This month's Searchlite intro written by SEO Analyst, Cristiana Hawthorne
As the saying goes, April showers bring May... Core Web Vitals updates? Turns out the old adage is wrong, and SEOs everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief. Google has decided to push out its page experience update, and will now start a gradual rollout in June. It won't be fully live now until August!
On the grand scale of the world, this is not a huge deal. If you planned on May, you've probably already looked into your page experience in Google Search Console and checked your Page Speed Insights.
If you haven't, now is a good time to take a peek at your client's or your own Core Web Vitals score, but before you jump into purchasing a CDN or redeveloping your whole site, take a look at how your site compares to competitors. If it's in the same range, there are likely bigger SEO priorities to concentrate on.
Moving on to this week's newsletter content, we have updates on Google's ad targeting, tips on successful site migration, how to surface content ideas with small keyword volume, and more.
Even cooler than all that, we have a special promotion with ContentKing this month. Searchlite users get a full 28-day free trial. Check it out, by clicking on our referral link, HERE.
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ContentKing is a platform built by a group of digital marketers, who were looking for a more scalable solution to auditing, reporting, and tracking content. And if Core Web Vitals are still top of mind, ContentKing has a solution for you, with their new Origin Core Web Vitals Monitoring. Get over there and try it out!
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by John Smith, for Uproer
Key Takeaways:
- Google is expanding the reach of its keyword match types to get more data and anonymize individual users.
- At the same time, it’s building up a new tracking and targeting mechanism focused on groups of users and cohorts, FLoC.
- As Google’s bid strategies get smarter, we will likely find ourselves doing less keyword maintenance and more algorithm management.
Why it Matters:
Last month, we shared an article in which some PPC specialists spotted a new, “smart” keyword match type in Google Ads. That got us thinking, so we decided to dive into the history of Google keyword updates to get a sense of how targeting might change in the coming years, especially with FLoC looming on the horizon.
Taken together, these trends will likely push PPC managers to rely more and more on first-party audiences. So as targeting changes, we recommend you begin to incorporate audiences into your strategies.
Start with observation of your top audiences, then layer in customer look-alike and custom intent. And be sure to measure everything you can on your site. When FLoC hits, granular first-party audiences will give you an advantage over your competitors who don’t have the data to compete.
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by Jacob Hurwith, for BuiltIn
Key Takeaways:
- SEO works in isolation, but really works best when you are able to incorporate and collaborate with other channels and departments
- SEOs should develop strong working relationships with product teams, web development teams, designers, content creators, SEMs, social media strategists, sales teams, and data analysts.
Why it Matters:
SEO can really easily be isolated, but at its core, it's an incredibly interdisciplinary field. We can optimize a blog for SEO, but you need a product or sale team member to check that the product placements are what they're looking for, and brand voice is spot on. A content creator or copywriter to write it, and a designer to make it look good.
You and the web developer need to work on the back end to make sure it looks good but is still built well. Then instead of just leaving the content for a few months until it ranks, work with the social and SEM teams to make sure it's promoted.
You can do a scaled-down version of this alone, but it's easier and more successful to do it with the expert resources around you. It also keeps you from running in circles, miscommunicating. Why not optimize content for both SEO, SEM, social, design, and email, all in one go, instead of later, realizing you missed an opportunity.
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by Chris Green
Key Takeaways:
- For a successful site migration, SEO should be in the room from the very beginning
- Critical decisions relating to SEO are often made before the SEO team even knows about the migration
- Before actually starting a migration, you should do a “premortem” in order to fully understand the financial risks of migrating and what could go wrong
Why it Matters:
In the ideation phase of a website migration, when everyone is excited about the possibility of a shiny new website, an important reality is often overlooked: poorly-planned migrations cost businesses real money - sometimes a lot of it. A decision as seemingly simple as what CMS to use can have enormous consequences for SEO, even if everything else is done right.
When you're planning your next website migration, heed Chris’s advice: start slow and deliberate, involve SEO from the earliest conversations, and do a real, honest, assessment of what you can stand to lose if things don’t go according to plan. It could ultimately mean the difference between a successful migration and a revenue disaster.
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Key Takeaways:
- When keyword tools tell you there is "0" search volume for a query, should you trust it? Not likely.
- You can find content ideas that have high traffic potential but will never show up in keyword tools, by listening to your audience (i.e., customers)
- If your audience is small, turn to forums and other sites where they might congregate and mine for frequently asked questions
Why it Matters: Keyword research tools have their place in any SEO strategy. But, if they're your sole driver of content ideas, then you're missing out on tons of search volume.
The reality is that these tools have limitations. They can only capture so much search activity and store so much data. There are keywords out there being searched hundreds, even thousands, of times per month that might never show up in your tool-based research.
So, where should you turn to uncover these hidden gems? Your customers. Find out what they're asking, either directly or from the people in your organization that talk to them the most (e.g., sales, customer service).
And, as SEOs, we can't eliminate keywords from the content plan just because Ahrefs or Semrush says they have no volume. We need to trust the insights we gain from asking our clients the right questions and optimize accordingly.
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by Mack DeGeurin, for eMarketer
Key Takeaways:
- Google is set to officially stop recognizing third-party cookies in the next two years, but their replacement for that data, FLoC, is getting criticism from major browsers and hosting services.
- WordPress, which makes up about 41% of all websites, is considering two proposals that address Google’s FLoC. In one proposal, WordPress would label FLoC a security threat and block the tracking outright, but in another, they are considering allowing users to toggle their decision and opt-in.
Why It Matters:
As we’ve said before, FLoC will not be as good as third-party data. Third-party-data-heavy strategies will see huge dips in performance. And as more browsers, search engines, and hosting providers chip away at FLoC, Google’s alternative will become even less effective as a tracking tool.
If WordPress labels FLoC a security threat, Google will lose a ton of behavioral data signals. Marketers need to start building contingency plans. If you rely on third-party behavior data, you will need to create a list of tactics and channels that you can pivot to if your strategy starts to sink.
Users have a right to privacy. If you’re going to pivot to first-party audiences, be sure you’re collecting this data ethically. Let users know you use remarketing audiences on your website and be sure your forms allow users to consent to emails, newsletters and remarketing. Because nobody likes spam, and nobody likes feeling like a company is following them around the internet.
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Other Interesting Stories:
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Free Tool of the Month:
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One of Uproer's favorite tactics is using Reddit to source content ideas and learn how people talk about a topic. Keyworddit is a free tool that extracts keyword ideas from subreddits. Just enter in a subreddit name to generate keywords.
This tool helps you quickly identify keywords being referenced across a subreddit, which can help guide your content strategy, inform your research for new pieces of content and provide interesting audience insights.
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