And with that, it’s time to jump into the latest search marketing news. We have Semrush split test case studies, Tom Critchlow thought pieces, and much more. Let’s get started!
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By Tom Critchlow, SEO MBA
Key Takeaways:
- A collection of tactical recommendations does not make an SEO strategy. Instead, an SEO strategy is a “wrapper” that communicates the purpose & business case for those recommendations.
- A good strategy has three critical components: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action. All three are important in successfully framing a recommendation and gaining buy-in.
Why it Matters:
We’ve written about our approach to developing outcome-driven SEO strategies and Tom’s advice is in the same vein. A true SEO strategy contextualizes the tactical recommendations by communicating how they’ll advance the client towards their desired business outcomes. When you do this, you’re laying out a vision that all parties can align on and showing the value that your strategy will drive. You’ll find it much easier to gain buy-in from key stakeholders with this approach.
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By Kevin Indig
Key Takeaways:
- While embedding videos may not have a direct impact on rankings, video is still a useful tool in the SEO’s toolkit
- Embedding videos and using Schema markup can help video thumbnails show up in SERPs, often improving click-through rates
- Video carousels are showing for an ever-increasing number of search terms. Publishing videos helps to increase your odds of showing up for these terms
- In addition to the SEO benefits, videos can be an excellent way to grow brand awareness
Why it Matters:
Does video help SEO? While it seems like a simple enough “yes or no” question, Kevin Indig helps us understand the nuance behind the answer (don’t worry, we’re not going to say “it depends”). Instead of thinking of video as helping you rank (it probably won’t), it’s more accurate to think of it as one tool among many that can help capture incremental traffic. And, on top of any potential gains in traffic, video has the added benefit of getting your brand in front of your audience in a way that many folks will find more engaging. Is it worth it to invest in video? Our answer, on average, would be yes.
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By Karissa Bell, Engadget
Key Takeaways:
- Google is testing a SERP feature that breaks out results from forum sites, such as Reddit, Quora, and smaller niche-specific forums.
- These are being included for queries that might benefit from hearing people’s real, unique experiences or perspectives.
- Authenticity is increasingly what searchers are looking for in an Internet crowded with disinformation and content that is ‘too good to be true.'
Why it Matters:
As more and more of the general public is made up of ‘digital natives’, people are more likely to deem things they read on the Internet as inauthentic. Many of us now see right through the positive, well-edited content on many websites when searching for honest opinions. For example, if people are searching for reviews of a specific product, they are increasingly aware that not only the brand’s website will talk about the product in a positive light, but other results in the SERP, such as affiliate bloggers, have incentives to do the same.
Searchers are increasingly looking for raw, authentic, and unbiased opinions on the Internet, and appending forum names like ‘reddit’ to the end to get these types of results is just the beginning of this new emphasis on Internet authenticity.
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By Adam Gent, the SEO Sprint
Key Takeaways:
- Implementing SEO recommendations (or getting technical elements implemented for ANY team) hinges on communicating the importance and impact of your recommendations.
- When you’re working with development or product teams, it’s CRUCIAL to get everyone on the same page by speaking the same language.
- Developing a common language starts with the end goal, uses empathy, and involves lots and lots of documentation and expectation setting.
Why it Matters:
Speaking the same language avoids the “lost in translation problem”, the technical jargon, and immediate “no” from the team receiving the request. This helps everyone work together and share the same brain. If you’re starting with the end in mind, you can all come to the table and develop solutions that work with and for the betterment of the project.
If you think about this as a healthcare team for an individual, your end goal is to get this person healthy, but that involves people from physical therapy, any specialty doctors, their family doctor, maybe their dentist, who all speak different specialty languages. The two things that unite all these folks is the language of medicine and their desire to achieve a great outcome.
Come together with empathy and paint it done with common language for every team you work with, and you’ll always get your SEO tasks implemented.
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By Brian Moseley, Semrush
Key Takeaways:
- Producing content for ecommerce sites can be challenging, often because it’s difficult to differentiate a product from the competition. It’s also difficult to prove if the content can be valuable.
- Semrush defines ‘helpful content’ as content that is relevant to a product and will help expand potential organic searches.
- Semrush’s split test shows a potential negative traffic trend when existing helpful content was removed from a product page, indicating that this type of content can be helpful for ecommerce SEO.
Why it Matters:
This article is timely, especially after the rollout of Google’s recent Helpful Content Update. As search engines evolve and Google catches up to SEO theory, we need to continue thinking about how to create relevant and valuable content for the people that visit our landing pages. While the results of this Semrush split test weren’t significant, the trend was still enough to conclude that Google may consider helpful content as a ranking factor, even before the update.
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Other Interesting Stories:
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