You only have to do ordinary things extraordinarily well which means every month improving the accuracy of our business data, improving the quality and helpfulness of our local pages, improving our business data visibility and improving our online reputation. For doing those things every month we're building a pattern that Google is going to recognize as being a great helpful result. And unfortunately a lot of the spammers and PBN networks and black hats out there. 

‍

I was just at an event with a couple of folks that were Black Hat SEO and they were bragging about how great their Black Hat techniques are working now that Google's done some sort of where they've reverted a lot of the spam filters and they can do a lot of old school like 3 way links and and. Link reveals Web 2.0 linking from the 2000s and it's working all of a sudden. Like they somehow the different teams never passed on the history of why they did things and they got rid of a lot of those filters. And so it's creating a big mess of really useless content on the Internet in an effort to try to game search results. And what I'd encourage Google to do if Google ever listens to any of my podcasts is to really, really get more team members involved. In the spam filters and someone that we can e-mail when we get an email from somebody that says hey I can, I'm a blog outreach person. I've got these 100 websites that I can get you a post from and they're all domain authority 50 that I can just forward it to them and they can disavow all of them and they'll literally discount them. One thing that I've complained about multiple times is how easy it is, it's a game. The search results for featured answers, they're using really old school tools, article Wizards and whatever to Syndicate 1 little paragraph. Then H2 across thousands of websites and they're dominating these featured answers using spammy content and syndication techniques instead of sharing through their social profiles into their audiences. You know, and maybe even through PR, they're gaming the system by using old school SEO tools to blast the Internet and WordPress dot orgs and or WordPress dot coms and. Umm. Blogspots and Weebly lies and Wix sites and GoDaddy free sites using all these different crappy websites. Tumblr right to to create content that nobody would ever go to in an effort to try to game the search results. And it's getting worse. So please, Google if you're listening, get a team on this stuff, contact me, I'll show you so many examples of it. Disavow all that garbage because it's not making it easy for those of us who are doing good things to help our clients see great results. At some point, sometimes our clients quit on the white hat and they end up going the blackout route. And then what's going to happen in a year or two, they're gonna get penalized and have to start all over. So let's just, let's just clean up the mess, honestly.

‍

Madeleine

Yeah, yeah. I feel like that's a common thing where it kind of becomes almost standard practice to use these, you know, Black Hat techniques and kind of try to game the system just because you can. But then Google a few years later, we'll come up with these enhanced spam filters.

‍

Steve

And hope. Well, they've gotten rid of a lot of them.

‍

Madeleine

Things.

‍

Steve

It's sad.

‍

Madeleine

Yeah, yeah. I feel like they've recently kind of upped their game on, especially reviews and. I've seen a ton of people I sometimes browse like Google, my business, Reddit, and a ton of people are complaining about their authentic reviews being taken down. Or they're like, oh, my friend bought me.

‍

Steve

They did bring some back though. No one of the good ones did go away and some of them did come back. I think it was just yesterday I saw a post and it was Southern or Barry Schwartz was talking about it, but it looks like Google brought back a lot of the good reviews that went away. So I'm glad to hear that they're getting back together on fixing that. I've been fortunate enough to be able to work with Ben Fisher and Ben Fisher has done just an amazing job for our clients and doing two things. One he has this assurance package that we love so that if a competitor tries to go in and change our business information I suggest editing for example his team his software flags it right away and reverts it and make sure that you know nothing changed. So that's part one so that competitors can't screw up our listings. Part 2 is if a competitor shoving. Key words into their business name or faking that they have a location using a virtual office, his team will actually get it flagged and get it removed from the search results right away. So we've got 2 angles, 1 getting rid of competitors who are doing spammy things and protecting our site from competitors that just don't want to do ordinary things extraordinarily well. And that's been great. So kudos to Ben and his team for what they do to help our clients and there needs to be more beneficiaries out there they really do need.

‍

Madeleine

To. Ben is great. I actually just talked to him a few days ago for the podcast.

‍

Steve

No way. He just, he just, he just saw the concert that I'm going to tomorrow. I'm singing Elton John. And he just thought he's like, I'm gonna tell you all about it. I'm like, please don't. I'm gonna be surprised. I want to enjoy myself. So next week we're gonna talk about how great Elton John's concert was. And he and I hung out in Vegas 2 1/2 weeks ago to see the Scorpions. So that was cool. He's such a great guy. I love Ben. Yeah.

‍

Madeleine

Yeah, yeah. I had a great time talking to him. He's so knowledgeable, obviously. In this space, yeah. That's so funny. I also, I had no idea that Elton John was still on his final tour, right, I feel like.

‍

Steve

It's been getting worse. This is his second to last day. His last day I believe is Sunday, and then he's going to Europe and he's probably never going to perform in the US again because this is farewell tour. So yeah, we're if we would have gone Sunday instead of Saturday, but I didn't know any better, we literally would have seen his last concert in the states ever.

‍

Madeleine

It's still fun. You saw them.

‍

Steve

I'm so excited. I'm so.

‍

Madeleine

Excited. Love Elton John. Love him. Well, that's so fun. Yeah. I mean, OK. I just have one final question. Yeah, I mean, like obviously we've talked about all these changes and how multi location businesses kind of don't, if they use the right tools, they don't have to necessarily be so Privy to all the changes because they manage it through the API.

‍

Steve

But you have CRM, that's why you use platforms to manage your business data.

‍

Madeleine

But for those who don't, or for those who are on the fence, how should they? Just like get the new, get the new Google News. How should they? Because I feel, I feel like if you're not, you're not near to the ground. It's hard to. It's very overwhelming to kind of get all the information, find out where to get the updates from, because there's.

‍

Steve

No, I do. I do a lot of guest speaking at the colleges and one of the things that I've always tried to help students who have a real passion for SEO. My whole how do you become an SEO expert right? And stay abreast of everything? The first thing you could do, and I'll share this with you after the podcast is. There's a site called Feedly FED LY and I've got a file that you could literally just import into your Feedly account. And the way I have it organized is search engine news comes up 1. So you see all different search engine news from search engine land, search engine journal, search engine roundtable, all the sites that talk about what's going on and it sorts it by the pages that are getting the most engagement and interaction and and being talked about the most. So you see the important stuff first. Beyond that I've got elite SEO which is RSS feeds from the top. CEOs in the industry that I really enjoy their content on. And then I've got a segment on local SEO conversion rate optimization. I've got another one that's for ecommerce SEO. So depending on what your niche is in search, you can use that feedly opml file, import it into your account and then reorganize it based on where your priorities are. But I would still encourage you to keep you know your news focused on the news part first and then the other blog post second. Next I would create a Twitter list of all the top. Experts in that particular niche that you're in? Mine's just, you know, hashtag, SEO experts and Twitter. If you can follow my lists, find an SEO expert in it. And what's needed in that one is if you keep that tab open in your browser and every hour or so just toggle over there, hit refresh and see what the top SEO’s are talking about right now. That'll help you. If you're in local search and multi location, the local search forum is amazing. Joy Hawkins, and you know all the gurus and local search Darren Shaw. They're all hanging out in there and they're all giving great advice. So I really enjoy the local search forum and you get this recap every week of what's happening and what's being talked about so that you don't have to go through every thread. You can see the top posts in an email and pick and choose what you think is interesting to you. The other thing that I would do too is participate in social media groups. There's a lot on Facebook. There's an SEO signals lab, right with Stephen King. He's amazing. Dumb SEO questions are out there. Um. One of my favorite folks used to participate in it. Bill Slowsky passed away this year. So it's kind of sad when I toggle over there because I don't see him anymore. But there's still a lot of really amazing people that will share, you know, literally like veterans and SEO will share their best advice on how to handle a certain circumstance. So join those groups, participate, follow some of the streams, ask your questions. I have my own search marketers club as well. It's free if you want to check it out. Just, you know, just hit me up on social media and SEO Steve anywhere and let me know. You know who to add and all I'll Add all those people to that little club you know we've got you know Doc Sheldon's in there and you know some of my other buds that love to to live and breathe and talk search. So happy to introduce you to the crowd over there. I also have podcasts right. So if you're following podcasts as you're growing up and your SEO career. Our little podcast is called Unbottled Neck. I think we've had about 100 podcaster shows so far; they're also on our website. We've interviewed Rand Fishkin and Neil Patel and some other, you know, SEO nerds that that really love to share. So by all means follow our podcast and other podcasts like the Synup podcast because you'll get a lot of really good input and feedback from people who've been doing this for a long time.

‍

Madeleine

Yeah, yeah, that's great. I mean, I will definitely be. Yeah, fun not. I'm not doing all of those. So I'll definitely be taking the advice. Yeah. I feel like. I feel like sometimes what might prevent it. People taking the steps to implement SEO kind of delve into that realm with their business just because it can be intimidating and it's hard to figure out where to start. I could definitely relate to it.

‍

Steve

How do you eat an elephant right? One bite at a time. Start with a technical audit and strategy you can get into. That your competitive analysis sees what the competitors are doing versus you and then you want to do something with your off page and links and then you want to get into looking at what your content road map looks like, those taxonomies, you know when you when you take the time to pull. We had 185,000 keywords for Applebee's and it took us nearly six months to put together the long term content road map. But now we know every single way that somebody's going to be searching for what they offer and who they are. Um, so that there's enough content for a lifetime of writers, you know? Yeah, get that plan going. Put it in your project management system like monday.com or Asana or JIRA, whatever you happen to be using. Assign a tech person, a content writer, an off page, and maybe a local person if you're doing multi location, and then every month meet and see how they're doing on hitting those KPIs.

‍

Madeleine

Awesome. OK. Well, yeah. Thank you so much for all your advice. This was incredible. I learned so much, and I hope I know that our listeners did too, including perhaps Elon Musk.

‍

Steve

Yeah, I love you, Elon, but, you know, be nicer.

‍

Madeleine

Just a bit, just a bit. Yeah. Thank you so much, Steven.

‍

Steve

Thank you so much for asking me that line. I definitely look forward to doing this again and maybe we can dig into a specific area next time like just reviews or just local pages. I have so much data and case studies here. I think it would be a lot of fun. Let me.

‍

Madeleine

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. I was just touching the surface. There's obviously so much more to talk about. Yeah, I'd love to. Chat again, I'll definitely be in touch.

‍

Steve

Anytime.

‍

Madeleine

Yeah. OK, awesome. OK, have a great rest of your day. This has been.

‍

Steve

Thanks everyone. Thanks for my line.

‍

Madeleine

Beautiful. Yeah. Thank you. OK, I'll stop recording. Do I know how?

‍