Preparing Your Data Consumers for GA4 — Whiteboard Friday

You know GA4 is coming, and last week Dana took you through some of the top things to be aware of before making the transition to it. In this week’s episode, Ruth Burr Reedy discusses what a lot of marketers may not be thinking about enough: the people besides us who use Analytics data, and what they need to know about Google Analytics 4 in order to continue using Analytics data.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. I'm Ruth Burr Reedy. I am the CEO of UpBuild. We are a boutique digital marketing agency specializing in technical SEO, advanced web analytics, and whole-funnel digital marketing strategy. And today, I want to talk a little bit about Google Analytics 4.

GA4 is here

So as, hopefully, all of you by now know, Google Analytics 4 is here. It is the next generation of Google's Analytics tracking software. And what I think at this point, hopefully, most marketers at least know that it's coming. 

The most important thing to know is that on July 1st, 2023, which is less than a year from now, Google Analytics 4 will be the only Google Analytics product that will be continuing to collect data. Universal Analytics, which has been the analytics standard for several years now, will be completely sunset in less than a year.

A lot of people are talking about this. A lot of people are talking about Google Analytics 4, what it is, how to use it. I'm hopeful that the Whiteboard Friday audience already knows a lot of these things. 

But one thing I think a lot of us marketers are not thinking enough about are the people besides us who use Analytics data and what they need to know about Google Analytics 4 in order to continue using Analytics data for the things that they use it for.

Stop! Get GA4 running

So, before we get into that, let's just stop for a minute. Do you have GA4 collecting data on your web properties, on all of them? Do you? Are you sure? If you don't, if there's a website that you own or are involved with in any way that does not have GA4 collecting data, just pause this video. Just pause it real quick and just get GA4 running on that site. It only takes a second. It's actually very, very easy to implement. And all you need to do, at this point, you don't need to configure it, you don't need to do anything else, just get it collecting data. I'll wait.

Who needs this data?

Okay. Ready? All right, great. Here we go. So one thing that we need to think about, as people who use marketing analytics data, is that there are other people besides us who need that data and see that data and use that data to understand what's happening and make decisions accordingly. 

So who are these people? It might be team leadership. It might be your CEO. CEOs the worst, I know. It might be your boss. It might be your boss' boss. Your board of directors, if you're a publicly-traded or a venture capital-funded company or any other kind of company that has a board, chances are you are compiling at least a quarterly report for your board on how the website is doing using Analytics data.

You might also, if you are like me, an agency marketer, you have clients, you have client points of contact. Hopefully, you've already been in close communication with your client point of contact about Google Analytics 4. You've already got it set up for them. 

But chances are your client point of contact has these same people in their work life. So if you are working with a director of marketing, a marketing manager, a CMO, someone in the marketing seat, you need to make sure that that person, your client point of contact has this same information to message to the people above them and the other consumers of Analytics data within their organization who may not be as familiar with how Analytics data is collected but still know enough to be using it and at least know enough to be receiving reports containing this data. All of these people need to understand what is happening with Google Analytics 4.

Implement it now

The time to do that is now. The time to do that is not July 2023. We need to start right now. We have less than a year to get everybody on board with what GA4 is, how it's different, and what that means for the data that they consume and use to make decisions, because it is different. It's going to be different.

I've talked to people who have seen that little alert pop up in Universal Analytics, that strikes a little fear into all of our hearts, Universal Analytics is going away on July 1st, 2023. Some people seem to think of this as when your phone says, "I'm going to install an operating system update overnight." Like cool, great. Phone, you do you. Turn it on the morning. It's not that different. It's fine. That is not the case with Google Analytics 4. And we need to make sure that everyone who uses Analytics data, with whom we interact, understands that so that they are not taken aback when that change happens.

We can also start making that change now gently, iteratively over time, while UA is still collecting data in order to illustrate to our data consumers what the differences are.

Have a plan for historical data

So the first thing that we need to do, when it comes to GA4 and the upcoming transition, is have a plan for historical data. One of the big things about this transition is that historical data in Universal Analytics will not be available via the GA interface after July 1st, 2023. 

So how are you going to get that data? Because chances are you're not going to be okay with just saying, "All right, well, we installed GA4 when it first came out in the fall of 2020. So we've got a little more than a year or two of data, and that's our new data universe." There are companies who have just decided that that's what they're going to do, that's their new normal. KonMari your historical data, namaste, release it into the world. Most people are not going to do that. Most people are going to want to see historical data from farther back than fall 2020, which is the earliest that you could have been collecting this data.

So what is your plan for historical data? Hopefully, you have one. There are many blog posts and videos and articles out there on ways to preserve your historical data. I'm not going to go too deep into that. But whether you're using BigQuery and you're going to port it into some sort of database or data warehouse, maybe you have a small enough dataset that you're just going to export a bunch of spreadsheets and kind of store that, maybe you're going to build some kind of custom SQL database, whatever you're going to do with your historical data, it's none of my business, but you should have a plan to store that data.

Now, at this point, you may already have spoken to these people about the fact that historical data is going away, because that's something that they are probably feeling pretty amped up about. I'm feeling amped up about it. It's a lot, and we need to have a plan. But that's okay, that's what we're doing today.

Don't equate apples to oranges

The real thing that we need to keep in mind, as we're making a plan for historical data, is that the data in Google Analytics 4 and the data in Universal Analytics is collected differently. Even things that have the same name are going to be slightly different metrics behind the scenes. We're going to talk more about that in a minute. But it's important to know that comparing GA4 and Universal Analytics data is always going to be apples to oranges. They're not the same. 

So even as you have a plan to make and store and use this historical database, however you're going to do that, you need to keep in mind that that data and the data you use going forward are not going to be one-to-one. And that's okay. I mean, it is what it is.

Some people, keeping that in mind, are changing what they're doing. Is the expense and effort of data warehousing your historical UA data worth all of the time and expense it's going to take, considering that it's apples to oranges? I can't make that decision for you, but it's something to consider. It's something to ask yourself and really think about what you're going to do with historical data going forward and how you're going to use it.

What's changing? Everything!

Because what's changing with Google Analytics 4? Everything. It's really different. And hopefully, by now, you've gone in there, gotten under the hood, you've played with some of the reports, you've looked at the UI. It's really different from Universal Analytics.

I've been doing SEO since 2006, and this is the biggest change in Google Analytics, especially the front end, the UI that I've ever seen. And also the backend is different. The method of data collection within GA4 is different, because a big part of why Google is making this push for GA4 is in an effort to be more in compliance with data privacy laws. So they're having to change some of the ways the data is collected and reported.

They're also looking at how to better do things like report on cross-domain traffic, cross-device traffic, traffic between websites and apps, when those are the same thing, they're the same and they're different. And now, in GA4, you can look at that data in a more holistic sense.

There's a lot of exciting, cool stuff happening in GA4. But the important thing to know is that things that are called the same thing in GA4 are still fundamentally different and collected at the very least slightly differently than they are in Universal Analytics. This is going to be hugely important when we're looking at this historical data.

A great example is sessions. The session, for many, many years, has been the core unit of Analytics data. GA4, you can tell from their reporting, is really trying to shift everyone's reporting from sessions to users. Both sessions and users are collected slightly differently. They are counted slightly differently. So your session numbers in GA4 and Universal Analytics for the same time period are going to be slightly different.

Now, the degree to which they are different is going to depend on a lot of things. Filtering options in Universal Analytics are a lot more advanced than they are right now in GA4. So if you have a lot of custom filters set up, if you're filtering out a giant known bot network, if you are filtering out data from specific countries, whatever you're filtering out, chances are you cannot implement that yet in GA4. That's going to affect it. But the session itself, how it's counted, when a session resets. So, for example, a session is resetting at midnight, having your time zone configured, hugely important in UA, less of a thing in GA4. So depending on the time period, depending on your filtering, depending on how you're counting sessions now, your sessions data may be a little different or a lot different.

All of this is also going to depend on the scope of your data. Tiny differences become big in bigger datasets. So if you've got hundreds of thousands or millions of sessions in a given time period that you're reporting on, the chances that those numbers are going to be different in GA4 to UA, they're probably going to be different by a bigger percentage.

And, at the same time, if you only have a very, very small number of users, because that sample size is smaller, you may also see bigger gaps. It really depends on your data. 

The important thing is your data consumers don't need to know the ways in which data collection is different. You can tell them and they're not going to remember, and that's okay. They're busy and they don't need to know. What they do need to know is that it's different, it's not the same, and you have a year, at this point, to show them the degree to which it is different so that they can start to understand what the difference between the old dataset and the new dataset is, while you still have those same time periods of data collection to compare. Just to give them an idea of what's different.

So, at this point, you probably have some of these data consumers who are in love with a report. They've got their one report, and they look at it every day or they look at it every week or they look at it every quarter, and you have spent the last, however long you've been reporting to them, refining that report. You show them the report. And then they say, "What about this piece of data?" And you put it in there, and then they never look at it again. You take it out and no one notices. Or you put it in there and it becomes the new normal. Or maybe you have been trying for a long time to get them to look at users, instead of at sessions, but they just love sessions so much as a metric. Whatever it is that your data consumers love about Universal Analytics, chances are it's going to be at least a little bit different in GA4. And it's highly likely, and I would go so far as to say advisable, that that report is going to have to change. So the time to show them that it's different and ease them into that change, like dipping a toe into the Jacuzzi, is now. Not July 2023, now.

Users are another really great example of what is different between Universal and GA4. So in Universal Analytics, we're all used to total users and new users. Those are the two breakdowns of users. In GA4, you have a metric called Active Users, which is the users that have been active on your site in the last 28 days. That is the default users metric that you're going to see in GA4 and in the reporting. Now, you may decide, because you've already been reporting on total users, that you want to report on total users in the future. You can do that, but I would encourage you to look at the ways in which GA4 is presenting and encouraging you to use the data.

It's very interesting to me, this is a little bit of a sidebar, the ways in which Google Analytics, over the years, has taught us what is important to measure based on what they surface up most prominently in reports. And for my career, that has chiefly been the session. Now, increasingly, we're looking at the user, which is great in a world in which most people's purchase journey involves more than one device and certainly more than one session. But it does change the way we fundamentally look at and think about data. And I would encourage you, rather than trying to swim upstream on that, to think about how you are going to change your data reporting in order to mesh up well with the reporting that GA4 is going to roll out, because they're still rolling out new features all the time. You can take a look at what they are surfacing up prominently now to get an idea of where those new features are most likely going to be rolling out, especially in the next year, but even beyond that so that you are reporting in ways that are going to get you the most new cool data soonest. But I digress.

Another thing I want to make really sure that everybody, especially these people, understand is that events mean something completely different in GA4 than it does in Universal Analytics. In Universal Analytics, events are a very specific thing. You collect a piece of data. You have four parameters that you can assign — category, action, label, value. We've all, at this point, used UTM parameters. We know what those are. We're familiar with it. It's comfortable.

In GA4, everything is an event. It's almost going back to like super, super old-school internet days and thinking about hits on your website. At this point, everything in GA4, if you boil it down to a fundamental piece of data collection, is called an event. Could they have called it something different and made this less confusing? Yes, but they didn't, and here we are.

So this is really important to make sure that your data consumers understand that event collection is going to be different. And that's important because of this apples-to-oranges comparison. As you're collecting events data in GA4, it's going to be really, really tempting to try to recreate, as much as you can, your Universal Analytics instance, how you're collecting data, how you're reporting on it. Resist the urge to do that. 

When you're configuring custom events in GA4, resist the urge, and maybe even the pressure from these people, to replicate that category, action, label, value naming convention just because that's what you're used to. Instead, this is a fabulous time to really be rethinking your data collection and your reporting. And we, as marketers, have a huge opportunity here that I want to make sure we don't miss.

Now is the time for data governance

Many of us have come into whatever role we're in now and come into an existing Google Analytics instance. Filters have already been set up. Goals have already been configured. Events have already been set up and have been tracking data for however long before we got there. What this usually means is that things are not set up entirely to our liking. Many marketers, myself included, have come into an Analytics situation and found that the data is incorrect, inaccurately reported. It's double counting things. It's not counting things. We have an opportunity now, with GA4, to make sure that our data collection is complete, accurate, precise, and robust. And we need to seize that opportunity.

And the same thing goes with event collection. Now is the time, for everyone watching this video, to start thinking about data governance. Now is the time for us to seize control of the data and do what we can to not only make it complete, accurate, precise, robust, but also future-proof that data collection for ourselves, for the organizations that we work for, for our clients, and for our data consumers, because we may not be the only people using that data. 

There are often other teams going into Analytics. If you work with a paid search team or a display team or you work with just a general marketing agency who maybe doesn't do anything with Analytics but they look at the data, maybe they don't do anything to the website but they need data about the website because it informs their campaigns, they probably have dashboards configured. They probably have events set up. They may have set up those events in ways that you don't like. Things like, oh, here the label is capitalized. There the label isn't capitalized. Guess what, those are two different events. That's still going to be true in GA4, as of right now at least. Capitalization is still going to make two different parameters. So we have an opportunity right now to enact some data governance, make some rules, and take control. 

So when we think about events in GA4, yes, everything is an event. There are many things that are going to be collected automatically. You do not have to configure GA4 to collect things like page views. They're just going to do that. I don't think you can get them to not do that because it would break the tool. You could, but why would you?

In addition to that, there are enhanced measurement events that Google has available for you to configure. Almost all of those, they're very easy to set up and they're standardized.

The same is true for recommended events. So within GA4, the next level of complexity from automatic and enhanced measurement events are recommended events. And in the GA4 support documentation, there is a large and increasing list of different recommended events and the parameters that they collect that you can look at. I would say, at this point, any recommended event that applies to your site you might as well configure, because you could use that data. 

With both enhanced measurement and recommended events, because they have built-in parameters, Google is going to be using those more to drive some of the ... I know they're wanting to do a lot more with automated analysis and machine learning on datasets. All of that's going to start from the data that is consistent across Google Analytics' broader dataset, which is these enhanced measurement and recommended events. All of the parameters will be named the same thing, so it's very easy for them to collect them and then apply machine learning to them.

You still, as you are setting these up, need to make sure that you're enacting some data governance. You need to make sure the parameters are named the same way, that the same parameter is collected in the same way across recommended events so that you are, going forward, no longer having apples to oranges. That's GA4 to UA. Everything in GA4 should be oranges. Now, get that on a T-shirt, no one will know what it means.

And then the next level up is custom events. Custom events in GA4 are really cool. You can collect data on just about anything. You can pass just about any piece of data that Google Analytics 4 can collect. You can collect as a parameter. There's a ton of functionality, especially if you are pushing things into the data later to collect that as event parameters. We're no longer limited to category, action, label, value. We are limited by the total number of parameters that we can collect per property, which makes sense because data storage is expensive and it's expensive for Google. But we have a lot more customizability when it comes to custom events.

This is very cool. And we really need to apply the Spider-Man principle here. With great power comes great responsibility. Resist the urge to get in there and start tracking everything, partying like it's, I guess, 2099 at this point. Resist that urge. Make a plan. Now is the time for data governance.

As you are thinking about the custom events that you were going to track and the parameters you are going to collect, you might start by just outlining what you know you want to track and how you want to collect those parameters. But then it's time to make some rules, some rules for what you're going to track, how you're going to track it, what parameters you're going to collect, and how those parameters are labeled. You shouldn't just do this for whatever you're going to configure, as you're setting up GA4 now. Think about how you can create and future-proof rules for data collection going forward so that, over time, you get promoted, somebody else is doing your job, you win the lottery and go off to an island and are having a beautiful time. Whoever has your job after you should still have rules so that, when they are setting this stuff up, it is still oranges to oranges and you are creating a dataset that is correct, that is also useful in comparison with itself. Parameters that are useful in comparison across events and event types. This is the time to be doing that. Create those rules, make them clear. Make sure that people on other teams, anybody else who might be setting up events, even outside of the inbound search team or the marketing team, or whatever team you're sitting on, make sure that they have that. If you have clients, make sure you're doing a whole training session with them on what the rules are and how to use those rules to configure events in the future. Make a video. Document it. Share it out. The more you can do now to set yourself up for success in the future, the more valuable your GA4 dataset is going to be from day one and going forward.

So if you get nothing else out of this video, take some time to think about data governance and how you're going to make sure your data is useful and consistent going forward.

Now that we have this beautiful dataset, we're collecting data, it's configured, we've got a year. At this point, I'm filming this at MozCon 2022, we've got a year left to talk to these people about the difference between our apples and oranges and help them fall in love with oranges. So your CEO, your board, whoever it is that loves that report, don't just recreate that report for them with GA4 data. Take some time to talk with them, to understand what it is about that information that they use to make decisions, what it is about that report that they look at that helps them do their job. Find out how to solve that same problem for them with GA4 data rather than just trying to make GA4 look as much like UA as possible, because, over time, it's going to be less and less the case and, over time, people are going to forget about Universal and now you just have a GA4 instance that looks like Universal Analytics for no reason.

Now is the time to not do that. Resist the pressure to do that and figure out what your GA4 install is going to look like in 2023 and 2025, maybe even 2030. Institute those rules now so that you can help your board, you can help your CEO, you can help your clients and their bosses and their bosses' bosses gall in love with your new reports. They're beautiful. They're oranges-to-oranges. They've got new, robust, actionable data that you're using in new, exciting, advanced ways. This is coming. It's happening. Right now is a really important moment in terms of making sure that everybody is on board with what the changes are, in terms of making sure that everybody is on board with how we're going to collect data in the future, and giving everyone a year to fall in love with this new report before they have no other options.

If you have questions about any of this or you just want to talk about Google Analytics 4 and geek out about data collection, please holler at me at Twitter anytime. I'm very friendly, and I love talking about this stuff.

That's my Whiteboard Friday. Thanks, everybody. Have a wonderful Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

9 Local Search Developments You Need to Know About from Q3 2022

Did Q1 and Q2 whip past you? They did for me, but the pace of life often seems to slow down a little in autumn, and I hope you’ll join me for a relaxed and studious look at interesting local search marketing developments from the third quarter of 2022.

1) A small harvest of review-related changes

I’m grouping four different review-related developments under this heading. First, Joy Hawkins spotted a change to Google’s guidelines on prohibited and restricted content. As I’ve covered here exhaustively in my Moz column, there are lots of things a business can do to rectify a complaint in hopes of seeing an unhappy customer update their negative review to reflect an improved experience, but outright incentivization of negative review removal has now been declared out-of-bounds by Google.

Second and rather related, Greg Gifford captured a good stat from Aaron Weiche’s LocalU presentation that I’d not heard before: over ⅓ of negative experiences referenced in reviews mention communication problems. This means that you not only need to have your local business listings up-to-snuff with ongoing management of the accuracy of your contact info, but that all of your communications technologies (texting, live chat, phone, etc.) must be responsive!

Thirdly, Barry Schwartz spotted early testing of a Find Places Through Reviews feature in July, but as of September, I have still not been able to replicate this interesting result, which is a further indication of Google’s continuous experimentation in the review space.

Finally, another tip from the inimitable Hawkins as tweeted by Brandon Schmidt: longer reviews tend to remain higher up in your Google review corpus for a longer time. The problem with this is that lengthier reviews are commonly negative, with unhappy customers taking the time to wax poetic about their complaints. Take some time to consider whether you can finesse your review requests so that your delighted customers are inspired to leave more voluble reviews.

2) HCU near you

It’s my belief that local businesses which have already made a habit of publishing content that thoughtfully serves their specific customers should come out well in the much-talked-about Helpful Content Update, which finished rolling out on September 9th. While many SEOs are trying to ascertain which changes can rightfully be attributed to the update, our friends at NearMediaCo are having interesting discussions about whether the HCU is, in fact, part of Google’s response to the rise of TikTok as a vehicle for search. As Greg Sterling notes,

“Right now the most influential internet company is arguably TikTok. Google's HCU appears to be partly a response to the popularity of the site and its much-touted "authenticity."

Local SEOs and their clients cannot have failed to notice how many Google searches (including local searches) return low-quality results made up of optimized filler rather than human-worthy help. While the search engines and social sites play ball over who will win the authenticity trophy, my best advice to independent local businesses is to be sure that everything on your website is a proudly-published source of information for your community.

3) Beyond content: communication

There may be times when I’m willing to wander about in the Google maze or the morass of site search hoping for an answer to a complex query, but usually, I don’t have the patience and want to be able to ask a business directly, “Do you have size 8, man-made, furry boots, with fluffy linings, but not from this brand, and only from this brand, and can you deliver them to my house, and can you do that contactlessly, and is there a surcharge for that?” Local businesses can certainly publish content to cover all of these bases, but bless the brand that makes it easy for me to have a conversation with a human being.

Brandon Schmidt did us the favor of photographing Aaron Weiche’s recent presentation on this topic. Ahead of the holidays, be sure your texting, live chat, and phone staff is ready with all the answers via highly visible numbers and links (and my boots!).

4) Toggle to hide your address

Barry Schwartz highlighted Stefan Somborac’s screenshot of a new toggle feature in search and Maps that is meant to make it easier for business owners to hide the address on their Google Business Profile. The hidden address drama is one of the longest-running plots in the soap opera that is the Guidelines for representing your business on Google. I would personally like to see this character written out of the script in favor of businesses having the say in whether they want their exact location to be visible on their listings. I’ve never understood Google’s logic for requiring SABs to obscure their locations; living in an old house as I do, I’ve had too many opportunities of needing to know which 24-hour plumber is actually nearest to me.

5) Linked FAQs in Google Messaging

This might be one of the most exciting developments of the third quarter and we again have Stefan Somborac to thank for noticing it first. You can now populate Google Messaging with up to 10 FAQs with questions of up to 40 characters and answers of up to 500 characters and your answers can include links! While I’m not personally fond of automated consumer-brand communications, I can see a good use of this for answering really common questions about hours of operation, premise accessibility, or the availability of top brands in your inventory.

6) Filter local packs by days of the week

Google has long offered searchers the ability to filter packs by hours of the day, but Shameem Adhikarath realized that, at some point, the ability to filter results by specific days of the week was added. When a customer wants to know on Monday which are the best restaurants that are open on Saturday, a little feature like this makes sense. Word to the wise: be sure your hours of operation are always up-to-date on your listings!

7) Evaluate the role local SEO should play in property hunting

Elizabeth Rule brought us this screenshot of Andy Simpson’s LocalU presentation in which he reminded local SEOs that our concerns are not the only ones that should be involved when a client moves or opens a new branch. While I’m sorry to have missed Andy’s full presentation, I can see the sense of it, just from this slide. So many of the goodies of reputation and profit will flow naturally when other factors like the location, convenience, and size of a new locale are properly considered, so definitely weigh in with local SEO recommendations during times of change, but prepare to be in a queue of many priorities.

8) Maps Photo Pins exist, but have you seen them yet?

Our honored colleagues at BrightLocal captured a version of Maps-based photo pins in September that is different than the ones reported by Barry Schwartz back in July as spotted by Vishal Sharma. These latest examples are round instead of square. I have not been able to replicate this test with similar search terms from my location in the US, and so I have no way of sussing out what the source of these images is or how to nudge Google into giving a business pin like this. For now, keep adding photos and keep checking Maps for this intriguing feature.

9) Be the winner next-door next year?

Nextdoor users voted many local and ten national businesses as their favorites this past August, and the winners have received press, badges and $500 ad credits. It’s definitely a platform worth getting listed on, and home service providers came out especially well in the contest. Nextdoor highlighted how showing up on time for appointments, providing excellent service, offering specialty goods and services, and earning recommendations from neighbors all contributed to winners’ successes. Sounds like good advice to take with you into the fourth and final quarter of 2022!

How We Increased a Client’s Leads by 384% in Six Months by Focusing on One Topic Cluster [Case Study]

Content marketing is an essential part of any SEO strategy. Without it, how are you going to attract customers looking for answers to their questions, and who are potentially in the market for your products or services?

At Tao Digital Marketing, we've recently generated some great results for one of our clients operating in the business financial space, The Insolvency Experts, mainly by focusing on just one “cluster topic” that was a huge money maker for them.

When looking at six month comparison stats (August 2021-January 2022 to February-July 2022), we've achieved the following:

• Leads: 95 to 460 (384%)

• Clicks: 4,503 to 23,013 (411%)

• Impressions: 856,683 to 2,033,355 (137%)

• Average position: 33.4 to 23.6 (increased almost 10 spots)

This was mostly achieved by absolutely hammering one topic area: company liquidation. In this case study, we’re going to explain how we did this step by step, so that hopefully you can generate similar results for your own business!

Objectives

If you really break it down, the objective of all SEO consultancy work is essentially the same: increase the number of leads for a business. This was our ultimate goal.

It’s not just as simple as that, though. We all know you can’t get to number one on Google overnight. So, like other SEO geeks out there, we tracked our successes through additional factors such as clicks, impressions, and average position, to show our efforts were worthwhile.

In January this year (2022) our goals for the next six months were as follows:

• Leads: Just over double from 95 to 200 (110%)

• Clicks: 4,503 to 13,500 (around 200%)

• Impressions: 856,683 to 1,700,000 (around 100%)

• Average position: 33.4 to 25 (around eight spots)

Insolvency Experts’ audience is primarily directors of UK businesses that are going insolvent, closely followed by business owners looking for financial advice. The majority of Insolvency Expert’s cash flow comes from formal insolvency processes, such as liquidation, administration, and CVAs (Company Voluntary Agreements), so it was really important for us to push these areas.

Our strategy

1. Research “company liquidation” search volume and related queries

We first picked this client up in November 2020. Initially, our focus was on the basics: updating all the top level pages (such as service pages and guides) to make sure they fit the intention of the user and clearly explained the services that Insolvency Experts offer.

Researching what works well at present

One of the pages that our content team updated was their company liquidation guide. After updating, the page started to perform very well in the SERP, and ranked at position #4 for “company liquidation”. Clearly, this sort of content was working, and we wanted to hit it even more.

After pulling some research together, one of our strategists proposed the idea of a “Company Liquidation Content Hub”, as the company liquidation guide was ranking for a lot of long tail questions:

After cross referencing with the monthly search volume for these questions, she added some of these as H3s within the guide to see how they would perform. They resulted in so much more traffic that she decided they warranted their own individual guides, hence the idea for the hub. This would mean we weren’t putting all of our eggs into one basket, and that we could also internally link all of them together for users wanting to read more.

Users that are further down the marketing funnel don’t want to scroll down a huge guide to find the answer to their specific question, and we were certain that this would positively affect bounce rate. We therefore made sure that nine times out of 10, the H1 contained the question that was being answered.

In order to further target those at the bottom of the marketing funnel who want to speak to someone quickly, we placed regular “Contact Us” CTAs throughout the content so that they don’t have to scroll right to the bottom of the page to get in touch with Insolvency Experts.

Undertaking a competitor analysis

We also conducted a competitor analysis on this topic, focusing on three key players in the industry that were all ranking well for the phrase “company liquidation”. We found that the key competitors had the following:

Competitor A - 38 indexed articles on liquidation

Competitor B - 23 indexed articles on liquidation

Competitor C - 47 indexed articles on liquidation

Insolvency Experts only had six indexed articles on liquidation at the time, so it was clear we needed to be on their level - this was an obvious content gap.

Pitching the content hub to the client

We suggested this idea to the client alongside a forecasting spreadsheet created by our founder, in order to justify the resource that was needed to push the client as high as possible in the rankings for company liquidation.

This spreadsheet broke down a huge list of keywords alongside monthly search volume, average click through rate for positions 1-10 on the SERP, domain authority of competitors who are currently ranking for these keywords, and average conversion rate on the site at the moment.

This unique formula would then allow us to explain to the client that for X amount of work, we predict we can get you to position X in X timeframe, and this would result in approximately X annual revenue. After pitching this to the client alongside infographics and current performance statistics, they told us they loved our ideas and agreed to let us go ahead.

2. Plan the content after client approval

After the client gave us the go-ahead, the next step was to plan all of this work based on search volume, and therefore priority order.

It’s easy to get lost in all the data within SEO, so it was incredibly important for us to have a solid plan and timeline for these changes. Topics were going to range from How to Liquidate a Company with No Money through to Administration vs Liquidation.

How we communicate planned works to our clients

In order to orchestrate clear communication between ourselves and our clients, we create a Traffic Light Report, which is a live Google Sheets document detailing all work to be undertaken for the current and next quarter. This is split into sections for technical SEO, content, and digital PR/link building (the three pillars of SEO).

This includes justification for each change we make, as well as a link to any live changes or documents. It also details when this will be done and if the action is with us or the client. The tasks are coloured in green for live changes, yellow for action needed, orange for in progress, red for anything on hold and clear for not started.

Here’s an example of what the content section of Insolvency Expert’s traffic light report looks like for their current quarter (July-September 2022):

Scheduling the tasks

We then scheduled these topics for our various content writers to work on using our project management software, ClickUp. Within each task we placed a link to a skeleton document consisting of H1s, H2s, and H3s, as well as a title, meta description and keywords to include.

3. Write the content while implementing technical SEO

By this time it was around April 2022, and it was time for us to fully attack the content portion of our task list. Since then, we’ve written 18 pieces of content around company liquidation, and still have quite a few left to go before we consider this area of focus complete.

As part of our uploads, our technical SEO adds FAQ schema, which has helped Insolvency Experts showing up for several featured snippets (more details in results section).

Analyzing as we go along

Once we covered the big topics in the first couple of months of writing, we started to use Low Fruits to find smaller queries which are estimated at around 10 or fewer monthly searches. We’ve had a lot of success targeting lower search volume phrases, as these users seem to be more focused and lower down the sales funnel, so are more likely to be better engaged and convert better. A lot of the time they are pleased that you have answered their very niche question!

The below is a screenshot from a keyword analysis. We trawled through hundreds of keywords to pull out the ones relevant to the client.

We then used Low Fruit’s Keyword Extraction and SERP Analysis tool to give us further details on a select few key terms.

These terms are shown as having a search volume of either 10, less than 10 or 0. Of course, we know that this is still hugely important to cover, and targeting these will bring in a very niche reader who is much more likely to convert due to the nature of the long-tail queries.

Finalizing the hub

Our plan is to finalize the hub this fall, and ensure that everything is internally linked. There will also be a menu change to make the addition of the hub very clear. See screenshots below for the current hub vs. how it will be presented once all content is ready (screenshot taken from their staging site in Kinsta, our hosting platform where we make design changes so that the client can approve them before they go live).

Current ‘hub’ in the menu:

How the hub will look once all content is complete:

As part of our content process within ClickUp, we have a recurring task to check a new URL in Google Search Console two weeks after upload. This allows us to see if we have the “Google Spike of Acceptance”, which is a sharp incline of impressions/traffic indicating that the content will do well, before it falls then slowly rises again.

If we don’t see this spike, we carry out multiple checks, including: Is it an orphan page? Are there any technical errors? Is it indexed? If it is not indexed, we push the URL through Index Me Now.

If the issue is just that the piece isn’t getting picked up, we will take another look at the content to see if there is something else we can do to improve it, e.g. tweak the H1 or expand the content.

4. Build links to the relevant pages and homepage

Once we’d uploaded the content, it was time to build links to the priority pages and homepage in order to build the domain authority.

We wanted to really hone in on generating links for our company liquidation page. The page has 36 backlinks, many of which were built through link building efforts. This was largely done by working with business site publications and creating natural anchor text that would help with certain keyword rankings.

As well as building links specifically to the company liquidation page, we also built links to the main URL in order to boost overall domain authority. This was done through answering queries through platforms such as HARO and Response Source, as well as working with the client to create relevant, time-specific thought leadership pieces. Here’s an example of a HARO request we responded to, the topic being “Recession-proofing tips for small businesses”:

Although the site’s domain authority tends to fluctuate between 30-33 depending on links lost and general algorithm updates, the links to specific pages have still resulted in an increase in rankings, detailed further below.

Results compared to objectives

Although we knew that our strategy was going to work well based on our experience with our other clients, we were very pleasantly surprised by the huge positive effect our work has made, which enabled us to smash the targets we set!

Leads

Goal: Increase from 95 to 200 (110%)

Result: Increased from 95 to 460 (384%)

As a result of creating incredibly useful, lengthy content and placing regular CTAs throughout the content, we managed to almost quadruple the amount of leads coming through to the client in the space of just six months.

In the six months before our liquidation project began, our Leads Dashboard within WhatConverts shows that Insolvency Experts had five liquidation leads via phone call and 10 leads via their contact form on a liquidation-focused page.

In the six-month period since we’ve been working on the content hub, they have had 38 liquidation leads via phone call and 52 leads via contact form on a liquidation-focused page.

Result: 660% increase in phone call leads and 420% increase in contact form leads.

Previous six months:

Current:

Clicks

Goal: Increase from 4,503 to 13,500 (around 200%)

Result: Increased from 4,503 to 23,013 (411%)

By creating highly relevant content that matched the user’s search intent, we managed to almost quadruple the clicks over the space of six months, doubling our original 200% goal.

The site has received 29,400 clicks overall across the past 12 months. Below, you can see the huge spike in clicks and impressions from January onwards when we really started to focus on the liquidation content.

Impressions

Goal: Increase from 856,683 to 1,700,000 (around 100%)

Result: Increased from 856,683 to 2,033,355 (137%)

Again, by creating highly relevant blogs, Google started to understand the relevancy of our content, so the number of impressions hugely increased. Along with the 137% increase above, over the past 12 months (August 2021-August 2022) the site has received 485,000 impressions for the query ‘liquidation’ alone.

The main company liquidation guide that we updated had a total of 732K impressions over the past 12 months, too, with a huge spike from February onwards, when we updated the guide.

Average position

Goal: Increase from 33.4 to 25 (around 8 spots)

Result: Increased from 33.4 to 23.6 (increased 10 spots)

This increase is due to the relevancy of our content and the amount of keywords each piece ranked for. As mentioned, the main company liquidation guide has worked incredibly well, ranking for 181 keywords, 67 of which are page one (37%). It now has the number one spot for the term “company liquidation”. See below for an example of queries the page is showing up for.

The page also shows up for six featured snippets as a result of us implementing FAQ schema.

335 clicks and 93,663 impressions have come from the FAQ rich results alone.

In the six months before we updated the guide, it pulled in around 650 clicks and 227K impressions. In the six months following, it brought in around 1,180 clicks and 382K impressions. We’ve practically doubled clicks on one single guide.

As mentioned, this particular piece of content has 36 backlinks, and actually ranks ABOVE the official UK government company liquidation guide, which has a domain authority of 93 (about 60 higher than ours). Clearly, we’re meeting the searcher’s intent and giving them what they are looking for.

In the six month period before we started work on liquidation, Insolvency Experts had an average click through rate of 0.5%. Over a six month period of us working with them, this more than doubled to 1.2%.

Another success worth noting is that 3 out of 6 of our latest articles have an average page view duration of between 9 and 10 minutes! The other half are averaging around 5 to 6 minutes, which is still very good. Clearly, users are wanting in-depth information on this topic.

The “What happens to a director of a company in liquidation?” guide, which went live in May, is now the fifth most clicked page on the site. when filtered on GSC by the term “liquidation”.

Overall, we’re extremely pleased with the results we generated, and so are Insolvency Experts — the company liquidation department is now inundated with queries and they are rushed off their feet!

Top 4 Things to Know About GA4 — Whiteboard Friday

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Dana brings you some details on the exciting new world of Google Analytics 4. Watch and learn how to talk about it when clients and coworkers are intimidated by the move.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm President at Kick Point. And I am here today at MozCon 2022 to bring you some details on the exciting world of Google Analytics 4, which I know all of you are like, "Ugh, I don't want to learn about analytics," which is totally fair. I also did not want to learn about analytics.

And then I kind of learned about it whether I liked it or not. And you should, too, unfortunately. 

So I think the biggest thing about the move from Universal Analytics to GA4 is that people are like they log in and everything looks different. "I don't like it." And then they leave. And I agree the user interface in GA4 leaves a lot to be desired. I don't think there's necessarily been a lot of good education, especially for those of us who aren't analysts on a day-to-day basis.

We're not all data scientists. I'm not a data scientist. I do marketing. So what I'm hoping is I can tell you the things you should know about GA4 on just a basic sort of level, so that you have a better vocabulary to talk about it when people are horrified by the move to GA4, which is inevitable. It's going to happen. You've got to get it on your site starting basically immediately, if you don't already have it. So I started out with three things, and then I realized there was a fourth thing. So you get a bonus, exciting bonus, but we'll start with the first three things. 

1. It's different

So the first thing it's different, which I know is obvious. Yes, of course, Dana it's different. But it's different. Okay, so in Universal Analytics, there were different types of hits that could go into analytics, which is where hits came from originally as a metric that people talked about. So, for example, in Universal Analytics, you could have a pageview, or you could have a transaction, or you could have an event.

And those were all different types of hits. In GA4, everything is an event. There is a pageview event. There is a transaction event. There is, well, an event event. I mean, you name the events whatever you want. And because of that, it's actually a lot better way to report on your data.

So, for example, one of the things that I know people always wanted to be able to report on in Universal Analytics is what pages did people see and how did that relate to conversion rate. And that was really tricky because a pageview was something that was at the hit scope level, which means it was just like the individual thing that happened, whereas conversion rate is a session scoped thing.

So you couldn't mash together a hit scope thing with pageview with conversion rate, which is session scoped. They just didn't combine together unless you did some fancy blending stuff in Data Studio. And who's got time for that? So now in GA4, because everything is an event, you have a lot more freedom with how you can slice and dice and interpret your data and figure out what pages do people engage with before they actually converted, or what was that path, not just the landing page, but the entire user journey on their path to conversion. So that part is really exciting. 

2. Engagement rate is not reverse bounce rate

Second thing, engagement rate is a new metric in GA4. They do have bounce rate. They did recently announce it. I'm annoyed at it, so we're going to talk about this a little bit. Engagement rate is not reverse bounce rate. But it is in GA4.

So in Universal Analytics, bounce rate was a metric that people reported on all the time, even though they shouldn't have. I hate bounce rate so much. Just picture like a dumpster fire GIF right now across your screen. I hate bounce rate. And why I hate bounce rate is it's so easily faked. Let's say, for example, your boss says to you, "Hey, you know what, the bounce rate on our site is too high. Could you fix it?"

You're like, "Oh, yeah, boss. Totally." And then what you do is whenever somebody comes on your website, you send what's called an interactive event off to Google Analytics at the same time. And now you have a 0% bounce rate. Congratulations. You got a raise because you made it up. Bounce rate could absolutely be faked, no question. And so when we moved over to GA4, originally there was no bounce rate.

There was engagement rate. Engagement rate has its own issues, but it's not measuring anything similar to what bounce rate was. Bounce rate in UA was an event didn't happen. It didn't matter if you spent an hour and a half on the page reading it closely. If you didn't engage in an event that was an interactive event, that meant that you were still counted as a bounce when you left that page.

Whereas in GA4, an engage session is by default someone spending 10 seconds with that tab, that website open, so active in their browser, or they visited two pages, or they had a conversion. Now this 10-second rule I think is pretty short. Ten seconds is not necessarily a lot of time for someone to be engaged with the website.

So you might want to change that. It's under the tagging settings in your data stream. So if you go to Admin and then you click on your data stream and you go to more tagging settings and then you go to session timeouts, you can change it in there. And I would recommend playing around with that and seeing what feels right to you. Now GA4 literally just as I'm filming this has announced bounce rate, which actually it is reverse engagement rate. Please don't use it.

Instead, think about engagement rate, which I think is a much more usable metric than bounce rate was in UA. And I'm kind of excited that bounce rate in UA is going away because it was [vocalization]. 

3. Your data will not match

All right. So next thing, your data is not going to match. And this is stressful because you've been reporting on UA data for years, and now all of a sudden it's not going to match and people will be like, "But you said there were 101 users, and today you're saying there were actually 102. What's the problem?"

So, I mean, if you have that kind of dialogue with your leadership, you really need to have a conversation about the idea of accuracy in analytics, as in it isn't, and error and everything else. But I mean, really the data is going to be different, and sometimes it's a lot different. It's not just a little bit different. And it's because GA4 measures stuff differently than UA did. There is a page on Google Analytics Help, which goes into it in depth. But here are some of the highlights that I think you should really know sort of off the top of your head when you're talking to people about this. 

Pageviews and unique pageviews

So first thing, a pageview metric, which we're all familiar with, in Universal Analytics, this was all pageviews, including repeats. In GA4, same, pageview is pageview. Great.

So far so good. Then we had unique pageviews in Universal Analytics, which was only single views per session. So if I looked at the homepage and then I went to a services page and I went back to the homepage, I would have two pageviews of the homepage for pageview. I would have one pageview of the homepage in unique pageviews. That metric does not exist in GA4. So that is something to really watch for is that if you were used to reporting on unique pageviews, that is gone.

So I recommend now changing your reports to sort of like walk people through this comfort level of getting them used to the fact they're not going to get unique pageviews anymore. Or you can implement something that I talk about in another one of my Whiteboard Fridays about being able to measure the percentage of people who are reloading tabs and tab hoarders. You could work that into this a little bit.

Users

Okay. Next thing is users. Users is really I think a difficult topic for a lot of people to get their heads around because they think, oh, user, that means that if I'm on my laptop and then I go to my mobile device, obviously I am one user. You're usually not, unfortunately. You don't necessarily get associated across multiple devices. Or if you're using say a privacy- focused browser, like Safari, you may not even be associated in the same device, which kind of sucks.

The real only way you can truly measure if someone is a user across multiple sessions is if you have a login on your website, which not everybody does. A lot of B2B sites don't have logins. A lot of small business sites don't have logins. So users is already kind of a sketchy metric. And so unfortunately it's one that people used to report on a lot in Universal Analytics.

So in Universal Analytics, users was total users, new versus returning. In GA4, it's now active users. What is an active user? The documentation is a little unclear on how Google considers an active user. So I recommend reading that in depth. Just know that this is going to be different. You never should have been reporting on new versus returning users anyway, unless you had a login on your site because it was such a sketchy, bad metric, but I don't think a lot of people knew how bad it was.

It's okay. Just start changing your reports now so that when you have to start using GA4, on July 1, 2023, for real UA is done, then at least it's not so much of a shock when you do make that transition. 

Sessions

So one other thing to think about as well with the changes is sessions. So in Universal Analytics, a session was the active use of a site, so you're clicking on stuff.

It had a 30-minute timeout. And you may have heard never to use UTM tags on internal links on your website. And the reason why is because if someone clicked on an internal link on your website that had UTMs on it, your session would reset. And so you would have what's called session breaking, where all of a sudden you would have a session that basically started in the middle of your website with a brand-new campaign and source and medium and completely detached from the session that they just had.

They would be a returning user though. That's great. You shouldn't have been reporting that anyway. Whereas in GA4 instead, now there's an event because, remember, everything is an event now. There is an event that is called session start. And so that records when, well, the session starts. And then there's also a 30-minute timeout, but there is no UTM reset.

Now that doesn't mean that you should go out there and start using UTMs on internal links. I still don't think it's a great idea, but it's not necessarily going to break things the way that it used to. So you can now see where did someone start on my site by looking at the session start event. I don't know if it's necessarily 100% reliable. We've seen situations where if you're using consent management tools, for example, like a cookie compliance tool, you can have issues with sessions starting and whatnot.

So just keep that in mind is that it's not necessarily totally foolproof, but it is a really interesting way to see where people started on the site in a way that you could not do this before. 

4. Use BigQuery

So bonus, bonus before we go. All right, the fourth thing that I think you should know about GA4, use BigQuery. There's a built-in BigQuery export under the settings for GA4. Use it.

The reason why you should use it is: (a) the reports in GA4 are not great, the default reports, they kind of suck; (b) even the explorations are a bit questionable, like you can't really format them to look nice at all. So what I'm saying to people is don't really use the reports inside GA4 for any sort of useful reporting purposes. It's more like an ad hoc reporting. But even then, I would still turn to BigQuery for most of my reporting needs.

And the reason why is because GA4 has some thresholding applied. So you don't necessarily get all the data out of GA4 when you're actually looking at reports in it. And this happened to me actually just this morning before I recorded this Whiteboard Friday. I was looking to see how many people engaged with the form on our website, and because it was a relatively low number, it said zero.

And then I looked at the data in BigQuery and it said 12. That amount could be missing from the reports in GA4, but you can see it in BigQuery, and that's because of the thresholding that's applied. So I always recommend using the BigQuery data instead of the GA4 data. And in Google Data Studio, if that's what you use for your reporting tool, the same issue applies when you use GA4 as a data source.

You have the same thresholding problems. So really just use BigQuery. And you don't need to know BigQuery. All you need to do is get the data going into BigQuery and then open up Google Data Studio and use that BigQuery table as your data source. That's really all you need to know. No SQL required. If you want to learn it, that's neat.

I don't even know it that well yet. But it is not something you have to know in order to report well on GA4. So I hope that you found this helpful and you can have a little bit more of a better dialogue with your team and your leadership about GA4. I know it seems rushed. It's rushed. Let's all admit it's rushed, but I think it's going to be a really good move. I'm really excited about the new kinds of data and the amounts of data that we can capture now in GA4.

It really frees us from like the category action label stuff that we were super tied to in Universal Analytics. We can record so much more interesting data now on every event. So I'm excited about that. The actual transition itself might be kind of painful, but then a year from now, we'll all look back and laugh, right? Thank you very much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

How Helpful Was the Helpful Content Update?

On August 25, Google started rolling out the Helpful Content Update, an ongoing effort to reward sites with “people-first” (i.e. not written specifically for SEO) content. MozCast measured rankings flux peaking at 92°F on August 26, which sounds relatively high, but this is what the two weeks on either side of the update looked like:

The dotted blue line shows the 30-day average for the period prior to the start of the update, which came in at 87°F. Ranking flux actually peaked on August 23 above any day of the update rollout. To make matters worse, we had to remove August 8-9 from the 30-day average, because Google’s data center outage completely disrupted search results.

Let me sum up: it’s a mess. I like to think I’m pretty good at handling messes, but this is like trying to find one particular drop of water in two weeks of rain during a summer-long storm. If you like messes, read on, but for the rest of you, I’ll tell you this — I found no clear evidence that this first iteration of the Helpful Content Update moved the needle for most sites.

Averages, lies, and damned lies

Given the extended rollout, I attempted to look at the difference in visibility for individual domains for the 14 days before and after the start of the rollout (which helps smooth out single-day outliers and keeps the days of the week consistent across both sides). One “loser” that immediately popped up was Conch-House.com, with nearly a 50% visibility loss in our data set. I admit, I even got a little judgmental about the hyphen in the domain name. Then, I looked at the daily data:

The averages don’t tell even half of this story. Whatever happened to Conch-House.com, they were completely knocked out of the rankings for 20 out of the 28 days analyzed. Note that the MozCast data set is limited, but our much larger STAT data set showed a similar pattern, with Conch-House.com ranking for up to 14,000 keywords on one day during this period.

What happened? I have no idea, but it quite definitely, almost certainly, very probably maybe was not the Helpful Content Update.

Confirmed content coincidence

Here’s an example I got pretty excited about. WhiteHouse.gov saw a +54% total visibility gain across the two time periods. The keyword set was pretty small so, once again, I dug into the daily numbers:

Looks great, right? There’s a clear spike on August 25 (although it fades a bit), and while the spike wasn’t as large, I was able to confirm this against a larger data set. If I was smart, I would’ve stopped the analysis right here. My friends, I was not smart.

One of the challenges of the Helpful Content Update is that Google has explicitly stated that helpful (or unhelpful) contact will impact rankings across a domain:

Any content — not just unhelpful content — on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search …

Even so, it’s interesting to dig into specific pieces of content that improved or declined. In this case, WhiteHouse.gov clearly saw gains for one particular page:

This brief was published on August 24, immediately followed by a storm of media attention driving people to the official details. The timing was entirely a coincidence.

Is it helpful content (regardless of your take on the issue)? Almost certainly. Could WhiteHouse.gov be rewarded for producing it? Entirely possibly. Was this increase in visibility due to the Helpful Content Update? Probably not.

Is this blog post helpful content?

Hey, I tried. I’ve probably lost three nights of sleep over the past three weeks thanks to the Helpful Content Update. The truth is that extended rollouts mean extended SERP churn. Google search results are real-time phenomena, and the web is always changing. In this case, there was no clear spike (at least, no clear spike relative to recent history) and every once-promising example I found ultimately came up short.

Does that mean the update was a dud? No, I think this is the beginning of something important, and reports of niche impacts in sites with clear quality issues may very well be accurate (and, certainly, some have been reported by reputable SEOs whom I know and respect). The most viable explanation I can come up with is that this was a first step in rolling out a “helpfulness” factor, but that factor is going to take time to iterate on, ramp up, and fully build into the core algorithm.

One mystery that remains is why Google chose to pre-announce this update. Historically, for updates like Mobile-friendly or HTTPS, pre-announcements were Google’s way of influencing us to make changes (and, frankly, it worked), but this announcement arrived only a week before the update began, and after Google stated they had updated the relevant data. In other words, there was no time between the pre-announcement and the rollout to fix anything.

Ultimately, Google is sending us a signal about their future direction, and we should take that signal seriously. Look at the HTTPS update — when it first rolled out in 2014, we saw very little rankings flux and only about 8% of page-one organic results in MozCast were HTTPS URLs. Over time, Google turned up the volume and Chrome began to warn about non-HTTPS sites. In 2017, 50% of page-one organic results in MozCast were HTTPS. Today, in late 2022, it’s 99%.

The Helpful Content Update probably isn’t going to change the game overnight, but the game will change, and we would all do well to start learning the new rules.

How to Identify and Refresh Outdated Content

When someone regularly adds new content to their sites, they face an inevitable question: What happens to my older articles?

The way blogging works is really unfair to your past work: It gets buried in archives, losing traffic and relevance.

Is there a way to keep your content always up-to-date? Yes, but first let’s discuss the why.

Why update your content?

Keeping your content fresh and updated is more than overcoming the unfairness of your past work fading away. It's actually a legit marketing tactic that saves money and makes your users’ on-site experience smoother.

So let’s dive into why updating old content is so important:

1. User experience

The most obvious reason is that you want each of your site pages to be an effective entry landing page: Outdated content and broken links will likely result in bounces. These are lost leads and clients.

2. Search engine optimization

When it comes to SEO, content updates offer quite a few advantages:

• Maintaining more consistent rankings, especially for those queries that deserve freshness. We’ve all seen this before: A competitor updates a page and suddenly gains 3-4 positions. It can be a temporary boost, but unless you perform an update to your page, it may last 12-18 months. Updating your old content on a regular basis will help you avoid these situations without necessarily chasing each particular loss.

• Creating more helpful content (see what I did here?). What we knew about COVID three years ago has nothing to compare with what we know now. So, if you wrote an article on it back then, you will have a lot to add now. Adding new facts and guidelines to your old content makes it more in-depth — and yes, helpful — and that’s a ranking factor.

• Making the most of your already-built link equity: Your old content may have attracted some backlinks and trust signals. You can benefit from those without investing in new links to your new articles.

• Generating higher click-through thanks to a fresher date within your search snippet. I’m not aware of any organic search click-through study that would include dates in search snippets, but it’s safe to assume that in most cases, most people would be attracted to a fresher date, so if your search snippets include dates, it’s a good idea to make sure they're pretty recent:

How to identify content that needs updating

So how to identify outdated content (also referred to as expired content or content decay)?

Here are a few methods:

Loss of rankings

If you're monitoring your rankings, you will be notified of any loss.

There may be multiple reasons for rankings decline, but for content-based pages, it's often about content getting outdated. Evaluate your target SERP to see if a more up-to-date page is over-ranking yours now.

For new keywords you're not tracking positions for, you can analyze the ranking fluctuations using SE Ranking. The tool offers a handy SERP analytics feature that visualizes organic search result dynamics over time. It's a great way to analyze how versatile any SERP is and how often you may need to update your target page to keep up:

Loss of traffic

For multi-page, content-heavy sites, it may be next to impossible to keep track of all the rankings. Therefore regular page-level traffic audits will help you catch a possibly outdated article.

Google Analytics is a pretty solid way to identify pages that have seen a decline in the loss of clicks from organic search. All you need is to limit your Acquisition channels to “Organic search”, click through to the “Landing Pages” tab, and use the “Compare” checkbox when selecting dates.

You can compare clicks to the same period of the previous month, or go further back, depending on how often you do that exercise:

Make sure to select the same days of the week when comparing, as the traffic over the weekends will likely be always lower. You can also compare month- to-month to catch more extended losses.

Once you know which settings work best for your site, you can save that report to save yourself trouble of clicking all those settings again.

You can also use Search Console to identify pages losing traffic. There’s an option to compare clicks using various time frames, but you can only go as far as 16 months back:

Search Console lets you sort your pages by those that lost the most clicks, which is a great way to identify your biggest losses:

Clicking any page in the chart will load a new report focusing on that page. This is when you can click to the “Queries” tab to find the actual keywords that are sending fewer clicks.

It's also a good idea to set monitoring of your key competing pages, in order to be notified when those are updated. Visual Ping is a great tool for this, allowing you to monitor your competitors’ on-page SEO efforts and be alerted when they change anything on their sites:

In my niche, for example, I use the tool to monitor Wikipedia and Google pages to be alerted when there’s a change there. While I may not be able to ever compete with either, it's a good way to know when there’s an update needed for my pages on the same topic.

Link equity

You probably know your most-linked-to pages (if not, you may find them using Link Explorer):

The logic here is that if a page is heavily (and naturally) linked but has no organic traffic, you’re probably facing one of two issues:

• It used to rank years ago

• it's not optimized for any searchable query (and Google has trouble matching it to any)

In both of these cases, updating and re-optimizing a page could help it gain some rankings and clicks.

Likewise, if you see links pointing to an article of yours steadily disappearing, that may mean that your content has gone very outdated and the editors have started removing the links. Linkchecker is an easy backlink monitoring tool that will help you catch that unfortunate trend in a timely manner.

How to update your old content

Simply republish to a new date (Spoiler: Not recommended)

A popular way to ensure your search snippet has a recent date is to simply republish it to a new date.

Well, according to Google, this is wrong:

“...it’s against our guidelines to artificially freshen a story when the publisher didn't add significant information or demonstrated a compelling reason…”

It should be noted that it does help. While I cannot recommend anything that goes against Google’s guidelines, it's really frustrating to try and explain it to clients, especially when their competitors repeatedly and successfully use this simple tactic.

Nonetheless, let’s take this method off the table.

Add “significant” information

Unfortunately, Google wouldn’t tell what amount of information could be considered “significant.”

So you will have to use your editorial judgment. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Include fresh stats or more recent numbers.

• Update your sources (and replace broken links). Linking to articles that go back years ago will tell Google (and your site users) that yours is quite outdated as well.

• Update your screenshots / images and embed newer videos.

• Add new tools, mention new trends or recent events that may have influenced what is described in the article.

• Add internal links to your newer content.

• Add your new CTAs, link to your new (and relevant) lead magnets, update the forms

• Optimize your page better, and in a more natural way: WebCEO offers a cool tool allowing you to identify which keywords any page can be re-optimized for higher organic visibility.

While it's not the only tool I tend to use, this one helps define the direction.

Next, I run my target keyword through Text Optimizer to find more angles, concepts and entities that can be used to expand my content and make it more relevant and in-depth:

Now, republish it to a new date to push it up on top of your site’s archives. There’s also a way to display the last updated date, without republishing (there are similar solutions on WP alternatives as well). However, that way it will remain deeper in your archives. If you update content often and don’t want all of those updates to appear on the front page, this is a good alternative method.

Redirect to a new page

This makes sense only if you have a few old articles on the same topic and you're consolidating them into a single new one.

Another valid reason for redirecting is when you have dates in URLs.

In other cases, I'm not a fan of internal redirects if you can do without them, so I’d almost always try to keep existing URLs.

Make content updates part of your routine

For well-established, content-heavy sites, updating content should be part of your content marketing routine. In other words, it should happen on a consistent and regular basis. To make it happen, try one or a combination of the following tactics:

• Depending on your new and old content volume, make sure a certain percentage of content being published on your site is an update. For example, for every five new articles on your site, one should be an update.

• Treat article updates as new content. Many reputable blogs (like this one) pay staff writers the same amount of money for an updated article as for a new one.

• Allocate time every month to analyzing rankings and traffic losses and see if there’s an update opportunity there. I recommend assessing your declining organic visibility at least once a month.

• Depending on your new content frequency, define one day in your editorial calendar to article updates. For example, if you update your blog daily, allocate every Friday to an article update.

• Make sure your updated content is promoted as new: Create social media updates to push it using all available channels and diverse messaging. I use Creatopy for that because it makes this process extremely productive by allowing content writers and promoters to collaborate on visual creatives.

It should be noted that updating your site is not just about SEO and clicks. Many of your static pages that are not necessarily created to attract organic traffic are often left outdated. These include About us page, TOS, privacy policy page, FAQ page, and more. Keep those updated as well, based on your company’s milestones and legislation changes.

Takeaways

Keeping your existing content updated helps your user experience and SEO by letting you benefit from the past effort and already acquired link equity. Fresher content likely attracts higher click-through thanks to dated search snippets.

To identify content that needs updating, assess your losses in rankings and traffic. It's also a good idea to update well-linked content that has never ranked, for any reason.

Republishing an old article to a new date without updating it's against Google’s guidelines. Adding significant information – like new sources, tools, stats, images and videos — lets you republish old articles and push them on top of your archives, increasing their chances to rank higher and attract more clicks.

And finally, to make sure your content updates are really effective, make them part of your content marketing routine.