070: Two New Things In SEO with SEO Expert Paul Lee

Title: Two New Things In SEO with SEO Expert Paul Lee

Guest: Paul Lee

Peter: Are we talking about today, Paul?

Paul: We’re talking about what’s new in SEO. Two things to know. I mean, come on. Two things.

Peter: What is going on in SEO these days?

Paul: So, you know, this is kinda drawn from the stuff that I’m dealing with with clients right now with, with folks. And one of the big questions was, something happened to my rankings around July and then something seems to be happening again. You know, that seems to be, and then other people, nothing. So no, no, no changes, no nothing, but a few people. Sometimes something’s a little off.

So we’ve looked into it and and it one of the problems that we run into is Google updates.

Peter: So When you say rankings one, Google updates. Let’s let’s back up the bus just a second here. So when we say rankings, what are we talking about?

Paul: Somebody types in any kind of search query into Google. So or actually can speak it into Google now. You know, plumber near me, best, metal roofing contractor, etcetera. Where do you rank in those? You know, obviously, number one gets the blind share of the traffic.

So if you’re if you’re number 20, you’re number 50. If you’re number a 100, you’re getting beat to heck by the guy that’s number one. One of the things we do, of course, in SEO is monitor your rankings really closely. You rank for a lot of things, but we we put in specific words that we really wanna track. These are the ones that we think drive revenue for you, drive conversions for you, show the most intent that people have.

Peter: Drive leads. Yeah.

Paul: Drive the leads, drive the phone call so your phone is ringing. That’s what we wanna know. So we wanna know when you are number 20 and when you moved up to number 15 and how can we get you from 15 to number eight or all the way up to number one. So we watch that stuff really closely. The problem is one of the challenges I don’t say challenge.

I won’t say problem. But the challenge is that Google doesn’t tell us exactly the algorithm that they use, the behind the scenes programming they use to figure out how to put this one number one and this one number two and this one number three, etcetera, etcetera. They make constant improvements, but there are times in a year, maybe three or four times in a year, that they will do what’s called a core update. And a core update means that it affects many parts of the algorithm and it can drastically change things. Some of those pass without too much, you don’t notice it too much.

Some have massive effects on people. So they did a core update in July, and then they’ve done another one in September. One of the things that I think is new in SEO right now is just the need to monitor the rankings more closely and look at them in these times of turbulence. We don’t know what they change. They don’t tell us exactly.

Tell us maybe they’ll give us a little hint, but they don’t tell us exactly. They don’t get into the nitty gritty of what they do. So there are still people that are trying to figure that out through experimentation and analysis and all that kind of stuff. But we just know that it’s a time of turbulence. People who had, whose rankings were always high may find them have dropped all of a sudden.

Peter: So what you’re suggesting is there are ways to track your rankings and maybe check them, what, on a weekly basis, something like that?

Paul: Yeah. They update every week, so we can watch the movement over time. But when when when these core updates happen, there can be some changes. So what I would say is new is that with these core updates coming so quickly that, you need to have somebody looking at that. For most people, they may not see a problem and it’s going to be fine, but there are going to be some people that’s going to be, oh, okay.

You got you got an issue.

Peter: Have you seen any with the most recent updates, have you seen any particular trends?

Paul: I have that what what I’ve seen so far is that ecommerce sites some ecommerce sites are losing some words that they rank for. And I don’t know if it’s the, they just made it harder for Shopify based or e commerce based sites to rank through some change that they’ve made. But that seems to be the one that it’s the guys that are running e commerce stores. Their rankings have sagged since July and then now again in September. I think it’s maybe in the fact that their pages are promoting a product and maybe their product descriptions aren’t all that different, things like that.

There’s kind of thin pages. There’s not a lot of content

Peter: Pretty on generic. Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. There’s gonna be pretty generic. And so that’s what I’ve found so far. It’s the guys that are running ecommerce sites that are seem to be having being hit. But it’s that’s not that’s not the hard and fast rule.

But if nobody’s paying attention, you don’t know. You know? So that’s why I’m saying if you’re not closely monitoring your rankings, you need help to do that at a base level. If you do nothing else for SEO, you should just know where you are

Peter: Right.

Paul: And what’s going on. And if you’re not gonna have anybody promote it, write content for you, do all the other stuff to keep trying to improve it, but at least monitor it. Right. Because you don’t know exact those guys didn’t know that that one day they were going to drop off the rankings, just be chucked out of the archives completely. You know?

And if nobody was paying attention, they would just wonder, why is the phone not ringing? But some luckily, they were paying attention, and then then they said, oh, jeez. We need some we need help to fix this now. Yeah. So closely monitor it.

Peter: It looks like you have something else you wanted to talk about today. Something else that’s new and exciting in the world of Google

Paul: and all things

Peter: SEO. What is it?

Paul: Well, it’s it’s this thing that we all love, Google Analytics. It’s how we tell how many people have been to our website and where did they come from. And it’s, I think, been around since 2005, and people use it. It’s a fantastic tool to be able to say, This is how many people came via referral from another link. This is how many people came from finding us organically in searches, directly typed our name in versus all those things.

Ads. And then, know, did they convert? Did they become newsletter subscribers? All that kind of stuff. We can tell all that.

How long did they stay on the site, etcetera. So that’s the fantastic tool that most people are using.

Peter: If you’re getting any reporting from your, marketing company or you do it yourself, Google Analytics is just kinda like the Swiss army knife of digital marketing. It really has a lot of basic information that you’re gonna need to figure out what’s going on. And the first thing I always wanna look at is analytics just to see what’s going on. Right? Having said all that, what’s happening?

Paul: Google’s killing it, of course. So it outdated, and it needs to be updated. So Google decided apparently that they couldn’t update it anymore. They needed to scrap it and start over. So they have decided to have what’s called Google Analytics four.

That’s the new fourth version of it, GA4 for short. GA4 has already launched and you can get your site onto it. But the big announcement, the big thing that they’re pushing, and this is something that impacts SEO because obviously SEO eventually drives traffic and leads to leads and conversions and new clients and new customers, new patients, etcetera. So we really pay attention to Google Analytics. The thing is that it’s being replaced, and the original, the old version of Google Analytics is being shut down on June 30.

So from 07/01/2023, they you’ll only be able to use the new version Google Analytics four. So that’s a big change.

Peter: Paul, stop freaking out, man. That’s, like, seven, eight months away. I mean, what’s the big deal, dude? Come on.

Paul: Yeah. Think about the next couple months. November, thanks thanksgiving. It’s gonna be Christmas before you know it.

Peter: It’ll be here before we know it.

Paul: Oh my gosh. Well, and and

Peter: the biggest reason why you should do it now, now you’ll have comparative data after, you know, after the old Google Analytics. Get it on your site now. Right? So then you can the legacy data that you can compare in the tool. You don’t wanna just, like because you’ll be basically, if you wait until June 30 to turn the thing on, you’re gonna have no legacy data to compare.

Paul: Yeah. Exactly. You’re gonna see everything start from that day. And it will appear that, as you’re looking at GA4, that it has no history from before. But it does, of course.

Get it in as soon as possible. And I think, like you said, it’s going to come faster than we think, so any kind of delay. And some people’s websites are complex. They have a lot of moving parts, they have a lot of conversions and actions that they want to get in there, and it takes a little while to do. So don’t underestimate the fact that this is going to take a little while.

And like you said, you find the other one easier to get around in, so you still keep using it. I’m in the same way. I’m in the same exact boat. But I have to get my mind around the reality that in July, I have to know what I’m doing with GA4. I’m a professional.

That’s what I’m supposed to do. We’ll be fine. But it’s just an indication of like, we’ve all got to kind of, you know, get our heads around this new reality. Yeah.

Peter: So we’re using, for example, we’re using the core analytics code right now to report metrics to over a 100 clients a month. That core reporting platform that we’re using that is that is using Google Analytics as its source of truth, we we have to switch it all. Downside one downside that you were talking about as well was the fact that there are a lot of tools that were built to work with Google Analytics, and they may not be available. We’ve we’ve been running the gauntlet right now with a couple of our, tools like call tracking. We use call tracking metrics.

Mhmm. We have been attending their webinars and everything that they they’ve actually been collaborating with the whole team of folks to best implement GA four for call tracking. Call tracking is how you figure out, or how we help clients figure out where traffic to their website people who convert, they’re gonna call the business, And we use that as a tool to connect the dots between somebody who visited your website and then somebody who called you now

Paul: as well. Yeah. So the and there are hundreds and hundreds of examples of that, of little programs, applications, things that people have done with that tied into Google Analytics that pulled the data from Google Analytics and then repackaged it in interesting ways or whatever Yeah. That now are having to do it for GA4. Some of those are not going to be replaced.

Some of those aren’t being maintained in the same way, or they don’t have the resources to get them going or whatever. We’re getting down to having some less choices for some of those tools. That’s definitely a con, I suppose, in this situation. But it’s also collateral damage, I suppose, because what’s happening is GA4 is fixing so many other things. You know, the the question first question I had was, why would Google?

Why would you do this? When I first read that they you know? What are you doing? Yeah. So many things are built on this.

Why would you do it? Well, when you read their arguments about why they’re doing it, it actually makes some sense. They’re not doing it to be capricious or difficult or just because they want you to adopt something new. They’re doing it because the old version was written and started in 2005. Privacy think about the landscape of privacy on the Internet in 2005 versus the landscape in 2022.

Things have changed massively. Expectations have changed. The previous version is kind of a privacy nightmare, and especially in a world in which the European Union has all kinds of privacy rules. The United States and even states inside The United States have different privacy rules. Different countries have different privacy rules.

Some devices are not allowing the personalization tracking that used to be, so iPhones and things are turning that stuff off.

Peter: Yeah, Apple.

Paul: Apple stuff is pushing that stuff away. How in the world do they know this person that visited your site is 24 and a college graduate and all that kind of stuff? Well, it’s cool that in some ways that advertisers know that or that analysts know that, and it’s also super creepy and spooky that they know that. They’re trying to walk this line, and they’re trying to make a new version of this, which is respectful of privacy, allows people to opt in, all that kind of stuff. The other thing that it is, is it’s mobile friendly.

One of the big downsides to Google Analytics was it makes mobile sites slow on mobile devices. It makes the site slow down. It really wasn’t meant for mobile devices to be using because in 2005, people were just thinking about BlackBerrys maybe. I mean, we were way before surfing on your iPhone. Now we’re doing way more browsing, everything else on the phones.

And the phones are, let’s just say bluntly, super sensitive to JavaScript and all kinds of scripts that run on the page. Of course, Google Analytics is done through JavaScript. That makes pages go slower, makes people unhappy, and they stay off the websites. Google doesn’t want that. They want something that’s lightweight, faster, privacy respected.

It’s more configurable and easier to use eventually, we hope, for the user. Yeah. And to do that, they had to start over from scratch. So that’s why they’ve done it. So we lose some tools.

We lose some familiarity with originally the stuff that we’ve been doing for the last ten years, been fifteen years. That’s a problem. But it’s a good thing overall. It’s a good thing to move to GA4. It’s something that we need to embrace.

And as you said, you need the data as soon as you can. You need the history as much as you can. Yeah. And we don’t need any delays. With, jeez, what we know is coming in November and December, we really ought to be on this as well.

So that’s the other thing we need to do, though, be doing in SEO is making sure that our sites are moving and transitioning to GA4, at least joining it in parallel for now until the regular analytics dies, and then we turn it off.

Peter: So what are the two big takeaways from our conversation today?

Paul: Number one, you gotta know your rankings. That’s number one. You gotta be looking at and monitoring and know where you rank for the stuff that you wanna rank for. And number two, you need to be implementing implementing GA four, Google Analytics four, now or as soon as possible.

Peter: And if you don’t know how to do that, we’re here to help.

Paul: Yeah. So

Peter: Yeah. We have a opportunity to book a consultation with us on our website. Go to bizmarketing.com, and you will see a book appointment there. And we can book an appointment and chat with you about it and help you figure out what’s going on with your rankings and your Google Analytics. Yeah.

Paul: We

Peter: are more than happy to help. I don’t know if I’ll leave this on the podcast, but two things. First, Google is updating. Know your rankings. B.

Paul: Yeah. I almost did that because my wife does that all the time. She’s she is hilarious. And she does it on purpose, but she’ll be like be like, two things. One, I never said that.

And b, you shouldn’t. Cracks me up every time. Grace and I, I

Peter: we do that. That was like a Michael Scott thing. Yeah. So Grace and I Grace and I pull that on each other all the time. Oh,

Paul: how the turntables.

Peter: Oh, yeah. Paul, this is good stuff. Thank you.

Paul: Alright. Thanks,

Peter: Pete. Thank you for joining me today giving us the latest on SEO for twenty twenty two, late twenty twenty two, looking at 2023.

Paul: Yeah, my pleasure, man. Thanks so much for having me.

Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.