So What? Analyzing organic search traffic that has been lost

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.

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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on your SEO traffic. We walk through how to determine which pages on your website are losing organic search traffic and how to use your own data to re-optimize those pages to regain your authority and search ranking. Watch the replay here:

 

Listen to the audio here:

In this episode you’ll learn:

• How to determine which pages are losing organic search traffic
• Which data sources to use in your analysis of organic search traffic loss
• What actions to take for optimizing your site for better ranking and authority with your organic search traffic

 

Affiliate links from this episode:

• Talkwalker Media Monitoring
• AHREFS

 

Upcoming Episodes:

• How to Improve your Email Marketing Deliverability – 9/24/2020
• How do you optimize a page for SEO in the modern era? – TBD
• How do you benchmark a website’s performance? – TBD
• What are Core Web Vitals and why do they matter? – TBD

 

Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/insights/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/

 

AI-Generated Transcript:

Katie Robbert 0:15
Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insight live show from Trust Insights. We are Trust Insights. I’m Katie Robbert. I am joined by Chris Penn and John Wall, I’m pointing to them as if they are all in the same spot on every single screen. It’s a little bit like the Brady Bunch. So this is our pilot episode. We are testing this out, we would love any kind of feedback that you have. And so let’s just get right into it because we do not want to waste your time. Chris,

Christopher Penn 0:44
all right. So today, what we want to do with the show in general start there is provide some useful stuff, because there’s nothing worse than staring at their talking heads for an hour, right? But let’s instead focus on being practical. Today’s topic is about SEO. Search Engine Optimization, SEO is probably one of the most important channels you can have from a digital marketing perspective, but also one that not a lot of people do well. And part of the reason people don’t do well at it is because it’s very hard to prioritize to figure out, Okay, I have this huge elephant eat, right? dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of pages on your website, and so many things that can go into what makes you rank well, in Google. Now, we’re not going to spend a whole lot of time on trying to decode the Google algorithm, maybe for a future show. But we want to talk about today is how do you start to prioritize what you need to fix, and then walk through some of the obvious ways that we could fix those things. So to start, let’s go ahead and we’re gonna switch over here into screensharing view. The first place that you should start with all of your investigation is within Google Analytics itself to figure out how big a deal is organic search If you know, then you can skip to skip this part of the video. But if you don’t know, one of the first places I would suggest going is in Google Analytics assuming that you have goals and goal value setup, which is a big assumption. We’re going to go to conversions, multi channel funnels assisted conversions. And what we’re going to look at here is the default channel grouping. And again, there’s a cautions on bookmark there, your default channel groupings have to be set up correctly, because out of the box, Google Analytics does a whole bunch of things wrong. Like it will classify, for example, MIT mail google.com, which everyone knows is Gmail as referral traffic and not email, but that’s for another show. In this case, what I’m looking at here is organic searches the from an assisted perspective, meaning that it was part of the path to conversion but was not the last thing somebody did was the number four channel for the period. July one to yesterday for the Trust Insights website. If I click on last click, or direct me was the last thing somebody did. So number three channel, right? So it’s important. I actually am surprised, confused why it’s not higher. Right. I know we have a robust email marketing program and that explains why email so prominent, but why is search not working as well as it should be? And that’s a great place to start our investigation.

Katie Robbert 3:25
I mean, do you want the real answer to that? No. Okay.

Christopher Penn 3:33
When it comes to understanding what’s good to have gone wrong, this is where a lot of people get stuck. They’re like, Okay, I know something’s wrong. Now what now? What do I do? How do you prioritize? Many companies will have access to Google Analytics. Most folks who are savvy digital marketers probably have access to Google Search Console, which is the site that allows you to see from Google’s perspective how things are working. Right Google will tell you, Hey, I’m noticing some some issues here. And some companies look decent number of companies will have access to some kind of SEO tool, like ahrefs or href. So I don’t know how to pronounce their, their company name.

Katie Robbert 4:16
I think we determined it was href. Is that right, john?

Unknown Speaker 4:19
He said, The folks at h refs, they love us. And so we call them h refs. That’s our new,

Christopher Penn 4:24
new approach. We’ll call them whatever they want to call is probably some sort of data that tells you, you know, from the SEO tool of your choice, now, here’s the catch. These all don’t talk to each other. Right? You have Google Analytics data, which can tell you down to the page level, how many visits from search data page get. And then you have your SEO tool, and you have Google Search Console. The only thing these three tools have in common is the URL of the pages on your website. Right. That’s it. There’s nothing else in common, but we want data from all three of these from our SEO tool, we would want to know like, what keyword does a page rank for it? Does it does a piece of software think this is relevant? Right? That’s an important part. From Search Console. We want to see how many impressions did a page show up with? In from Google’s perspective, like this page here, 22,000 impressions, it’s showing up in search a ton of times 347 clicks that page. Yeah, not not so hot. And then for Google Analytics, of course, the pages and the number of searches each page has got. So to bring all this data together, there’s a couple of different ways to do this. If you’re doing it ad hoc, and you’ve got good Excel skills, you could just take all three sources, hit export CSV, and spend a whole bunch of time doing v lookups and trying to match the V tables together and that’s okay. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that approach. If you want to kick things up a notch, you can use data processing software. So you could do this, for example, in IBM Watson Studio within the modeler software, load all three data sources and say, connect these three. Or if you’re really a nerd, you could write your own code to bond the three together, which is what I do because I have no life.

Katie Robbert 6:24
That’s not true, Chris. No, I think I could clarify you do have a life but I think that what you’re trying to get at is that you’re trying to work smarter, not harder, so that you’re trying to get to more efficient information faster, so that you can take action versus getting inundated. Buried in all of the different software systems,

Christopher Penn 6:47
and more importantly, repeatability, repeatability and scalability with you do the V lookup route, even if you’re an Excel Master, it’s still going to take a fair amount of time to do that every time you get three new files. If you have Have a some sort of system or code based approach, like Watson Studio or like R, then it’s going to go a little faster. So what do we get? When we do this? What we get is what we call a search loss report. And I’ll show you two versions of the the very basic version tells me in the last two months, which is the time period, I’m looking at, these the pages that have lost search traffic, their pages, like, hey, this page is in trouble. It used to get more search traffic in the beginning of the time period than it did at the end. I need to go fix that page. There’s there’s something wrong there. If we then look at the version of this that has all of our different data sets combined, like this is good. This is an important thing. This is like I know this page is in trouble. But this doesn’t tell me what to do. This doesn’t tell me what to what could be a potential contributing factor. So remember how I said we’re going to bother Those data sets together. When we do this, we get a spreadsheet. for lack of a better visualization tool that looks like this to has the same information, the traffic impacts, the click through rates, I’m going to actually color code our click through rates here. And, most importantly, the keywords for those pages. Now remind me Chris, where did this particular dataset come from? So this is the blend this is okay. In the beginning here we have the search loss report. In the middle we have Search Console information. And at the end, we have keyword information and and search features from the href tool. I was going to color code this here as well. So for this page here, which is our top loss page, we see this is applying machine learning attribution, applying machine learning to attribution. We lost 38 visits from search from in this time period. It hasn’t 6.61% click through rate, which is actually pretty good. It means that when this page comes up in search results, you know, 6% of people click on it. So it’s relevant, as opposed to the homepage where the homepage is coming with a lot of stuff. And you know, the click through rates are pretty low there. And here’s why we lot where this page isn’t going as well. It’s ranking, you know, position 31. Right? If you’re not on the first page, you’re not on Google boils down to like, you get some traffic. But let’s be honest, if you’re not on the first page, you’re not on Google.

Katie Robbert 9:27
Yeah, if you’re if you’re scrolling through like second page, third page, fourth page, then, you know, the person who’s searching definitely does not know what they’re looking for. And they’re just fumbling around or it’s probably a bot.

Christopher Penn 9:39
Exactly. And what’s happening in search now is these lovely things, which is my smart device here on my desk. present one result, right. So if you’re literally now if you’re not number one you’re nothing for for these these other devices. I can see for this page, attribution score and applying machine learning are the two keyword terms. That’s how I could go in and and, you know, maybe tune up the page for those terms. Now, what I’m going to do here is I’m going to scroll down, because the next section is the home page. And I have this page here out of the box, Google Analytics, right. And then I look at the keywords for that, you know, out of the awkward outside of the box out of the box thinking, but when we go to the page itself. This is the page right outside the box, thinking outside the box, Google Analytics. When you look through this page, what is this page about? It’s not about thinking outside the box. It’s about Google Analytics. It’s about more advanced Google Analytics, how can you use more advanced techniques to analyze a Google Analytics data? So what has happened here? Is we screwed up.

Katie Robbert 10:50
Chris, how often do you think this problem occurs? So, you know, I think that one of the things that marketers and PR people are trying to do is Come up with a catchy headline for their article for their blog for their thing. And for us, you know, we do that as well like what is? What’s, uh, what’s the title of something that’s going to catch people’s attention? With no really no thought behind the SEO implications like, so we just named it thinking outside the box Google Analytics, because to us that made sense of looking at Google Analytics a different way. But at no point, were we trying to rank for Google Analytics. At no point were we trying to rank for thinking outside the box. And we happen to start to rank for the wrong thing. So people looking for Google Analytics on our website or for our expertise in that we’re not finding that because Google Analytics wasn’t part of the SEO plan for this particular page, which is our error, which is what we’re here to fix.

Christopher Penn 11:52
Right? Yeah, we screwed up is what boils down to Yeah. And so how do we fix this? Okay. So we Know what the page is about generally, what we now need to figure out is what should be on this page. So let’s go ahead and do this. We’re going to go ahead and close out of our performance, our search console stuff now. And we’re going to say, Okay, what are the terms that we could be using on this page that will be related to Google Analytics? Obviously, you want to change the headline won’t be like advanced Google Analytics techniques or something like that. But what are some of the other things you might want to say? One of the challenges with Google itself these days, is that Google focuses on topics it focuses on and understanding what the humans would want out of a page like this. Right? So we have to do things like examine page structure. Does this page answer the question that someone will be searching for? Like, what are some good at Google Analytics advanced techniques? And does it answer the next question that would be in their minds, which could be things like how do I do that? This page has all the pieces. So we’re good on the content side. Now we have to figure out the tuning side for keywords and specific topics. Again, we want to focus on what Google would expect to see if it was a human, which it’s not. But if it was a human, what are the things that we as people would want to see on this page? So how do we do that?

Katie Robbert 13:20
So Chris, before you get too far down that rabbit hole, how does how does someone figure out what Google wants to see? And you know, this, this might be a complicated question, but so let’s say you go with the Okay, I’m on my desktop, and I’m googling advanced Google Analytics techniques. Of course, I’m mimicking a phone as I’m talking about a desktop, so I’ve already screwed it up. So regardless, um, let’s say someone is on their desktop typing and saying advanced Google Analytics techniques, you know, how do you know as the person creating the content, what Google is looking for, and then you also mentioned other devices. So you have an Alexa, you have Siri, you have Google Home? Do you have to think about that differently? Because you all of those algorithms work different from the main, you know, google.com search algorithm.

Christopher Penn 14:12
So to answer the second part, we don’t know, Google. To answer the first part, we’re actually going to dig through that because one of the challenges that, again, a lot of marketers have is they don’t necessarily know how to do advanced stuff, like, for example, topic modeling and natural language processing. And that’s okay, you don’t need to know that what you do need is access to qualitative data that would tell you what are the things that are related to this. Now, one of the challenges with almost every SEO tool out there is that those SEO tools tend to be focused on very much a narrowly related things. So for example, if I put in fact, let’s go over to our friend H. refs, I put in Google Analytics in here. You’ll note there’s a whole bunch of search terms here that all have Google Analytics, right you know, so it’s a very nice narrowly focused thing. And those are the things that we want to focus on for sure. But it doesn’t explain the natural ways that you and I would have a conversation about that. So to figure that out, what we would do is we would use a tool of social media monitoring tool. This case, I’ve got Talkwalker By the way, full disclosure of a lot of the companies are mentioning in here like h refs, and Talkwalker, our business partners of Trust Insights, so FTC disclosure, if you buy something from them through us, we get like enough money to buy a beer. But we have to say that for compliance reasons. When I put advanced Google Analytics into Talkwalker, I get the social media conversations that people are having and the most prominent terms. I did the word cloud here for fun, but you know, we can you can mess around this. When we start to dig in here and go, Oh, there’s actually other things that really should be on this page that are semantically conversationally related that are not going to show up in an hour keyword search, like Digital Marketing, right digital marketing Google Analytics like peanut butter and chocolate. But if we go back to our page, we see exactly one instance of that phrase, right? Even though it’s from a conversation perspective, that’s what this is all about. Right? marketing campaigns in here, analytics skills, power users, Data Studio. All these things are things that when people talk about advanced Google Analytics in social media qualitatively, we can find in here now, here’s the challenge. Social media data is extremely good for qualitative purposes to understand conversations, it is terrible, terrible for quantitative stuff, because you have things like selection bias, people who are not particularly passionate about topic are not going to chip in on a topic right? You have interference of all kinds Like Russian troll farms just you know spamming and re spamming accounts over and over again. So you can’t rely on the quantitative side. But what we can do is export the social conversations. Let’s go ahead and move this away here and move in our Talkwalker. Export.

Unknown Speaker 17:15
Yep. So Chris, when you were in Talkwalker, which social channels is it looking at the standard Facebook, Twitter, go LinkedIn. What is it looking at? Let’s see if I can just remember Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Cora Reddit, asked com blogs, forums, newsletters, some web pages.

Christopher Penn 17:38
And bulletin boards is a whole bunch of different data sources that it has in there that it can pull from so there’s a lot of you get a really nice wide selection. If you want to drill on a specific platform. You absolutely can do that. If I go back into here, I can choose under media types. Oh yeah, there’s like no other brands like flicker like for the five people who still use liquor

Katie Robbert 18:01
I think that that’s important to point out because I think when we, when traditionally a lot of people who think about social media listening or might be newer to it, there might be this an assumption that it’s only looking for Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram, sort of like the big four, but forums, especially now, Reddit and other forums, discord, you know, I’m sure I’ll forget a whole bunch of them. That’s where a lot of the conversation is happening. And so as you’re looking for the language that you know, your potential customers are using, or you, your audience you’re using, make sure you’re going beyond that narrow focus of just Facebook and Twitter.

Christopher Penn 18:42
Yep. So now we can take that data out of Talkwalker. And what we’re going to do is we’re not going to pay attention to Talkwalker hit percentages, because that’s not super helpful. just for an example. You want to do some cleaning of this mentally, first and just logical stuff, but we’re going to skip that step and go straight into the processing side. Go to your keywords tool. So of choice again, we use the H refs here. And then you stick your conversational terms in here to get keyword volumes. All right. So look at the X. Let’s go to overview. Here we go. So this is what I’ve stuck in. Right, but I just copied and pasted. conversationally, Microsoft Excel was not super high up in what was in the Talkwalker data, but it’s number one in here in search volumes, right? So as we rework this post, when I talk about, hey, you might be able to take some of your Google Analytics data and export it to Microsoft Excel conversationally does a logical thing. Talk about digital marketing, data visualization, strategic planning how you would use Google Analytics for strategic planning. And this is how you start to check the box on the things that we know are conversationally logically and human related to Google Analytics, advanced Google Analytics Analytics, that a regular keyword tool is going to miss now it’s not to say that A tool like href is a bet. It’s obviously very good. We use it all the time. But there is no substitute still, for that qualitative look at what real people are saying, because Google is optimizing for real people behaviors. So with that,

Katie Robbert 20:15
so would you know, before you dig into like the how, you know, I can certainly share a quick anecdote. And I would like to say, john, you probably fall in the same category as me when you were a beginner. I don’t believe ever that Chris was a beginner. So I’m just going to exclude him from this example. You know, when I was first getting up to speed on what SEO entailed. If someone gave me the instruction, go ahead and optimize for the keyword Microsoft Excel. I have the Personally, I have the misunderstanding that, when you’re looking at the edit view of the post, you just put in target keyword, Microsoft Excel, not even really thinking about how many times it was reflected in the content and so for me, I had a huge misunderstanding and mismatch of how to actually optimize for SEO. And so Chris, I’m definitely interested to see what specific, you know, low hanging fruit you want people to go after? And then what are some of like the things that people might not know where the gotchas when you’re optimizing?

Christopher Penn 21:20
So let’s go ahead into this. The first thing we’re going to do is the keyword itself. The term we’re targeting really should be front and center in the title, right? There’s the what we’re thinking about advanced Google.

Katie Robbert 21:32
And so as you’re doing that, Chris, just another quick question is, if I’m changing the name of a blog post, on my website, do I then have to worry about a broken link or is that only if you change the permalink

Christopher Penn 21:45
it’s only if you change the permalink, which is something we also want to do and from a content recycling perspective, or in this case, a content upgrade perspective, the general processes, we’re going to make a note of the old page, we’re going to redo the URL. We’re going to redo the title. And we’re going to redo a bunch of the content at effectively creating a new page. Then we go into our, either our admin, in this case, WordPress, or go down to the server level itself and make a redirect to say everything going to the old page, all the links, all the traffic goes to the new page. You’ll also want to do things you know, very tactical stuff, like changing the publish date to reflect the brand new page.

Katie Robbert 22:23
So that’s essentially a checklist of things. You don’t just go in and start mucking around, hit publish, and, you know, pray for the best.

Christopher Penn 22:30
Not if you don’t want to get your butt handed to you. Yeah, you’ll want to check things like your categories and stuff if you’re using a pool. And like any of these SEO plugins, you can tell we didn’t do any of our homework here. So even just having that you know, putting the focus keyword that you’re going to be using in here and identifying like, yeah, this is should be Cornerstone content. This is a big piece of content. We want to make sure that it’s prominent flipping switches like that, and either Yoast or rankmath Which are two of the more popular plugins for WordPress will change what algorithm the these tools used to score your page and tell you, hey, if this is Cornerstone content, this page would be better be longer, it better be richer and better have expertise, authority, trustworthiness, and so on and so forth.

Unknown Speaker 23:15
So what’s the deal with that? Do you only get like X number of cornerstones per site, like you can’t just take everything as Cornerstone,

Christopher Penn 23:21
you could, but then you would be essentially trying to optimize for Cornerstone content for every single page. So instead of like a 600 word page, you’re not going to crank out like a 1500 word page, if it’s if it’s all Cornerstone content things and you can have, you know, differences in the number of keywords that you use and related terms and stuff like that. There’s a lot more. It’s a lot more rigorous on that front. The catch being that the recommendations are also not always correct, either. So they take them with a grain of salt. I’m not going to go through and optimize everything here because it’s probably about a 30 to 45 minute process and nobody wants to watch that. But what I will say is that when we’re going Through, we’re looking at structure. So the structure of a good Cornerstone page is going to look something like uh, what why how, what is the thing? Why is the thing important? How does how, how should we do the thing or what’s so in this case? We have What is it? This should be rewritten to say what is advanced Google Analytics. And there is no y section here, we need to add a why section. Why is advanced Google X important to digital marketing for example, each of the major section headings should be logical things but logical things that we have pulled from our expanded topic list right? So we go down this list and then you have the how. So I would say from these terms, digital marketing is is a y term, right? strategic planning is a y term. Why do you need to do advanced Google X, you need it for things like strategic planning, so on and so forth. And then the how terms think terms like Microsoft excel in here, Google Data Studio in here. So we’re going to we would Go back to our page, reformat it, and then add in the why section. And then a lot of what we have here is the how stuff how do you do this? How do you apply these different techniques that will help this page stand out more and will be more authoritative, more trustworthy, and demonstrate a lot more expertise than what we have been doing. So, to wrap up, if you want to make the most of SEO, and you want to get your activities focused, you first have to do an audit of your data, you need to pull in your Google Analytics data to figure out which pages are in trouble. You need to pull in keyword data from the SEO tool of your choice to figure out why those pages might be in trouble. And you need Search Console data to understand how Google is seeing that page perform. Each of those data sources is important on their own but you get the biggest bang for your buck when you put all three together. Once you’ve done that, once you’ve put all three together which is not enough In significant step, it is then incumbent upon you to build your punch list look at for easy stuff. So easy things would be like keywords completely out of alignment with what the page was supposed to be about. Other things to look for in here, it would be pages that have a lot of track loss with unusually low click through rates telling you, hey, people see this in a search result. And frankly, they don’t understand why it’s even showing up. They understand it’s relevant. So you would need to do some tuning on a basis things like your title and your meta description to tune what snippets it shows. And then, after all that, the final section is you go in and you do the hard work the you know, 30 4050 minutes of tuning the page, you might find out like I have a personal blog is about 10 years old at this point, you might find out that a page you’re getting a lot of traffic on

Unknown Speaker 26:48
Hey,

Christopher Penn 26:49
you know what, it’s not relevant anymore. And it’s okay in those cases to redirect it. So

Katie Robbert 26:58
So question yes. Lots of questions, tons of questions. I have so many questions. Not all of them related to SEO, but I will keep them focused on SEO. So okay, so let’s say, I go through the steps that you’ve just outlined, I re optimize the page. Now what?

Unknown Speaker 27:19
What a once in a while after that,

Christopher Penn 27:21
once the optimization is done, then you rerun your auditing tools. You, you watch it carefully in Search Console. And then in another 714 days, rerun your auditing tools and find out did the pages that you just optimize how have they grown in search via when we look at this traffic impact report, if I scroll all the way to the bottom? Let’s go further. A million lines. There are pages down here that have grown in traffic since the last time through. Question is, are those things like for example, the great shut down here Is that something that we care about? Right? If If I optimize a bunch of pages in the next month I see traffic’s up on this page is great, then we did our jobs. If traffic is still down, then we know that we didn’t solve the root problem, we need to do some more digging some more investigation.

Katie Robbert 28:15
It sounds like that there is definitely a lot of planning involved in doing an exercise like this. But the planning is probably worthwhile because organic search is it’s in for all intents and purposes, it’s a free marketing channel, meaning that you’re not paying for Google to pick it up. It’s not a paid search. It’s not a paid ad. So as much as you can double down on your free channels, because it is, you know, Google search engine is you know, the most widely used. I think that it definitely makes sense. So that that way when you’re looking at this, like I know off the top of my head when we did this our exercise for ourselves, there’s definitely a handful of pages that I saw doing some work on. And I made a note of which pages I had done work on so that when we run the analysis, I’d be able to see did the work that I do have any impact at all. So I think that, you know, if someone is looking to do something like this, definitely make sure that you have some way to keep track of what it is that you’re doing. Don’t just run this, mess up a couple of pages, and then go, Okay, I’m done. Like there’s definitely a process and a project and a methodology to it. Um, one question I do have for you, Chris is so we’re so focused on Google, as the search engine, but there are other search engines out there that are popular, you know, where does that factor in Bing, Safari? You know, DuckDuckGo, those different search engines like, Do you follow the same process,

Christopher Penn 29:51
you follow the same process for the data. So instead of using Google Search Console, if you’re optimizing for Bing, you would have a a Bing Webmaster Tools account. In that Webmaster Tools account, you would then be pulling that data in and doing exactly the same process. DuckDuckGo does not provide that information. So you’re out, you’re kind of on your own, you’re sLl. But also, it’s not a huge search engine. Right now, it’s one to 2%. Of course, although you should be looking in your Google Analytics to see which search engines are sending you the most traffic. One thing that’s important about Bing is that Bing because they’re much more open with their data and their API’s. They are used by a lot of other devices. So you know, this, these little cute desktop systems and things. awful lot of them have Bing as the back end for their search. So there’s a there’s good reason to, to go ahead and optimize for Bing as well. That said, Bing has the same optimization goals as Google, which is deliver a user experience that’s compelling enough to get people to keep coming back so that they can sell ad revenue. Which means that the things that work for Google most of the time, and most is also worth living.

Katie Robbert 31:03
Okay, that’s good to know. Because I think that I think Bing is one of those overlooked search engines that could actually be a very powerful, competitive tool for people who are focusing on those more free digital channels. One of the questions that we got was how do you deal with optimizing for quality versus simply simply quantity? Google only Google Analytics only tells you how many eyeballs not how good they are.

Christopher Penn 31:30
So that’s a good question. The answer to that is that you need to also be running and looking at attribution analysis in parallel. attribution analysis will help you understand which channels are contributing to actual conversions. So this is an example of one. This is a digital customer journey roadmap for the Trust Insights website. And what we’re looking at here we see Google organic search was responsible for 4.9% of conversions. This is a very specific conversion goal in Trust Insights website in the month of August, if we spend all of our time optimizing, and we don’t pay attention to attribution analysis, then yeah, you could figure out Oh, actually, we optimized for crappy traffic, right? we optimize for stuff that you don’t want. Part of that is going to be topical relevance. So if you have very specific customers, let’s say like you’re a big, complex sale company, you sell mortgages or Gulfstream jets, or B2B, such as SAS appliances, or something like that. Chances are, you probably have a customer advisory board, where you have focus groups with customers, you should absolutely be taking those conversations and mining them for words and phrases like we just did with the social data and putting that into search engines as well. And using that to optimize your page the focus on those very specific lucrative audiences, because that’s what people the humans talk about. So optimizing for quality requires you to do that. to looking at the outcomes that you care about, if you’re you could you can absolutely can have a great optimization for stuff you don’t want. My personal website has ranks really well for someone searching for the difference between pseudo evergreen and phenol Efrain, which is I wrote a blog post 14 years ago about the difference between those two medications. That still sounds like 1000 visitors a month that have zero conversion. Because I mostly about machine learning and AI, not decongestants, but it’s still out there. That said, there is a lot of value to if you’re getting if every traffic generator and the traffic is poor. Remove that content so that you’re not attracting audiences you don’t want

Katie Robbert 33:46
well, and again, make sure that you have a plan as you’re removing things from your web page so that people don’t just get a bunch of error messages. Make sure you’re smartly looking at you know, redirects and correct error messages. For four years, those kinds of things that if you don’t have those in place that will harm your search rankings overall for your website.

Were there other questions? JOHN, did you have a question that you were,

Unknown Speaker 34:19
you know, I just want about tool stack as far as. So everything you’re doing you’re doing in the, for this site and the Word Perfect. The WordPress interface, you’ve got Yoast plugged in there, is there any place else that you go to make any changes?

Christopher Penn 34:33
It depends on the changes you’re making. So for example, if you figure out that you’re, you’ve got reputation problems, right, meaning that your content is fine, you’re showing up for the right keywords, but your performance is really crap. Now, you may in that case, have poisonous inbound links. In that case, you’re going to go say, into your Google Search Console, you got to make a list of all the links that are link to your site from the SEO tool of your choice. and identify the crap was like, you know, promo codes, you know, disney.com or whatever sending you those garbage links. That gets loaded to search console. And you say I’m disavowing these links. I’m saying these do not count these at all whatsoever towards how you see my site. The challenge there is, you need a fair amount of experience in SEO to understand what symptoms you’re seeing together. Because if you see contents, okay, keywords are okay, but you’re still losing traffic. And the traffic losses are pretty sustained across the site. That probably means you got a reputation problem, as opposed to a content file. One of the challenges that it’s one of the reasons why it’s important to have access to all the data and look at the data holistically is that you may jump to the conclusion you have a content problem when you don’t have a content problem, you have a trustworthiness problem. And so search console is absolutely an essential part of the package and you should have both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools because they can detect different things. You should have a good SEO tool. And you should be looking at all this data, have it like a Data Studio dashboard and have it be something you pop it and look at it once a week. Say for your attribution analysis pop in and look at it once a week so that you go Okay. What’s happening looks makes logical sense or That’s weird. What happened there?

Katie Robbert 36:26
Yeah, I guess we go down the rabbit hole of additional questions, you know, but again, we want to make sure that people’s time is well spent. So if you have additional questions, you can reach us at our free slack group. Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers, again, totally free to join. If you go to that link, you will get an invite. You can subscribe to our newsletter TrustInsights.ai dot AI slash newsletter where we actually talk about a lot of this information and share resources on a weekly basis every Wednesday is our new newsletter. Or you can just contact us and you will likely get one of the three of us because you were looking at Trust Insights, and one of the three of us will respond to you. And we may even feature your question on one of our shows. And so we’ve covered a lot of ground SEO is a big topic, it’s probably a lot more complicated than people realize. But with that complicated technique, you get a lot better results for what you’re trying to do, because search engines and you know, people in general, everything is getting more complex. And so trying to keep up with what’s happening is really difficult. But doing really good content that’s really well optimized is the thing that will stay consistent across the board. Chris, john, anything else that we should cover before we wrap up for today?

Christopher Penn 37:48
That’s all folks.

Katie Robbert 37:50
All right. So we will see you again next week. We’re going to be doing this every week. The so what show so what the marketing analytic And insights live show from Trust Insights. That’s us. And you can find us on YouTube. You can find us on Twitter. You can find us on Facebook. Or if you just go to our website then you will find all of the social channels there that you’re looking for.

Christopher Penn 38:19
Thanks for watching, folks. Take care

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

 

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.