July Winners and Losers — Jordan Koene & A Party Crasher

About the speaker

Jordan Koene

Searchmetrics

- Searchmetrics

Show Notes

  • 02:14
    What happened in SEO for July
    In light of the recent algorithm updates, there were more losers than winners for the month of July. This is to be expected as the different stages of the updates continue to roll out.
  • 04:49
    July SEO winners
    Larger websites with historically strong content were the July SEO winners. These sites are informative sites mostly in the area of health like WebMD.
  • 05:31
    Why informative sites are now outranking their competition
    With each update, Google focuses more on EAT elements. Recently, theres been a lot of focus on query intent and understanding context.
  • 06:45
    The role of the MUM update
    The MUM update streamlines content today so that you only get results that are relevant to you. So if youre searching in one language, you wont get results in another language. The same is true on platform sites like YouTube.
  • 08:45
    How eCommerced fared in July
    Big eCommerce companies like Target, Best Buy, and Amazon saw growth this past month. The eCommerce sector has been generally benefitting from the algorithm updates so far.
  • 09:36
    The impact on media and publishing
    Based on their keywords and queries, sites like Spotify are starting to come back from last years May update. Theres more focus now on the actual music rather than news stories about it.
  • 11:55
    The impact on websites with ads
    Currently, music websites like Shazam are ranking higher than news sites that would host ads. While ads are important to Google, more value is now being placed on user experience and user intent.
  • 15:11
    July SEO losers
    YouTube falls among the July losers as Google deprioritized video in SERP. Where you had 2 large competitors, eg, booking.com and hotels.com, the tie breaks cleanly with one dropping and the other increasing.

Quotes

  • "Google launched 75 different updates. They launched them all out in micro fractions. And there's no way for us to understand what is causing changes in performance..." - Benjamin Shapiro, Host of VOS podcast

  • "The biggest winners in aggregate have been some of the larger brand players that had established content credibility, especially in the informational medical arena..." - Jordan Koene, SEO Strategist, Searchmetrics

  • "With MUM, Google can disambiguate certain scenarios where users are searching in one language and possibly seeing content that's addressable to a different market or language." - Jordan Koene, SEO Strategist, Searchmetrics

  • “Google has made it very clear and, and has delineated in terms of how much of an ad supported experience or affiliate based experience they're willing to tolerate." - Jordan Koene, SEO Strategist, Searchmetrics

  • “If you're got 17 ads on a page and you've got pop-ups and you've got quote request or email request type experiences, they're going to come down on that pretty quick now.” - Jordan Koene, SEO Strategist, Searchmetrics

  • “Google had some changes in terms of the number of FAQ's that they're going to show for a site. They're limiting that now to 2 FAQs per listing on the SERP. ” - Jordan Koene, SEO Strategist, Searchmetrics

About the speaker

Jordan Koene

Searchmetrics

- Searchmetrics

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