Tyson Stockton

Managing search engines is based on understanding the core components of your SEO strategy - Content links and technical optimizations. The components range from keyword choices to editorial review of the content in your content marketing strategy. These are the key components to keep search’s “Engine,” running.

One of the best ways to scale SEO efforts at a startup is to quickly establish a template system for content creation. A template will eliminate ambiguity and provide guidelines for all teams producing content to follow. 

Poker players and SEO specialists both weigh risk, thinking about whether a certain action will ruin their credibility, gauging the upside of a particular action or strategy. Poker and SEO’s most fundamental lesson lies in solving for expected value. In poker there’s a 50/49.5% chance of winning a lot of money or a thin spot of falling short or losing, or if by calling you lose money, but setting yourself up for a long-term win. SEO works similar in that respect when it comes to a range of business decisions and SEO strategies.

Although outsourcing content production to freelancers is a good idea, it’s best not to outsource every production task. Bottom-of-funnel content is best written by an in-house team as bottom funnel content requires deep, in-depth knowledge of your business. Case studies should be written by a long-term, in-house employee who knows your business best and can thoroughly speak to its achievements and benchmarks.

Content marketing’s importance rose steadily since 2010, and consumers have become more savvy as they’ve adjusted to the digital landscape. Traditional marketing models no longer work as successfully as they once did with consumers, whereas content marketing provides both value and business to consumers.

Google announced within the last week that web vitals officially go live in May 2021. Simply put, web vitals are a new ranking factor that evaluates how quickly a page loads, its interactivity and how much the page jumps around once it loads. Vitals’ criteria ultimately evaluates how stable and usable a webpage is for the user. 

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.

Eleven state attorney generals filed a lawsuit against Google this year claiming the company leveraged monopoly practices to dominate the search market. Attorney General Bill Barr stated Google controls as much as 90% of the search market, despite search features appearing on the majority of websites that belong to Amazon and Apple.

Google’s efforts to own the zero-click experience with voice queries increased throughout 2020, taking content from competitors like Rap Genius. An algorithm update in early 2020 sought to prevent showing the same result twice, in high positions for a user at the top of SERPs. This proved contentious among SEO specialists who saw pros and cons to the new update.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted businesses internationally and the massive shift to ecommerce influenced Google to implement changes. Google made product listing feeds free for its users, eliminating its pay model to assist small businesses through challenging times. However, Tyson believes it’s another method Google is applying to increase its competitive edge against Amazon by boosting its inventory.