Good morning search marketers, how do you stay motivated at work?
On this Labor Day, we're turning our focus to the unglamorous but essential aspect of our business — doing the work. After all, you can know everything there is to know about algorithm updates and ad extensions, but until you put it into play it's all pretty useless.
In a great example of this, Barry Schwartz interviewed David Greene of Cars.com after the company saw a 49% in search visibility over a 3-month period. What was Cars.com's secret? No secret, it turns out. Greene and his team just plugged away at their content and site performance objectives, reaping the rewards when a competitor lost hundreds of thousands of number one placements in Google.
"Greene said Cars.com's strategy will remain the same," writes Schwartz. "He is currently running around 100+ SEO projects, which are around building out great content and improving site performance."
Another super-inspiring story comes from Overstock.com, which in July saw a 51% increase in organic traffic year-to-date and a 97% increase in organic traffic year-over-year. Again, there was no magic involved. It just turned out that Google's June Core Algorithm Update seemed to recognize the work the retailer had been steadily doing to improve its content and user experience. On the UX side, Overstock reengineered its personalization machine learning models so that the images were more tailored to the specific visitor and also were delivered more quickly. Meanwhile, the team at the 25-year-old site set about consolidating duplicative content and writing "buyer's guide"-like content from scratch.
I'd be remiss if I closed out without sharing some work that we at Search Engine Land are particularly proud of — our Periodic Table of SEO Factors — which we updated this summer to reflect the latest thinking on how to be successful in SEO. I feel privileged to work with such a smart, hard-working group of people in such a dynamic industry. We hope you're enjoying your work as much as we are!
Pamela Parker,
Senior Editor and Projects Manager, Content Studio
