In the last few weeks I've seen digital marketing budgets shrink significantly for the first time since the pandemic started. Does SEO still matter in this market? Judging by all the discussions I have had with businesses who have seen traffic drops due to the May core update — the last thing you want to do when times are tough is stop working on the channel that drives most of your website traffic.
SEO investment is still vital for business growth, especially when budgets tighten. Why would you throw away the best source of high-quality, free traffic?
Learn more about the most recent core update below, and how you might diagnose and fix these traffic drops.
Google’s May 2022 core update was scheduled to run from May 25th to June 9th, but many SEOs are still feeling the tremors with some significant volatility across industries. When you see a performance drop from a core update, you don’t want to “chase the algorithm.” The key to SEO is building a useful, high-quality site, not trying to guess what Google wants you to do.
However, it is important to look at the areas of your site that did drop, and do a quick gap analysis on the competing content that is ranking for those keywords. Are there major gaps in quality, approach, uniqueness, or technical elements between your content and the competitors that are doing well in the SERPs? That might give you a clue for areas to improve in future content programs or optimization runs.
Of course, "Make better, high quality content that your audience wants," is the guiding SEO principal, but using the signals and data Google gives you on that path can be useful to achieve this goal.
This next one is a shocker. Twitter has removed the Nofllow attribute from all links. Twitter has nofollowed bio links since 2008 and tweet links since 2009! Honestly, this probably won’t matter much from an SEO and link building perspective, since Twitter has so many low quality links, you won't gain real value from link building with Twitter, even if they are followed. However, it is really interesting to see a brand the size of Twitter remove this link attribute. I honestly can’t understand why they would do it.
More and more Google Maps reviews are disappearing. Have you seen this? There doesn’t seem to be any answer from Google, and none of my local clients have experienced it (yet) but the community consensus is that this is a growing problem. My guess is that it’s related to overzealous spam catching from Google.