On December 1, 2021, Google began to roll out the second product reviews update of the year, the December 2021 product reviews update. This was at the tail-end of the November 2021 core update that finished rolling out the day before, on November 30, 2021 (note, this is an important point for this story). RankRanger and Semrush, two SEO toolsets, sent us data that showed that the December 2021 product reviews update was more volatile than the April 2021 product reviews update — but there may be some caveats to that.

Please note that Google told us that this product reviews update will take approximately three weeks to roll out and we are only now in the start of week two. So, the data may change but generally when Google rolls out these updates, the bulk of the impact you would see from an update would be in the first few days of that rollout.

Data providers show December was bigger than April

RankRanger. The RankRanger team first sent us their data showing that overall, the December fluctuations and volatility “were substantially higher in the top three and top five positions,” the company said. This is across comparing the changes in the top-three, top-five and top-ten ranking positions in Google Search:

This is also when looking at average position changes overall between April (in blue) and December (in orange) product reviews updates:

The company also broke down just the December volatility by niche across sectors by top-three, top-five and top-ten results. The company showed the top-five positions both retail and travel stand out as having the most fluctuations and in the top ten results, health and finance showed the most fluctuations.

And you can see, the RankRanger index tracker tool is now starting to show this update slow down a bit:

Top winners and losers were also provided by RankRanger, showing Tripadvisor, Choice Hotels, Agoda and Hotwire were the losers and Expedia, Kayak, U.S. News & World Report were the top gainers.

Semrush. The Semrush team first sent us their data showing that overall the December fluctuations and volatility also peaked at much higher rates than the April product reviews update. The company said that the volatility highs seen during the December update are far greater than what was recorded in the April update.

But Semrush said that if you look at the overall volatility, it would appear that the April update was 44% more volatile than the December update. That is likely because this year overall was a lot more volatile than previous years, sending the numbers a bit off overall. If you look at level of volatility as compared to what Semrush normally would see, the April Product Review Update was significantly more volatile. Here is that chart showing this data:

But again, this is not a normal year and the chart showing the peak volatility is probably a better measurement of which update was more significant.

Semrush also broke down this update by vertical for the top-five and top-ten search results. The shopping vertical seemed to have seen the most drastic movement with 6% of the top ten coming from positions 20+ — that would make sense, being this is a product reviews update.

The Semrush sensor tool is now starting to show this update somewhat slow down a bit:

Core update impact, if any?

Like I said above, this year overall was a lot more volatile than previous years, which may be setting some of this tracking off a bit. We just finished rolling out the November 2021 core update about 24 hours before the December product reviews update started to roll out. It is possible the tracking tools data may have some overlap. Between it being a crazy year with volatility in general, both in terms of confirmed and unconfirmed updates, and the confirmed updates being very close together, it is hard to say with 100% confidence which update was bigger.

Semrush did tell us that the November 2021 core update was bigger than the December product reviews update, but they are two different types of updates and that makes sense. In fact, The December product reviews update is not showing huge amounts of movement compared to the November core update, Semrush said.

In fact, Sistrix, another tool provider, told us early on that they did not see huge changes with this update and didn’t have data to share with us overall. They simply didn’t see huge changes with the products reviews update in general.

More on the December 2021 products reviews update

The SEO community. The December 2021 product reviews update, like I said above, was likely felt more than the April version. I was able to cover the community reaction in one blog post on the Search Engine Roundtable. It includes some of the early chatter, ranking charts and social shares from some SEOs. In short, if your site was hit by this update, you probably felt it in a very big way.

What to do if you are hit. Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by this product reviews update. We posted that advice in our original story over here. In addition, Google provided two new best practices around this update, one saying to provide more multimedia around your product reviews and the second is to provide links to multiple sellers, not just one. Google posted these two items:

• Provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience with the product, to support your expertise and reinforce the authenticity of your review.
• Include links to multiple sellers to give the reader the option to purchase from their merchant of choice.

Google product reviews update. The Google product reviews update aims to promote review content that is above and beyond much of the templated information you see on the web. Google said it will promote these types of product reviews in its search results rankings.

Google is not directly punishing lower quality product reviews that have “thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products.” However, if you provide such content and find your rankings demoted because other content is promoted above yours, it will definitely feel like a penalty. Technically, according to Google, this is not a penalty against your content, Google is just rewarding sites with more insightful review content with rankings above yours.

Technically, this update should only impact product review content and not other types of content.

Why we care. If your website offers product review content, you will want to check your rankings to see if you were impacted. Did your Google organic traffic improve, decline or stay the same? Long term, you are going to want to ensure that going forward, that you put a lot more detail and effort into your product review content so that it is unique and stands out from the competition on the web.

We hope you, your company and your clients did well with this update.

More on Google updates

Other Google updates this year. This year we had a number of confirmed updates from Google and many that were not confirmed . In the most recent order, we had: The July 2021 core update, Google MUM rolled out in June for COVID names and was lightly expanded for some features in September (but MUM is unrelated to core updates). Then, the June 28 spam update, the June 23rd spam update, the Google page experience update, the Google predator algorithm update, the June 2021 core update, the July 2021 core update, the July link spam update, and the November spam update rounded out the confirmed updates.

Previous core updates. The most recent previous core update was the November 2021 core update which rolled out hard and fast and finished on November 30, 2021. Then the July 2021 core update which was quick to roll out (kind of like this one) followed by the June 2021 core update and that update was slow to roll out but a big one. Then we had the December 2020 core update and the December update was very big, bigger than the May 2020 core update, and that update was also big and broad and took a couple of weeks to fully roll out. Before that was the January 2020 core update, we had some analysis on that update over here. The one prior to that was the September 2019 core update. That update felt weaker to many SEOs and webmasters, as many said it didn’t have as big of an impact as previous core updates. Google also released an update in November, but that one was specific to local rankings. You can read more about past Google updates over here.

The post Google’s December 2021 product reviews update was bigger than the April product reviews update, say data providers appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Content has become the primary tool we use to create a dialogue with our prospects and cultivate online customer relationships. That content must be relevant, valuable and interactive to win their attention and draw them into a conversation. In reality, content has always been the best way to do marketing.

But with the overabundance of information overloading your customers and prospects, it becomes difficult for them to find a trustworthy source of information. The solution is more than positioning your brand as the expert in your niche by creating content and reaping the rewards. It is optimizing your content for organic, paid traffic and site search that converts.

By exploring the relationship between SEO, SEM and on-site search, you can begin to optimize the experience your prospects get when they arrive at your site. 

Learn more by watching Coveo’s Director of Product Marketing, Stephen Rahal’s informative SMX Next session for tips and tricks on creating an onsite search strategy that helps you better understand each visit and optimize every interaction.

After this session, you’ll be able to educate your teams about the value of onsite search and why you need to invest now; benchmark your site search and learn what capabilities are key to boosting conversion; rethink how you design navigation and map user journeys with artificial intelligence and start unifying your search and web analytics data to understand customer intent better.

Ensure that every visitor you get through organic and paid search finds what they’re looking for. Sign up here to learn more about on-site search.

The post Why on-site search is the best investment you’ll make in 2022 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Messy SEO is a column covering the nitty-gritty, unpolished tasks involved in the auditing, planning, and optimization of websites, using MarTech’s new domain as a case study.

This installment of “Messy SEO” details my process of addressing the SERP title change made to one of our most important MarTech pages. In Part 3, we discussed the tactics we used to fix broken images, find the correct replacements and, ultimately, improve user experience.

RELATED: Navigating Google’s title changes: The rollout, what’s happening now and what you can do about it

Analyzing the Google SERP title tag changes

Ever since Google announced changes to its SERP page title generation process, SEOs have been scrambling to measure its impact, adjusting their strategies when necessary. Many organizations saw minor changes to their site’s title tags, but there were some notable exceptions. Our team, in particular, noticed a major edit to our MarTech mission page title link (the title of a search result in Google Search).

The SERP title was changed to “MarTech is Marketing Logo,” (shown above) which is pulled from our MarTech site’s header logo alt text. Whereas the original title link (shown below) was our chosen title (“What is MarTech? …This is MarTech”), Google opted to display a piece of alt text that gives little context and fails to encourage clicks.

Reviewing the changes in clicks and CTR

Most of the MarTech SERP title changes we’ve seen haven’t changed drastically. As a result, their clicks, impressions and CTR numbers stayed at expected levels over the past few months.

But, we wanted to zoom in on the search metrics for our “What is Martech?” page to see what impact an unwanted title change made by Google has had, especially since it’s one of our most visited pages. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t good.

Knowing the SERP title change took place between October 27 and November 1, we compared the page’s November performance to its October results. We found that the page’s total clicks decreased from 2,301 to 1,500 and the average CTR went from 3.1% to 2%.

The total impressions went from 73,691 to 75,427 and the average position remained 12.7. This implies that the SERP title change hasn’t affected visibility or rankings (as Google said it wouldn’t), but rather heavily discouraged people from clicking on the result.

Clearly, the SERP title change hurt our traffic, so we needed to find a way to address it.

Taking steps to change the SERP title

Waiting for Google to change the title on its own is the last thing we wanted to do. We decided to take action right away. Here are a few of the tactics we’ve tried so far.:

• Resubmit the page. We immediately resubmitted the page to Google via Search Console. While this isn’t likely to change anything, there’s always the chance it helps crawlers pick up on page elements they’ve missed — in this case, our title tag.
• Update the title tag. Since it appears the algorithm had an issue with our chosen tag, we made an adjustment. We were careful not to transform it completely; it is now ”What is MarTech? …MarTech is Marketing.” This version more clearly points to the topic of the page, which we hope Google notices.
• Add contextual internal links. There are already plenty of internal links pointing to this page, but we wanted to be sure Google had plenty of context. So, we added more links with contextual anchor text to the page — keyword phrases such as “what is martech,” “martech is marketing,” or simply “martech” — to show the crawlers what this page is actually about.
• Monitor the SERPs. We’re keeping an eye on our title link to see if these changes helped. We will continue repeating these steps every week or two — as long as it takes.

Have your title links experienced major changes over the past few months? What strategies have you implemented and have any been successful? Email me at cpatterson@thirddoormedia.com with the subject line “Messy SEO Part 4” to let me know.

More Messy SEO

Read more about our new MarTech domain’s SEO case study.

• Part 1: Navigating a site consolidation migration
• Part 2: The importance of canonicalization
• Part 3: How to find cached images and improve user experience

The post When Google’s title change goes wrong appeared first on Search Engine Land.

“When I talk about the metrics that will help you get and secure and keep buy-in, I come to you with a perspective of operations,” said Jessica Bowman, CEO of SEOinhouse.com, in her presentation at SMX Next. “How do we get other people involved in SEO as well?

SEOs are constantly searching for new ways to prove their work’s value to higher-ups. And, many prefer to let the results speak for themselves. But, as Bowman argues, it’s often more effective presenting executives with actionable metrics that get them involved in operations.

Here are three metrics Bowman recommends SEOs hone in on to secure that coveted buy-in so that they can continue to improve the visibility of their brands.

Metrics that can change the conversation

“SEO operations . . . is focusing on how you go about getting the SEO strategies and tactics done,” Bowman said. “Dp that well and you start setting yourself apart from the competition because most companies don’t address SEO operations.”

“Now we can take this framework and kind of shrink it down and make it [into] a strategy scorecard,” she added.

The SEO strategy scorecard framework gives executives and other departments a clear look into your tactics and what they’re designed to achieve. In her version, Bowman links these strategies to one of two categories: those that grow SEO traffic and those that accelerate SEO through operations.

Bowman says you can add more insight by featuring metrics such as estimated revenue. Highlighting these numbers can be pivotal in getting executives talking about SEO’s value.

Metrics that can get executives to recognize SEO’s value

“What I find is that SEO teams spend a lot of time fixing SEO problems that other teams introduced,” said Bowman. “And when you’re working on this stuff, it is time not spent on growing SEO revenue.”

Bowman recommends SEOs start reporting on time spent fixing SEO problems stemming from other departments. The goal should be to get executives to realize that prioritizing SEO training and department accountability will prevent these issues.

The point isn’t to create animosity between departments, but rather to identify roadblocks in SEO operations and show why they’re valuable.

Here are specific issues Bowman suggests SEOs identify:

• Changes in core web vitals metrics;
• Changes in page speed metrics;
• 4xx URLs in tags;
• 3xx URLs in tags; and
• Schema errors.

Metrics that can forecast SEO success

Executives and other higher-ups want to know your SEO projects are on track to meet specific goals. That’s why Bowman suggests marketers report on the most pertinent metrics — these are the campaign’s critical drivers.

“It is not uncommon for project managers and executives to talk about critical drivers,” Bowman said. “What is uncommon is to report on critical drivers.”

“These are metrics that tell you, and executives, if you even have a chance of reaching the SEO goals,” she added.

As Bowman says, critical drivers are well-known to the leaders of any organization. But when SEOs lay these out in their reporting, it gives decision-makers a clear roadmap and proves their worth that much more.

“The important thing to think about these critical drivers is that they are reports on the activities that must happen to achieve the revenue goals,” she said.

“When you communicate it in this method, this will get executives focusing on the right teams to do what needs to happen to grow SEO,” she added.

Watch the full SMX Next presentation here (registration required).

The post 3 SEO metrics to help secure executive-level buy-in appeared first on Search Engine Land.

IndexNow has now been turned on by over 60,000 websites that use Cloudflare in less than two months after IndexNow was announced by Microsoft. IndexNow is an open protocol that any search engine can participate in to enable site owners to have their pages and content instantly indexed by the search engine. 

Microsoft and Cloudflare announced today that “more than 60,000 unique websites that have opted-in to Crawler Hints. Those zones have sent Bing about billion Hints for when specific assets on their websites have changed and need to be re-crawled.” I turned it on for the Search Engine Roundtable, my personal search blog, when it was announced.

How to turn it on. It literally is controlled by the flip of a switch in Cloudflare under the crawler hints section that you can access under the cache tab, then under the configuration section:

Microsoft said once this setting is enabled it, IndexNow “will begin sending hints to search engines about when they should crawl particular parts of your website.”

Google may adopt it. Google said recently that it too will test the IndexNow protocol for indexing. So while Microsoft Bing and Yandex are the only two who have fully adopted it, if Google adopts it, you can expect other search engines to as well.

Why we care. Like we said before, instant indexing is an SEO’s dream when it comes to giving search engines the most updated content on a site. The protocol is very simple and it requires very little developer effort to add this to your site, so it makes sense to implement this if you care about speedy indexing. Plus if you use Cloudflare, it can be turned on with the flip of a switch.

The post 60,000 websites using Cloudflare turned on IndexNow appeared first on Search Engine Land.

“Everyone has annoying tasks in their job that you wish you could hire someone else to do, and at this point, you could automate it,” said Colt Sliva, SEO Engineer at iPullRank, in his presentation at SMX Next. “Additionally, you can be effective even when you’re not available.”

Many SEOs, however, lack the programming knowledge to set these systems up themselves, which is why automation tools are on the rise. Choosing one may seem daunting with so many automation resources, including no-code, low-code, and maximum-code options. But, as Sliva points out, there is always a tool available, no matter your technical literacy.

Selecting a marketing automation tool is just the first part of this process. Here are some actionable steps Sliva recommends marketers take to automate their SEO tasks.

Create a data storage space

Every marketer has their tool preferences, but Sliva recommends using Google Sheets and its macro scheduling when setting up SEO task automation. “What it will do is run a crawl in your site on a schedule and then write that straight into a single excel sheet,” he said, “You get a summarization of all the features of the crawl, and that data is saved in a sheet.”

Craft data visualizations

Whether you want to focus on missing HTML elements such as title tags, meta descriptions or H1 tags, or more technical components like orphan URLs or XML sitemap issues, creating visualizations can help marketers better analyze their data.

Sliva shared some helpful SEO data visuals from Dan Sharp of Screaming Frog, highlighting different ways marketers can display their automated crawl data.

Develop a feedback loop

Once the data storage and visualization elements are in place, marketers will want to ensure their automation systems can detect significant crawling issues on a regular basis. SEO should use tools that highlight these problems.

Sliva pointed to a significant indexability issue shown in his own automated report: “I can see that there’s been an issue in the past here with total internal non-indexable URLs, where the number of indexable URLs completely flip-flopped and most of the site was non-indexable. That is a clear problem that we would want a feedback loop for.”

Build SEO alerts

Automation systems that fail to notify SEOs of issues aren’t helpful, even if they can identify them properly. Sliva recommended using a script that pings specialists when a set number of issues arise — in his case, non-indexable URLs.

“It grabs the active spreadsheet of the current sheet and then it gets the range of data and grabs the last column and last row. So we have a complete section, and then it grabs the 11th column, which just happens to be the non-indexable column.”

SEOs can use scripts of this sort to set automated alerts for a variety of issues, allowing team members to begin working on solutions as soon as problems arise.

Automate SEO processes with programming tools

Here are some additional tasks SEOs can automate with their chosen tools, according to Sliva.

• Automated segmentation;
• Internal link analysis; and
• SEO data extraction.

“There are endless automation opportunities,” he said. “And that is exciting once you start to track these patterns and these simple programming concepts to get this work done.”

Sliva offered a caveat to automation implementation: “If you could spend 10 minutes doing the task manually and then you decide to spend 10 hours writing the code — and you don’t do that task very often — you probably don’t need to automate that task.”

But often, the advantages outweigh the costs. It all depends on your campaign goals and workload. “The benefits are speeding up your tasks, removing obstacles, and lightening your workload,” said Sliva.

“It’s just a fun problem to solve. If you enjoy solving problems, this is for you,” he added.

Watch the full SMX Next presentation here (registration required).

The post 5 steps to automate your SEO processes using simple programming tactics appeared first on Search Engine Land.