Content Pillars

Google seems to have the entire SEO industry talking about Content Pillars.  I'd like to complain about the word choice.  Why aren't we thinking about:

• Content Clusters
• Content Segments
• Topic
• Subjects

And what's with the "pillar" metaphor? I think the idea is that there is a single collection of source material such as a book, study, or white paper which can be used to provide bite-size pieces of content for social media and to fill up a number of webpages, perhaps each taking a section from the book, study, or white paper. 

There’s a big difference between a blog with uninspiring poor content and one that’s ripe with interesting and intriguing relevant information.  Good content is designed to appeal to an audience and answer their questions and respond to their interests. Poor content has no editorial success in culling together a coherent framework of info

Curious About the Mountain of Traffic

Sometimes, I look at my blog statistics that are built into Wordpress.

Today, for the last 20 days, I see this Wordpress reporting of HITs:

​

Naturally, I am curious about that mountain of traffic this past few days but since the WP data is so flakey, I jump to Google analytics for that blog and look at the last 30 days:

hmmm, no sign of any traffic event in the last few days.​

Looking back at the WP data, I notice that while visits had the mountain, the visitors did not. So there was maybe one person who returned to the blog over and over and read the entire blog a few times creating lots of visits but not lots of visitors.

Except, GA shows no corresponding increase in either page views or sessions that supports this idea.

So:

- I go back to WP stats are flakey, they are counting some sort of bot activity that GA does not

- WP stats are flakey, what the heck is a "hit" anyway and why when I look closely, are they reporting last 20 days?

SEO Agency Update to Marketing

The GURU: JL 2/28/2018 visited us fresh from pubcon. Here's the update.... 

AMP - accelerated mobile pages - BIG DEAL Costly in terms of maintenance Image work amp dot ig - <?> 

Structured snippets - Increased emphasis on schema.org Typically events Tickets News Location Reviews Breadcrumbs Questions by us. 

Impact of Voice search. Relevant? Secure pages - Oct https rollout was moved out to April from October. Good to have both in search console, Get both verified. Compare. I’ll check on https for blogger. Rewarded across the board. 

New search console - Fully rolled out in January. Old features not all there, ie fetch and render. Now has a YonY data and we still need to archive after 15 or 18 months. Has great features on what to fix. But now it requires fixes. Page speed tool removed and now integrated into lighthouse thing. Testmysite with Google will be page speed measure. Lighthouse: good for 1st look at what’s wrong with a website. Visual and quick. 

Question of what Google is really measuring. Is it first render? Full paint? What’s the right measure? Pay attention but more towards problems 

PPC - microPPC - Frequency that a person sees it. If you are trying to save budget, limit to a few a day. Set up an audience to improve quality. Example, layer in “female” and “mother” . There’s also interest categories. Bing serves ads in the timeframe of the user. <weird> Low time on site audience - block them. Block spam bots. Rev.com will do closed captioning for $1/minute and translations and transcripts. 

Chat bots - Huge capabilities. Mobilemonkey is an example only on Facebook (will it go cross platform with paid version?).. This is the future. Awesome. Home advisor. 1800 flowers. Like a progressive web app. John is 100% on board with it. Mitsuku per Brett. Super user friendly. Zootopia marketing was around it. “Skills” - like Alexa skills. Looks futuristic. Skills are like apps. Roger. Tie Alexa into sdk of student planner. 

2017 Big SEO Initiatives 

Mobile friendly - still a big deal. What is the real measure? A technical check (the mobile friendly label no longer works) with the Google checker. 

Https Speed Schema and answer box - Get the answer box results. There are now tools for monitoring. What are they? SEO traffic spikes usually links back getting an answer box. Lots of sniping to beat each other for key searches. 

Organic search is down….on mobile, the ads just win. But the search volume seems solid. “Homeschool” broad match - is it down by 6% - Why not ask Google reps? $1.5M paid search in Google. Netplus. Give credit to JL and the agency for our spend. Get direct access to google team for questions 

Segments & filters to distinguish between brand traffic and real search Can’t do it in console Can do it in GA Filters are for forward. Will segments or channels work going backwards? 2013: Dropped details in GA with https. Keep marketing your brand. And buy your name.