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I'm honestly surprised we don't have more threads like this. I put it in the speedway so it wouldn't be public info. I thought to make it an INSIDERS thread, but I'm wondering how active it even will be.
I know there's a lot of search engine marketers on this forum. Why aren't we talking strategy? Exchanging ideas? Noticing what we're seeing out there?
I've got other groups I've already do that with, but I thought I would start this thread and see where it goes. Let's keep this thread to search engine marketing, whether it's paid or organic tactics.
I think it'd be cool if somebody started an email marketing thread or social media mastermind thread. Or maybe just specific masterminds for TikTok, Insta, etc.
That's not my area of expertise, so I decided to start this thread...
Anyways, between Google Ads verification, and the last Google core update, I have been super busy lately. I've been doing SEO for 13 years. A normal update for me means 20% of my clients go up, 10% of my clients go down, and 70% of my clients stay basically the same.
This last update, I saw a third go up, a third go down, and a third stay the same. I have never had that much movement across clients.
For context, I don't specialize in a niche. I've got a couple of bigger real estate clients, most of my clients are local service businesses, and I've got a couple e-commerce stores.
Now that the update has been out for a month, I'm starting to draw conclusions.
The one thing I believe is happening, is Google is ramping up EEAT signals. Not a surprise, they've been making a big deal about this for a while. But I never seemed to pay it much mind.
For example, I had two different clients that used the old SEO tactic of creating a bunch of city pages + service. You know what I'm talking about, /window-cleaner-phoenix type pages.
When I say a bunch, we're talking hundreds. The other one had 2K.
Those two clients had been lagging the results of my other campaigns for a while. So a few months back, I just got rid of the pages. (For beginners, I wouldn't normally recommend just cutting a bunch of pages. That kind of stuff has ramifications. But in this case I chose to do it.) With this last core update, I saw the first page rankings jump up 2-5 spots for those clients, and a noticeable increase in phone calls as a result.
To be clear, I do have some clients that use the city plus service tactic at a reasonable level, and they didn't seem to have been negatively impacted. Although those companies tended to be in the "not affected" category, as opposed to the "Woah look at that jump" category.
Another thing my clients that had a jump up had in common was many of them have career pages. This has not been a common thing across my clients, so it was easy to spot correlation with the winners.
So I've started adding career pages to everyone. I'll report back how this experiment goes. It's a minor thing, I doubt as much of an effect, but I can't deny the correlation. I also I'm not sure that I'll actually be able to isolate anything to career pages when we've done on going link building going on.
As for my clients who went down, it's pretty clear. For 13 years I told clients not to worry too much about what their website looked like. And for 13 years I've been able to make the phone ring as long as they had decent content and proper conversion points.
For 13 years, I've actually been worried when someone does a site redesign. Because it'll look pretty, but often it doesn't convert as well.
This last update I think is the end of telling clients not to worry what the website looks like. I haven't pinned down the little details. Font size? Dwell time? Stock images versus original images? I've got my suspicions, but I don't have a ton of conclusions about what specifically is holding them back.
But just one thing I've noticed is that the clients that lagged don't have privacy/terms pages.
For years I've been hearing rumors about Google having a site-wide score that impacts rankings across the board. With this update, this is the first time I believe I have data showing it to be true.
Anyways, I hope this helps. I'll post when I have something interesting to say. Or if I have questions that I'm looking for answers.
One thing that might help if you're going to post in this thread is to share a little bit about your experience level. Do you market one side or several? How long have you been doing this?
So... Who wants to chat about search engine marketing?
I know there's a lot of search engine marketers on this forum. Why aren't we talking strategy? Exchanging ideas? Noticing what we're seeing out there?
I've got other groups I've already do that with, but I thought I would start this thread and see where it goes. Let's keep this thread to search engine marketing, whether it's paid or organic tactics.
I think it'd be cool if somebody started an email marketing thread or social media mastermind thread. Or maybe just specific masterminds for TikTok, Insta, etc.
That's not my area of expertise, so I decided to start this thread...
Anyways, between Google Ads verification, and the last Google core update, I have been super busy lately. I've been doing SEO for 13 years. A normal update for me means 20% of my clients go up, 10% of my clients go down, and 70% of my clients stay basically the same.
This last update, I saw a third go up, a third go down, and a third stay the same. I have never had that much movement across clients.
For context, I don't specialize in a niche. I've got a couple of bigger real estate clients, most of my clients are local service businesses, and I've got a couple e-commerce stores.
Now that the update has been out for a month, I'm starting to draw conclusions.
The one thing I believe is happening, is Google is ramping up EEAT signals. Not a surprise, they've been making a big deal about this for a while. But I never seemed to pay it much mind.
For example, I had two different clients that used the old SEO tactic of creating a bunch of city pages + service. You know what I'm talking about, /window-cleaner-phoenix type pages.
When I say a bunch, we're talking hundreds. The other one had 2K.
Those two clients had been lagging the results of my other campaigns for a while. So a few months back, I just got rid of the pages. (For beginners, I wouldn't normally recommend just cutting a bunch of pages. That kind of stuff has ramifications. But in this case I chose to do it.) With this last core update, I saw the first page rankings jump up 2-5 spots for those clients, and a noticeable increase in phone calls as a result.
To be clear, I do have some clients that use the city plus service tactic at a reasonable level, and they didn't seem to have been negatively impacted. Although those companies tended to be in the "not affected" category, as opposed to the "Woah look at that jump" category.
Another thing my clients that had a jump up had in common was many of them have career pages. This has not been a common thing across my clients, so it was easy to spot correlation with the winners.
So I've started adding career pages to everyone. I'll report back how this experiment goes. It's a minor thing, I doubt as much of an effect, but I can't deny the correlation. I also I'm not sure that I'll actually be able to isolate anything to career pages when we've done on going link building going on.
As for my clients who went down, it's pretty clear. For 13 years I told clients not to worry too much about what their website looked like. And for 13 years I've been able to make the phone ring as long as they had decent content and proper conversion points.
For 13 years, I've actually been worried when someone does a site redesign. Because it'll look pretty, but often it doesn't convert as well.
This last update I think is the end of telling clients not to worry what the website looks like. I haven't pinned down the little details. Font size? Dwell time? Stock images versus original images? I've got my suspicions, but I don't have a ton of conclusions about what specifically is holding them back.
But just one thing I've noticed is that the clients that lagged don't have privacy/terms pages.
For years I've been hearing rumors about Google having a site-wide score that impacts rankings across the board. With this update, this is the first time I believe I have data showing it to be true.
Anyways, I hope this helps. I'll post when I have something interesting to say. Or if I have questions that I'm looking for answers.
One thing that might help if you're going to post in this thread is to share a little bit about your experience level. Do you market one side or several? How long have you been doing this?
So... Who wants to chat about search engine marketing?
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