Jordan Koene

Join host Ben as he continues his conversation with Jordan Koene, SEO Strategist and Advisor to Searchmetrics. Together they discuss how Google is cleaning up their search engine. 

Google announced the final update of 2020 on Dec. 3, and indicates a continued trend of focusing on content quality throughout the year. The update caused fluctuation in stack results, where sites that appear twice with the same domain, or same ownership, in search results one after the other. Google aims to remove duplicate content, or similar content, from appearing in SERPs to diversify rankings, provide a better user experience and allow for more competition in ranking stacks.

Securing the right resources depends on knowing what is available within your organization. A thorough planning process helps reveal what resources you need from content writer resources to analytics needs. Assessing the capabilities of teams within your organization and their capacity to work together to achieve goals and initiatives will define whether you need to change your goal roadmap. 

Creating a roadmap is not only understanding the activities you’re going to perform and what order they’re going to occur. It requires understanding their dependencies and how your roadmap reflects what’s happening with your team and the impact on the rest of the organization. Establishing key milestones within your roadmap ensures you’re staying on top of your goals and tracking your progress. 

The complexity of SEO goals require detailed steps to ensure they’re executed successfully - SMART goal methods are great tools to execute complex SEO initiatives. SMART goals break initiatives into actionable segments where you can track each touchpoint to achieve an overarching goal. When one aspect of the SMART goal isn't met, you can easily isolate the issue and implement the right changes to easily eliminate obstacles that prevent you from achieving an overall goal.

Initiatives are the body of work you’re creating for the quarter and year overall, and the goals you aim to accomplish with them. To ensure the success of your initiatives it’s best to break big items into smaller, more manageable items. A commonly overlooked area in the defining initiative phase is analytics and reporting processes.

Aligning with company goals involves taking a step out of the day-to-day processes of SEO to determine how to drive traffic that fulfills greater company goals. Contributing to alignment setting in bigger companies is a more difficult task than smaller companies. In order to create influence in larger organizations,  SEOs must speak the language other departments and teams use to effectively communicate initiatives. 

The Justice Department required Google to submit an official response to the presiding judge regarding the lawsuit by mid-December. It’s expected the summary will include Google’s POV of what a search engine is and that the search landscape is far more diverse than the monopoly allegations state. They’re expected to use Amazon and Facebook as examples, while also requesting to see 16 months worth of data the government collected on the search giant.

The suit against Google pertains to its growing influence in and monopoly of the search industry and how its business practices are hindering marketplace competition. The U.S. government is concerned about the exclusivity agreements it formed with companies like LG and Apple, whom it paid the latter an estimated eight to $12 billion to become the default search engine on iOS devices. 

Taking inventory of content assets is a helpful way to identify the topics and subjects that are performing well. These insights can help tailor your organic approach, helping map current traffic trends. The information can be used to see what terms and topics competitors are ranking highly for.