Ross & Scott started the episode with a recap of current events, and then they moved on to Google’s various updates. They discussed the updates in Google search ranking, page experience, the verification process for local businesses, interactive maps in the local pack, and more!
Noteworthy links from this episode:
- Search Platforms Suspend Ads in Russia
- New Tutorial Series on Data Studio – Starting with Connecting Search Console
- Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update On March 4th – Unconfirmed
- Google page experience update for desktop done rolling out
- SEO Claims Higher Rankings Without Content Hidden In Tabs Again
- Google Tests Removing Estimated Number Of Search Results
- Google Search local pack’s map is now interactive
- Google Updates Verification Process for Local Businesses
Transcription of Episode 427
Ross: Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR.FM episode number 427. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of StepForth Web Marketing and my co-host is my company’s senior SEO, Scott Van Achte.
Scott, nice rig you got there.
Scott: I know, it looks like someone else’s. I think it was handpicked just for me.
Ross: Yeah, well, we are fully set up now with proper podcasting rigs, for both of us. It’s exciting times, exciting times. And you’re going to use the amplifier that John Carcutt had. So it’s also getting repurposed.
Scott: Put to good use. I had something set wrong on it, took me forever to get the mic to work, but then I figured out I made a stupid mistake and now it works, so look at that. User error the whole time.
Ross: Wonder what John would say to that?
Scott: I wouldn’t have told him.
Ross: Quite an opening. Well, it’s been a little while since our Martin Splitt interview, and it was so good. I really enjoyed that. I thank him again for being on. I know that I’ve already got some good feedback from people who have listened. If you haven’t listened to Episode 426 with Martin Splitt, please do. It is very revealing, lots of great stuff.
Scott: He’s just a great guy, so interesting to listen to. He does like to talk, which is awesome. That’s why we’re here.
Ross: It makes our job easy.
Scott: It absolutely does. I sat and listened for basically the whole interview. It was awesome.
Search Platforms Suspend Ads in Russia
Ross: Now, unfortunately, on a very, very dark note, since our last episode, war has begun in Ukraine. That’s really hit us hard at home, we’ve got one of our main staff members in Crimea. He’s already been through this, but his whole family is in Ukraine and it’s been a really trying time for him. I’ve known him for 15 or so years so he’s a very close friend. It’s just hard to see him go through this worrying about his family and such. So we’re thinking about him and all Ukrainian people. It’s just a nightmare. I can only hope that it’s resolved soon for the best. Anyway, I’ve been inhaling all the news on it, probably not the best thing for my psyche but it’s been kind of fascinating, and it is certainly affecting everyone and will do for years to come. No matter what happens.
Scott: It’s true. Whenever there’s any kind of bad news, natural disasters, war, anything, as bad as it is, it is fascinating and it’s hard to get away from it. You just have to digest all of it. I don’t know, I feel like it’s good to keep informed with what’s going on.
Ross: Other disasters, I find a little different, sometimes they affect us but in this case, it’s remarkable how much of an impact it’s going to have for the whole world for a long time. I won’t get into it. It’s really interesting stuff, though. Never been interested in politics, but the impact on our economy and the whole nation’s war chests and everything, everything’s gonna change again, like we rewound everything back to a war culture. Just really freaky. Anyway, lots of really good stuff on YouTube, I’m finding. I’m watching it three times a day, usually, just to keep on top of things. Again, partly because of our dear friend there and the other part to really see how the world responds.
Anyway, search platforms have suspended ads in Russia, which is great to hear and you’ve got a list of them here.
Scott: Yeah, so I found a few different articles. I was wondering if I should bring it up or not, and I thought I would. You know, it kind of started with, I think Twitter was one of the first – near the end of February. Then in the following week or so, basically, everybody started to follow suit and I’m sure those that haven’t, will. Like Google has pulled their ads, Microsoft /LinkedIn (because Microsoft owns LinkedIn for those that don’t know), Snapchat, Reddit… Microsoft has actually banned new sales of all Microsoft products and services to Russia. So it’s extending beyond search ads. Facebook, they were a little bit late to the party on the fourth, and then Apple as well, I’m not sure when Apple started, I didn’t see a date for that. But all the major players are pulling out, which is good, you know…Is it good? I’m so torn with it because it’s bad for the politics in Russia that, you know, they don’t want the economy up, but there are a lot of innocent people in Russia, who are just civilians who don’t want this war, and it affects them too.
Ross: Sucks what’s going on. They’re being completely in the dark, and this is one way to make it very clear that the world is not happy with them.
Scott: Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, so that’s good to see a lot of these companies doing what they can, anyway.
Ross: Yeah, and I know McDonald’s has shut down everything, Starbucks has shut down all of their locations, and its considerable amount. I mean, both of those places have a lot of footprints there. Again, that’s going to be pretty hard for Putin to cover up, so I’m glad to see that.
Global Searches for “Poutine” Spikes
Scott: Yeah, or as a lot of people are calling the President “Poutine,” I think, segue.
Ross: That’s what my daughter calls him.
Scott: Perfect. She’s one of them. So if you haven’t looked at this data yet, go to Google Trends and do a search for “poutine” and you’ll see a huge spike in searches for “poutine” since this war broke out, and it’s really irrelevant, I suppose. But I just found it funny that so few people could spell his name. It’s a global thing. If you don’t know what poutine is, you haven’t lived so you know, research that as well and get some. To be fair, regular searches for Putin are also up even more than poutine, but I guess it’s a common misspelling, I don’t know. It’s entertaining to say the least.
Ross: Awesome. Another note, I watched a movie called ‘Icarus,‘ a while ago, a documentary that was suggested to watch by a good friend of mine. It is worth every second, not only is it credibly revealing, it’s all about the doping crisis in Russians in the Olympics. It also really shows just how much of a cover up was involved directly from Putin. Again, it’s just… holy cow. The corruption is mind blowing, and has been going on since 1968. They proved it. It’s nuts, man. Anyway, another revealing peek behind the newly raised iron curtain of sorts. Anyway, enough of that.
New Tutorial Series on Data Studio – Starting with Connecting Search Console
Ross: On another sort of non-SEO note, but it is interesting is there’s a new tutorial series coming out on Data Studio. The first one came up the other day. It’s, in this case, starting with connecting your Search Console to Data Studio. If you don’t know what Data Studio is, Google Data Studio is a dashboard system that allows you to integrate data from different places to one select URL. So you can just go to this page, and you can see all your data. It’s very handy when you want to consolidate data from different places. It is, however, not simple. Now the series they’re using or they’re putting together now makes it simpler using the existing connectors, they call them, that Google Data Studio is packaged with. So you know, connecting Search Console, connecting Google Analytics, connecting paid ads, all that stuff will be possible. I’m sure they’re going to discuss it. However, a lot of the other tools we all like to use…depending what you’re using, of course,… from Semrush to BrightLocal, to Majestic, you name it, all these different tools require paid connectors, which are not cheap. That’s unfortunate. I do hope and wish at some point that Google would create some of these connectors themselves. It has created an industry which I guess is good for the world in that sense, you know, there’s business being done and money being made. But it is a little frustrating to have to pay for all this stuff.
Oh, and on top of that, even though you’re paying for it, not always does the content show because Data Studio isn’t exactly 100% solid on that, you’ll find some stuff doesn’t show, connector isn’t rendering, something like that, you’ll get some sort of weird error and you’ll have to refresh. That’s it. You know, it’s free. Other systems that are similar to this, you’ll spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars per month, just for access to their systems. So I’m pretty pleased with it. We’re using it for all our clients, slowly rolling it out for all our clients, anyway. It’s a bit of work to put it mildly. But yeah, worth a shot and I like that they’re putting a tutorial series out. So check it out. You can find it on their blog in developers.google.com, their search blog, and the latest one came out on March 8, 2022. and it’s connecting to Data Studio. So check it out.
Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update On March 4th – Unconfirmed
Ross: Onto SEO news directly. The Google search ranking algorithm update on March 4, yet another unconfirmed update. What’s this all about, Scott?
Scott: Yeah, I think you said it. I think that’s it. We get a lot of these. I feel like every show there’s an unconfirmed Google update and in common fashion that we’re used to, I haven’t seen anything firsthand about this, you know. There’s chatter, people talking about things happening across our client base. I haven’t seen anything to indicate. You see little ups and downs all the time and maybe some of those ups or downs are part of this, but nothing significant enough for me to get excited or worried or nervous about it. This was in an article, I think it was on Search Engine Roundtable and Barry also mentioned this unlikely related to the desktop page experience update, which we’re gonna talk about very briefly next. So, a bunch of updates happening that aren’t having much impact, I suppose certain industries and verticals will see results and fluctuation from this, but so far on our desks, I haven’t seen it. So it’s good for me, I guess, although ups would be great. But, glad I’m not seeing any downs.
Ross: That’s true. And we had seen some impact from Local SEO, some of the big updates. What did they call it… I can’t keep track of all the names of these updates. Anyway, I believe it was early February, and that actually caused a bit of havoc. It doesn’t usually cause any problems for us, but across our dentists and any of our local folk, locally-focused clients. It has stabilized thankfully, and a lot of them have popped right back up again, as we expected and hoped. Some required some extra work, though. Definitely a good thing, though, all around Google did tighten things up to prevent bad actors from getting a leg up on all of us, using some of the more nefarious tricks to get local ranking. So that’s good. Just meant that we had to clarify a few things to make it clear that a couple clients weren’t doing that and it worked, things are moving up so that’s good.
Google page experience update for desktop done rolling out
Ross: Apparently, there’s the page experience update rolling out, what’s this?
Scott: Yeah, I feel like we talk about page experience way more than anybody wants us to, but there’s always something to say. Last year, the page experience update rolled out for mobile in, I think it was, March last year. Now, it’s rolled out for desktop. I think it started around the end of February, February 22 or so. It ended on March 3. You probably won’t see anything happen from it but even as Martin Splitt was saying in our interview last episode, that the page experience updates are going to increase in importance over some amount of time. It’s probably a few years away, probably years before we have to really worry about it. But keep it in mind, it’s there and work on improving your scores when you can, but don’t lose sleep over it.
Ross: Don’t. Oh, my God, if I lost sleep over them, I wouldn’t be sleeping at all. I’m using this great tool. For those who are looking for one that helps you monitor, it’s called PageSpeed Plus. It’s 75 bucks a month but it’s really handy because we’re able to put all our clients in it and it gives us updates on where they’re sitting, if they go below a specific threshold it notifies us. OMG, the amount of updates we’re getting, it’s using Google Lighthouse, which is what you should be using to sort of track to see how things look, and how good your page speed is, how well it’s ranking up towards core web vitals and stuff and it gives you a score. Oh, we are updating these sites so often trying to keep that score high. It’s beyond frustrating. And you know what, I honestly wouldn’t bother if it weren’t for the fact that..Here’s a peek under the the hood of running a business in the SEO industry, you’re always on the lookout for these little chinks in your armor that competitors can use. And in the dental market, they find something, they’re in. In our case, if our clients don’t have high page speeds, like really good page speeds, we get calls pretty regularly from clients going “Why isn’t my PageSpeed higher? Someone just told me it’s not.” It’s usually some email they just got and people are using this way to get in. I think we lost one client from it and that was not obviously a very entrenched client, otherwise, they would have asked us for questions. But you know, we want to be perfectionists to a degree, we want this to be perfect. So we’re looking at other solutions to maintain this other than doing it by hand. It is too much work at this stage because it’s not stable. It seems every time we change things, it just changes back. You get it high, a couple days later, we get a low ranking again. Part of this is because the PageSpeed update recently has been kind of severe. Like it really changed how they were ranking things. Frustration is the very, very polite term for it.
Scott: So simple.
Ross: Well, it is very, very annoying. I am glad it’s not having a huge impact on rankings, because it is one hell of a learning curve. It feels like they’re changing the finish line every time we do a test.
SEO Claims Higher Rankings Without Content Hidden In Tabs Again
Ross: Going forward here. You found a very interesting test done by Dan Shure. Tell us a little about this.
Scott: This popped up on Search Engine Roundtable. I’m going to test it out for myself and see, I haven’t seen this firsthand, but it’s definitely high on my to do list. So, back in 2018, Google had confirmed (sort of) that content hidden behind tabs, or accordions, especially on mobile was given full weight for ranking purposes, which makes sense because on a mobile device…well, I don’t know if this test is specific to mobile or desktop, I don’t think it said, but that’s what Google had said at the time, in mobile, if it’s hidden behind these tabs or accordions, you got full weight, because you know, from usability perspective, that makes sense, you don’t want everything out. They’ve kind of stood behind this and so Dan Shure made a little test and he expanded his accordions by default, and apparently resulted in a huge boost in rankings for extremely competitive terms. He also went on, he said that it was mostly for FAQ-related content. So that’s about it for that, he did show some screenshots from Search Console to try to prove that this is true. I say, if you want to give it a test, try it on one of your pages if you’ve got some of this hidden content, I guess it’s hidden, but it’s collapsed so it’s not really hidden. Anyway, try opening it up and see what happens. I know, I’m going to look for a couple key clients that might be able to benefit from this and give it a test and see what happens. If I see positive results, as well, I’ll report back on another episode. But interesting, it shouldn’t help and Google says it won’t help but it looks like it might help.
Ross: Might be something that they’ll correct now that they’ve seen this, which is good, too, right?
Scott: Yeah, maybe it was a glitch, who knows?
Ross: It is weird. I was looking through the article while you’re talking and I don’t see anything suggesting desktop or mobile, which is a pretty big missing factor. We should know more about how this was evaluated. Probably states in his original case studies. Anyway, We do, “know” that mobile is supposed to take for granted what’s in there, it’s fine. Because they know that we’re trying to tighten up the mobile experience for users so it doesn’t take a lot of space, more screen time and all that stuff and using accordions is a great way to do that. Now, on desktop, as far as I knew it was still being counted against you if you had accordions, that’s me probably being a little behind the times on that one, I guess. I don’t know. Anyway, this is really interesting stuff. There was a time when I had Denis, our programmer, actually code a new plugin for accordions that would open by default on desktop and be closed on mobile that way, so we could ensure that that content was being indexed. It’s what Google sees when it gets to the page, right.
Scott: Absolutely.
Ross: Interesting stuff. Thanks, Dan. Dan actually went into SEO after listening to the SEO 101 podcast, which is pretty cool. He was a fan and he realized, “Wow, I could actually do this for a living.” Now the bugger has a more popular podcast.
Scott: We’re still waiting for that royalty check. We’re getting that.
Ross: Yeah, come on, man. Good guy and I’m really, really happy for him. He’s done very well.
Google Tests Removing Estimated Number Of Search Results
Ross: Oh, right. Google tests removing estimated number of search results.
Scott: Yeah, so that’s kind of interesting. I haven’t seen this again, they are probably just doing it in the US. Up in Canada, we miss out on all the tests and new rollouts of things, but there were some reports and some screen captures where they’re not showing the estimated number of searches. So you know, you do a search for whatever you want and you’ll always see “estimated number of searches 800 trillion / billion results” because that’s I think that’s a default number. Now, there’s so many pages for everything. Google has been removing that in some of their testing, and it’s not the first time they’ve removed it in testing. I think they did it probably five or six years ago now and they’re trying it again. This figure is not super useful anymore but it’s been a staple, and it does have its place. You know, for example, from an SEO perspective, you’ll often do a site:search search to get a rough idea of how many pages on the site are indexed. It’s not super accurate but you don’t always have access to Webmaster Tools or other other things that you might use for clients’ websites or potential clients. So you know, you want to get a sense of what you’re looking at and that is affected by this. If they remove that data, we won’t be able to do that anymore, which is unfortunate. That number doesn’t have a lot of play for normal people. I think, mostly SEOs, they’re probably the only ones that look at it ever. But, you know, after…geez how old is Google now, 20 – 25 years? I don’t even know, a long, long time.
Ross: Yeah, they’re the same as us. We started in ’97 and they technically launched then too.
Scott: Yeah, so I mean, all these years that number has been there. Just leave it, come on. We’re sentimental over that useless number.
Ross: I did a test and it is still showing for us in Canada, at least, but who knows? Maybe it’s a test or it’ll be rolling out permanently.
Scott: Yeah, interesting stuff.
Ross: Well, let’s take a quick break and when we come back, we’re gonna touch on a few more pieces on Local SEO. We’ll be right back.
Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR.FM. Hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of StepForth Web Marketing, and my company’s senior SEO, Scott Van Achte.
Google Search local pack’s map is now interactive
Ross: I had not seen this before. This is interesting. So Google Search local pack’s map is now interactive.
Scott: Yeah, super cool. You know the best part about it, it works in Canada, I could do it. I just finished talking about a bunch of stuff and I haven’t seen this happen like people say, it works for me. Do a search, I did a search for my city name with pizza, just because I like pizza, who doesn’t? The map is there and the map is fully interactive, you can pan over and you can zoom and click and all the things you would in Google Maps you can do in that little embedded map now. After all these years of being static, it’s dynamic now, which is great. I think it might be pretty interesting for people who don’t rank in the top three in local because now, for people that go to that map, they will see sites 4, 5, 6, 7 that they might not normally see on the first page results. So that might help with some business for people that don’t rank in the top three typically in that local pack.
Ross: Maybe I took that for granted, it’s been there for a while. I don’t know, I feel like I’ve clicked on it before and moved things around.
Scott: Maybe you clicked on it, and then open it up in the second page, and then not in the embedded little window there
Ross: Maybe. It seemed to be a surprise to me but then again, maybe it’s just such a logical enhancement.
Scott: Yeah, it’s just natural, right? You assume it should work out and I don’t know why it didn’t before. But it’s great that it does now so that’s kind of cool.
Google Updates Verification Process for Local Businesses
Ross: Well, on a good news, tricky news front, because it could be tricky for some businesses, but Google has updated its verification processes for local businesses. I think it’s good news, simply because anything that can weed out some of the garbage we see online would be a good thing. But there’s a few aspects to this. First of all, they occasionally verify, re-verify particular locations. When they do that, and you confirm, and you’ve re-verified, there’s now going to be a new confirmed label that shows on the listing. Under your listing, it’ll say “This was confirmed three weeks ago” or whatever it might be. It could be kind of a trust signal when people look at the different results in the local pack and they see that, say the three businesses, one of them happens to have just been confirmed a few weeks ago, less likely to be fake, it’s more trusted. Anyway, who knows, it is something that either they’re testing or they’re going to be rolling out permanently. Also, I guess, because it’s not being done for everyone, but there’s gonna be double verification required for some listings. I think it’s when there’s some uncertainty of the legitimacy. I would expect this is more likely the case for multi-location businesses. Let’s say, a medical building, there’s many, many doctors, where they’re going to want to ensure that each of these particular businesses are actually in there. Because those are frustrating. They’re a little harder to market as well, because everything’s too close to each other. So I imagine they’re gonna be doing that and also other locations that are probably residential. This is going to be tricky for anyone out there who has said that their business is at their home, but they don’t have any signage, which is a requirement for Google’s guidelines. So you may have to put some signage up there, semi-permanent. For photos, update your photos within your Google profile, with photos showing your signage and then best to keep it there honestly. Because that’s the kind of thing that will show up, if that’s gone when they take a photo next, if one of their local guys takes a photo and adds it and it’s not there anymore, you could lose your listing, it could be suspended. On another note, I was looking through the local search forum and came across a somewhat connected piece of information. It was a search thread, and this user Keyserholiday, he says that after speaking to Google about a strangely high number of photo views on his client’s local insights (local insights are what you see when you log into your Google Local profile and look at the data showing how many views you’ve had all that sort of thing.) He was told that, “view photos” or photo views is counting both impressions. (that’s the photo that appears in the three pack or the knowledge panel) and if a user clicks to go to the photos. These are really not all clicks, but rather impressions, which is very misleading. And that’s why you’ll see absolutely insane numbers for photo views because even just loading the page and your photo happens to appear, that’s counted as a photo view but it’s not necessarily someone clicking on it and viewing it. This is part of what drives me a little bit nuts about local insights. It’s very ambiguous. I get questions sometimes from clients who are like, “What does this exactly mean?” And I’m like, I can’t really put into words. And I realized, I’m not sure of everything that comes together to make this that, that’s frustrating, it should be really obvious, especially to us. Anyway, it’s kind of weird that we’re still finding this stuff out at so long, with all this data.
Internal Linking is Super Critical For SEO
Ross: Alright, it’s time for the Mueller files. Internal linking is super critical for SEO,
Scott: This is kind of interesting, because I wanted to talk a little bit about internal linking, anyway. I had a note in our show notes to do that and then I came across this link recently from Search Engine Journal about John Mueller. And I thought that’s kind of funny timing. So in a Google office hours hang out, John was asked, “If you have structured data for breadcrumbs, is internal linking still important for SEO?” So John’s answer was “Yes, absolutely. internal linking is super critical..” Super critical, that’s like saying something “…super critical for SEO, I think it’s one of the biggest things that you can do to a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important…You should look at it in a strategic way and think about what you do care about the most and how can you highlight that with your internal linking,” he says a whole bunch more, if you want to go to Search Engine Journal, you’ll see it. But that’s sort of the gist of it. The reason I wanted to mention it is because it is supercritical, and a lot of people overlook it. I’ve been doing quite a few audits but recently, I’ve had extra audits, I feel like, and extra consulting. This has come up a bunch of times, surprisingly, and I don’t know why more so now than it has before. But in all the audits I’ve been doing, the clients have not been using inline internal linking as much as they should. In one case, a client she even had on her, I think it was on her services page, “If you want to learn more about this service, go to our homepage and scroll down and click the ‘About more’ link” and we had a call about this yesterday, it was pretty funny. And she’s like, “Why would I do that? Why wouldn’t I link that?” Like, exactly. So you know, she had directed someone to go find their own way to find the link that’s hidden on my site. But the thing is, it’s not uncommon. I’ve seen that sort of thing before. I don’t know why that happens, or why people do that, but they just do. I guess the gist of the story is, link to the content, especially if you have a supporting blog post about a core services page, or a product you sell or some important area of your website, in that blog post in the paragraph somewhere where it makes sense to do so, link to that other important content. Tell Google that this content over here is relevant to what you’re talking about and you want them to go there. It seems incredibly obvious but so many people don’t do it. Especially in blogs, they just don’t do it. So I guess that’s the tip of the day, you link to your content within your blogs. It’s good for SEO and according to John, it is ‘super’ critical.
Ross: It’s a matter of strategy too. Think about what your Cornerstone content is? What does that mean? This is the content on your site that you want to direct people to, because it’s been designed to interest them, create shares, really engage them, but also lead them down your funnel, you know, making them ultimately go to the place you want them to where they’re likely to become a lead. That means, when you’re creating articles, if it turns out that you have an opportunity to link to your Cornerstone content, do it. As you do this, it just becomes more of a signal to Google that that page is very important, and so are those pages. So, you know, we often get asked, “What the heck do we do for SEO maintenance.” When we do search engine optimization for our clients, or we do much more than that now, but when we do, let’s say, what we call an SEO initialization, that’s when we do the initial optimization on a site, and it’s getting it ready for our monthly. They go, “Okay, so you’re doing all this work? It sounds great. What are you going to do for me monthly? Why am I going to spend 1000 a month, or whatever it may be, for you to do monthly maintenance when you’ve already done the work?” The thing is, when you’re creating new content, which you have to do. When you’re working with us, almost always content needs to be created. It’s much less money per month, because we have to do less. But we’re going and looking at that content, and we’re optimizing it but we’re also finding ways to do that internal linking. The same time we’re looking at other pages, I’m getting a little off track here. But we’re looking at other pages that we’ve already tried to get rankings on. And we’re like, “Okay, that hasn’t really moved up a notch. Maybe there’s some places where we can prove this.” One way, there are other ways, but one way we can do that is perhaps add an internal link from another popular page, maybe one of those Cornerstone content pages. So there is a lot that’s done on a monthly basis and internal linking is something you have to continue to work on and shifting around some of these signals can be a very powerful method for improving rankings where you need them to be. This is particularly important when you’re talking about, let’s say you call it seasonal terms, you know. If you decide, “Okay, well, now it’s time for me to really start driving traffic,” maybe it’s October, you really want to start driving traffic to a specific article about preparing for Christmas, you know, whatever it might be, you can do that just by switching some of these links. Anyway, that’s, again, I’m digressing, but this is important stuff. I’m really glad that John answered that it’s super critical, because we’ve seen that, it is, it’s very clear.
How Google Search Console Tracks ‘People Also Ask’ Performance Data
Ross: Alright, so How Google Search Console Tracks ‘People Also Ask’ Performance Data. What the hell is this, right? So if you go into Google Search Console, you can find out where your results are appearing. One of them is a data point that says ‘People also ask.’ If you go to a search result and you look on that page, generally on that page somewhere, I think it’s almost always at the end.
Scott: I’ve seen it mostly near the top, well, or the middle, I don’t it’s anywhere, anyplace
Ross: They give examples of what other people ask that are similar to the phrase you’ve done. In this case, someone had a question about “Well, when I see this data in my report, what does it actually mean?” Thankfully again, this is one of those things where we don’t necessarily ask that question enough. For more information it says, “whenever someone expands that ‘people also ask’ section and sees the URL for your site, then that is counted as an impression.” If it’s accordion style, which is usually what it is, they click on that ‘People also ask’ section and they see the result, that’s when you get the impression because it will be the content from your website showing up there with a link to you. Well, anyway, that’s when that appears. “When it comes to measuring the ranking position, Search Console tracks where the ‘people also ask’ section appears in a particular set of search results. If it’s shown in the second position, for example, then all URLs shown within the ‘people also ask’ box are counted as ranking in position two.”. “The only thing to watch out for — the Search Console performance report shows the ranking of the topmost items. So if different URLs are listed multiple times in a search results page, it tracks the position of the first one.” You added something else here?
Scott: Oh, yeah. Recently people have been seeing this ‘People also ask’ box being displayed multiple times in a single search result. Again, as a Canadian, I haven’t seen this. I hate that so much, man. I hate it when people are reporting seeing cool things or different things, and we cannot replicate it. It drives me batty. But if you see it twice, great. If you don’t, I guess you’re in Canada, or some other country where Google doesn’t like to show us stuff until they’re absolutely positive they want to roll it out to everybody.
Google People Also Ask Displaying Two Or More Times On A Page
Ross: ‘People also asked’ (sorry I got messed up), appears mostly in the middle or just just down from the top, like, say, a local pack. I did a search for tourist attractions in Victoria to see what it would say, and the first couple are normal links and then top sites in Victoria is a section and then below that, one more ranking, and then the ‘People also ask,’ and then there’s a whole bunch more below. Then finally, what I got confused with, which is the ‘Related searches’ at the very bottom.
Scott: Hmm, gotcha.
Ross: Alright. So we did have a question that was posted. It’s really about the updates, the unconfirmed algorithmic updates, and someone has suggested they thought they had seen some in February because it seems to have affected her, we don’t have much that we can actually add to that because frankly, there’s a lot going on there and detangling is nearly impossible, unless you’re well, even if you were monitoring it all the time. I’m afraid we don’t have anything to add to that, I’m sorry. But we do appreciate the question and please do keep throwing them our way. We love those questions on our SEO Facebook group where you can just type in SEO 101 on Facebook, and you’ll find it
Well on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of StepForth Web Marketing and my company’s senior SEO Scott Van Achte, thank you for joining us today. Remember, we have a show notes newsletter that you can sign up for at seo101radio.com where you don’t have to miss a single link and you can refresh your memory of a past show at any time. Have a great week and remember to tune in to future episodes which air every week on WMR.FM
Scott: Great. Thank you for listening, everybody.