🔍 How to reboot evergreen content in the SERPs

Dec 04, 2019

Good morning, search marketers, it's finally a day that has no name, just Wednesday.

Hopefully the commerce folks among us have a chance to come up for air after the whirlwind of days that brought record online sales. Revenue is one thing, profit's another when steep discounts are involved. Here's wishing you a healthy bottom line this season.

Now, how's this for an unsettling stat? 90% of the content in existence today has been created within the last two years, yet 91% of content gets no traffic from Google. John Shehata, VP of audience development strategy at publishing powerhouse Conde Nast, shared that tidbit at SMX East last month. He discussed how his team helped breathe fresh life into evergreen content. Now for the inspiring stat: "For the first 100 articles that we optimized, we saw a 210% increase in search traffic and our keyword coverage for that content increased by 900%." He went on to share a step-by-step process for bringing evergreen content back to life.

You might recall the dust up earlier this year when lyrics site Genius Media Group said it caught Google "red handed" copying and misappropriating lyrics in search results. Now the company is suing the search giant and Google licensing partner LyricFind for more than $400 million in damages. The case speaks to the broader challenges for sites posed by "zero-click search results" as Google shows more answers in infoboxes or knowledge cards and keeps searchers on the SERPs.

Read on for a Pro Tip from Greg Gifford on getting support for your GMB accounts.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

GMB phone support ended, but help from the experts has not

"Google has officially shut down its phone support for Google My Business, but that doesn't mean you can't get quality support. The Google My Business Forum is an awesome resource if you're having any problems with your GMB listing," explains Greg Gifford of SearchLab. "You can't talk to anyone from Google, but it's managed by Google 'product experts' (basically, GMB superusers who have special access to Google because they've helped users on the forum for a long period of time). In most cases, the product experts will be able to answer your questions but if they get stumped, they can escalate issues directly to Google. The forum is a great place to get help with reinstating suspended listings, report inappropriate reviews or Q&A content, report GMB or maps spam or to get help with verification of a listing."

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How to create a seamless cross-channel customer journey with call tracking

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When consumers jump from online to the phone, it can be a frustrating experience. But it doesn't have to be.

For example, the customer fills out a form online, gets stuck and then decides to call the company. That's when the relationship usually begins to fall apart. The cause of the communication breakdown is usually the company's inability to pass data from online to offline realms.

Here's how you can create a seamless online-to-offline experience for your customers.

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Search Shorts

Interstitials, BERT and content

Legal interstitials are fine. Google's John Mueller said: "Legal interstitials are fine as long as we can index the content without having to do anything special."

BERT and indexing. BERT does not affect indexing, Mueller also said recently.

Commodity content. When it comes to commodity content, you really need to differentiate yourself. Mueller said it doesn't matter what kind of site, ultimately you need to find a way to differentiate yourself, especially when it comes to "commodity content".

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