Office Hour #18 - New trends, algorithm updates and everything you need to know

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Okay, back after a long break, there's a bunch of things happening in the industry, we'll be doing a session this week, we'll also do a session next week, because there's a lot to chat about, there's a lot to talk about. You don't need to take notes, as usual, everything that we discuss, present, we talk about, you will receive our perspective and notes that Akshita will send out in a couple of days, we will send you the links to the original articles or content, workflow, etc. Along with these industry updates and typical SEO tips roundup that we are doing, we are also working on a couple of other content projects.

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One is there has been a lot of good solid discussion around the state of SEO events, there are different events, I'm just trying to create a roundup of all of them, and maybe include them in the next newsletter. Additionally, we are also scraping a lot of content at the moment to figure out what is ranking well in local search results. So that's a report that Akshita and team are working on that will be published roundabout probably next month. 

We'll keep you in the loop. So that said, some of the biggest news that's coming from the industry as of the last few weeks, we all know there's this Department of Justice investigation that started during the regime against Google. So apparently, the DOJ just asked Google to see if they want, ask them to sell the Chrome browser to restore some competition in the online search market.

(2:21 - 3:24)

I'm unsure personally as to why they are asking them to hype up one of the most popular products. But there's a lot of discussions going around, there could be a possible Android spin-out considered. While the DOJ is not immediately demanding it, Google could spin out its Android business if other remedies fail to improve competition.

Some of the key proposals from the DOJ to Google was from paying companies like Apple to make search engines the default, maybe ban Google from favoring its search engines on platforms like its own. Google gives prominence and favorable positioning to its own properties on most search results. They also may require Google to share search engines data with Biden, which I'm unsure they would be willing to do.

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(3:26 - 8:32)

Allowing websites to opt out of AI overviews without penalty search rankings, kind of difficult to achieve. Google has reacted kind of on the front foot, I would say, they criticize the proposals as extreme and harmful to technology innovation, which is kind of right. Then the chief legal officer has also termed the entire DOJ proceeding as a radical interventionist agenda. 

So what's the next step for Google in this? How does it impact us? Well, if Chrome goes away from Google's purview, and I've got into a separate business without Google, I will want to have some kind of a data transaction happening with whatever the new entity is, because a lot of search ranking algorithm setup, as we see now, is based on user intervention. So based on usage, like CTR is a major factor, how will Google understand that and how will Google derive information from that? Anyway, the revised proposal from the DOJ is expected sometime in March, and the remedial priorities are supposed to be in April. So it remains to be seen what goes on after that.

There's a detailed article on Burge that you can find online or we will include in the notes that you can read through if you want to read more about it. Okay, the second thing that I was looking at, we found a couple of clients that I know of who are buying a lot of five-star reviews. And this has become a pattern right now.

Even if you buy a lot of reviews, some people, a lot of businesses get away with it. We have always recommended people not to do this, not to go this path, because there are several things that can happen. Okay.

You can actually go out of business if you are dependent on GBP for your customer acquisition channel. So what Google has started doing that I've noticed in the past as well, in the recent past, no need to go back a few years, Google may implement some kind of a review block. Okay.

It's basically what happens is Google temporarily blocks the business that they have purchased or they've identified as purchased eight reviews and prevent them from receiving any new reviews. During the block itself, the listing appears unchanged. There's no visual differentiator, still shows the review button on the old reviews might show up all right.

Users, when they go in to submit a review, this review submits fine. However, these reviews don't get published on the profile. And I'm seeing more and more of this.

The next update that we were tracking was related to AI overviews. Personally, what AI overview has done to search results is more than what any feature has ever done. You don't see it here, but it's because I'm in India.

So I'll send you details of it later on. But what is happening is it's collating information from already existing content that you and I are writing, our customers are writing, or we might just write, providing a snapshot or synopsis of highlights from those content. And the way the content is displayed along with the gray link, nobody clicks on that gray link ever.

So if you're tracking your CTR from organic searches for us, if I am comparing it like the previous three months, last three months, compared to the previous three months, CTR has been down. CTR has been down across the board for most of the properties that I'm tracking information for. Not just our website, but I've seen client websites, websites that we consult for, other properties that we own.

Okay. Though in the last 10 days, I've seen a dip in AI overviews for transactional keywords. So I don't know if it's going to stay, but the AI overview is not going away anytime soon.

(8:33 - 12:00)

It is here to stay. So what do we learn from it? Based on what I'm seeing right now, AI continues to steal our clicks. And especially this week when Black Friday, the typical Black Friday and Cyber Monday searches are on the up and the overviews are affecting them negatively.

Okay. The search landscape has evolved just in the past one year. OpenAI has surpassed Bing to become the third largest search engine showing a shift in search behavior.

That's a drastic shift. In fact, a lot of results in OpenAI are also driven by Bing searches. Okay.

I've seen a steady inflow of, on our platform, on our own website, we added a field for self-attribution. I think you can try doing it on some of your customer accounts or a bigger customer account where you ask users to self-attribute where they find you. I've seen a growing trend in the way people are finding us via OpenAI and perplexity.

Again, the doomsday conspiracies are back. SEO is dead. SEO is not dead.

It's just evolved and we have to evolve alongside it. The focus will shift from typical traditional SEO tactics to broader marketing strategies, but user intent will remain the key. Okay.

Quick answers will impact businesses reliant on ad surrounding basic information. SEO effectiveness has diminished. In fact, ad conversion has also diminished.

For businesses prioritizing customer intent and delivering some valuable insight, SEO will remain crucial. So we'll have to see how AI is going to impact our search marketing in 2025. Okay.

We dig through the forums a lot, especially Google's forum and associated forums. There's a tremendous increase in GBP suspensions and video verification issues. Already verified businesses that have been in business for 20 plus years or 30 plus years or 50 plus years or 10 plus years are getting suspended or Google is asking them to re-verify video verification.

Video verification is still buggy. This is not just for one or two people, it's across the board. At times it works well, at times it does not, and there's no solution at the moment.

Again, if you face such a problem, do not post in Google's forum. That's only going to take up your time. Post directly, create a ticket with Google directly, have their support in dealing with if you're facing issues with verification and suspensions.

(12:02 - 14:15)

Okay. This is a screenshot of how Google's new map search results are showing up at certain locations. It looks like they have started rolling out their conversational search alongside AI-cumulated results.

They did a blog post a few weeks ago where they mentioned that they're going to start rolling this out in November. It looks like they've already done so. We also have a short video from Google that will include in the notes that you can review and learn from what it can do.

I have seen a lot of AI-curated search results similar to AI overviews. Those AI-curated search results are primarily for local searches. It remains to be seen if it's going to impact local search as well and how it impacts them.

If Google still continues to steal clicks, then it's a problem. Okay. Tips of the week.

While going through some of the talk tracks and decks from recent search marketing events, I found this post and presentation by Stephanie Briggs. It's a detailed post and checklist of how you can review your content on your website. I don't recommend you do this for new customers that you're on-boarding right away because it's going to take a significant amount of time.

What it basically says is you identify topics that your websites are good for. Okay. Authoritative on.

Try and create pages for every facet, every category and promulgation that you can think about. Okay. This workflow is also going to help you analyze and leverage topical authority.

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Basically, understand keyword research and crawl the site to extract the backgrounds. You can use tools like Streaming, Prog, NCM Rush to map the keywords to the URLs for each. Okay.

Then you can create a topical area. Okay. It will help you analyze and find out what topics that you should be writing about, what your website is good for at the moment.

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You can also use this study tool to optimize some of the word count. Generally, people just randomly come out about the length of a content or article piece. Okay.

Let's write 1,000 words or let's write 1,500 words. People who are a little more research-oriented, they might go and review what is already ranking in SERP and then decide. This article and workflow will help you with it as well.

Additionally, it can also help you improve your internal ranking. But if you have a customer that you're trying to onboard right now and do not want to do a ton of work from them right at the onset, just hold on. There are a couple of other tools that I'm going to show you towards the end of this session that you can utilize to find out the topical relevancy of your website to your target topics.

Okay. But Stephanie's article is really, really good. I will include the link along with the suggested checklist that you can try and implement.

If you have problems and are planning on doing a separate video for this as a step-by-step guide, that's how we deal with this ourselves. Okay. There was a question recently from a customer asking us about the order in which the social media links appear on their Google My Business profile or Google Business profile.

It's random. Google determines how they want in or what order they want to display the links. What I recommend customers to do is just because you have all your social media profiles set up, you do not need to add them all into Google GDP.

Add the most important ones. Let them get synced. Let Google order them in any way they want.

And if you want, later on, you can always add more links. But the more links you add, the more the chances that Google is going to select some random order and they highlight the links to the profiles that you're not active on. So put your best foot forward.

Only use the links that are important to you and leave the rest alone. Another thing that we noticed this week is Google is rolling out some kind of a recommendation screen on Google search console. We checked our own properties.

We did not see them on our own properties. Apparently, Google is deciding this at random. They are only rolling these automated insights and recommendations only for sites where they think that they need some kind of automated insights.

Automated insights provide you recommendations related to structured data improvements, adding sitemaps and sitemap related changes and queries. They're showing you trending queries and pages, rich results, eligibility, video indexation and data limitations. So if you are somebody who logs into a search console on a regular basis, take a look at your profiles, take a look at your client's profile and see if you see them, if you find them useful.

I checked like seven or eight accounts today. I have not seen this on any of them. Okay, helpful tools for the week.

So the first tool that I have is a schema analyzer. But when we talk about schema, we traditionally talk about just schema related to local SEO, but there are several other types of schema that can impact a website. You can have entities measured, you can do article schema, you can do how-to schema, you can do FAQ schema.

(19:14 - 20:41)

You can basically mark up every word on your website based on that entity. Why is it important? Why are we talking about schema so often nowadays? It's because primarily for AI searches. Schema was kind of useful for Google, but they never used it as a ranking factor.

I don't think anybody uses schema as a ranking factor per se, but schema makes it easier for search engines to identify and categorize the information that you're providing on your website. So if you have a website related to certain keywords or a term or a category, it's always good to check because schema is going to be extremely useful for AI scrapers. Okay, if you are planning to block all AI tools, then it's okay.

You don't need to really do this, but it's a good practice that we follow. We recommend our clients follow them as well, because the more useful you make the content, the more structured you make the content on your website and make it easy for search engines and AI engines, the better for the website. Okay, try out the schema analyzer tool.

I think it was pretty neat. Don't expect a lot of bells and whistles. It's something at work, somebody doing it for free.

(20:42 - 21:11)

There are two other tools that you can also use. I think I like them better. One is from Michael Kuhlking.

It's a site-focused calculator. Remember just now we were discussing the topical relevancy on the website. You can basically feed in the XML sitemap of a particular website or enter a list of URLs, run analysis, and it will tell you what your focus terms are.

(21:17 - 22:39)

Similarly, Dijon SEO created another tool, a similar tool. It will also send you the site focus. The problem is getting too many hits.

It's basically not working during normal hours. You can try this later. Both the tools does something similar.

It analyzes your website and tells you what are the keywords or the topics that your site is relevant for. And if you find it's relevant for terms that you don't want to optimize your website for, then it's time to take a look at your content. Okay.

Both are very rudimentary analysis tools. I think they're useful when you're trying to onboard a client or you're trying to quickly review a prospect's website and review their content and then send up a proposal. I think this is a very useful tool for that.

 Okay. That's all I have for today, until and unless anyone has any questions. Okay.

Thanks, Neel. We can take questions. You can either send them on the chat to me, or you can unmute yourself and ask us.

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(22:46 - 23:15)

Oh, sorry to mention, I think there was another study we were looking at. I think it was done by Neel Patel's team about is everywhere now. It is true.

AI is everywhere now. There was this study that I will send you a link to that was done by Neel Patel's team. Recently, they went through a bunch of accounts and tried to figure out influencer marketing.

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As for them, it's useless paying those high valued influencers. It's better to target micro influencers or specific to a niche. I will link to that article as well when we are sending out the notes.

I don't think you have any questions, Akshita. Got it. I think we can wrap it up.

We'll see everyone next week again with the latest updates. You don't have to take any notes. We'll send you the recording and the event notes as well.

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Have a good day. Have a good week. Thanks, everyone. 

Bye-bye.

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