Common SEO Problems Recovery Options – AuthorityLabs HoA Recap, Video

This episode of the #AuthorityHoA was originally streamed live on November 11 with featured guests Michael Schwarz and Dan Roberts of ImprooveSearch.com, and hosted by Melissa Fach, produced by Michelle Stinson Ross. Below we a have a quick written recap and the video from the hangout.

The Recap

Melissa Fach: What is the best strategy to avoid content vomiting and still rank for important topics?

Dan comments that engagement is the critical signal to winning top position for your content. How users interact with the content produced on your website matters. If you’re not tracking things like click-through rate and impressions in Webmaster Tools, you are missing out on key validation of the effectiveness of your content.

Michael chimes in that more is not better when it comes to content. Over time we have moved from ranking due to the volume of content we can produce on a topic to becoming the highest quality source of information on a topic. He hints that Google also compares sites that can be verified as high quality against other sites that are more difficult to verify. Your best bet is to emulate the best sites in your business space. Do your best to serve the users’ expectations.

Michael moves quickly into talking about some of his favorite free tools.

  • onpage.org
  • answerthepublic.com

Melissa Fach: What recommendations would you have for people regarding voice search?

Michael says they have been debating the issue internally. He’s careful how he answers this particular question, and if you know anything about former Googlers, they know way more than they can actually say. He does comment that voice search is opening up fresh opportunities, especially in light of how queries are changing. Users are more likely to use longer questions via voice search. Those longer queries indicate far more intent and specificity than a two or three word phrase. He also mentions that the answer boxes served up in mobile search can be more helpful for branding than traffic. To make the best of the opportunity, your content needs to expand on the basic answer to a question.

Dan reminds people that you need to be more comprehensive in the way your content deals with common questions. However, be aware that the return on the investment to produce this kind of comprehensive content is likely to be long term and cumulative rather than a quick payoff.

Melissa Fach: What do you look for when helping clients with mystery SEO problems?

Michael says he loves the challenge those kinds of clients present. He shares the example of a European sports betting site that was about to lose their placement in Google search about 3 weeks before the World Cup championships. In their case, they had to get a ton of pages reindexed before they lost major seasonal traffic. For issues like this that need to be fixed and fixed quickly, they don’t take time to experiment, but rather comb through the site to reverse engineer what is still working. For other clients, communicating directly with Google is critical. If the mystery issue turns out to be related to an algorithm update, site owners have to understand that while they are dealing with making improvements they may have to give those improvements time to work their way through the update.

When it comes to Panda related issues, site owners have to make certain that their “product” really does the best job possible to answer the questions they intend to rank for. Getting into Panda difficulties are much easier to get into than to get out of. Do users get the information and experience they are expecting? Are the pages that have been created really useful? Are those thin pages driving too much traffic to cut lose? Finding ways to update or remove thin pages isn’t just an SEO issue. Site clean-up on this scale is a business issue. To be truly successful, choices have to be made about time and effort so that both rankings and revenue improve.

Michael and Dan also had a great deal of information to share about mobile search behavior and how you find an SEO consultant to help you with problems. Be sure and check out the entire video and share your thoughts in the comments.

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