Table of Contents
This month's Searchlite intro is written by SEO Analyst, Sara Zuehlke.
Welcome to this month's edition of Uproer’s newsletter, Searchlite. We’re excited to share our two cents on some recent important industry changes that have rolled out and came to fruition this past month.
Let it be known that we understand it’s hard to keep up with unpredictable and tragic world events happening all around us, on top of work and life in general. If you’re looking for a light read about search trends and events, read on. If you need a break, we get it!
What we’ve got on our lineup today:
Why You Need to Revamp Your Category Content Right Now
by Lucy Dodds, for Evolved Search
Key Takeaways:
- Adding category page content isn’t about increasing your word count, it’s about providing relevant information for shoppers who are turning to websites to make big purchases.
- From adding expert opinions to improving internal linking, creating interactive product comparisons to adding common FAQs, there are several creative ways to revamp your content on category pages.
- Using keywords with transactional intent is key for creating category page content that impacts your businesses KPI’s.
Why it Matters:
For sites trying to break into the SERP for highly competitive non-brand keywords, leveling up category page content is essential when it comes to landing on the first page. Having less detailed category page content can negatively impact visibility, depending on what your competitors have in the works.
Reviewing competitor category pages and using your creativity to provide specific and valuable information for your customers are the first steps to revamping your category page content.
Anatomy of Top-Performing Content in 2022
by Miné Salkin, for SEMRush
Key Takeaways:
- Content is changing, and it’s time we changed the way we think about its structure.
- Brevity is the soul of wit, and the soul of new headlines, but don’t be mistaken, headlines should be short but descriptive.
- Article length doesn’t really matter, but just know, “articles with 3K words or more receive 138% more traffic than articles with 500 words or fewer.”
Why it Matters:
Content is an ever changing beast, and will continue to be so with constantly changing search engine goal posts. SEMRush in this article analyzed blogs with 30-500K monthly unique pageviews and has found some correlation between different elements of content and ranking ability. Some of the characteristics of great performing content were highlighted like headings and structure, visual elements, and more.
This study emphasizes the importance of constant content optimization and testing, so make sure you’ve got that in your 2022 plan! To win, you’ll need to take stock of what you’ve already got; review your how tos and guides, take and make better visuals, and be 100% certain you’re covering the total topic in your piece.
12 Tactics for Better SEO & Dev Relations
by Crystal Carter, published on her professional blog
Key Takeaways:
- Frame Improvements as Opportunities over Problems
- Have a Feasibility Chat Before Briefing Substantial Changes
- Validate the Changes as Soon as Possible
Why it Matters:
When developer teams and SEOs are working well together, clients see improving performance and users get a better experience. A great way to keep relations positive between developers and SEOs is by scheduling time to meet and discuss large-scale changes before they receive the first ticket or brief.
This gives the developers time to process and communicate the level of effort required for the lift, along with any potential gaps in their knowledge that will require investigating (developers are smart but they can’t know everything!). This just shows that you (the SEO) respect the developers and their time by giving them a heads up on large undertakings in the pipeline. Validating large or small changes ASAP is important for mitigating that annoying mental focus shift we all have to deal with when switching between projects or tasks. Your developer partners will thank you later.
Google Announces Depreciation of Universal Analytics
by Nick Iyengar, for Merkle Inc.
Key Takeaways:
- Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics (UA) in 2023. The platform will stop processing hits on October 1st, 2023 for Google Analytics 360 properties or on July 1, 2023 for standard properties.
- Google is replacing UA with Google Analytics 4, the flagship product Google has been pushing hard in recent months. GA4 isn’t just a cosmetic update; it’s a wholesale rebuild. Companies should begin implementing this change soon.
- Once your UA properties stop processing hits, they will become “read only.”
Why it Matters:
The takeaway here is that GA4 is a new way of tracking and analyzing website and app data. This makes it important to start the migration process early. In the short term, you can do this by dual-tagging your website, by building a GA4 property alongside your current UA. That will give you time to collect historical data before you're pushed into GA4 in 2023. Over the long term, it's also important to use this next year to familiarize yourself with the key differences between GA4 and UA.
Because this is the first major update of Google Analytics in over a decade, it is going to look and feel different from the UA experience we’ve all gotten accustomed to. While GA4 is set to be more flexible than UA, the learning curve will be steeper. We should all do what we can over the next year to set ourselves up for a smooth transition to what will become the new default way of tracking across our web and app properties.
Other Interesting Stories
Found on Twitter
Tim Soulo of Ahrefs walks us through his insights after analyzing his company's own data to determine the five different levels of content. These levels range from simple listicles to experiments and research studies. Read on to understand which level you are producing content at, how to break into different levels, and other great content tips.
