A (0:00)

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B (0:48)

Now boarding Group A, please have your boarding passes ready to scan. If your phone is cracked old or was chewed up by your Chihuahua travel companion, please refrain from holding up the line and instead simply go to Verizon and trade in any phone in any condition from one of their top brands for the new Samsung Galaxy S25 plus with Galaxy AI on Unlimited ultimate and a Watch or tap also on them. Service plan required for Watch or Tap. Trade in and additional terms apply. See verizon.com for details.

C (1:22)

Hello and welcome to SEO101 on WMR FM, episode number 491. My name is Scott Van AK and I am the Senior SEO at Stepforth Web Marketing. Ross is away today, so you are stuck with me. So hopefully this goes well. This is only my second time doing a solo show, so I kind of, you know, I'm not fluent in all the aspects of recording the show and all the intricacies and tend to make maybe stupid mistakes because this is actually my second time recording this show when, well, the first little bit I got about 10 minutes into it, then realized I was muted the entire time. So we're starting over and hopefully that's my only hiccup. We'll see here. I'll try to keep my errors to a minimum. So anyways, we are back from the holidays. Our last show was I think about a month ago, early December. And you know, with the holidays we all take breaks and then we come back and you've got to make up that workload that you've been away from. And you know, we just had to miss a couple shows. So here I am on my own because we don't want to miss another one just because Ross is a way so I don't actually have a lot of news, but we have a few things to talk about here, so I'll dive into those. The first is more updates at Google of course. So we had a core update back in November. You'll probably remember about. Remember it? We talked about it on the show last episode and the core update finished and I think it was a day or two later there was another core update. Google just back to back core updates. Not sure I've seen two core updates that close together before, but they did it anyways right before Christmas. It's just the best time of the year to be screwing with things, isn't it? Hopefully you did not have any kind of weird surprises right before the peak for you, but some people certainly did. So that core update took place just sort of your standard core update. Not a lot to talk about it. We mentioned them when they happen, but there's typically not a lot to say most of the time. And then right after that core update ended, there was a Google spam update. Let's throw another update in there. Why not back to back to back updates? Although if you're not spamming and you're following the rules, spam updates are typically good for you. If you're breaking the rules, well, maybe you kind of deserve it. I don't know. So this latest update, it actually was a day after the December core update completed. It ran from the 19th until the 26th. It was just sort of a general broad spam update, nothing special, not a link update. It didn't involve automating the site reputation abuse policy, which those will remain manual for some time. I think Google will automate the site reputation abuse stuff in the future, maybe even this year. But currently that's manual, so there's no impact related to that at all. But one thing to note here about this, if you found that over the holidays your site traffic did drop, first of all make sure it wasn't related to your natural seasonal declines that you may have or unless you normally grow. It kind of depends on your niche. But you might want to look at your actual rankings using maybe a tool semrush or another one. Or you know, however you're normally tracking your rankings if you are assuming you are. Because a drop in traffic may not be an indication of the spam update. It could be just a seasonal dip or it could be the spam update. So to try to get an idea, check your rankings. If your rankings have also dropped, you may have been hit by this. If your rankings are flat, but your Your traffic is still dropped. It's probably a seasonal thing. Just something to keep in mind. But again, I mean, people that are hit by spam updates typically know that there's some spam, because people don't usually spam unwittingly. So anyways, there's another update for you. I'm sure we'll have another one soon. But for now, that's it for core updates. But here's a few other things that are kind of fun. Continuous scroll. So back in June, so Summer this year, 2024, Google got rid of infinite scroll. Typically, you know, on your phone especially, but even on desktop, you could just scroll forever. And that's kind of good. It's kind of a pain for SEOs if you're trying to track a specific position, it may be harder to see that your position 14, because you got to scroll and you got to count them. Whereas with the 10 blue links, you go to page two, you're the fourth listing. It's easy to track. Well, they got rid of continuous scroll. Sorry. In June, they got rid of that, went back to the 10 blue links and we were back to normal. Well, now continuous scroll is appearing again. It is, however, only in place for image and video results that I've seen. So if you're in your regular web results, news results, other places like that, then continuous scroll does not exist. It's still your 10blue link. So not a lot of news per se, but it is a little bit interesting, something to keep track of if you're noticing increases or dips in traffic. I mean, if you're position 11, for instance, and we have continuous scroll, you may be more likely to get clicked on as opposed to being on the top of page two. If someone doesn't want to go to page two, they scroll to the bottom of the first page and stop. So continuous scroll can be a little bit better if you've got those high page two rankings. So that's a big thing to take away from this. So it's kind of fun. More changes at Google. Why not? Right? And let's see what else is kind of fun here today. Google's market share. We talked a bit about market share recently and how ChatGPT search ChatGPT might be affecting that. Well, in October, Google's market share dipped to below 90% for the first time since 2015. So nine years, almost 10 years now. In October, November and December, it all sat below 90%. At the end of December, global market share for Google was at 89.73%. Sometimes it's a bit more common to see Google with lower market share when you're starting to deal with sites like Baidu and other big non American entities. But we also saw that in the US specifically, it's also below 90% and even by more down to 87.39%. So maybe this is the start of more competition, more opportunity for SEO across different platforms. Search GTP is going to keep growing. It's probably going to chip away at Google a little bit as we keep moving into 2025, 2026. We can't say for sure this is all based according to stat counter and stat counter does not measure search GPT ChatGPT. It sort of clumps it in with other and other has all kinds of, you know, Baidu is another, for example, DuckDuckDo is another. So we can't say exactly where that went. But the fact that Google dipped, you know, I don't, I don't mind the giant taking a bit of a step backwards here. So that's great. That's really all I have for news, but I wanted to jump in and have a bit of a tip section here. So there was a post over on Search Engine Roundtable and I'm not really going to be talking about that post specifically, but it was about Google startups and needing a blog or business startups. If you're starting a new website, do you need a blog on that new website? And you know, the answer could sort of be yes or no. It really depends a lot. But I want to just generally like, do you need a blog? Are you a new site, an old site? Doesn't really matter. Do you need a blog? So I've got a few things. Talk about why you might need a blog, what you should even blog about, a bit of alternate content, ideas and when to not blog is blogging isn't for everybody all the time. So why to blog? So the first thing is about authority really and, and having an associated author, a voice of a human in your website helps with that. If you just have all your regular content, which is fantastic, you should have, you know, product descriptions and all that kind of stuff. That's great. But when you bring in a blog and you have an individual talking about products, talking about your business, talking about whatever is relevant, some of that authority from that person translates into your site through their social accounts or their other external links and citations and all that kind of stuff. So authority is helped by having a blog, especially if it's associated with an individual. A lot of people will have blog posts, but the blog may not have an author or the blog will just say the company name as the author. Have a real person. Like it doesn't have to be the CEO, but maybe it should be. Sometimes it could be a key employee. It could be someone that's just an author, a writer for your site and that's all they do. But have a human that's associated with your site in there. Make sure you have structured markup, a bio page about the author, stuff like that, a link to the bio with references from other online publications, social media, all that sort of stuff and other reasons to have a blog. It translates well into social media accounts. So if you're looking for social media content, you can blog about something and you can share that post with your social media accounts. Now don't make your social media accounts only a reflection of the blog. Have other stuff in there too that needs to be in there. But it's a great place to help cross promote your blog and draw attention to both accounts really. So make sure you do that if it makes sense. May not in some cases. A blog can sometimes help build links if they're high quality, if they have reasons that people may want to share them. If they have reasons they might be viral, maybe a really good list or detailed article or who knows, it could be anything. If you build highly quality, sorry, high quality blog posts, you can help get free links to your website. I would not expect to get lots of links all the time, but it can help and it's free and it's just an added bonus to blogging. So do that. It's great. Blogs often rank really well for long tail queries. So you know, your product or service page descriptions like that won't always rank for a lot of long tail stuff because those pages are really focused on one specific thing. So they're great for getting relevant targets for your product or service rank. But you won't get a lot of long tail traffic. Usually if you have your blog, you know you can get all kinds of rankings. Like I'm in the process of doing a competitor analysis for a client and part of that in this case was looking at her main competitor's content and see what content is performing well. And they have a few blog posts that are doing really well for long tail rankings. And according to Semrush, there's one post in particular has more than 5000 rankings in the top 20, 5000 rankings in the top 20 for one blog post. In that case, the post, it's relevant to the site and what they do and it's very big, long term, sorry, long form content and it's just doing gangbusters. It's doing really well. It's built some links. That type of content you can't always put in your main site. And in this case, in that particular example, it's like a tip page and has a bunch of tips and all kinds of stuff and mixed media. It's got video and images, it's got a chart. It's like really well done, researched, very good content. It's built links and a ton of rankings and I'd like to see their analytics and see what kind of traffic they're getting, but who knows? They're probably doing well with that post and they have a bunch of others that are getting hundreds of rankings. But that really stood out to me. If you put out the time and effort to build quality, you can get a lot of rankings in return for that. So keep that in mind. It's also a great place to keep your site fresh with new, fresh content that may not fit elsewhere on your site. You know, if you've got an event or some kind of story to share or something, you can't really put that nested in a product page or a resource page. A blog is a place to put that stuff and it keeps the site fresh by having this new content coming through the site and giving Google a reason to spider those pages and visit them and find good links to relevant content and it's just perfect for that. So you can't really do that without a blog typically. And yeah, so those are your main reasons why you should blog. At the end of the day it comes down to rankings. If you blog, you can get rankings. That's sort of in a nutshell, but those are a bit more specific, so. And so what should you blog about? I get clients a lot that'll ask me. It's like what should we even blog about? You know, and sometimes it's really easy, sometimes it's hard. But you've got business related stories, things that are happening in your company that you might want to talk about, current events related to your business, comparison posts, maybe you want to talk about your product and compare it with your competition. If you have contests or giveaways. Things that perform often really well in a, in a blog are lists, tips like Top 10 signs, you, whatever, FAQ sometimes. Although FAQs you might want to put in an actual FAQ page. So an faq, it kind of depends. You might want it within the main part of the site, a blog might be more appropriate. You just going to have to decide in the moment there and press releases. You may want to put press releases in your blog. PR stuff is really good in its own section, usually without like not within the blog, but rather in its own, maybe under resources or a news section on your site somewhere else. Have a press release section with all your press releases. But if you don't have a lot of press releases, if you're only putting out a few here and there, then that may not be really worth it to create a whole section of your site for one press release once. But if you have a blog that's perfect, put it in the blog, maybe add it in a category called press releases. And then if you have a few more, that'll grow slowly. So that can be a good place to put that stuff as well. Alternate content. If you're looking to create alternate content, but you don't want to put it in a blog, you know, sometimes a blog, it may not be appropriate. So product guides may not necessarily be in a blog. If you've got a number of products and you need how to guides to talk about how to work in these products, how they function, how to use them, you may want a whole section of your site called product guides or how tos or I've seen a lot of cases where people have a subdomain help or support or guides or you know, that sort of thing and they'll put all of that in there. If you have a lot of it, if you only have a couple, a blog is great. If you have a lot, you might want a whole section for your site. The same goes for case studies press releases. As I said, those things really work best as like evergreen content. If you will have them in a dropdown somewhere outside of the blog, because those pages don't really get dated. Like a blog is really best for content that may become outdated at some point. If you have content that you want to create that's really evergreen, create those pages, those static pages within your navigation for that content. Again, if it makes sense to do that. So that's, you know, kind of the gist of that. Really. A blog only really, if you can create a useful post that showcases your expertise and kind of helps build that authority. Otherwise you might want to consider just having a page. And a few times when you might not want a blog would be if you don't have anything to say. I mean, seems obvious, I know, but a lot of times people create the blog. Yeah, we got to do this blog and they don't keep up a proper regular cadence. Maybe they're putting out a post today and then they wait three weeks, they put another post and they wait a year and then maybe a couple years and then another month. If you don't have a regular cadence of your publishing, it's not going to perform as well. You need to keep it up. If you can do it daily, do it daily. But you know, creating quality content every day, that can be tough. Obviously I don't have a lot of clients that like to do that because how could they? It takes too much time. So try to keep up something regular though, like maybe a weekly post, even monthly. Try not to go less than monthly. At least once a month will help you when you start to break it up with too big of a gap in between posts, it just doesn't have the same impact. So you might not want to do it. And also don't blog if you're not willing to put in some effort in creating great content. If it doesn't have high quality, if it doesn't express your personal knowledge, your eat, your expertise, your trustworthiness, all that stuff. If you don't have a unique angle or some perspective or something of value to offer that really will help make it stand out, you probably don't want to be blogging because you need that to be unique. If it's just a fluff piece that copies what somebody else did and rewords it, you're not going to get a lot of performance from that post. It probably won't rank, you're not going to get a lot of traffic. It's just not worth your effort. Make sure your posts are good or maybe don't blog at all. So hopefully that's helpful in this blog world. If you're thinking about starting a blog and you don't know what to do, you know, there you go. Hopefully that helps. We are going to take a quick break right now though and when I come back we will touch on country code, top level domains, AI overviews, and I have a question from Ricky from Facebook. So we'll be right back.