SEO Snack: Week of May 19th
Quick Week Summary
What I worked on this past week
First off, the reason this is a day late is that I feel like it’s extremely important to recognize/honor Memorial Day. If you reading this have served, have a family member who has served, lost anyone who has served, I sincerely appreciate the sacrifice you and your family have made.
This past week was a lot of quarterly planning meetings for clients (internal strategy, more on this below). I also worked on a lot of page linking, 301 setups, and also continued to work towards onboarding a new client which consisted of more client/competitor/keyword research.
Week Insights
What I struggled with
Pages Being Deindexed
This is sort of normal so not something I necessarily “struggled” with but for a few clients, there are some main pages that I would like to make sure are indexed. That just continues to not happen. As I’ve stated before, I use URL Monitor to help with this but it looks like they just continue to be deindexed.
What was a bigger headache than it needed to be
301 Redirects (Squarespace)
I personally use Squarespace for my website and also have a friend that I help with their website who uses it. To say that how they have their “developer tools” setup is lacking is an understatement. If you don’t use it or haven’t, you’re not missing out.
What went well
Client Kickoff Meeting
Last week I talked about how we were working on onboarding a new client and a part of that process is to have a kickoff meeting that showcases a few things (more on that below). It went really well and I feel like we’re off to a great start with our work, communication, and strategy put in place.
What to look out for or tune into
Google’s AI Overview (Scrutiny)
I talked a bit about Google’s AI Overview recently and it seems like a lot of what I thought was in line with others. Maybe we’re the minority but it seems like we’re the majority…
What weird things happened
Video On Product Page
I’m working on a website utilizing WooCommerce and I’ve been having a tough time getting a video to “surface” in the product gallery. I have some ideas but none have worked out quite yet.
Key Takeaways
1. SERP Volatility
So Google has announced recently that there has been no algorithmic actions for site reputation abuse yet but I don’t think I’m the only one seeing some interesting data the past week or so.
If you haven’t used or looked at SERP volatility before, it just gives a ranking to search engine results based on changes possibly happening and the amount of unpredictability of Google rankings.
As you can see recently, it’s been pretty high. I've done some digging to see if I just missed any algorithm changes/updates and I don’t see anything (I see the opposite) but based on this and a lot of data from clients over a similar time period, I wouldn’t be shocked if Google was working on a few things. Time will tell but as a reminder DO NOT let the recent traffic/keyword dips you might be experiencing change your whole strategy.
2. Quarterly SEO Planning
This one will be pretty quick but I just want to hit on the importance of this again. Throughout my SEO career so far, there have been times (early on) that I got very stagnant in strategy for clients.
Another blog here, another blog there, and we should be good to go. Reality was I wasn’t having much impact for our clients. Since realizing this, I’ve started to look at strategy differently. Is new content good? Absolutely but so are things like going back and linking old blogs to new, combining content, checking link structure, etc.
I strongly encourage you to look at SEO strategy at a quarterly perspective because you have previous months to look at performance and can start to pivot if needed. Some quarters, it’s just to keep on with the current strategy but at least you know you should instead of just doing it out of laziness (like I used to).
3. SEO Kickoff Meeting
I want to hit on a few things here. First, it’s important to do some extremely detailed research when starting with a client. If you can’t start to understand who they are, what they do, the industry, their competitors, etc., then you’re starting off on a rough start.
So much of this is done when we onboard a client and it gives us time to come to the table with questions (industry, company, verbiage, etc.) that will help us have the best impact for them we can.
The other piece I want to mention (since I didn’t do a great job of this at this last meeting) was to also ask the client what their understanding/background of SEO is and what they’re looking to get out of the kickoff meeting.
If you just go in and start talking, sharing ideas, etc. then you’re likely missing some key points they want to talk about or talking over their head. SEO isn’t simple and the lingo can be even more confusing, so take the time to help get them a foundation and here what they want to hit on when starting off with a client.
Resources To Look At
1. Key Events vs. Conversions
We recently wrote a short blog on what the difference is between key events and conversions for Google these days. Hopefully, it clears some confusion!
2. Semrush Sensor
To give you some tools to help with potential volatility, here is the link to the Semrush Sensor.
