David_Lewallen_bSEO-Google_Update_-_HCU.pdf

Transcript

1. Recovering from a Massive Google Update. David Lewallen Verbatim Digital https://speakerdeck.com/davidi lewallen @davidilewallen @davidilewallen
2. Poll How many of you have been hit by a Google update?
3. Our SEO strategy was strong We played a safe and conservative SEO strategy. We were up +43% over 3 quarters.
4. Then one October day, things took a slight turn Our page 1 rankings Dropped -20% M/M in October.
5. Then downward trend continued Continued into November
6. After 3 months of decline, we had a real challenge By December Our page 1 rankings had Dropped -35% Essentially negating all the improvements we had made over the course of the year.
7. What do you do when you’ve been hit by a massive update. 1. Rely on your SEO Experience and Foundation 2. Consult your network, reach out to your mentors 3. Confirm with the Community
8. Conduct the Right Audits 1. Content Audit - Since it was a Helpful Content Update, the first advice was to conduct a content audit of your entire site. 2. Technical Audit - I wanted to be sure there wasn’t something technical that I didn’t know about.
9. What was new about this Content Audit?: 1. Full-Site Audit a. Expanded scope to include all sections of the site, not just SEO-priority areas. 2. Semantic Duplicate Detection a. Leveraged Screaming Frog’s Semantically Similar feature to identify duplicate or near- duplicate content. 3. Deeper Engagement Analysis a. Used GA4’s Engagement metrics for a more accurate read on user behavior. 4. Updated SEO Scoring Model a. Incorporated these new signals into our proprietary SEO Score for stronger prioritization.
10. Information Architecture: Information architecture is the foundation of a good SEO campaign. We made sure to build our content plan was build on a foundation of a world class information architecture system.
11. We worked on the UX of the category pages. We redesigned the category pages for clarity and usability, adding clean layouts, images, and sub-navigation links to make them easy to browse. In order to make it as painless as possible for the client, we used only templates that they already had and made them work for our purposes.
12. Added helpful content identified through keyword research: Our research showed users had product questions we weren’t answering that other websites were. We created a plan to address all major user issues with dedicated content.
13. Optimized and added content Where appropriate The audit uncovered that most of the content in the support section was incredibly thin. Most pages had one or 2 sentences. We build full how-to, long form article pages out of each and every support section topic where appropriate, added helpful images, internal links linking to deeper content,
14. Fixed Scores of Duplicate Content We identified scores of duplicate and near content. In some cases there were 3 or more pages discussing the same topic. We took the opportunity to consolidate all the content that was helpful, add more content when needed and redirect all old pages with SEO value to the canonical page.
15. After six months of planning, writing, and optimizing, we launched our first rebuilt section.
16. August 2024 was the highlight of the year. In July we launched our first rebuilt section. August we celebrated getting back to even on our main KPI +7% YoY
17. We were not out of the woods yet. But in September, our client launched a new section of the website without consulting the SEO team. -12% YoY
18. But by the end of the year, we had reached our goal. By the close of the year, we had not only regained everything we’d lost but also hit the projections we had set out to achieve the year before. +75% Y/Y
19. Marketing Your Brand in the Age Of AI