SEO Snack: Week of April 28th

Quick Week Summary

This past week was working on finishing up some April work (new pages & page edits), looking at April data (both analytics and SEMRush data), and having some conversations around the processes we have for page edits & new pages as well as our monthly approach to work we’re doing for clients which I’ll likely share more on next week.

Week Insights

1. What I struggled with: Optimize Then Combine vs. Combine Then Optimize

With a lot of clients we’ve been working with lately, they have a lot of content (blogs, ebooks, etc.). This is a great thing, something that I truly like to see but at times it’s not the “best content” (specifically from an SEO & Google perspective). Now there’s opportunity to combine similar topic content but the question is, do you do this before you start to optimize content or after? More on this below.

2. What was a bigger headache than it needed to be: Interactive Map

One thing I’ve been working on for a client is an interactive map component. Now their site is an older build (that we didn’t do) and it’s not the most design-friendly. I’ve tried to do something with their GBP, looked at other potential solutions, and also just did a simple image. As much as I’d love it to be interactive, I’ve struggled to find a way to do this…

3. What went well: Indexed Pages = Better Keyword Quality

Over the past few weeks, I’ve worked on getting pages indexed faster. What’s occurred is that these pages are starting to rank for keywords quicker but also some very quality keywords. More on this below but it's something that’s been a big win recently.

4. What to look out for or tune into: False or Exaggerated Promises

This is a WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR piece. With working with a friend and his buddi’s small business, I ran across another example of other marketers claiming things that just aren’t true and promising results that are pretty unrealistic. It’s happened with large companies and small one-person businesses, so be careful. More on this below.

5. What weird things happened: Google Search Market Share

This is a piece I get asked about by some clients every now and then, should we focus on other search engines? While it’s not a bad thought, Google is still very dominant here. Now I believe back in 2023, there was news that Google’s share dropped about 9%, well apparently that’s not 100% accurate. See the resources below to get some more insight into it.

Key Takeaways

1. Combine vs. Optimize

As I was talking about before, when a client comes to us with a lot of content, it’s a great thing. So often I start working on a client that just doesn’t have content (blogs or really anything). Now the other end is just pushing stuff out as fast as possible, that’s not ideal either (better than the other side though).

Now my recommendation is to take a good look at how much of this content has similar topics to other pieces and put a plan in place to merge some of it together so you’re not cannibalizing yourself.

This comes second most times though in my opinion. When a website is seeing a bigger dip in traffic, (after doing page edits and optimization) I recommend taking a look at content that previously (or still has a good amount of traffic) and optimize it from the jump. You can always come back and add to it by merging other content to it but if you don’t take action on what used to perform well, you might lose out on traffic that could be grabbed quickly.

2. Indexing (Quality) Pages

When creating new pages, quality (design, content, and SEO) is important but if you aren’t getting those pages indexed, a lot of the time your work is going to “waste”. This is something I fell into a lot early on when learning SEO.

I would take a lot of time to work on those three pieces and just sit and wait for impact to happen. Shocker, it normally took a while since they weren’t indexed quickly.

Now that I’ve started to focus on getting pages indexed more, it’s helped increase the traffic, keywords, and overall authority of these pages at a faster pace than usual. Now for some sites, this might not mean a lot if they already rank for a lot of keywords and have high amounts of traffic but one client we recently onboarded didn’t have either of these, and getting new pages indexed has helped in many areas. QUALITY pages are the focus here though.

3. False Promises

I believe I’ve hit on this before but it continues to surface with people I talk to. Whether it’s how “with our SEO services, we’ll increase traffic 200% in 2 months” or “We’ll get you 5x the conversions with the Google Ads we’ll set up for you in a month”, it’s the same song being sung.

I’m not saying most marketers do this (and I hope they don’t) but it’s the bruises that show themselves the most and it can really hurt people whether that’s just putting a bad taste about marketing in a bigger company’s mouth or “stealing” money from small businesses that don’t have the budget flexibility.

My belief is the more we can be honest, transparent, and genuinely under promise, the more we improve the reputation marketers (especially SEO) have and to me, that’s worth it, rather than taking the easy dollar over-promising and under-delivering.

Resources To Look At

1. Google’s Search Market Share News

As much as I’ve struggled with analytics, it looks like I’m not the only one. There was false reported data on search engine market share that’s being revised.

Check it out here

2. Potential Instructional Videos?

This is more of a question but I’ve started to think about the idea of doing more instructional videos around SEO and analytics. Whether it’s “how to set up GA4” or “what I look at when optimizing pages”, I feel like it might be helpful but I’d love some feedback on it. Let me know if this would be helpful and if there are specific things I could chat through/show that would be a benefit.