Is there a correlation between the author of an article and higher rankings? In other words, does Google “know” if a person is an expert in their subject, and rank a given article by them higher than a “non-expert” in that same field? This is a question that comes up a lot because of E-A-T […]
Does Author Expertise Help SEO? The Truth About E-A-T
9 Things You Need to Know Before Hiring a Web Design Agency
Choosing a web design agency to build your website is a daunting choice. A new website is a big investment, and if you get it wrong, it can be thousands of dollars in your marketing budget gone to waste. It’s difficult to discern between all the different choices — there’s so many web agencies out […]
Google Does Not Use Webspam Reports for Manual Penalties
Many people see competitors “breaking the rules” on Google guidelines and engaging in ranking manipulation. You may be surprised to learn, when you report your competitors using the Google webspam form, they don’t automatically slap a manual penalty on your competitors. There are an estimated 1.74 billion websites in 2020 (at the time of this […]
Using Google Natural Language API to Analyze Content
You have likely heard of RankBrain, the machine learning aspect of Google’s ranking algorithm. How does a search engine extract semantic meaning from a web page? When evaluating the subject matter of a page, how does it “understand” what the content is about? There is a Google API (Application Programming Interface) that shows how their […]
Does Adding Text To E-Commerce Category Pages Help SEO?
Google representative John Mueller, when asked about optimizing e-commerce category pages, noted that if there is too much text on the page, then the algorithm may be confused whether it is an informational page or not. He suggests some text on the page may help. The caution is to not go overboard with blindly writing […]
2019 Year in Review
Around this time each year, I publish a year in review post. This is to help me reflect on what has happened and what I’ve learned. It’s also to help me look back and see what progress I’ve made. If you want to track the progress over time, check out the years in review for […]
High Impressions, Low Clicks and Few Leads: How To Fix It?
Published November 11th, 20194 Comments on High Impressions, Low Clicks and Few Leads: How To Fix It?What if you have a page on your website getting a ton of impressions in Google Search Console, but you aren’t getting much business from that page? A question we recently came across deals with this dilemma. The page is focused on business objectives, (like a services page), and the page receive more impressions than […]
Google BERT Update: Understanding Search Queries More Effectively
Published October 29th, 2019No Comments on Google BERT Update: Understanding Search Queries More EffectivelyGoogle announced on October 25th, 2019 that they are rolling out a new update to their algorithm, named BERT. BERT is an acronym for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. The “transformers” are words that change the context or a sentence or search query. The “encoder representations” are subtle concepts and meanings in natural language that […]
Did Your Keyword Rankings Drop? Rethinking The Ranking Algorithm
Published October 23rd, 20193 Comments on Did Your Keyword Rankings Drop? Rethinking The Ranking AlgorithmWhen your rankings suddenly drop in Google, do you immediately think it was an algorithm change? Or that you got a Google penalty? The reality is, Google is starting to figure out what the majority of people want to find when they type in a given search query. This is why the Google representatives say […]
How Does Google Know Users Are Satisfied With a Web Page?
How does the Google ranking algorithm know if users are happy with a web page? You probably think that the algorithm uses data from Google Analytics to measure if a page deserves to go up or down in rankings. What if I told you that Google Analytics is there for webmasters, and not for Google […]