In the latest edition of the Digital Breakthroughs Podcast – National Positions CEO Bernard May (virtually) sat down with SEO expert and strategist Holly Miller Anderson to unpack 20 SEO success strategies that businesses and brands around the world can put into practice.
As a former head of SEO for brands like Macy’s and Bloomingdales, Holly’s invaluable insight into SEO’s impact on eCommerce and search rankings could not have come at a better time for our listeners and readers.
Let’s dive into this episode of the Digital Breakthroughs Podcast!
Today’s Guest – Holly Miller Anderson
Holly Miller Anderson is a seasoned SEO strategist. In her career, she’s worked at agencies, she’s advised B2B and B2C brands, she’s worked with startups, and most recently, she served as the SEO in-house product manager for macys.com and bloomingdales.com. Welcome, Holly. It’s so great to have you on the show today.
1. What to Do When Rankings Start to Dip
I’ve had a lot of experience working with different B2B and B2C companies, and as I said, going from agency to consulting, so I’ve really gotten to see quite a bit of a range with what works and what doesn’t.
But what I’ve come to find is kind of the core pillars of what does work is something that was developed by Jessica Bowman. She has a book called The SEO Playbook. I highly recommend it. The best thing that I can say about this book is that it has a visual representation of what works, the pillars that are SEO, and every team in an organization plays a part in contributing to SEO success, or they can detract from it.
2. Focus on What You Can Control
You really want to be looking at the things that you have control over as a marketing leader or an SEO lead within your company. Those things are that your content, your actual website content, your internal links, and which pages you’re pointing to, how the page gets crawled, and rendered.
You can also be really looking at your information architecture. That’s how your entire website is put together in terms of your site map, how that’s presented to both search engines and people when you have a site map page that people can look at as well.
3. The User Experience in 2020
I will say one of the more nebulous things, but one of the other things to really be aware of, is user experience. This is becoming even more of a factor. People, if they can’t easily navigate your website, they’ll leave. Marketers really need to be aware of what device people are using when they’re accessing their website. Is it a mobile phone, a desktop? That’s going to really guide the content that you provide and how your site is linked and how it’s architected so that people can navigate it easily.
4(a). What Is Content in 2020?
It’s so interesting because content right now, content is everything. It’s anything that a business puts out onto the web. It can be anything that you put onto your YouTube page. It can be things that go onto social media. It can be your blogs. It’s your email. It’s the actual content that’s on your website as well. It could be a podcast. Content is the thing that the customer, the consumer, can absorb that you’ve put out there.
4(b). Your Content & SEO in 2020
You as a marketer, and this is where SEO really comes in, is you have to understand how search engines will consume that content and help it to rank and how people will consume it as well. The written form of content is important because search engines, they don’t know what visuals are. They don’t know what a video is. They can’t watch the video, so you have to describe it for them.
Same thing with images.
When you’re thinking about content, you have to think about, “How does the search engine need to understand what this content is and what it should be ranking for?” And then, “How does the consumer want to see this as well?” If they want a video, that’s great, perfectly fine, but we’re going to work in some elements in there to make sure that that type of content is optimized for search engines as well.
5. How Do You Know If Rankings Are Dropping?
There’s two pieces to that question that I want to make sure that users are aware of. One is the first piece, which is, how do you know? If you’re using any kind of tracking software like Moz or SEMrush, you can usually use those to track your URL and keyword rankings, and you will see a drop in those rankings. That will cause you to question and think about what’s going on there.
6. Rankings vs. Traffic vs. Conversions
The other piece of it is I really want to take a moment to define the difference between rankings, traffic, and conversions. It’s really important to make sure you clarify, like when you do see a drop happen, the rankings are really where you sit, where your listing actually sits on the Google search engine results page on desktop and mobile.
Traffic is what you get to your website. Organic traffic is the best, the free type that everybody wants in terms of SEO. There’s also direct traffic and referral traffic. Conversions are really the actions that users will take on your site, like they will purchase something, they’ll sign up for your newsletter, download a whitepaper, those kinds of things.
That’s why it’s really important to understand the difference between, “Is my traffic decreasing or are my rankings decreasing?” Those two things you can kind of tackle a little bit differently, but knowing at least which one is decreasing, depending on the tool that you’re looking at, that’s going to give you the understanding of, “Okay. How can we take action?”
7(a) Did You Do Something to Impact Your Rankings?
I’ve kind of been thinking about it in terms of three factors. There’s three basic reasons or hypotheses, if you will, for why rankings drop.
The conclusion I’ve kind of come to is it’s one of three things, or maybe a combination therein, but it’s either something changed on your site that you were responsible for, like your internal teams may have changed something, pushed some new content live, migrated a portion of the website and not the entire thing, those kinds of things. You did something that’s causing a change.
7(b) Did Google Do Something to Impact Your Rankings?
Google did something. Usually, that’s considered an algorithm update. Unfortunately, that happens a lot, but Google could change something and that’s when rankings can fluctuate. You can definitely see a lot of movement when that happens.
7(c) Is Something External Impacting Your Rankings?
The third factor is something external in the market that is affecting your rankings. Case in point, it can be a global pandemic where people are changing their search behaviors and their buying patterns as well. They’re home more often. Those kinds of things can affect both traffic and rankings to your site.
8. Diving Deeper Into a Rankings Drop
There’s so many different types of scenarios. I’ll just give you kind of a couple that I’ve seen. It can be something as simple as a folder gets moved in your CMS, or your content management system. That’s a whole section of content for your website. If Google can’t find that, then you’re going to lose rankings for those pages.
Code can be updated and pushed live that can break other pieces of code that have already been written or it can get overwritten. You’re overwriting some of the other code. That’s certainly happened before, and you have to roll things back and that can certainly affect your rankings.
9. Google Bots and Indexing
I’ve seen Googlebot just being blocked from crawling and indexing important pages of your website because someone made a change to the robots, that text file. They forgot a slash or they used disallow and it’s like it changes everything. It changes the way Google’s crawling your site.
Really, you have to be a good detective in a way to find the source of the problem. The good news though is if these internal things do happen, if you have really good open lines of communication with your team across the company, you can usually trace it back to the source and figure out what went wrong or what changed and then quickly take steps to kind of correct it.
10. Google and Broad Core Updates
They make thousands. They can be small tweaks. It’s almost like an earthquake. I think I’ve heard it referred to that in a way. Yeah. They make changes all the time.
I was looking through the recent May 2020 broad core update and super interesting to read the webmaster blog on this because it’s still kind of being considered the same broad core update. It’s like, “We’re focusing on content, the quality of content, and the relevancy.” There’s not much that changes there, but it certainly does affect different industries differently.
11. Google’s Webmaster Blog
I will say that if you have the time, go check that article out. I think I tried to tweet it at one point. If you follow me on Twitter at some point, you’d be able to find the article.
But they have a really great list of self-evaluation questions in the article that can help you to kind of self-diagnose and ask your teams, “Is our content authoritative? Is this something that we can really stand behind? Are we really providing value to the customer? Is this the best piece of content given that someone else has published content on that same topic?”
Really a good opportunity for website masters and people who work on websites and also the contributors, the content, and the editors to say … Hold yourselves accountable and say, “Is this really the best quality? Does this deserve to be ranking as high as it does?”
12. Diagnosing External Factors
It’s almost like having to also diagnose whether an algorithm update did or did not impact our site. One of the things I do quickly try to remind people is to say make sure you can validate that an algorithm update is moving through the web because you can’t point the finger at Google if they haven’t … They don’t always confirm an update, but sometimes they do. The May update has been confirmed. You can kind of benchmark a little bit off of that.
With external factors, it is difficult to understand what could be affecting my rankings, but I like to look across a couple of different tools, market insight tools that I happen to use that kind of give me some indication about consumer trends or things happening in business landscape, just what might be going on in the world that might be affecting my rankings.
13. Tools for Uncovering the (SEO) Truth
The five tools that I usually refer to are Google Trends. That’s a free tool. It’s fantastic. Something called SparkToro developed by Rand Fishkin. There’s another tool called Glimpse. Another one, eMarketer. They have a really great newsletter, by the way, lots of data. Then Pinterest Trends is really interesting. Kind of being able to look across those different tools and say, “Is there a pattern? Has something changed? Is there something that has become a little more relevant to consumers more recently?”
Those types of things may kind of give you clues as to where the attention is going on the web.
14. Leveraging Google Analytics
I think with Google Analytics, that is your traffic tool. With Search Console, that’s going to give you an indication of your rankings because it will show you your impressions. That doesn’t translate into hard traffic. That’s kind of why you maybe want to be looking across both of those two tools to see what’s really going on.
But the kind of questions I like to ask myself when I’m in that tool is, at least within Analytics, you say, “What pages started receiving less traffic and when did that happen?” When you can start to isolate that, then you can get a sense of, “Okay, was there something that someone changed about those pages or was there an algorithm update that is in particular about an aspect of our site that maybe is impacting things like user experience?”
Maybe we have some really heavy pages that are just not performing well. Could be something about quality or being more transparent with consumers about your products and your services, things like that.
15. Leveraging Google Search Console
When you’re in Search Console, you want to look at … You want to ask the question rather, “Has the crawl rate decreased and when did that occur?”
If you’re seeing a decrease in kind of Google coming back to your page and not crawling you as often, maybe you need to evaluate, “Are my pages as relevant for queries that are happening right now? Maybe I need to reevaluate the content that I have, make sure that the freshest content is out there, that the page is crawled and indexed and ready to go. It’s ready to be ranked.”
Those are some questions that you might want to ask when you’re looking at those different tools.
16. What If You Are Not Technical?
They’re skills that I’ve started to develop over the last couple of years, but if you have an agency partner that you work with, usually your account manager, if you’ve got someone that is supposed to be your SEO lead, I think that person can certainly tell you, can give you that kind of insight.
You can talk to your developers.
I wouldn’t really necessarily talk to a website designer so much as I would talk to the person who’s worked on the code and at least can help you understand when Googlebot comes through if they’re able to look at those types of like log files. That gets really technical, but if they’re able to see those types of things, they can kind of help you assess whether or not Googlebot has actually come through and crawled your pages.
17. Google Core Web Vitals Update for 2020
This is something that was really just recently announced to the street by Google. This concept of Core Web Vitals, it’s a new feature within Google Search Console. Also a really important aspect of being able to have access to that data because that’s a new tab, a new section within Search Console that you want to start playing around with and taking a look at that data.
At a high level, this is really Google trying to make it easier for webmasters to understand the vital signs across the different tool sets that they try to provide. These are basic things like page speed, mobile-friendliness.
The two really important things to note here about this kind of announcement is that Core Web Vitals will be incorporated into Google’s ranking algorithm. That’s what we’re hearing. We already know that something like page speed is a ranking factor, so that’s why you want to start getting familiar with this data, start understanding how it’s looking at your website, what are the things you need to be sprucing up before next year.
18. Google Core Web Vitals Impact for 2021
The other piece of that is just the timeline. Google has said that they’ll try to give at least six months’ notice before these signals start taking effect in 2021, but the fact that it’s already available in Search Console really just means like dive in, get in there and see what’s going on, start having those conversations with your teams to get familiar with where your website can stand to be improved in terms of these signals.
I actually wanted to give a quick shout out. I tweeted an article that Marie Haynes Consulting did a Roundup on this topic. It’s great. Again, more links for your users, more resources. I love to share good information. They did a really great article to kind of sum this up, so it might be good to bookmark that.
19. Adapting During Covid-19
The biggest change between 2020 and 2019 is COVID, is the pandemic. That has been something that really it’s the elephant in the room for a lot of people.
It’s caused such a change in search trends and a shift from retail goods or people buying more retail goods. That’s the biggest thing that I think people need to, marketers really need to, be aware of is this is an external factor that is really … It’s changing everyone’s life in lots of different ways.
Being able to provide helpful information, reliable information, accurate information, good products and services, that’s really what people are really looking for.
It’s only going to continue to, just from Google’s perspective, they just want to provide a fast, great, seamless user experience. In a nutshell, those are the things that you kind of have to be always working towards.
20. Resources & Recommendations From Holly
I hope I don’t leave anybody out. I know a lot of great people in the industry. I am not the smartest person in the room, but I love being able to learn from other people and read their blogs.
Some of the people that I think your users would really benefit from following or reading their blogs is one by Glenn Gabe, another one from AJ Khan. Andrew Shotland is really great. If you have a local business, he’s absolutely … He has a very, very good understanding. He’s been in the industry a long time about local search in particular.
Eli Schwartz is also a really great resource. He blogs quite a bit. And Bill, I hope I don’t butcher his name too much, but Bill Slawski. He is with, I think, Go Fish Digital. He’s a veteran in the SEO world and also looks at Google patents and kind of tries to understand what Google’s trying to do with certain patents. It’s fascinating. He’s a very, very smart man.
Connecting With Holly Miller Anderson
I do maintain a public Twitter profile so I would love it if you would follow me. My Twitter handle is @millertime_baby. I follow lots of great people, so I would love it if you would follow me. You can find me there. You can also find me on LinkedIn and reach out to me there if you have any specific questions about your website or anything related to search.
Additional Resources from Holly Miller Anderson!
- https://www.mariehaynes.com/core-web-vitals/
- https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/08/core-updates.html
- https://www.seobythesea.com/
- http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/
- https://www.localseoguide.com/blog/
- https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/
- https://www.elischwartz.co/blog/
Wrapping up
If you want to hear more full episodes of the Digital Breakthroughs Podcast you can visit our YouTube channel playlist, listen on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our podcasts page. The Digital Breakthroughs Podcast is syndicated and distributed by Bloomberg Radio’s 880 The Biz.
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