by Courtney Logel
The latest episode of Slingshot SEO’s SearchTV, a 30-minute rapid-fire show, provided interesting highlights of Google’s freshness update, the impact of Siri, and branded SEO. Watch as Account Executive Jim Brown and Director of Consulting Jesse Laffen discuss the latest in the ever-evolving world of search.
Translation:
Jim: Welcome back everybody to Search TV, we had a little bit of a one month hiatus but I’m back with Jesse Laffen. Jesse, how you been?
Jesse: Great. Glad to be back.
Jim: It’s travel schedules and the increasing growing company here at Slingshot has kept us off the air in October, we’re back for November and we promise we’re going to try as hard a possible to be back in December. December 1st is the date that we’ll be doing that. Jessie, when we were talking about today’s show, obviously one of the things we’re going to hit on is that freshness update that Google just came out with and you just wanted to call it keeping it fresh.
Jesse: Keeping it fresh. This is especially fresh today because this will be the first time that you and I haven’t sat down and actually talked about any of this so this is real. This is uncut, unscripted.
Jim: You had to tell them that?
Jessie. Yeah.
Jim: In our previous planning sessions we said at some point we’re just going to get together, we’re going to sit around the table and we’re just going to go, we have our topics and just go and now that’s today.
Jesse: That is today.
Jim: You ready to get started?
Jesse: Witnessing history, let’s do it.
Jim: Here we go. Let’s start with the Bing versus Google click through rate that our R&D team did here at Slingshot SEO in the last month. One of the things that I’ll just start out with that was kind of funny to me, I think it was Casey or it might have been Evan or it might have been someone else and they ripped them off, but they said, “Bing stands for, Bing Is Not Google.” That’s kind of funny to me.
Jesse: Yeah.
Jim:
But the data kind of said the same thing. Bing is not Google.
Jesse:
It did to a certain extent. I do want to preface this with the fact that maybe some of Bing’s data as far as how many searches are happening a month could be a little bit different than Google’s.
Jim:
Sure.
Jesse:
So that could be affecting it. But overall, much lower click through rate curve on the Bing side.
Jim:
I was seeing about half. Yeah. About half of what Google has, so positions one through four with Google was 181075-ish. Check out our website for the full details. But then Bing, first through fourth, 9532. So almost right about half, that’s kind of underwhelming if you will. One of the things that was funny though that I pointed out as well, Bing as a default search engine, we’ve talked about demographics before . . .
Jesse:
Searchers.
Jim:
Bing is the default search engine on Internet Explorer. Yet there are 117 million searches a month of people searching Google on Bing.
Jesse:
Yeah, as opposed to far, far fewer of people searching for Bing on Google.
Jim:
Right.
Jesse:
Historically though you have to factor in the brand recognition that Google has built. Bing as a brand is only, what, couple year’s old maybe? So I think that has a lot to do with it. I think people look at Google and they think, “That is search.” Right?
Jim:
Right. Absolutely.
Jesse:
Or even, that is the internet.
Jim:
Just Google it. Right.
Jesse:
Exactly. Right.
Jim:
One of the partners here at Slingshot, Jeremy Derringer, he say’s that quite often, “Google is the internet.”
Jesse:
Yep.
Jim:
So anybody that wants to come and talk about Facebook replacing it, how are they going to replace the internet?
Jesse:
Right.
Jim:
Another thing too, this is kind of off topic a little bit but I’m seeing some data that says Bing might actually be more biased than Google. Have you seen this or is it new to you?
Jesse:
I’ve heard that argument before certainly.
Jim:
The stats that I’m seeing here, this is from Search Engine Land, I want to give them props, Josh Wright who’s a George Mason professor did the study, that Bing shows Microsoft products in the first position of search 14.3% of the time where Google only does it 6.7% of the time yet Google gets all the scrutiny.
Jesse:
Yeah. Well, YouTube is still the highest downstream traffic website from Google so it probably exists both ways. Another topic that Google has made top of mind lately is the idea of secure search. So how are they doing this? They’re basically saying that if you’re logged into your Google account we’re going to run all of your searches through basically, a secure website or a website with an SSL certificate.
What that does is it means that they’re not passing certain pieces of information about your query to the website where you eventually go. So if I do a search for Jim Brown’s widgets and I’m logged in and I land on your website Google’s no longer going to tell you my approximate geography, what browser I’m using, maybe my screen resolution, not the keyword I used to find your website.
Jim:
Right. And let’s just be overly clear here. Right now it’s affecting low, single digit percentage of the population.
Jesse:
Yep.
Jim:
But it could be increasing, to have this be effective you have to be logged in as a Gmail user . . .
Jesse:
Correct.
Jim:
. . . or a Google apps user . . .
Jesse:
Yep. And also searching at Google.com.
Jesse:
. . . Yes.
Jim:
You have to go to Google.com for this to be impactful. So obviously as a marketer, not just in search, any kind of marketer, this is a little bit frustrating because now you go into your Google Analytics, like you said, you don’t see some of that data. Now I see a “keyword” that’s driving a huge amount of traffic to your site, but it says “Not provided.”
Jesse:
Not provided, right. So we’re seeing the not provided keyword anywhere between 7% and 30% for any of our clients. What’s funny is that you can actually kind of predict how tech savvy your demographic is based on how many people are actually logged in. So for some clients that deal more in the tech space, they’re towards the 30%, whereas maybe some traditional, older demographic type websites are really seeing like 7% or 8%.
Jim:
Is this going to affect or does it already affect the other analytics packages as well? Or is this . . .
Jesse:
Yeah. Basically, this is Google not passing that information on. So even if you’re using Google Analytics, Site Catalyst, whatever you have, that information is still not showing up.
Jim:
One of the things that I was reading is that this has a lot to do with personalization and actually it’s a control effort, again, by Google, what do you know right? That they want people to adopt Google+, and so the more people who adopt Google+, they can serve them better experiences because Google still knows the data. Google still knows who’s searching, where you’re at, all that. They’re just not passing it to the webmaster. Question for you, you can still go into Google webmaster tools and get some of this data correct?
Jesse:
Yeah. So you’re still going to see a list of keywords that you’re ranking for, how much traffic approximately they should be driving to your site, that kind of thing. You’re also still going to continue to see all of the data from page search whether I’m logged in or not.
Jim:
How convenient is that, that the page search is unaffected?
Jesse:
That is.
Jim:
So here we go, the show is all about keeping it fresh and we’re going to talk about that freshness update from Google. Here’s what we know, it affects 35%, and you’re the expert here, I’m just the guy who reads about stuff. I’m kidding. Right now it’s affecting 35% of queries, not necessarily keywords, but queries so it’s recent events, regular recurring event and frequent updates. Tell me more about it.
Jesse:
Yeah. Freshness has always been kind of important to Google right? Maybe updates on current events and news type queries should be more fresh than say, maybe a recipe or information about how to fix a broken pipe or something like that. Those things tend to be universal over time.
Google is saying that they are actually going to turn up the dial just a little bit more on those types of queries. We know, and we’ll talk about this in the next segment a little bit more, we know that Google tends to want to classify queries into one of three categories. Do, which is like, “Hey I want to make a transaction.” or I want to do something obviously. Know, which is an informational query or go, which is a navigational query.
This is really only going to effect the know kind of query. If you’re in an e-commerce space you’re probably not going to see this being effected as much, the specs on your headphones that you’re selling on your website for example are probably not changing.
It’s also probably going to be pretty relative to your competition so if you’re a recipe website for example, going in and changing grits to cornmeal is probably not going to actually have a huge effect on your website traffic.
Jim:
Sure. As a search marketer or as an agency doing search, how does this affect what we do, how we do it for clients? What can clients be thinking about it?
Jesse:
Sure. I think it certainly demonstrates, it’s one more of a litany of things that have happened in 2011 that show how committed Google is to the content on your page. I might rant about that at the end of the show too actually. But really, Google really, really cares about how much you care about what you’re showing to your end users.
Jim:
One of the things that are showing up in the SERPs right now too is annotations rather than site links, that’s kind of an interesting change there.
Jesse:
It is, I just think they’re doing really interesting things right now and they’re saying, “Listen. There’s not going to one, defined universal SERP, right? We’re getting away, I’m trying to serve up to you what you want and to me what I want.”
Jim:
Sure.
Jesse:
So again, we kind of touched on that do, know, go thing. That actually cam from a document that Google uses called “Human Review Guidelines.” This is kind of the idea that human’s actually do review SERPs in Google for Google. After all, it is a search engine that is serving up pages for humans so it makes sense that they actually care what humans think about those pages.
Just a little bit of background on how Google works. What they’ll do is they’ll bring a whole bunch of humans in, they’ll ask them a whole bunch of questions, “He, what do you like about this site, what don’t you like about this site? Does this look spammy, yes or no?” and they’ll use that information to create algorithms that go out and take that input and algorithmically determine, “All right. Pages that humans don’t like look like this.”
One of the most interesting things on, the reason we’re talking about this, have to back up, I get really exited.
Jim:
Sure.
Jesse:
There was, I guess you could call it a leaked document, where one of Google’s former human reviewers actually posted this online and since then it’s been taken down, you mentioned . . .
Jim:
There were a couple of sources that had it and Google has reached out to them and they’ve noted it now. Google reached out and said, “Take this down.”
Jesse:
Sure.
Jim:
It doesn’t fall into that copyright commons because they weren’t citing it or anything like that. They were just linking to it.
Jesse:
That blog’s probably not going to go up against Google and win that long term. So I’d take it down too.
Jim:
Sure.
Jesse:
One of the coolest things in this to me was how Google asked their quality guideline raters to actually rate the content on the site, getting back to how focused they are on that again. At the very, very bottom there was off topic content like I did a keyword giraffes that came up carrots, off topic, completely non-related. Now the next one up above that is the most interesting to me and that’s a category called Not Relevant.
The reason why that’s interesting to me is because Google said that anything that would be maybe too broad or too narrow in scope would be considered not relevant so if I’m trying to rank for, say, accounting software and I build up this really nice page that’s all about accounting as a function or as an industry or maybe as a job, that would be too broad and I’m all of a sudden not relevant to that keyword phrase.
Jim:
Even though you’re topically relevant you’re not specifically relevant.
Jesse:
Exactly. So maybe being too broad or too narrow even doesn’t satisfy what they’re looking for. Above that is relevant, so basically you’re writing all about that keyword query. Above that is useful, so you’ve done something that your users really, really want and above that is vital, like we cannot not have this result in our search.
Jim:
We’ve talked about this before, we’ve said when you’re doing this, you’re not designing for Google, you’re not designing for a bot, design for the human being . . .
Jesse:
That’s right.
Jim:
This just kind of goes back to it, one note, I used to [make] a quote from Eric Schmidt said, “Search is subjective and there’s no correct set of search results.”
Jesse:
Right.
Jim:
So it’s going to be about what a human moderator or a human rater thinks, or the human being actually searching.
Jesse:
Let’s talk about that conundrum of a search engine. Which is the most relevant result for running shoes? Is it Dick’s sporting goods? Is it Nike? Is it Adidas? Is it Reebok? All pretty deserving, so that’s really at the core of what a search engine does, the problem it’s trying to solve.
Jim:
Absolutely. Let’s touch on misspelled or misspelling, if you will. One of the things that kind of triggered us talking about this topic today is, if you’ve used a Firefox browser any time in the last three or four years, they’ve already, if you’re typing in an email or anything, will note with a red squiggly line that you are misspelling something, something that Microsoft word started doing a long time ago.
Jesse:
Happens to me all the time.
Jim:
Me too. What’s funny is Google is actually starting to do that, so in the search query box now, Google is actually giving you a red squiggly line as you misspell a word to say, “Hey, here’s a flag.” So it’s kind of prompted this conversation, but what do misspellings mean to Google? For instance, Google will serve a result to you and say, “Did you mean?” or “We’re showing you results for, etc.”
Jesse:
Right.
Jim:
Saying, “Hey dummy, do you really want to search for the misspelling?” What does misspelling mean with S-E-R?
Jesse:
I think it gets back to Google’s core purpose is to serve you up the one result that you’re looking for right? At the end of the day they don’t necessarily want to show you 10 links, they just want to give you the answer. You can argue about what it says about humanity or whatever. None of us can spell anymore. Blame Microsoft word maybe.
Jim:
Sure.
Jesse:
Who knows. Doesn’t matter because we have programs like Google and Word to actually fix that stuff for us. I’m guessing that what happened was in their Quality Raters Guidelines, “Yeah. I want to know when I misspell something so that I am getting the most accurate search results.” For example, Duke’s coach, Mike Krzyzewski.
Jim:
Krzyzewski.
Jesse:
I can’t spell that guy’s name ever.
Jim:
It’s hard enough to say it.
Jesse:
Exactly. Exactly. So the other day I was trying to look up how many national titles he had won, I typed it in, butchered his last name, spelling it horribly, Google was like, “Yeah. This is what you meant Jessie.”
Jim:
With today being spirit day here at Slingshot I will say that he hasn’t won as many as Kentucky has won. I just want to put it out there. Thatgirlmeghan on Twitter, that’s for you. So what is the impact here? One of the things that I read or heard Rand Fishkin say a while back is like, “Sometimes it actually makes sense to optimize for the misspellings because there are so many people that actually misspell words.”
Jesse:
Sure.
Jim:
One of his suggestions was meta-keywords which people have said make no impact at all anymore, another thing he say’s, maybe put it in a sidebar that said, common misspellings or other people, topical areas like that. Is it there value to optimizing for misspellings or should we just . . .
Jesse:
Keep in mind that Google isn’t the only search engine on earth right? Maybe Google and Bing do a pretty good job of correcting those spelling errors but you’re still dealing with people maybe searching for your products on Amazon or eBay or maybe within Newegg or shopping engine or something like that that don’t do quite as a good a job on that so there is still some value in optimizing for misspellings.
Jim:
Very good. Gotcha.
Jesse:
On kind of the techy, architecture side of SEO, Google announced recently that they were no indexing content within Ajax.
Jim:
You’re going to have to lead here because this is a very geeky subject.
Jesse:
That’s cool. I actually think this is neat. Ajax is at its very, very simplest a combination of JavaScript and XML. Basically, these are things that perform actions on a website. For example, if you’ve ever used Google’s image search that’s a function of Ajax, the way that they load images as you keep on scrolling down the page, just as an example.
Now they’ve always been really, really good at executing certain things for discovery so say you have some links inside some Ajax then we’re going to go in there and find those and then we’re going to execute them and be like, “Oh. I found these new pages over here, that’s awesome.”
They’ve actually taken that a step further. They’re always committed to providing more and more server space, to storing more and more information, they want to own the world’s information right?
Jim:
Right.
Jesse:
Some of that information is inside JavaScript, inside Ajax. In order to do that they’ve said, “All right. Now we’re not only going to read it and follow it, we’re actually going to take that, warehouse it and be able to serve it up now as a search result.”
Jim:
Right. One of those places, and we’ll talk about it specifically in a minute, is Facebook. There’s other third party commenting tools, Discuss and other things like that where Google is now being able to get into this data and bring relevance to conversations that have happened. We’ve talked about it before. The first part of social media was commenting on websites.
Jesse:
Absolutely.
Jim:
Now this data of a community having a conversation is accessible and indexable by Google.
Jesse:
This is also really cool because it kind of opens up a world of utility for webmasters. We’ve talked on the show before about choosing a medium that fit’s your message right? So is this something that was meant to be printed out and carried around? Put it in a PDF. Is this something that’s better explained in a 30 minute video? Put it in video.
Jim:
Right.
Jesse:
This is just one more tool in your toolkit to be able to actually format the medium around the message that you’re trying to do it with.
Jim:
What impact, if any, does this have on the freshness update to Google?
Jesse:
Ajax and JavaScript are really, really good at culling information so if you have something that’s being loaded dynamically these are tools that people use all the time to go cull information and put it on my website.
Jim:
I’m talking about even the conversation, if there’s a continuing conversation going on, that’s fresh content being posted.
Jesse:
Yeah. Basically the idea here is that I can store a world of information over there, pick out what’s most relevant, fresh if you will, put in on my page and Google’s going to be like, “All right. I see that.”
Jim:
Okay. So specifically, like I said, we are going to talk about Facebook comments. This is a part of that, Ajax, not update if you will, but the ability for Google to access that information. So for the longest time, Google has had no opportunity to get inside of Facebook and still to some intent it doesn’t have the ability to get inside it but this has kind of opened up a back door where Google can see, if I have my privacy settings to where a normal person, the public, cannot view my profile on Facebook, Google still can’t get in, except, if I post on another site where they use Facebook comments as their commenting system, Google can read that stuff now.
Jesse:
Yeah. And this is a very, very clear distinction between the two. Google’s not indexing your Facebook wall if you’re concerned about that. Also I want to touch on really, really quickly, Google probably could index Facebook if they want to using tools like basically anytime somebody does something on my Facebook page I get a Gmail alert or I’m using chrome, there’s a lot of different ways that they could if they wanted to.
Jim:
Sure.
Jesse:
But they haven’t yet, at least in a way that is demonstrable as far as search results. I think this is part of a broader conversation about how Google wants to move forward with their search algorithm. Social signals, we kind of talk about this. We kind of think about things like Facebook and Twitter even though social signals are well beyond just social media.
But really, if you think about links like an endorsement of content, what is behind the link is an actual person who owns that website and Google is trying to say. “All right, this is the person who owns that website actually endorsing the content.” What better way to do that than actually tying a persona to a profile or . . .
Jim:
Exactly.
Jesse:
You’ve talked about here all the time, “I want Goggle to know who I am so that my information is mine and it’s always mine and Google knows it’s mine.” Google wants that too so they know that when you’re talking about a subject like search engine optimization or Chicago Cubs or something like that like, “Hey. Maybe I’m going to listen to what Jim has to say.” And if you’re out there talking about carrot farming, probably doesn’t care as much.
Jim:
You haven’t been to my carrot farm have you?
Jesse:
I had no idea.
Jim:
I’m all about carrot farming.
Jesse:
Another thing that Google kind of let us know about, actually Google’s been pretty vocal over the past month, told us all kind of neat things. There was an update to the places pages. For anybody who doesn’t know, places is kind of that map with those little red pins in it and I type in, Broad Ripple Pizza and it’s like, “Doo, doo, doo. There are 25 pizza joints in Broad Ripple. Here’s where they are.”
The places page can contain information like the hours and obviously address, phone number, stuff like that. I’m sure you’ve all seen it. So new layout for places. They’ve moved the map to the right of the search results, almost using more of that page.
Jim:
Making it vertical instead of horizontal?
Jesse:
Yep.
Jim:
Because here’s a sidebar.
Jesse:
Yep. Taking those little listings and moving them up into the top of that SERP, right underneath the paid ads.
Jim:
But also splitting them up.
Jesse:
Yeah.
Jim:
It used to be just a block, now you might see place one, place two, organic result, organic result, place three, four, five, six, organic results
Jesse:
Yeah.
Jim:
So that’s kind of changing some dynamics as well.
Jesse:
Yeah. It really is and one of the things that they have also incorporated into this simultaneously is you’re seeing a lot more blue map pins. Blue map pins are paid map pins basically so I can go to Goggle and say, hey, when you show that map, put Jessie’s Pizza Place in there because I want people to know that I’m here too.
Jim:
When we talked about secure search earlier, one of the things we brought up right at the end was how paid search, PPC is not affected by this. It’s amazing, this is almost another area where by doing this you’re putting more emphasis in paid results.
Jesse:
Yeah.
Jim:
That’s obviously where Google makes their money. At some point, we have to admit we talked about the Google, Microsoft bias earlier, it’s Google search engine at the end of the day.
Jesse:
Right.
Jim:
Some people consider it the portal to the web or that it is the internet but it’s Google search engine.
Jesse:
Yeah. So you get a lot of this outcry where, “How can they send all that traffic to their own properties?” and things like that. They’re a corporation. You don’t accidentally make $30 billion.
Jim:
Right.
Jesse:
You do it by creating some really nice products and services that the people want to use.
Jim:
So we saw this week the launch of Google Plus Business Pages right? So there’s got to be some business impact coming here very soon right? And also the direct connect so now you can search for plus WWE if you’re a wrestling fan and you automatically go to the Google Plus business page.
Jesse:
Right.
Jim:
Is there going to be any impact here on the places pages?
Jesse:
Impact on the places from the Plus?
Jim:
Yep.
Jesse:
I would assume so because we’re getting back to that idea that Google wants to draw all these connections and find out all of the signals and put them together in one place.
Jim:
All right. I am not an iPhone . . . are you an iPhone user?
Jesse:
Yeah. I don’t have a 5 or a 4S.
Jim:
Oh, okay. Anyway.
Jesse:
I don’t talk to Siri.
Jim:
We’re not talking the Siri yet but we are studying Siri. One of the things that’s interesting is in they iPhone launch and really, any mobile phone for that matter, they’ve all used Google as their primary search engine, or the majority, except for Microsoft obviously Microsoft’s not going to do it by default but I read a stat that said Google accounts for 97% of mobile searches and 2/3rd of those come from iOS devices not Android devices so that’s an interesting stat. But again, it goes back, when Apple launched the iPhone they used Google results, used Google maps, used all that for everything.
Now with Siri, Apple wants to get away from Google so they want you to voice a question, ask a question by voice and just give you the answer. Kind of what you said about Google. Google just wants to give you the answer. Now Siri in the mobile space is getting closer. It’s encroaching on that. What do you think?
Jesse:
One of the most interesting things to me and also it should be said that Google has had this out for a minute, Google Voice.
Jim:
Google Voice, that’s right.
Jesse:
So basically one of the most interesting things to me is that there tends to be one right answer when you’re using Google Voice or Siri, right? Give me a pizza place next to my house, right? I found a pizza place here it is go do it. So that’s getting back to that one answer type thing. The other interesting thing about Siri as a search engine is that she doesn’t always use Google first.
Jim:
Correct. Could use Yelp?
Jesse:
Absolutely. Urbanspoon. Actually uses Wolfram Alpha for a lot of . . . that’s kind of a search engine that’s been a round for a while if you don’t know about it. Tied strictly to informational and scientific like queries. So like what’s the value of pi would be right up Wolfram Alpha’s wheelhouse.
So it still uses Google as a last resort, but in a certain sense maybe in a certain way almost evaluating Google.
Jim:
Apple wants to separate search from Google.
Jesse:
Sure.
Jim:
So another thing that I read, not read but started to play with here is we talked about the Microsoft bias, we’ve talked about the Google bias, we just started talking about it again, is this going to create an Apple bias? Is Apple going to start using its own product or is Apple going to be able to pick winners and losers? If Apple decides that its going to use Yelp and Yelp’s it, how’s that any different than Google saying we’re going to use Google Places?
Jesse:
To me, it just means that you got to make really good content so that any search engine that people are using they’re going to find it . . .
Jim:
Comes back to content. Good quality content.
Jesse:
Google quality content.
Jim:
There we go.
Jesse:
Speaking of good quality content, there’s probably some really good quality and possibly some bad quality content on the web about your brand. So we just wanted to touch on a little bit–branded SEO as a practice or as a subset of what SEO is or does. So when we talk about branded SEO, we’re talking about, all right, I’ve done my research on this purchase. This is definitely true in very long sales cycle type things, so definitely in business-to-business type sales cycles, really important.
Jim:
Or even business-to-consumer. I’m searching for a Samsung TV.
Jesse:
Certainly.
Jim:
Tell me about Samsung.
Jesse:
Yeah, I’m going to do the check really quick just to make sure that before I pick up the phone and call you, who are you guys, what are people saying about you on the internet? So this is something you probably run into a lot, especially in the enterprise space because so many people are talking about these really, really big brands.
Jim:
Absolutely. Just from me as a person too, I’m guilty of some of this stuff that maybe anti what we’re talking about here. If I had a bad experience somewhere, I’m going to talk about it. If I fly on Delta and I have a bad experience, I’m going to tell Delta. I just gave blood the other day and I have this really big vein in my arm that usually people hit and she missed and I told the [world] about it. But the reason why I’m saying this is because it’s easy to put bad content out there on a company and not know it so a company has to protect that brand. If you do a search for your company’s name into Google, obviously you’re going to get your website, at least I hope you really get your website.
Jesse:
If you don’t, call us.
Jim:
But you also get maybe some of your social profiles and things like that but you may see some Better Business Bureaus things, you may see a blog where somebody doesn’t like you, I’ve seen them about banks, and thing like that. But there are ways to protect you and quality content is one of them but owning your SERP, owning your brand and so whether it be videos or social media profiles, blogs doing great press releases on stuff that actually matters, what else can we do to protect the brand or protect the SERP?
Jesse:
Earn the media is one great way. In my findings, Jim’s widgets on ABC News 6 or whatever. So your PR department has that additional function another really, really good way is to actually do some outreach with the bloggers in your niche. So not only are you building that SEO value, but then when people are searching for your brand, those really authoritative place where you’ve spoken are going to end up popping up.
Jim:
And it goes back to one of the things we talked about earlier this year. We talked about Google wants to rank brands and so as a result of that, what do brands do? Well, brands hire and fire. So do you have your LinkedIn profiles up to date? Are you adding fresh content? We’re going to bring it back to freshness.
Jesse:
That’s right.
Jim:
But all those types of things are you creating great content and great signals for Google to look out for you?
Jesse:
Yeah. Obviously content, you know how I feel about content so I’m going to rant about that for just a little bit. So you’ve got this website, right? And you’re like hey, Google rank me for this.
Jim:
Jim’s Blue Widgets.com
Jesse:
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s out there and you write the paragraphs: Since 1937 Jim’s Blue Widgets has been committed to quality and service. Cool.
Jim:
It’s a long time.
Jesse:
Kind of. But remember when we were talking about that sliding scale of off topic not relevant, relevant useful vital. Why would Google want to rank your website if it’s not useful at the very least. So really when we talk about SEO and this has been true from the beginning of time but today algorithmically it is hands down the most important thing that you can do–produce at least useful content. Links are an endorsement of content. Architecture is a way for bots to find your content social signals are about the popularity of your content. it all starts with the content. That’s why it’s the leading letter in our methodology. That’s why we have all these people in this room, the majority of our company is focused solely on content delivery and production. If you’re not going to want to put in the work to make your content great, then Google is not going to put in the work to rank your content.
Jim:
Absolutely.
Jesse:
That’s all I can say about that with out getting angry.
Jim:
It’s okay if you get angry.
Jesse:
I like getting angry. I’m good at it.
Jim:
Well, we want to thank everybody for joining us again. Again, we do apologize for our hiatus. We will be back again December 1st. If you have questions, our hashtag SearchTV. Also I want to send a shout out it is the 236th birthday of the United States Marine Corp. Happy Birthday Marines.
Jesse:
Thank you.
Jim:
And tomorrow is Veterans Day, so thank you to all the veterans out there. Until December, Jesse you got anything else?
Jesse:
No, man. This was fun. Let’s do it again.
Jim:
All right. Take care.
Jesse:
Bye.