Tag: Google’s

How Google’s Bert Update Will Affect Content Marketing

Google announced that it has been rolling out a new update call Bert.

I know what you are thinking… does this update really matter? Should I even spend time learning about it?

Well, Bert will affect 1 in 10 search queries.

To give you an idea of how big of an update this is, it’s
the biggest update since Google released RankBrain.

In other words, there is a really good chance that this impacts your site. And if it doesn’t, as your traffic grows, it will eventually affect your site.

But before we go into how this update affects SEOs and what you need to adjust (I will go into that later in this post), let’s first get into what this update is all about.

So, what is Bert?

Bert stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from
Transformers.

You are probably wondering, what the heck does that mean, right?

Google, in essence, has adjusted its algorithm to better understand natural language processing.

Just think of it this way: you could put a flight number into Google and they typically show you the flight status. Or a calculator may come up when you type in a math equation. Or if you put a stock symbol in, you’ll get a stock chart.

Or even a simpler example is: you can start typing into Google and its autocomplete feature can figure out what you are searching for before you even finishing typing it in.

But Google has already had all of that figured out before
Bert. So let’s look at some examples of Bert in action.

Is Bert even useful?

Here are 4 examples
of Bert.

Let’s say you search for “2019 brazil traveler to usa need
visa”.

Before Bert, the top result would be how US citizens can travel to Brazil without a visa. But look at the search query carefully… it’s slight, but it is a big difference.

The search wasn’t about US people going to Brazil, it was
about people from Brazil traveling to the US.

The result after the Bert update is much more relevant.

Google is now taking into account prepositions like “for” or
“to” that can have a lot of meanings to the search query.

Here’s another example… “do estheticians stand a lot at work”…

Google used to previously match terms. For example, their
system used to think “stand” is the same as “stand-alone”.

Now they understand that the word “stand” has the context of physical demand. In other words, is the job exhausting… do you have to be on your feet a lot?

And one more, “can you get medicine for someone pharmacy” …

As you can see from the before and after picture, it’s clear
that the new result is more relevant.

Same with this one on “math practice books for adults” …

Is that the only change?

It isn’t. Google also made changes to featured snippets.

For example, if you searched for “parking on a hill with no
curb”, Google used to place too much emphasis on the word “curb” and not enough
emphasis on the word “no”.

That’s a big difference… and you can see that in the
results.

The new changes this algorithm update brings makes it much more relevant for searchers and it creates a better experience for you and me and everyone else who uses Google.

But how does it affect SEOs?

You need to change your SEO strategy

There are three types of queries people usually make when
performing a search:

  1. Informational
  2. Navigational
  3. Transactional

An informational query is like someone looking to lose
weight. They aren’t sure how so they may search for “how to lose weight”.

And once they perform the search, they may find a solution such as different diets. From there they may search for a solution, using a navigational query such as “Atkins diet”.

Once someone figures out the exact solution, they then may perform a transactional search query, such as “the Atkins diet cookbook”.

From what we are seeing on our end is that Bert is mainly impacting top-of-the-funnel keywords, which are informational related keywords.

Now if you want to not only maintain your rankings but gobble up some of the rankings of your competition, a simple solution is to get very specific with your content.

Typically, when you create content, which is the easiest way
to rank for informational related keywords, SEOs tell you to create super long
content.

Yes, you may see that a lot of longer-form content ranks well on Google, but their algorithm doesn’t focus on word count, it focuses on quality.

The context of the tweet from Danny Sullivan, who is Google’s search liaison, is that he wants SEOs to focus on creating content that is fundamentally great, unique, useful, and compelling.

So when you use tools like Ubersuggest to find new topics to go after, you need to make sure your content is super-specific.

For example, if you have a business about fitness and you blog about “how to lose weight without taking pills”, your content shouldn’t focus on diet shakes or supplements or anything too similar to diet pills. Instead, it should discuss all of the alternative methods.

I know what you are thinking, shakes and supplements may not be diet pills and they aren’t the same keyword but expect Bert to get more sophisticated in the next year in which it will better understand what people are really looking for.

Additionally, you should stop focusing on keyword density.

Yes, a lot of SEOs have moved away from this, but I still
get a handful of emails each day asking me about keyword density.

Keyword density will even be less important in the future as
Google better understands the context of the content you are writing.

So, where’s the opportunity?

As I mentioned, it’s related to creating highly specific content around a topic.

It’s not necessarily about creating a really long page that talks about 50 different things that’s 10,000 words long. It’s more about answering a searcher’s question as quick as possible and providing as much value compared to the competition.

Just like when you search for “what is it like to be in the
Olympics”, you’ll see a list of results that look something like this:

Although the first result has the title of “What it’s like
to go to the Olympics”, the article doesn’t break down what it is like to go as
an attendee, it breaks down what it is like to go as an athlete. Just like a
searcher would expect based on the query.

Bert was clearly able to figure this out even though the title could have gone either way. And the article itself isn’t that long. The article itself only has 311 words.

If you want to do well when it comes to ranking for informational keywords, go very specific and answer the question better than your competitors. From videos and images to audio, do whatever needs to be done to create a better experience.

Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean that long-form content doesn’t work. It’s just that every SEO already focuses on long-form content. They are going after generic head terms that can be interpreted in 100 different ways and that’s why the content may be long and thorough.

In other words, focus more on long-tail terms.

You may think that is obvious but let’s look at the data.

It all starts with Ubersuggest. If you haven’t used it yet, you can type in a keyword like “marketing” and it will show you the search volume as well as give you thousands (if not millions) of keyword variations.

In the last 30 days, 4,721,534 keyword queries were performed on Ubersuggest by 694,284 marketers. Those 4,721,534 searches returned 1,674,841,398 keyword recommendations.

And sure, SEOs could be typing in head terms to find more long-tail phrases, but when we look at what keywords people are selecting within Ubersuggest and exporting, 84% of marketers are focusing on 1 or 2-word search terms.

Only 1.7% of marketers are focusing on search terms that are
5 or words longer.

Following the strategy of creating content around very specific long-tail phrases is so effective that sites like Quora are generating 60,428,999 visitors a month just from Google alone in the United States.

And a lot of their content isn’t super detailed with 10,000-word
responses. They just focus on answering very specific questions that people
have.

Conclusion

Even if your search traffic drops a bit from the latest
update, it’s a good thing.

I know that sounds crazy, but think of it this way… if
someone searched for “how to lose weight without diet pills” and they landed on
your article about how diet pills are amazing, they are just going to hit the
back button and go back to Google.

In other words, it is unlikely that the traffic converted into a conversion.

Sure, you may lose some traffic from this update, but the
traffic was ruining your user metrics and increasing your bounce rate.

Plus, this is your opportunity to create content that is super-specific. If you lose traffic, look at the pages that dropped, the search queries that you aren’t ranking for anymore, and go and adjust your content or create new content that answers the questions people are looking for.

If you don’t know how to do this, just log into Search Console, click on
“search results”, and click on the date button.

Then click on compare and select the dates where your
traffic dropped and compare it to the previous periods. Then select “Queries”
and sort by the biggest difference.

You’ll have to dig for the longer-term search queries as those are the easiest to fix. And if you are unsure about what to fix, just search for the terms on Google that dropped and look at the top-ranking competitors. Compare their page with yours as it will provide some insights.

So, what do you think about the latest update?

The post How Google’s Bert Update Will Affect Content Marketing appeared first on Neil Patel.

How I Beat Google’s Core Update by Changing the Game

Google released a major update. They typically don’t announce their updates, but you know when they do, it is going to be big.

And that’s what happened with the most recent update that they announced.

A lot of people saw their traffic drop. And of course, at the same time, people saw their traffic increase because when one site goes down in rankings another site moves up to take its spot.

Can you guess what happened to my traffic?

Well, based on the title of the post you are probably going
to guess that it went up.

Now, let’s see what happened to my search traffic.

My overall traffic has already dipped by roughly 6%. When you look at my organic traffic, you can see that it has dropped by 13.39%.

I know what you are thinking… how did you beat Google’s core update when your traffic went down?

What if I told you that I saw this coming and I came up with a solution and contingency strategy in case my organic search traffic would ever drop?

But before I go into that, let me first break down how it all started and then I will get into how I beat Google’s core update.

A new trend

I’ve been doing SEO for a long time… roughly 18 years now.

When I first started, Google algorithm updates still sucked but they were much more simple. For example, you could get hit hard if you built spammy links or if your content was super thin and provided no value.

Over the years, their algorithm has gotten much more complex. Nowadays, it isn’t about if you are breaking the rules or not. Today, it is about optimizing for user experience and doing what’s best for your visitors.

But that in and of itself is never very clear. How do you know that what you are doing is better for a visitor than your competition?

Honestly, you can never be 100% sure. The only one who actually knows is Google. And it is based on whoever it is they decide to work on coding or adjusting their algorithm.

Years ago, I started to notice a new trend with my search
traffic.

Look at the graph above, do you see the trend?

And no, my traffic doesn’t just climb up and to the right. There are a lot of dips in there. But, of course, my rankings eventually started to continually climb because I figured out how to adapt to algorithm updates.

On a side note, if you aren’t sure how to adapt to the latest algorithm update, read this. It will teach you how to recover your traffic… assuming you saw a dip. Or if you need extra help, check out my ad agency.

In many cases after an algorithm update, Google continues to fine-tune and tweak the algorithm. And if you saw a dip when you shouldn’t have, you’ll eventually start recovering.

But even then, there was one big issue. Compared to all of the previous years, I started to feel like I didn’t have control as an SEO anymore back in 2017. I could no longer guarantee my success, even if I did everything correctly.

Now, I am not trying to blame Google… they didn’t do anything wrong. Overall, their algorithm is great and relevant. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be using them.

And just like you and me, Google isn’t perfect. They continually adjust and aim to improve. That’s why they do over 3,200 algorithm updates in a year.

But still, even though I love Google, I didn’t like the
feeling of being helpless. Because I knew if my traffic took a drastic dip, I
would lose a ton of money.

I need that traffic, not only to drive new revenue but, more importantly, to pay my team members. The concept of not being able to pay my team on any given month is scary, especially when your business is bootstrapped.

So what did I do?

I took matters into my own hands

Although I love SEO, and I think I’m pretty decent at it
based on my traffic and my track record, I knew I had to come up with another
solution that could provide me with sustainable traffic that could still
generate leads for my business.

In addition to that, I wanted to find something that wasn’t “paid,” as I was bootstrapping. Just like how SEO was starting to have more ups and downs compared to what I’ve seen in my 18-year career, I knew the cost at paid ads would continually rise.

Just look at Google’s ad revenue. They have some ups and downs every quarter but the overall trend is up and to the right.

In other words, advertising will continually get more expensive over time.

And it’s not just Google either. Facebook Ads keep getting more expensive as well.

I didn’t want to rely on a channel that would cost me more next year and the year after because it could get so expensive that I may not be able to profitably leverage it in the future.

So, what did I do?

I went on a hunt to figure out a way to get direct, referral, and organic traffic that didn’t rely on any algorithm updates. (I will explain what I mean by organic traffic in a bit.)

I went on my mission

With the help of my buddy, Andrew Dumont, I went searching for websites that continually received good traffic even after algorithm updates.

Here were the criteria that we were looking for:

  • Sites that weren’t reliant on Google traffic
  • Sites that didn’t need to continually produce
    more content to get more traffic
  • Sites that weren’t popular due to social media traffic
    (we both saw social traffic dying)
  • Sites that didn’t leverage paid ads in the past
    or present
  • Sites that didn’t leverage marketing

In essence, we were looking for sites that were popular because people naturally liked them. Our intentions at first weren’t to necessarily buy any of these sites. Instead, we were trying to figure out how to naturally become popular so we could replicate it.

Do you know what we figured out?

I’ll give you a hint.

Think of it this way: Google doesn’t get the majority of their traffic from SEO. And Facebook doesn’t get their traffic because they rank everywhere on Google or that people share Facebook.com on the social web.

Do you know how they are naturally popular?

It comes down to building a good product.

That was my aha! moment. Why continually crank out thousands of pieces of content, which isn’t scalable and is a pain as you eventually have to update your old content, when I could just build a product?

That’s when Andrew and I stumbled
upon Ubersuggest.

Now the Ubersuggest you see today
isn’t what it looked like in February 2017 when I bought
it.

It used to be a simple tool that
just showed you Google Suggest results based on any query.

Before I took it over, it was generating 117,425 unique
visitors per month and had 38,700 backlinks from 8,490 referring domains.

All of this was natural. The original founder didn’t do any
marketing. He just built a product and it naturally spread.

The tool did, however, have roughly 43% of its traffic coming from organic search. Now, can you guess what keyword it was?

The term was “Ubersuggest”.

In other words, its organic traffic mainly came from its own brand, which isn’t really reliant on SEO or affected by Google algorithm updates. That’s also what I meant when I talked about organic traffic that wasn’t reliant on Google.

Now since then I’ve gone a bit crazy with Ubersuggest and released loads of new features… from daily rank tracking to a domain analysis and site audit report to a content ideas report and backlinks report.

In other words, I’ve been making it a robust SEO tool that has everything you need and is easy to use.

It’s been so effective that the traffic on Ubersuggest went from 117,425 unique visitors to a whopping 651,436 unique visitors that generates 2,357,927 visits and 13,582,999 pageviews per month.

Best of all, the users are sticky, meaning the average Ubersuggest user spends over 26 minutes on the application each month. This means that they are engaged and will likely to convert into customers.

As I get more aggressive with my Ubersuggest funnel and start collecting leads from it, I expect to receive many more emails like that.

And over the years, I expect the traffic to continually grow.

Best of all, do you know what happens to the traffic on Ubersuggest when my site gets hit by a Google algorithm update or when my content stops going viral on Facebook?

It continually goes up and to the right.

Now, unless you dump a ton of money and time into replicating
what I am doing with Ubersuggest, but for your industry, you won’t generate the
results I am generating.

As my mom says, I’m kind of crazy…

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do well on a budget.

Back in 2013, I did a test where I released a tool on my old blog Quick Sprout. It was an SEO tool that wasn’t too great and honestly, I probably spent too much money on it.

Here were the stats for the first 4 days of releasing the
tool:

  • Day #1: 8,462 people ran 10,766 URLs
  • Day #2: 5,685 people ran 7,241 URLs
  • Day #3: 1,758 people ran 2,264 URLs
  • Day #4: 1,842 people ran 2,291 URLs

Even after the launch traffic died down, still 1,000+ people per day used the tool. And, over time, it actually went up to over 2,000.

It was at that point in my career, I realized that people
love tools.

I know what you are thinking though… how do you do this on a budget, right?

How to build tools without hiring developers or spending
lots of money

What’s silly is, and I wish I knew this before I built my first tool on Quick Sprout back in the day, there are tools that already exist for every industry.

You don’t have to create something new or hire some expensive developers. You can just use an existing tool on the market.

And if you want to go crazy like me, you can start adding multiple tools to your site… just like how I have an A/B testing calculator.

So how do you add tools without breaking the bank?

You buy them from sites like Code Canyon. From $2 to $50, you can find tools on just about anything. For example, if I wanted an SEO tool, Code Canyon has a ton to choose from. Just look at this one.

Not a bad looking tool that you can have on your website for just $40. You don’t have to pay monthly fees and you don’t need a developer… it’s easy to install and it doesn’t cost much in the grand scheme of things.

And here is the crazy thing: The $40 SEO tool has more features than the Quick Sprout one I built, has a better overall design, and it is .1% the cost.

Only if I knew that before I built it years ago. :/

Look, there are tools out there for every industry. From mortgage calculators to calorie counters to a parking spot finder and even video games that you can add to your site and make your own.

In other words, you don’t have to build something from scratch. There are tools for every industry that already exists and you can buy them for pennies on the dollar.

Conclusion

I love SEO and always will. Heck, even though many SEOs hate
how Google does algorithm updates, that doesn’t bother me either… I love Google
and they have built a great product.

But if you want to continually do well, you can’t rely on one marketing channel. You need to take an omnichannel approach and leverage as many as possible.

That way, when one goes down, you are still generating traffic.

Now if you want to do really well, think about most of the
large companies out there. You don’t build a billion-dollar business from SEO,
paid ads, or any other form of marketing. You first need to build an amazing
product or service.

So, consider adding tools to your site, the data shows it is more effective than content marketing and it is more scalable.

Sure you probably won’t achieve the results I achieved with Ubersuggest, but you can achieve the results I had with Quick Sprout. And you can achieve better results than what you are currently getting from content marketing.

What do you think? Are you going to add tools to your site?

PS: If you aren’t sure what type of tool you should add to your site, leave a comment and I will see if I can give you any ideas. 🙂

The post How I Beat Google’s Core Update by Changing the Game appeared first on Neil Patel.

Google’s New Link Building Guidelines

In case you missed it, Google has just changed up the rules for link building.

It used to be that when people link to you, the link would either be a dofollow link or a nofollow link.

Well, that’s now changed.

They are now introducing 2 more link types that will affect
SEOs.

Now before we get into the 2 new link types, make sure you read the whole post. Because not only will I explain Google’s requirements, but I will break down what this means for SEOs.

The current landscape

The current SEO landscape is simple… especially when it comes to link building.

The more dofollow (regular links) links you can get the better your search rankings.

If you are unsure of the number of links you have or the type, just go here and enter in your domain.

You’ll see a count of total backlinks along with the total amount of nofollow links pointing to your site.

Now, when you are link building, if you are paying for links or leveraging tactics like guest posting, Google wants you to nofollow those links because they don’t think you should be leveraging tactics like guest posting to manipulate rankings.

And as for buying links, you shouldn’t do that as it is a simple way to get penalized or banned from Google.

So don’t send emails like this if you are trying to build links… it’s a big no, no.

How does Google look
at links?

Google’s algorithm is smart. Sure, they ideally want you to nofollow links if they are bought or not naturally earned (such as from guest posts), but many SEOs break the rules.

They aren’t going to say it publicly but they do these things. And because Google isn’t dumb, they also know.

Google can easily
identify when a post on these big news sites aren’t earned because many of them
have signs all over them that Google can detect.

For example, here is
an example of a guest
post from me.

Forbes, of course, uses nofollows links, but it wasn’t always that way.

Google can easily detect it is a guest post through verbiage on the page like “former contributor” or “guest contributor”.

And even if they didn’t label me as a guest contributor, Google can use other signals to figure out that this link shouldn’t be given much weight when it comes to SEO just by reading the URL structure of that article on Forbes.

Let’s take a closer
look at the URL

https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2016/12/26/my-biggest-regret-in-life-going-to-college/#5f74f3a91ac7

Do you see the big
issue with the URL?

It’s clear that an author can have their own subsection on Forbes through the “site” folder structure. Now that doesn’t mean all “Forbes sites” are bad, but they clearly know which one is from staff writers because they are clearly marked.

Those signals (among others) that Google probably won’t disclose (nor should they) make it easy for Google to determine if a link is natural or earned.

If Google doesn’t want to count a link from a specific author, they can just ignore it on their end.

So, whether it is nofollowed or followed, on their end they can systematically control whether a link should help your rankings or if it shouldn’t.

As John Mueller from Google once said, in the context of bad links…

If we recognize them, we can just ignore them – no need to have you do anything in most cases.

Now keeping that in
mind, here are the changes Google wants webmasters to make.

Google’s new link
policy

If someone pays you
for a link or you are buying a link, Google now wants you to mark it as sponsored.
Not just in the text of the site, but more so through the link attribute:

Rel=”sponsored”

And if you build links through user-generated content, they want you to mark the links with the attribute:

Rel=”ugc”

The same goes for site owners. For example, if you have a forum on your site because the content is user generated, the links that people place should contain a rel=”ugc”.

You can still use the nofollow attribute or if you want you can use a combination of the above. For example, if you have a paid link you can use:

Rel=”nofollow sponsored”

So, what’s the
purpose of this change?

Well, here is how
Google puts it:

All the link attributes — sponsored, UGC and nofollow — are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search. We’ll use these hints — along with other signals — as a way to better understand how to appropriately analyze and use links within our systems.

Now if you are wondering what that means, Google is pretty much saying that adding these attributes will give them a better idea on if they should crawl the link or not. Or how they should analyze the link when it comes to indexing or SEO.

This change goes into effect March 1, 2020, and don’t worry because you don’t have to make modifications to your old links. The ones that were nofollow can just be left as nofollow.

And even in the future, if you decide to just use nofollow instead of “sponsored”, you’ll be fine.

What does all of this mean for SEOs?

As I mentioned
earlier, I would provide my own insights and opinions on why Google is doing this.

We all know their algorithm is sophisticated and hard to game. But, just like any other algorithm or computer, it isn’t perfect.

By webmasters and SEOs labeling the type of links they are building and the purpose of them, it will make it easier for Google to learn how we use different link types and it will help their algorithms more quickly and easily identify link types and the context they are used in.

For example, if thousands of people use rel=”ugc” for links generated through guest posts, it may help train Google’s algorithm that these links were actually created by random people instead of the webmaster and they should be discounted.

Of course, Google already can identify wikis, forum, and other types of user-generated content, but this helps them tighten things up and make things more accurate.

They can also decide to take a more relaxed stance on certain link types. For example, maybe they will decide to count UGC links when it comes to link building, but they may decide to only give it 1/3rd the weight of a naturally earned link.

In addition to that, this also provides them with more signals on if the URL linked to should be potentially crawled or ignored.

But in the long run, as their algorithm becomes more accurate, it’s safe to say that the real solution to winning is putting the user first.

Their goal isn’t to rank a site at the top that has “perfect SEO”. They want to rank the site that people love the most.

Hence, you’ll want to focus on creating an amazing user experience, building a great product/service, creating mindblowing content, and anything else your competition isn’t doing.

As for link building though, links will always be hard to come by, so they will be part of their algorithm for the foreseeable future. And as the data shows, there is a strong correlation between links and rankings.

So one thing I would recommend is that you build as many links as possible, even if they are user-generated links. As long as they are from relevant sites, the referral traffic can generate you sales or leads. And if Google starts placing some value on these user-generated links, it can help boost your rankings.

Now that doesn’t mean you should go out to forums and spam your link everywhere. It means you should go find all of the user-generated content sites, provide a ton of value, AND ONLY IF IT MAKES SENSE, add a link back to your site when it benefits the reader.

Conclusion

Over the next year or so you’ll see adjustments in how SEOs build links.

First off you’ll start seeing companies like Ahrefs and the SEMrush show you nofollow, dofollow, UGC, and sponsored backlinks. This one change will help SEOs build better links and spend their effort on the links that actually help with rankings.

Secondly, my hunch is UGC links will eventually carry some weight. Probably not a ton, but more than 0 as long as they are from relevant sites, the link is within context and it provides value to the end-user.

And lastly, most webmasters probably won’t use sponsored or UGC attributes anytime soon. It will probably take another year before they really catch on, which means for now you will just have to focus your efforts on dofollow links.

So, what do you
think about the new change?

The post Google’s New Link Building Guidelines appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Generate More Traffic with Google’s New Features

You’re probably already familiar with Google My Business.

If you aren’t, as a quick recap, Google My Business is a simple way to claim your office address or storefront on Google.

backyard bowl

That way, when someone searches for your business, you’ll show up on the right side of a Google search like the image above.

Or better yet, when someone searches for a product or service you’ll offer, you’ll show up in the local pack.

acai bowl

What’s interesting, though, is Google has been making changes to it, which means it just got easier to generate leads and sales for you.

Best of all, very few marketers are even leveraging these features.

Welcome Offers

What’s one of the easiest ways to generate more sales?

By offering discounts and coupons, right? Just think of it this way, if it didn’t work, Cyber Monday wouldn’t bring in $7.8 billion in sales.

Google knows that people are looking for ways to save money and find good deals. With this new feature, businesses can reward their customers by giving them welcome offers.

By following your business, they can get first-time deals and always keep in touch to see when new deals are posted.

offers

Not only will this bring you new customers but also repeat customers because people will be notified every time you have new deals.

To set up a welcome offer, open your Google My Business app and tap on your profile. Under “Turn followers into customers,” click on ‘Create Welcome Offer’ and hit ‘Create.’

You can enter the following information in your offer:

  • Title (30% off oil changes)
  • Description
  • Coupon Code (Optional)
  • Terms and Conditions (Optional)
  • Website (Optional)

Once finished, you can preview your message and publish. For notifications on new followers, and editing or deleting offers, you can read more on Google Support.

Generate leads in just a few clicks

Google is now adding a “Request a Quote” button in your business listing which was discovered by Joy Hawkins and can also be seen on mobile when searching branded terms.

request quote

This is happening with businesses that have the Google My Business messaging feature on.

To enable messaging, open the Google My Business app and go to your listing.

mobile 2

Navigate to Customers -> Messages and turn on!

moble 1

People will now be able to ask for quotes on cars, insurance, and pretty much any service out there.

You can even review these quotes and reply to them within the Google My Business App and connect with your customers easily for a quick sale.

Make sure you claim your URL

Businesses can now claim a Short Name and URL for their listing.

If you haven’t claimed your URL, make sure you do so before it gets taken by someone else.

Don’t get too crazy though as you can only change your short name three times per year. You can enable this by navigating to your locations page, click “Info” on the left-hand side, and see “add short name”.

short name

You may not think this is a big deal, but if you have used Google My Business before, then you know it’s not easy to share your profile on business cards, emails, and text messages without posting a huge URL.

With short names, your landing page will show as g.page/businessname and can be easily shared.

A business can choose a name between 5 and 32 characters and it can contain the business name, location, and more. People can still flag a name for impersonating another business or if the name is offensive, fake, spammy, or contains inappropriate terms.

So, remember not to violate any policies with your name.

I recommend doing this as it will make it easier for your customers to refer back to your profile where they can read updates, post, make reservations, read/write reviews, and more!

And eventually, people will be able to search short names in Google Maps to find the businesses they love.

Google Assistant

Google is now letting customers order food from restaurants and stores via Google Assistant, which is delivered through DoorDash, Postmates, Delivery.com, Slice, ChowNow, and Zuppler, with other partners possibly coming soon.

naab med

Users can click on Order Now on the listing and can choose pick-up or delivery and if they want to order ASAP or schedule for later. Payment happens through the default payment on Google Pay. If they do not have one, they will be able to add credit card information through this too.

Additionally, customers can order food by using Google Assistant by saying “Okay Google, order food from [restaurant].” If the user has ordered before, it will let them see past orders.

naab

Updating your menu online, as well as delivery service carriers and their apps will help get you started on this.

You’ll want to make sure your menus are consistent through all your service carriers to get the best orders to your hungry customers.

And of course, I know there is a good chance you don’t have a restaurant or aren’t in the food delivery business, but expect to see more ways Google My Business gets integrated with Google Assistant.

It’s better to be early than late.

And speaking of food, Google has also added the popular dish tab on your menu which features images and menu items that people love the most.

pop dish

This scans reviews and images on your Google My Business profile to find the most commonly mentioned dish and adds it to your popular dish tab. Of course, if anything is wrong, you can suggest edits to these.

This helps if there are dishes without names, wrong names, or typos can be fixed.

Auto-generated posts based on reviews

Look, you are busy, but you have no choice but to create content.

Google has given you easier ways to generate posts… in essence, they are now creating auto-generated posts for you.

These recommended posts are suggested through customer reviews on your Google My Business profile and are similar to their Small Thanks program, which tried to get you to highlight reviews given by previous customers on social media and even being able to print it out and display it on your business walls.

You are probably wondering why should you use it, right?

This helps keep people engaged in your profile if you haven’t posted on Google My Business in a while and gives you fast and easy publishing. It even gives you options to customize backgrounds with images and colors.

suggest post

This will pop up on your Google My Business dashboard and all you have to do is hit “Create this post”.

There’s no real way to pick other reviews for Suggested Posts, but you are always welcome to create your own. This is just a simple feature created to help engage your audience more.

Boost your conversions by controlling your images

Businesses can now set a preferred profile cover photo in your image carousel and have a place for logos at the top-right of your profile next to the business name.

This is an additional feature to the regular NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) as well as business hours and will be prominently featured.

images

You can easily create offline material

Google is launching a website where businesses can order and get custom promotional items such as stickers and posters to advertise their business. This is in hopes that it will entice customers to follow places on your profile, add reviews, and create bookings.

You can even order signs like ‘follow us on Google’ and more for free (one shipment per location).

stickers

For posters, you can use the editor to create your own type of poster that can be downloaded and easily printed by yourself or a local printing company. If posters aren’t your cup of tea, you can even share these on social media.

posters

This is currently free as it is a downloadable offer, but you may want to pay to have someone print this out in poster size or as stickers to put on your business windows.

Just think of it this way, people put Yelp signage everywhere because it works. Chances are, it will work on Google as well.

Place Topics

Google launched Place Topics which uses data based on reviews to help give information on what previous customers think about your business.

place top reviews

This can help users see themes of reviews at a glance for businesses and it’s all automated.

It’s kind of like a tag cloud.

This does mean that you cannot generate these yourselves or edit them. So, if you don’t have one, you may not have enough reviews.

Also, if you have a negative one, there’s potentially no way of removing this unless you get the review removed. So, make sure your happy customers are leaving reviews is very important.

Possibly entice them with a 10% discount the next time they come… assuming you aren’t breaking any policy guidelines.

Q&A Auto-Suggest Answers

This feature that Google updated uses previous answers to questions and Google My Business Reviews to answer new questions on the spot. As you start writing the question, different answers start to pop up to give you the best match.

instant qa

So how can you make sure people get the most accurate answer?

Similar to place topics, encouraging your customers to leave detailed reviews of their experience really helps. The more detailed the review is, the better the question gets answered.

Of course, people who are searching for answers can potentially see negative reviews such as prices are too high, service takes long, very long waits on weekends, and more.

In other words, always encourage positive reviews from your loyal customers.

Conclusion

If you haven’t used Google My Business before, you should check it out. With their updates and new features, it is now easier to generate sales and collect leads.

In the future, you’ll see a much deeper integration between Google My Business and Google Assistant. This is going to be important as 50% of the searches will soon by voice searches according to ComScore.

Make sure you are leveraging all of these features and releases Google is launching because it doesn’t cost you money and if you get in early enough, you’ll have an advantage over your competition.

So are you using Google My Business to it’s fullest extent?

The post How to Generate More Traffic with Google’s New Features appeared first on Neil Patel.

Google’s Advice for Surviving Algorithm Changes

In case you missed it, Google just published advice for SEOs on how to continually do well throughout their algorithm changes.

Now, what most people don’t know is Google doesn’t just push out a handful of algorithm changes per year.

They publish substantially more.

Just to give you an idea of how often Google changes, they had 3,200 algorithm changes in just 1 year.

You heard me right, 3,200 changes.

That’s a lot!

So instead of focusing on one algorithm update that you may read about, you need to focus on making your site compatible with Google’s core goal.

First I’ll go over the advice they are telling us all to follow… and then I’ll break down what it really means.

Google’s advice to SEOs

Just like most of their announcements, Google tends to be vague. But of course, they did mention that you should focus on content.

What’s interesting, though, is they did give a list of questions that you should ask yourself with your existing and new content.

But as I mentioned they are vague… so I decided to do something a bit unique. Next to each question that Google provides (in the color black), you’ll find my thoughts on what I think Google is trying to tell you (in the color orange).

Here goes:

Content and quality questions

  • Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis? – Although Google doesn’t penalize for duplicate content, they are looking for new, fresh content. With over a billion blogs on the Internet, there is a lot of regurgitated content out there these days.
  • Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic? – When a user performs a search, Google wants to give them what they are looking for with the least amount of work. They don’t want to have the user go to multiple sites to get their answer. Pages that are thorough and answer all parts of the user’s search query are more likely to rank. In other words, if you write thin content, it probably isn’t satisfactory for the searcher, which means you may not rank as high as you want.
  • Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious? – Does your content have more to offer than what your competition is producing? Go above and beyond by providing additional analysis or drawing your own conclusions using additional data that may be helpful to the reader.
  • If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality? – Don’t just copy and paste someone else’s content then link to them and provide a few lines of commentary. If you are going to reference someone else’s content, make sure you draw your own conclusions and the majority of the text on that page is unique and useful.
  • Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content? – 8 out of 10 people read a headline and only 2 out of 10 people click through to read the rest. Your headlines not only need to be appealing, but they need to summarize the content. Don’t just focus on keywords or clickbait, focus on user experience with your headlines.
  • Does the headline and/or page title avoid being exaggerating or shocking in nature? – Google can tell if you are using clickbait as that typically causes a high bounce rate. If they see that people are going back to the SERP listing, it means that your content wasn’t up to par and you just used clickbait to trick searchers.
  • Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend? – As Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, once said, brands are the solution. Google prefers ranking brands, so don’t prioritize SEO. Focus first on your user. Make them love your content, your product, and your service.
  • Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopedia, or book? – If you think your content is so great you are willing to print it out and hang it up on your wall, you have done a great job. If you are just creating content for the sake of it, people will be able to tell.

Expertise questions

  • Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page? – The best way to position yourself as an expert is to use data and cite your sources. In addition, if you are going to be an expert, make sure you have your name on the page and even link to your bio.
  • If you researched the site producing the content, would you come away with an impression that it is well-trusted or widely-recognized as an authority on its topic? – Compared to your competition how are you seen? If you are more respected and more popular, it shows that you are potentially an expert. You should work on your brand queries as it will help get you more visibility.
  • Is this content written by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well? – Are you faking it or are you clearly an expert on this topic? Sure, I can research the law and write content about the law, but I am not a lawyer and it would be obvious. Write about what you know, and if you don’t know it, go learn it really well first before writing about it.
  • Is the content free from easily-verified factual errors? – Creating fake news will hurt you. Don’t contribute false information to the web. If you write a few pieces with false information and Google catches on, it could potentially damage your whole site.
  • Would you feel comfortable trusting this content for issues relating to your money or your life? – If someone does a search on Google and lands on your site, what will happen if they read your content? If they continue on to another site and continually researches, it means that they don’t trust you enough yet. Not only is it important for you to create amazing content, but you need to show the reader why you are a credible source and why they should pay attention to you instead of someone else in the space.

Presentation and production questions

  • Is the content free from spelling or stylistic issues? – Check your content for grammar and spelling errors. Once you do that, make sure your content is easy to read. For example, having a neon font color on a white background is hard to read.
  • Was the content produced well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced? – Spend time making sure the content you put out on the web is polished. From custom graphics and videos to images and podcasts, make sure the overall experience is great. Write good content isn’t enough as everyone is doing that these days.
  • Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care? – Google wants individual pages to fully answer searchers questions. If someone is looking for an answer and you link out to a lot of other sites to explain your answer, then you aren’t creating the best experience. Focus on creating an amazing experience not only from a site level but from an individual page level too.
  • Does the content have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content? – Your website needs to load fast. Ads slow down a site and can ruin the user experience. Monetizing shouldn’t be the core focus of your site, instead, it should be to educate and help visitors.
  • Does content display well for mobile devices when viewed on them? – Roughly 60% of searches on Google happen on mobile devices. Your content needs to be mobile and tablet friendly.

Comparative questions

  • Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results? – If you are trying to rank for a keyword, look at the top 10 pages that currently take up page 1 and make sure your content is better and more thorough than what is already ranking. If you don’t create something that is superior in quality, there is no reason for Google to place your site above the competition.
  • Does the content seem to be serving the genuine interests of visitors to the site or does it seem to exist solely by someone attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines? – Don’t write content for search engines. Write for humans first as Google’s goal is to satisfy humans. Even in the short run if this means you won’t rank as high, that’s fine. Eventually, Google will figure it out and your content will rank higher over time as long as you are focusing on the end-user.

Conclusion

There were a few other things Google mentioned, such as their quality guidelines, but there was one really important thing that they mentioned.

It’s also important to understand that search engines like Google do not understand content the way human beings do. Instead, we look for signals we can gather about content and understand how those correlate with how humans assess relevance.

Google’s wants to please you, not the version of you that is a marketer or an entrepreneur, but the version of you that uses Google on a daily basis.

When you perform a Google search, are you happy with the results?

If you aren’t, you aren’t going to tell Google with your words as there isn’t an easy way to do that. That’s why they look at signals, such as click-through-rates or how many people hit the back button so they can go back to Google and click on the next listing.

Instead of focusing on SEO, the real trick to winning is to focus on the user.

Go above and beyond and do what is best for them even if you feel it will hurt your rankings in the short run. Because in the long run, Google will figure it out and you should rank better if you are genuinely putting the user first and doing a better job than your competition.

So, what do you think of Google’s advice to SEOs?

The post Google’s Advice for Surviving Algorithm Changes appeared first on Neil Patel.

How Google’s New Layout Predicts the Future of SEO

When you think about SEO and what’s changed over the last 5 years, what comes to your mind?

Chances are, it’s something related to how it’s harder to get rankings on Google.

But why has it gotten harder to get more organic traffic?

Well, if you ask most SEOs, they’ll say it’s because Google has created a much more complex algorithm.

They look at factors like page speed, brand queries, and hundreds of other factors that it may have not been placing much emphasis on in the past.

But that’s only half the story.

The reason SEO has gotten harder is only partially related to Google’s algorithm changes.

Here’s what most SEOs aren’t talking about that you need to pay attention to because this will show you the future of SEO.

Google’s ever-changing layout

When you perform a Google search, what do you see?

Some organic listings and some paid results, right?

And that’s what Google has shown for years. Much hasn’t changed from its core concept.

But over the years, they have continually made small layout tweaks which have added up to big changes.

Let’s look at Google’s layout changes over the past few years… lucky for us, Orbit Media performed random Google searches in 2013, 2014, and 2015 and compared them to Google’s current layout for us.

2013 google

The big differences from 2013 versus 2019 are:

  • The first organic listing is drastically pushed down
  • The ads used to be clearly identified through design elements, but now they blend in more.

Now let’s look at 2014 versus 2019:

2014 google

And 2015 versus 2019:

2015 google

The big trend is that the organic search results have been drastically pushed down below the fold. Roughly by 3.3X.

That’s a huge difference!

A listing these days may have a map, elements from their knowledge graph, more videos and images, and whatever else Google feels their users may want.

Another big trend is that there are now featured snippets. Although these featured snippets can drive traffic to your site, they also provide the searcher with the answer they are looking for without having to click through to your site.

Just perform a search for the largest tree in the world…

tree

Sure, I could click through over to livescience.com to get the answer, but why? Google gives it to me right then and there.

With organic listings being pushed down, and Google answering a portion of people’s questions without them even needing to click through, this means organic listings will get fewer clicks over time.

And it’s not stopping there

Let me ask you a question…

How many organic listings are on the first page?

10, right?

Well, that’s what we are used to, but when’s the last time you actually counted?

7 listings

Google’s dumped 5.5% of organic first page listings. Yes, the first page does have 10 listings a lot of the time, but not as often now.

Here’s a graph that’ll show you the change:

serp listings

18%!! That’s the percentage of first page listings with less than 10 organic results.

What’s crazy is it used to be 2%. That’s a huge jump.

So, what else is Google testing with their layout?

This is a small test that they are doing with their layout, in which some results may not have any listings.

empty serp

But Google did report that was a glitch. The page was not supposed to contain any organic listings, but at the same time, it was supposed to contain no paid listings either.

And over time you should continually expect Google to run more layout experiments and make more permanent changes.

Now before we get into the future of SEO, let’s get one thing straight.

Google is a publicly traded company. Sure, their goal is to create an amazing product, but they have to make money at the same time.

You can’t blame them for making changes that increase their ad revenues.

Yes, you may claim that this is creating a terrible experience for users, but is it really? If it was, people would switch to Bing or any of the other alternative search engines out there.

I still use Google every day. Yes, it may be harder to get clicks organically, but as a user, they’ve created an amazing experience.

The future of SEO

Google doesn’t just make changes to their layout blindly. They run experiments, they survey users, they try to figure out what searchers want and provide it.

Based on the layout changes they have made over the years, you can make a few assumptions:

  1. More rich snippets – people want the answers to their problems as quickly as possible. You’ll see more versions and variations of rich snippets integrated within future layouts as this provides searches with their answers faster.
  2. Less clicks to your site because of voice search – according to Comscore, 50% of searches will be voice searches by 2020. Don’t expect people to go to your site because of voice search.
  3. People are trained to ignore ads – no matter how much Google pushes the first organic listing below the fold, people are trained to ignore ads. No matter how much Google blends them in, most people tend to click on organic listings.
  4. 43.9% of the world still hasn’t come online – we all know Google is the dominant global search engine. But only 56.1% of the world’s population has Internet access. As more people come online, more people will use Google as their search engine, which means more people to click on your organic listings.

In other words, SEO isn’t dead and it is still an amazing channel. Just look at my traffic stats over the last 31 days:

total traffic

Now of those 4,362,165 monthly visits, guess how many come from search engines like Google?

search traffic

A whopping 2,343,362 visits.

In other words, SEO makes up 53.71% of my traffic. That’s a ton of traffic.

And even with Google’s continual changes, you would expect my traffic to be lower, but it isn’t… it’s gone up.

search traffic year

A year ago, I was generating 1,088,251 visits a month from Google. It’s now gone up to 2,343,362 even though Google’s algorithm has continually gotten harder and organic results are continually being pushed further below the fold.

But still, you shouldn’t only rely on SEO

I love Google and even though there is a future for SEO, you shouldn’t rely on it. No matter how good you are at SEO, it doesn’t guarantee success.

Let’s look at a company that you are familiar with… Airbnb.

Did you know that Airbnb didn’t come up with the concept of renting out your house or rooms in your house?

Can you guess who it was?

It was VRBO and they came up with that model 13 years before Airbnb did.

But here’s what’s interesting… who do you think wins when it comes to SEO?

Shockingly, it’s VRBO.

VRBO crushes Airbnb when it comes to Google rankings and they have for a very long time. Here are just a few examples of keywords VRBO ranks for that Airbnb doesn’t:

  • hilton head rentals
  • ocean city maryland rentals
  • cape cod rentals
  • cabin rentals
  • vacation homes
  • vacation rentals
  • vacation home rentals

Airbnb does rank for organic keywords as well, but most of them are brand related.

They crushed their competition without relying on SEO and they were 13 years late when it came to entering the market.

So how did Airbnb win? Well, the main way was they built a better product.

But in addition to that, you focused on an omnichannel approach. From SEO to PPC to advertising on TV screens in airplanes, they tried all of the major channels out there.

Yes, you need to do SEO, but you can’t rely on it as your only source of traffic or income. Diversify, not because of Google, but because you can’t control consumer behavior.

People may not prefer to use search engines in the future, they may want something else, which means you will have to adapt.

Plus you can no longer build a big business through one channel.

Yes, Facebook did grow through referrals. Quora did grow through SEO. Dropbox grew through social media… but those circumstances don’t exist anymore. What worked for these old companies won’t work for you.

You have to leverage all channels to do well in today’s market.

Conclusion

Google may be making changes that you don’t like as a marketer or business owner, but that doesn’t mean SEO is dead.

You can see it from my own traffic stats. You can still grow your traffic, even with Google’s ever-changing algorithm.

Don’t worry about the future because you won’t be able to always predict it or even prevent the inevitable.

The only real solution is to take an omnichannel approach so that you aren’t relying on any one channel.

What do you think about Google’s current layout?

The post How Google’s New Layout Predicts the Future of SEO appeared first on Neil Patel.