What Your SEO Strategy Needs in 2022

Jason Hewett: Hello everyone, and welcome to iQuantified. I’m your host, Jason Hewett, here with Vice President of iQuanti, Wayne Cichanski. We’re here to talk to you about what your SEO strategy needs in 2022.

Wayne, thank you so much for joining us today. And just to kick things off, I wanted to ask you, what are some of the key takeaways for what someone needs for their SEO strategy in 2022?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, absolutely. Happy to be here, Jason. The thing that I get asked quite a bit is about strategy and how it relates to an SEO or organic channel. One of the things I want to talk a little bit about today is, there’s going to be some overarching stuff that is pretty standard but then there’s going to be some changes based on the algorithm update that happened in 2021 that you are going to want to make sure to integrate for your 2022 plans. I want to talk about that.

So overall, today, we can discuss about how to discover SEO opportunities, which I think is going to be critical. The key when you’re creating a strategy plan is where to even look for the opportunities, what does an opportunity look like, and then how do you prioritize and remove emotional decisions. There are always different key stakeholders in an organization and everybody’s got an opinion. So you want to be able to quantify that with some data and kind of remove those emotional approaches or those opinions, and then of course, looking at some algorithmic changes between 2021 – 2022 and then we’re going to get into some content strategy a little bit based on intent because that was some of the big core changes that google announced last year and then lastly, some metrics.

 

Jason Hewett: That sounds like a lot to cover but I’m really excited to dive into it with you.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Awesome. Yeah, me too. So, why don’t we get started real quick and we’ll talk about how do we analyze the different types of opportunities. I’ve kind of broken this down into six primary types and those being existing ranks, net new volume, what your branded journey looks like, any technical improvements that you can improve on, page experience and then how do you connect your journey from a user journey standpoint. So, getting into each one of those a little bit more in depth:

The first thing I want to talk about is existing ranks. This is something a lot of people will focus on. It’s within your footprint. You’re getting traffic already to your website in some form or fashion and from that standpoint, how do we look at that, how do we identify if there’s truly an opportunity there or what that actually looks like. So, one of the things I typically look at page 1 ranks. Now, if you understand the CTR curve from an organic standpoint, you’re going to see that the second position of a non-branded term and a fourth position of a non-branded term have actually 2x difference in the traffic. One has a five percent CTR rate and the other’s got a 10 percent CTR rate and that’s just a general type of terminology. Every CTR curve is a little bit different for your brand but when you look at second versus fourth position, it’s twice the traffic or half of the traffic usually. So, if you can kind of move something in your three to ten ranks up, you’re going to significantly improve your traffic. Now, the benefit here is that Google already finds you somewhat relevant so you don’t have a really big struggle or swimming upstream with relevancy. It’s possible that your relevancy is a little bit low and we can actually talk about how to score that in later on here but overall, you’re kind of in the ballpark. You’re within a striking distance.

The second component that I look for in existing ranks is what’s in page two. This is kind of sitting on the bench, waiting to get into the game, what do I do, how do I get it there. What I want to do is actually look at some volume within those page two ranks and within the whole organization, within the footprint. If you have a page that’s ranking in, let’s say, fourth position for one term and 33rd position in another term, you need to split the ranks. What I mean by that is, you’re never going to rank fourth and 33rd page in a top position. Most likely, the algorithm is seeing those as completely two irrelevant type of topics and sometimes, people base relevancy on partial match words or an exact match word and that means that if your keyword string contains the word, it must be the same relevancy. But that’s not at all. For example, credit cards and apply for credit cards are two completely different intents. They have the word credit cards in them so some people will often think, well, that’s the same intent, and it’s really not.

[05:01 – 10:00]

Wayne Cichanski: Credit cards brings the intent of a comparison – you want to look at different credit cards, and the application is a down funnel term that is looking to apply for a particular credit card. So, our data suggests that we want to be able to split the ranks when you look at the footprint. So, that  one is really good thing to look at from an opportunity standpoint. And then of course, look at your high volume terms. Strip away, look at your organic footprint, strip away anything, depending on the size a small business may drop into a lower volume set where a large enterprise is probably not worth the ROI to look at anything under a search volume of 1000 and a threshold from a keyword or a combination of two or three primary head terms, where a small business search volumes of 590, 370 can still be meaningful and their effort doesn’t cost as much as it does from a large brand enterprise.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s really fascinating. So, just to break that down a little bit, it’s really important to make sure that we’re ranking as high as possible and that sends a signal to Google that if you’re ranking really high for a certain keyword but then you’re not ranking so high for another keyword then they’re not likely to push that content forward. Is that what you’re saying?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. It’s kind of like when you look at something that, you always say is a jack of all trades master of none as an old cliché term. That’s a little bit about the algorithm. If your intent isn’t exactly matched on that, you may get a rank in that 33rd position or 53rd position but you’re never going to get that onto that first position because the intent most likely is different than the keyword that’s already ranking on first position. So, you look at the keyword mix on that footprint and you start segmenting off and saying okay, well there’s a problem here even though I’ve never looked at the data that closely before.  But if I do analyze that and I really dissect this term versus that term, I can see that the algorithm is actually right and the data will show that.

So, I can’t keep force feeding this down Google’s throat because they’re not going to be receptive. You’re not going to get rewarded. That third position is either going to drop because you changed the relevancy and now you’re in a 10th or 12th position and the 53rd position is maybe no longer at 53rd but now you’re in a 23rd. So now you lost all the traffic because you don’t have the third position and the 53rd is not in the top position and you’ve ended up with a net gain of zero. So logic would suggest always protect what’s driving your traffic, spin off the other and create a net new page that actually matches that intent.

 

Jason Hewett: I loved your analogy earlier about saying that second page position is kind of like waiting on the bench, waiting to get in the game. Would you say that it’s important to kind of specialize and one intent in order to get as many of your players, so to speak, into the game?

 

Wayne Cichanski I do. I firmly believe in our data. We’ll back it up that over the years and I’ve been doing this since before Google actually launched. Yeah, I know. I’m dating myself a bit, but it’s been a wild ride and when I look at the algorithm, it continuously tries to perfect itself. It’s trying to understand human behavior, the cognitive value of somebody’s search queries, what are they actually looking for based on click-through data, engagement metrics.

It’s mapping that data up for years and we have to kind of understand that this mapping is so sophisticated that it knows better than we do, that’s why it’s doing auto suggest. At this point, it’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you will, that it auto suggests a word and somebody clicks on it and bam, it’s there and it’s kind of an infinitive loop but other than that, the pie in the sky conversations with a whole another episode.

 

Jason Hewett: Okay.

 

Wayne Cichanski: When you look at the page two stuff, you look at those and my philosophy is that one intent equals one page. So, if your keywords change the intent or the pivot, you need to add another page. I give this a lot of times in my speeches or presentations is that in the human dictionary, if you were to pick out as many words that mean exactly the same thing, not a derivative word or a prefix or suffix but the intent. If they mean exactly the same thing, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anything that’s got more than 10, maybe 12 words that actually mean exactly the same thing together. So, when I look at these pages and they say, well I have 130 keywords on this page, you got probably 120 of them wrong. There’s 120 sitting on the bench waiting to get played and you’re not playing your staff. You put your players in market and let them play.

 

Jason Hewett: I love that analogy so much. And so one intent equals one page. What are some of the other things we want to focus on for 2022?

 

[10:01 – 15:00]

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, absolutely. So, another great data that comes up for an opportunity is new volume. Now, that’s everything we talked about existing but you’re only as good as what you have and typically, there’s always content gaps within any brand, any organization. You have to understand well, how do I get what I don’t know? I don’t know the question, I don’t know the answer words that come from.

So, what you want to do is mine for new data and what you can do is you can take a topic, whatever your product service, whatever you’re selling and kind of move up-funnel with that. When I say move up-funnel, you want to look at the user’s journey as they relate to that. Now, when I look at all of those types of journey analysis, you’re going to see that everybody comes in at different stage of that funnel and they’re going to have a different idea or a different thought process. Jason, you could throw out any type, any topic to me. I’m going to put you on the spot.

 

Jason Hewett: Let’s go with student loans.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Okay, student loans. So, the minute you hear student loans, what’s your first question that comes to your mind?

 

Jason Hewett: What’s the best way to pay for student loans, like do you refinance or something like that?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Okay, great. First thing came to my mind is how do I get a student loan.

 

Jason Hewett: Okay.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Right? So, we each have different questions about one topic. Now, those two topics are each of our questions, are two different pages. Those are two different intents that have different keywords that support that. So, when we talk about new volume, we want to take a topic like student loans or any other topic and we want to mine that. We want to go all the way up funnel from how do I apply to a student loan or how do I pay off a student loan to even the difference between the government or private loan companies. There’s so many questions that come up with that.

That’s the volume, that’s the journey that you need to map out on paper and there’s a lot of tools that will do keyword research for you and then you start looking based on volume. Volume is a representation of consumer demand. Search volume is a fancy term that SEO practitioners use to know what that is. But to CMOs, executive, senior leadership teams, the volume is a representation of what the consumers are looking for. I can go fish and I can drop my pole in the middle of the ocean and catch absolutely zero but if you bring me out to an experienced fisherman, he’s going to say you’re 50 miles west of where you need to be, you hit the shallow line where the ridge is, blah-blah-blah, and you’re going to catch all the fish that you need. Well, what did he do? He knew where the volume was, he knew where the fish were going to be in order to throw the line. You don’t want to pick a topic that there’s no volume, there’s no consumer demand, that there’s no need to it. You’re going to write content about your page or your topic or service. No one in the world is going to care, it’s not answering anybody’s question because nobody’s searching for that. So, that’s when you come back and you translate that journey into meaningful, quantifiable results with the search volume and then you can provide a gap analysis of what you have in the existing, where we just talked about the existing volume versus the brand-new, net-new.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s fascinating. It is really important to follow volumes. So I definitely have come across content where it’s kind of like ‘who’s asking this question?’ but then the ones that get it right and they create that journey for you, I definitely always feel like I want to stay with them and I feel like I can trust that brand so there’s a lot of value to it.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, absolutely. And another opportunity is looking at how to connect these two, right? How do you connect this journey together? I’m full of analogies. So, I’m crossing a river and there’s a rock in the beginning of my journey and there’s a rock at the end and one in the middle. Well, can I really make the jump from the beginning to the middle without falling in? Probably not. So, there’s not enough rocks to jump across the river.

Your content’s the same thing. If you don’t have enough rocks, enough content pieces in market, how does somebody go from the beginning of the journey to the end of the journey without falling in? So, we want to look at that journey and not only do we want to solve for that broken journey across that funnel, we also want to know like in our example in the student loans between you and I, we both came in at a different starting point, a different rock per se. We weren’t starting equally at the same spot. So, if your path has a rock to land on, you can cross the river. If I come and I search and my content’s not there and my rock is not there, what am I going to do? I’m going to go to somebody else that actually has that. I’m going to bounce out or I’m going to go to somebody else’s website.

[15:01 – 20:01]

Wayne Cichanski: So, if you can’t connect the dots and get somebody all the way across the river, you’re going to fail at this journey. You’re going to have partial success, which is nowhere near a full funnel connection and really grabbing this whole journey. So, your strategy plan needs to encompass both of these, your existing and the net new and ideally, what you’re trying to solve for is a complete, what I call a full-funnel connection to make sure a user knows everything that they need to know about student loans, from what it is, how to get to it, how to pay it off, what to look for, what not to look for. Every possible question that they can come up with, that needs to be on your website in order to do that.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s so true. And when it comes to that bounce rate, like if somebody is finding another path to get them across that river, what are the consequences for websites, especially in 2022 if somebody is constantly bouncing off their rocks over to a competitor? Does the search engine treat them differently if they start to see that?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, good question. This is part of the black box of the algorithm that google won’t ever admit or not admit but logically, it would make sense that if you’re in a top position for a keyword, somebody comes into your site and then bounces out within the first five seconds, they clearly did not get what they were looking for. So, that’s got to affect your site negatively as kind of a red flag that that didn’t go in there. Now, google put somebody else in that same position, they come in and they spend one to two minutes on that site versus the 10 seconds or five seconds, what signal is that telling google? Well, you must have been answered some question.

So, nobody can quantify this but there is a strong hypothesis to say that engagement metrics absolutely play a role. So, you do want to look at your bounce rates, you want to make sure that connection is good and sound. Now, the piece of that is also going back to this journey when I talk about coming in, if your page, if you came into how to apply for a student loan and the page is what is a student loan and it never addresses how to apply because you haven’t segmented and broken off those pages, sure you might be ranked for temporarily on both keywords but your engagement and your bounce rates, if somebody’s looking to apply and you have no dot, no connection, no rock, no CTA to get you to apply somewhere very visible, they’re going to bounce off. They didn’t want to know what a student loan is. They’re far beyond that. They know what the heck it is, they need one and they need it within the next two weeks because school started. So, yeah, absolutely. That’s the connection between those.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s so fascinating and I guess, it makes inherent sense that whoever lands on your page, you want them to like what they see, you want them to stay with your brand, you want them to feel that trust with your brand and everything.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, you mentioned something really interesting about the brand, the other opportunity is about branded queries, branded search volume. This is something that often gets overlooked. We always talk about non-branded because that’s acquisition, that’s driving growth to the strategy of everything you’re doing. We all want that, I completely understand but what I can tell you this that a branded query is up near the 40 percentile of a click-through ratio on a data metric where non-branded is about 18 percent. So, it’s almost 2x or more for a branded query, which makes sense. If I’m looking for XYZ brand and then the product name, clearly any other query that comes up is going to be subpar, I want that brand. Now, the critical thing here is you have intent, you have purchasing lower funnel. Somebody knows they’re looking for this. Now, if you’re mapping and your keywords aren’t matching the journey that somebody’s coming into, for example, if your branded queries are grouped together and you have too many keywords on one page or you don’t have enough content about that brand modifier, it’s going to leave somebody very frustrated and they may, well, go out to somebody else that actually offers your product.

There’s a lot of distribution models, a lot of different aggregators, third-party people that actually will carry your product as well that you’ve partnered with and they’ll bypass your own brand to go to them because they couldn’t find it on your own brand. That is absolutely the worst-case scenario. You do not want to do that, you need to avoid that.

 

Jason Hewett: Oh, absolutely. I’ve seen that happen a lot in my experience as well, where somebody finds it from another retailer or something like that and it’s definitely important to make sure that your brand is the authority on its own brand.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, absolutely. So, after we kind of did all this research and we talked about how do we get some opportunities, mining, existing and new and we want to look at the journey connection. We kind of have to get to a point where we got to get pen and paper, we need to come up with a strategy plan and what do we do. How do we get started to plan this?

[20:02 – 25:00]

Wayne Cichanski: What I like to do is come up with those different work streams that we just talked about. Let’s look at your existing assets that you have. Map all of those, what pages, what hero term. When I say hero or primary keyword, there’s always one high-volume term that represents the intent of that page and that’s the thing that you want to kind of represent and map to that. And then you want to be able to sort this by highest volume and lowest volume and then you can kind of create a threshold of where you want to stop that and I do the same thing for net new and I look at existing and I look at net new. And why I segment those differently is I create a master content plan that will integrate both existing and net new but typically, those work tracks are running at different paces. I can modify an existing page in most CMS’s a lot quicker than bringing a brand-new page to market.

Most large enterprise companies need to bypass or get through legal and compliance, brand owners, stakeholders, product owners. There’s a lot more hoops to jump through on a net new asset than there is an existing that’s already been approved, you just need to modify it. So, I do look at those tracks separately, but from a small business standpoint, you don’t necessarily have to. You can do both at the same time. If I had the choice, I would do them almost equally. If I could only do five or ten per month content pieces, I would work on five existing, five net new.

You want the net new, it’s kind of like planting seeds in a field. They’re not going to grow overnight. You want those net new to get into market, get some authority, get some longevity, connect the dots with the internal linking, get some external link equity to them so they can kind of grow and prosper. That’s not going to happen overnight, especially if you’re trying to forecast your mathematics and your numbers on traffic, which equates to your revenue that you can’t count on the brand-new stuff providing good results overnight.

 

Jason Hewett: That makes a lot of sense. I love your analogy about planting new seeds in the field and giving them time to grow. I’ve also heard of philosophy that if you’re optimizing existing pages that already have some traffic, it’s kind of like starting with an account and it has the value of compounding interest like compounding traffic. Is that something that’s relevant to 2022?

 

Wayne Cichanski: No, I haven’t heard that one but I like that analogy as well. It does because you’re building engagement metrics. You’re building equity, which I call, you know, when people talk about links, the old term was link building, we talked about more authoritative equity and how authoritative that page is, how authoritative the domain is as that equity or that authority relates to your topic. It doesn’t do you any good for a car company to link to you about student loans. Car Company doesn’t belong in your space so that link doesn’t do you any good.

You could have talked to me five years ago, eight years ago, I might have had a different opinion that probably would have been an okay link and you would have gained some equity out of that. Today, the algorithm doesn’t really allow for that. So, you definitely want to have it topical and when I look at this content plan, I then move to this authority plan and I don’t treat all pages equally and I don’t treat all plans one catch-all. I have a plan for existing, I have a plan for net new and then your authority is going to be different as well. So, I may be working on the existing page A but existing page B has a larger authority gap that I need to bridge. So, my authority plan for my priority number one might be page B where page A might be the priority number one in my content plan, if that makes sense. So, those are definitely independent triggers that I work on and your strategy needs to include both. It needs to look at all of these signals independently and create a master plan that you can kind of execute against each one of these gaps and you need to know what the gaps are in order to do that. And lastly, the last plan I do is technical, which again is completely separate from authority and content or the relevancy. I look at the technical. The biggest things on the technical is get your page speed in a good comfortable, two to three second load time. Get your mobile response high, some good metrics, good numbers that I like to say on your desktop, page speed scores from Google’s developer index. You should be in the 80s, mid 80s at the very least, preferably 90s would be great. Most mobile scores I see are really lacking.

[25:01 – 30:02]

Wayne Cichanski: They’re in the teens 15, 17, 20 maybe. Those should be more in the 50. Ideally, if you can get those in the 60s, that would be a good index as well. So, from a technical standpoint, I would make sure and get those page speeds. Google has always said they want to reward the most relevant, most authoritative result as quick as possible to the user and they believe very heavily that everything is moving into mobile, it always has been but I think our mobile is going to look very differently. Right now, we think of mobile as a cell phone but in the years to come, mobile could be your car, it could be your refrigerator, it could be the pair of glasses that you’re wearing, the metaverse, all of the stuff that’s happening. Mobile is going to change what mobile means from today versus tomorrow.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s so fascinating. I feel like that’s not talked about enough that you’re absolutely right, like already, if you need directions to a restaurant, you’re in your car, you want to be able to plug that right into your GPSs and it would be really cool if my glasses could do have a SERP on them. Do you think that in the future that with these different types of mobile, is there going to be more of a technical complication, you know, like a lot of websites sometimes struggle with optimizing their sites for mobile? Is it going to create another layer of work for them to have to optimize for these different technologies?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, I believe it probably will. I think that in order for things to respond at the timely manner that when you’re querying it, if you’re looking at it, Robert Downey junior’s, you know, the Eddie glasses and you ask them what something is, it needs to respond instantaneously. So, that means big data has got to be sourced instantly over several different databases, different IPs, different networks, different bridge hops and it’s just a magnificent lift. So, the styling and the query, I don’t know as if in my personal belief that the look in the field is going to be as important as the data will be. I think in the years to come, data is going to be the key and how quickly you can access that and mind map that data together is going to be the critical component. And then you overlay GUIs and visuals on top of that.

 

Jason Hewett: Oh, yeah. Of course. It sounds like in order to get ahead of the game, you want to have as many insights as possible because like you were saying earlier, you treat every page differently as a case-by-case basis and I guess, the more insights a company has, the better they’ll be able to formulate a good strategy both today and in the future.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. One of the things we’re seeing that we haven’t seen before is some requests, I’ve always heard about voice search but one of the requests I’ve been getting is voice assets, voice content, which is strange that that is kind of something that surfacing knew that somebody, it’s still the same web page but they want to be able to click an audio file that it’ll actually read the content to you. So, that that’s a shift. That’s something different.

I think that our content assets, everybody’s getting a little stickier. They want video. Tiktok doing, what tiktok does and everybody’s doing quick small snippets of rich media, rich content. And I think that that’s going to be the same with your data near your web pages and on how that kind of goes but so it’ll be interesting to see how this evolves.

 

Jason Hewett: Yeah. It’ll be really interesting for sure. I know, I personally love to hear content read out loud if I’m just reading through articles all day. Sometimes, it’s nice to have a change of pace.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. Now, I’ve had people ask me what’s the latest book you’re reading or what’s the last books you’ve read and I’m like, read, like can you define that because I don’t actually pick up a book to read anymore.

 

Jason Hewett: Do you think that someday that there will be keywords coded into voice? Like, we’ll have to, you know, it auto creates a transcript or something like that and it’ll look for that within an audio file.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. I think that’s actually kind of already here. I think that behavior, you know, looking at the transcripts and what I think is going to be different keywords, google will tell you keywords are kind of dead. There’s keyword topics, that’s a great topic we should really drill into as well. But the cliff notes on the keywords are they’re directional. They’re directional for the intent, that we no longer actually put keywords in, we’re not looking to stuff keywords and content but keywords will identify in kind of a shorthand way of what somebody’s looking for or what their intent is behind their cognitive behavior. And I think that as that evolves and that masters, I’m really fast forwarding but if you could ever get to a point where something’s reading your thoughts or reading, you know, obviously, there’s no key word in there. So, again, I think everything comes down to intent. What is it that somebody’s looking for and what do they mean by what they’re looking for and can I answer that question to the best ability to match exactly what they want. And that’s really the ultimate goal. Keyword just happens to be a directional term that allows somebody to kind of segment that off.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s a really useful distinguishment that it really is all about intent and keywords are just evident of that and so is the data, I guess.

 

[30:03 – 35:04]

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, you know that it’s funny because that is actually a really good transition. We did not pre-plan that but when you look at the 2021 differences of what happened in 2021 versus 2022, intent is probably one of the largest things that happened. There were more core updates in 2021 than I’ve experienced in any period of time. We had core update after core update. Now, core algorithmic update means that google says it’s not you, it’s me, it’s the good old dating line, right? That you don’t have to change anything, it’s us.

An example that that Mueller and other people use is if I were to ask you what were the top 10 movies of 1985 and I asked you that in 1985, you would have a list of 10 movies. Now, fast forward to today, if I asked you today what are the top 10 movies of 1985, your list is going to be different. Does that mean that the movies in 1985 in in that year were bad and the ones now are good? No, it’s not bad and that’s what Google’s trying to say with their core update is it’s not bad, it’s just people’s opinions have changed. What we think is the answer used to be one thing but now it’s different based on kind of a peer-to-peer crowdsourcing type of behavior pattern and that’s what you need to understand is that these core updates is google shifting and changing, how intent is actually perceived and interpreted.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s so fascinating. And just on my own personal curiosity, would you say that a lot of these updates are based around people’s individual search history and like you and I could have a different SERP just like we had the difference with the student loans. If we both typed in just student loans, we would get a completely different serp experience because of our past queries or?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, that hasn’t but I’ve been predicting that one for years now too that I don’t think that there’s going to be a number one rank in the years to come. I think we’re all going to have a different number one rank and it’ll be interesting to see if that actually comes to fruition but right now, there still isn’t but yeah, I do think that our behavior patterns, our proximity, our geolocation, all of those are going to take into play of what actually comes out.

It’s a slippery slope because that’s getting into some data privacy but it’s definitely, you know, kind of goes back to the age-old, would you rather have an ad that actually is something that interests you or would you rather have something completely off the shelf that has nothing to do with what you’re looking for.

 

Jason Hewett: It sounds like a twilight episode in the making or black bear.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. So, I wanted to talk a little bit more about some of the shifts in 2021 and how you have to adapt in 2022 for your strategy.

And I mentioned that intent but here’s an example. I’m going to read off a series of keywords and they’re all going to sound somewhat similar and I’m going to break this apart in a second. So, we have the keywords. The following keywords; credit cards, apply for credit cards, credit card offers, credit card application, apply for credit card online, sign up for a credit card, new credit cards, secured credit card and credit cards to build credit. Now, when I look at that and hear that, at face value, you’d think that the intent of that thing was about credit cards. However, and if somebody maps that to one page, which often happens, I see it over and over with brands that that’s one page. If you were to actually dissect that, I come up with four different pages in four different intents and here’s how I see it. Apply for credit cards, credit card application, apply for credit card online and sign up for credit card. They all mean the same thing, they all mean that I am looking to get a credit card. I’m looking to sign up or apply for a credit card. Now, that is very different in my eyes and google would agree to the general term credit cards, new credit cards or compare credit cards. So, I look at that as a completely different page. That intent has to do with I want to see what type of credit cards are out there and oftentimes, it kind of has a prefix of best credit cards, right, which nobody can actually say that they have the best credit card but there are different ways around some of that too so we can ask someone that relevancy, you’ll have to DM me for that answer. Then the next set, the next page is secured credit card and credit cards to build credit.

[35:05 – 40:09]

Wayne Cichanski: That is a very different intent as well. Credit card to build credit is the definition of what a secured credit card is. So, the last one is about credit card offers and that credit card offers is very different than the secured credit card or applying for a credit card. Somebody’s looking for a deal. They want to know what offers are out there.

So, when I look at the two sets of data, in the 2021 algorithm, I saw these shifts. I saw these exact keywords shift, matter of fact. And I’ve seen very similar that you might have been ranked for a position three or four in the large set and then you might have been ninth or eighth in another keyword and maybe 13th in a different one. Now, after the algorithm update, you might be third or fourth for the page still but the 8th, the 9th and the 13th dropped to like 50 or they dropped a 70th position or 33rd position. That is an indicator that there is a shift in algorithm, that that page is no longer relevant. Your 1985 movies are no longer the best movies today as they were back then. So, you have to shift with this.

And ideally, if you really want to protect yourself against algorithmic shifts, just do this strategy, the correct way to begin with. This is what google wants to do. It doesn’t keep changing its mind over the years. The person that had this credit card mix, if this was your credit or if this was your keyword mix was getting the benefit of a poor algorithm for years. They were getting positions and traffic on a page that they should have never ranked for, to begin with, and then they question why did it drop? Well, it drops because it’s not relevant to what the page is talking about. You just happen to be a huge brand with a lot of authority and you mentioned credit cards and you got the benefit of that. Those times are gone. That was 2021. 2022 is a whole new year, new algorithm. You got to break the stuff apart.

 

Jason Hewett: Wow. It happened that quickly. That’s such a fast but important shift because like you said, it’s getting more and more relevant and Google’s trying to get better and I guess, people had a lot of time to work on it in 2021, working remotely and everything. So, we’re seeing that changes happen.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. Another change and shift that we’re seeing is the different types of media assets. We talk about long-form content on a web page, which is great but as you move up funnel, which everybody wants to do. We want to get that full student loan journey that we talked about earlier. That requires different type of media. We talked a little bit about video. Now, if you don’t have video assets or infographics, you might be losing an audience segment and they all have a role to play in this big strategy. For example, if I start at the upper funnel, the high end of informational educational, I’m going to look for video in infographics. I use video in my comparison or my research. I’m trying to understand what this is recent weird off topic candle making. I’ve taken candle making up with my daughter. She wants to do make some candles, okay? I started doing research and video on what is candle making, what do I need to know? I’m not in a purchase state yet but I’m being educated. Now, if you don’t have content such as that and I don’t want to just read content because we’ve already clearly defined I’m not a reader so I want to watch, I want to listen, I want to be engaged and videos doing that for me. So, if you’re a brand that is not doing video and you’re not assigning that video asset to the role of mid to upper funnel informational content, you’re missing out. You’re missing out on people like myself, especially the Gen X, the millennium, the younger generations. They’re quick. They’re not doing this, picking up the newspaper and let’s read all of the articles.

Data’s flying million miles an hour in front of them and you have to capture that attention. So, video and infographics for mid to upper funnel and then as you move down funnel, when you get into a comparison set and I’m saying okay, well, I want to look at the best credit card for cash back. Well, also now, I probably want to see a chart or a pdf or a white paper, I want to be educated a little bit more. I want to know the features and the benefits, I want to compare A to B and a chart makes sense. Now, again, I don’t want to read a thousand words just to try to interpret what’s the difference between product A and product B. So, again, you need to incorporate more media assets into this and google recognizes this. This is part of that core algorithm. This is part of those shifts. And it recognizes and will reward you based on all of this. And then of course, when you get into the bottom funnel, you can get into those lists or those features or benefits of what somebody’s buying and that’s going to help somebody as well.

 

[40:10 – 45:25]

Jason Hewett: Absolutely. I totally empathize with all the steps that you’re mentioning and what I’m looking for, different parts of my journeys for things I’m comparing or wanting to learn about.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we didn’t talk about too much but again, we can have a whole another episode on this is how do you even score these gaps of the deficiencies?

We do have a product called ALPS, that is just mind-blowing. It’s definitely different. It’s not just a reporting tool, it’s not a research tool. It actually allows you to score the gap deficiencies in all three algorithmic pillars and be able to give you a printout of data and quantifiable results to know where your content is or where your authority gaps are at a URL level and a keyword level. I use that to prioritize a publishing plan.

So, then I’ll look at the smallest gaps to the largest gaps. I’m looking for quick wins, things that I can make an impression in the impact for a brand that are very relevant to the business, high volume, that’s going to make a good ROI case. And then eventually, a lot of my strategies will be concurrent, and I’ll do a short term on these quick wins but I also want to whittle away at the long term gaps. I can’t save those to the end. You can’t bite all of that off overnight, so you need to kind of to take those in strides month over month and eventually get that but you’re going to need some way to score that and understand what those gaps are in order to create this publishing and the strategy plan for it.

 

Jason Hewett: Yeah. I have to agree with that, like ALPS is just an amazing tool to be able to get those insights and all in one place and to really make some high-level decisions.

 

Wayne Cichanski: It is. And I’ve heard the ALPS teams recently won several awards. There’s a patent on it. It’s one, you know, different search drum awards and forester list and all kinds of stuff. So, a fantastic tool, definitely worth looking it up.

The last part of the strategy plan is how do you measure this? A plan is only as good as you can kind of measure, engage this. When I look at the metrics of an SEO channel, it absolutely can and should be ran as its own performance channel. It’s not a black box per se, it’s not something that people only invest into paid because we don’t know how to do SEO. You only don’t know how to do it because you’re not hitting the right conversation with the right people and it can very well be done and when I look at an executive or kind of a metrics of how to gauge this, I look at this in two folds; what the executive team looks for at a senior leadership and those metrics are very different. They want overall performance, they want macro improvements. They want to know if anything’s declining. What are the trends happening? They’re kind of upper echelon things. Now, whoever’s running the channel, they need more than that because you’re responsible for those results and if you looking at those, it’s already too late to make any changes in course direction because those are the outcomes of everything else and as a channel manager, you want to look at primary and secondary KPIs. You want to look at your ranks and your share of voice, you want to look at your authority and relevancy scores, you want to keep an eye on the competition, what are they doing, how much content are they producing, how much authority, what type of backlinks are they getting. Are you as active in the community or in that industry as they are? Those are all the pulses and things that you need within the dashboard and be able to kind of manage those metrics.

 

Jason Hewett: Absolutely. Those are just so useful to be able to have with Alps.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. So, that’s 2022 strategy and I mean, you do all of that, put it all together and you’re going to have a sound program.

 

Jason Hewett: Oh, absolutely. And in case anybody has further questions for you, Wayne, is there anywhere that they should go to get in touch with you or with iQuanti or?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, absolutely. My email is wayne.c@iquanti.com. So, you can go ahead and use that one and we’ll monitor it. Email me directly. Hopefully, on the podcast, you can do some questions, you can email our info line, you can leave a comment on our website, any of that information but we like questions. I’m here. I want to educate, I want to help, I want to inform, kind of move this industry forward. There’s a lot of good people. The SEO over the years kind of got a bad rep and needs change. So, happy to contribute in any way again.

 

Jason Hewett: Absolutely. And I can’t stress enough that we really do love questions for our podcasts and next episode or so, we’re definitely planning on having an episode where Wayne answers common questions from his webinars and for whatever else people send us. So, feel free to ask away anything that we can answer for you. We’d be happy to do so. But Wayne, thank you so much for joining us today.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Thank you.

 

Jason Hewett: And thank you all for tuning in and this has been iQuantified. See you guys next time.

 

Jason Hewett: Hello everyone, and welcome to iQuantified. I’m your host, Jason Hewett, here with Vice President of iQuanti, Wayne Cichanski. We’re here to talk to you about what your SEO strategy needs in 2022.

Wayne, thank you so much for joining us today. And just to kick things off, I wanted to ask you, what are some of the key takeaways for what someone needs for their SEO strategy in 2022?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, absolutely. Happy to be here, Jason. The thing that I get asked quite a bit is about strategy and how it relates to an SEO or organic channel. One of the things I want to talk a little bit about today is, there’s going to be some overarching stuff that is pretty standard but then there’s going to be some changes based on the algorithm update that happened in 2021 that you are going to want to make sure to integrate for your 2022 plans. I want to talk about that.

So overall, today, we can discuss about how to discover SEO opportunities, which I think is going to be critical. The key when you’re creating a strategy plan is where to even look for the opportunities, what does an opportunity look like, and then how do you prioritize and remove emotional decisions. There are always different key stakeholders in an organization and everybody’s got an opinion. So you want to be able to quantify that with some data and kind of remove those emotional approaches or those opinions, and then of course, looking at some algorithmic changes between 2021 – 2022 and then we’re going to get into some content strategy a little bit based on intent because that was some of the big core changes that google announced last year and then lastly, some metrics.

 

Jason Hewett: That sounds like a lot to cover but I’m really excited to dive into it with you.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Awesome. Yeah, me too. So, why don’t we get started real quick and we’ll talk about how do we analyze the different types of opportunities. I’ve kind of broken this down into six primary types and those being existing ranks, net new volume, what your branded journey looks like, any technical improvements that you can improve on, page experience and then how do you connect your journey from a user journey standpoint. So, getting into each one of those a little bit more in depth:

The first thing I want to talk about is existing ranks. This is something a lot of people will focus on. It’s within your footprint. You’re getting traffic already to your website in some form or fashion and from that standpoint, how do we look at that, how do we identify if there’s truly an opportunity there or what that actually looks like. So, one of the things I typically look at page 1 ranks. Now, if you understand the CTR curve from an organic standpoint, you’re going to see that the second position of a non-branded term and a fourth position of a non-branded term have actually 2x difference in the traffic. One has a five percent CTR rate and the other’s got a 10 percent CTR rate and that’s just a general type of terminology. Every CTR curve is a little bit different for your brand but when you look at second versus fourth position, it’s twice the traffic or half of the traffic usually. So, if you can kind of move something in your three to ten ranks up, you’re going to significantly improve your traffic. Now, the benefit here is that Google already finds you somewhat relevant so you don’t have a really big struggle or swimming upstream with relevancy. It’s possible that your relevancy is a little bit low and we can actually talk about how to score that in later on here but overall, you’re kind of in the ballpark. You’re within a striking distance.

The second component that I look for in existing ranks is what’s in page two. This is kind of sitting on the bench, waiting to get into the game, what do I do, how do I get it there. What I want to do is actually look at some volume within those page two ranks and within the whole organization, within the footprint. If you have a page that’s ranking in, let’s say, fourth position for one term and 33rd position in another term, you need to split the ranks. What I mean by that is, you’re never going to rank fourth and 33rd page in a top position. Most likely, the algorithm is seeing those as completely two irrelevant type of topics and sometimes, people base relevancy on partial match words or an exact match word and that means that if your keyword string contains the word, it must be the same relevancy. But that’s not at all. For example, credit cards and apply for credit cards are two completely different intents. They have the word credit cards in them so some people will often think, well, that’s the same intent, and it’s really not.

[05:01 – 10:00]

Wayne Cichanski: Credit cards brings the intent of a comparison – you want to look at different credit cards, and the application is a down funnel term that is looking to apply for a particular credit card. So, our data suggests that we want to be able to split the ranks when you look at the footprint. So, that  one is really good thing to look at from an opportunity standpoint. And then of course, look at your high volume terms. Strip away, look at your organic footprint, strip away anything, depending on the size a small business may drop into a lower volume set where a large enterprise is probably not worth the ROI to look at anything under a search volume of 1000 and a threshold from a keyword or a combination of two or three primary head terms, where a small business search volumes of 590, 370 can still be meaningful and their effort doesn’t cost as much as it does from a large brand enterprise.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s really fascinating. So, just to break that down a little bit, it’s really important to make sure that we’re ranking as high as possible and that sends a signal to Google that if you’re ranking really high for a certain keyword but then you’re not ranking so high for another keyword then they’re not likely to push that content forward. Is that what you’re saying?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. It’s kind of like when you look at something that, you always say is a jack of all trades master of none as an old cliché term. That’s a little bit about the algorithm. If your intent isn’t exactly matched on that, you may get a rank in that 33rd position or 53rd position but you’re never going to get that onto that first position because the intent most likely is different than the keyword that’s already ranking on first position. So, you look at the keyword mix on that footprint and you start segmenting off and saying okay, well there’s a problem here even though I’ve never looked at the data that closely before.  But if I do analyze that and I really dissect this term versus that term, I can see that the algorithm is actually right and the data will show that.

So, I can’t keep force feeding this down Google’s throat because they’re not going to be receptive. You’re not going to get rewarded. That third position is either going to drop because you changed the relevancy and now you’re in a 10th or 12th position and the 53rd position is maybe no longer at 53rd but now you’re in a 23rd. So now you lost all the traffic because you don’t have the third position and the 53rd is not in the top position and you’ve ended up with a net gain of zero. So logic would suggest always protect what’s driving your traffic, spin off the other and create a net new page that actually matches that intent.

 

Jason Hewett: I loved your analogy earlier about saying that second page position is kind of like waiting on the bench, waiting to get in the game. Would you say that it’s important to kind of specialize and one intent in order to get as many of your players, so to speak, into the game?

 

Wayne Cichanski I do. I firmly believe in our data. We’ll back it up that over the years and I’ve been doing this since before Google actually launched. Yeah, I know. I’m dating myself a bit, but it’s been a wild ride and when I look at the algorithm, it continuously tries to perfect itself. It’s trying to understand human behavior, the cognitive value of somebody’s search queries, what are they actually looking for based on click-through data, engagement metrics.

It’s mapping that data up for years and we have to kind of understand that this mapping is so sophisticated that it knows better than we do, that’s why it’s doing auto suggest. At this point, it’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you will, that it auto suggests a word and somebody clicks on it and bam, it’s there and it’s kind of an infinitive loop but other than that, the pie in the sky conversations with a whole another episode.

 

Jason Hewett: Okay.

 

Wayne Cichanski: When you look at the page two stuff, you look at those and my philosophy is that one intent equals one page. So, if your keywords change the intent or the pivot, you need to add another page. I give this a lot of times in my speeches or presentations is that in the human dictionary, if you were to pick out as many words that mean exactly the same thing, not a derivative word or a prefix or suffix but the intent. If they mean exactly the same thing, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anything that’s got more than 10, maybe 12 words that actually mean exactly the same thing together. So, when I look at these pages and they say, well I have 130 keywords on this page, you got probably 120 of them wrong. There’s 120 sitting on the bench waiting to get played and you’re not playing your staff. You put your players in market and let them play.

 

Jason Hewett: I love that analogy so much. And so one intent equals one page. What are some of the other things we want to focus on for 2022?

 

[10:01 – 15:00]

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, absolutely. So, another great data that comes up for an opportunity is new volume. Now, that’s everything we talked about existing but you’re only as good as what you have and typically, there’s always content gaps within any brand, any organization. You have to understand well, how do I get what I don’t know? I don’t know the question, I don’t know the answer words that come from.

So, what you want to do is mine for new data and what you can do is you can take a topic, whatever your product service, whatever you’re selling and kind of move up-funnel with that. When I say move up-funnel, you want to look at the user’s journey as they relate to that. Now, when I look at all of those types of journey analysis, you’re going to see that everybody comes in at different stage of that funnel and they’re going to have a different idea or a different thought process. Jason, you could throw out any type, any topic to me. I’m going to put you on the spot.

 

Jason Hewett: Let’s go with student loans.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Okay, student loans. So, the minute you hear student loans, what’s your first question that comes to your mind?

 

Jason Hewett: What’s the best way to pay for student loans, like do you refinance or something like that?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Okay, great. First thing came to my mind is how do I get a student loan.

 

Jason Hewett: Okay.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Right? So, we each have different questions about one topic. Now, those two topics are each of our questions, are two different pages. Those are two different intents that have different keywords that support that. So, when we talk about new volume, we want to take a topic like student loans or any other topic and we want to mine that. We want to go all the way up funnel from how do I apply to a student loan or how do I pay off a student loan to even the difference between the government or private loan companies. There’s so many questions that come up with that.

That’s the volume, that’s the journey that you need to map out on paper and there’s a lot of tools that will do keyword research for you and then you start looking based on volume. Volume is a representation of consumer demand. Search volume is a fancy term that SEO practitioners use to know what that is. But to CMOs, executive, senior leadership teams, the volume is a representation of what the consumers are looking for. I can go fish and I can drop my pole in the middle of the ocean and catch absolutely zero but if you bring me out to an experienced fisherman, he’s going to say you’re 50 miles west of where you need to be, you hit the shallow line where the ridge is, blah-blah-blah, and you’re going to catch all the fish that you need. Well, what did he do? He knew where the volume was, he knew where the fish were going to be in order to throw the line. You don’t want to pick a topic that there’s no volume, there’s no consumer demand, that there’s no need to it. You’re going to write content about your page or your topic or service. No one in the world is going to care, it’s not answering anybody’s question because nobody’s searching for that. So, that’s when you come back and you translate that journey into meaningful, quantifiable results with the search volume and then you can provide a gap analysis of what you have in the existing, where we just talked about the existing volume versus the brand-new, net-new.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s fascinating. It is really important to follow volumes. So I definitely have come across content where it’s kind of like ‘who’s asking this question?’ but then the ones that get it right and they create that journey for you, I definitely always feel like I want to stay with them and I feel like I can trust that brand so there’s a lot of value to it.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, absolutely. And another opportunity is looking at how to connect these two, right? How do you connect this journey together? I’m full of analogies. So, I’m crossing a river and there’s a rock in the beginning of my journey and there’s a rock at the end and one in the middle. Well, can I really make the jump from the beginning to the middle without falling in? Probably not. So, there’s not enough rocks to jump across the river.

Your content’s the same thing. If you don’t have enough rocks, enough content pieces in market, how does somebody go from the beginning of the journey to the end of the journey without falling in? So, we want to look at that journey and not only do we want to solve for that broken journey across that funnel, we also want to know like in our example in the student loans between you and I, we both came in at a different starting point, a different rock per se. We weren’t starting equally at the same spot. So, if your path has a rock to land on, you can cross the river. If I come and I search and my content’s not there and my rock is not there, what am I going to do? I’m going to go to somebody else that actually has that. I’m going to bounce out or I’m going to go to somebody else’s website.

[15:01 – 20:01]

Wayne Cichanski: So, if you can’t connect the dots and get somebody all the way across the river, you’re going to fail at this journey. You’re going to have partial success, which is nowhere near a full funnel connection and really grabbing this whole journey. So, your strategy plan needs to encompass both of these, your existing and the net new and ideally, what you’re trying to solve for is a complete, what I call a full-funnel connection to make sure a user knows everything that they need to know about student loans, from what it is, how to get to it, how to pay it off, what to look for, what not to look for. Every possible question that they can come up with, that needs to be on your website in order to do that.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s so true. And when it comes to that bounce rate, like if somebody is finding another path to get them across that river, what are the consequences for websites, especially in 2022 if somebody is constantly bouncing off their rocks over to a competitor? Does the search engine treat them differently if they start to see that?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, good question. This is part of the black box of the algorithm that google won’t ever admit or not admit but logically, it would make sense that if you’re in a top position for a keyword, somebody comes into your site and then bounces out within the first five seconds, they clearly did not get what they were looking for. So, that’s got to affect your site negatively as kind of a red flag that that didn’t go in there. Now, google put somebody else in that same position, they come in and they spend one to two minutes on that site versus the 10 seconds or five seconds, what signal is that telling google? Well, you must have been answered some question.

So, nobody can quantify this but there is a strong hypothesis to say that engagement metrics absolutely play a role. So, you do want to look at your bounce rates, you want to make sure that connection is good and sound. Now, the piece of that is also going back to this journey when I talk about coming in, if your page, if you came into how to apply for a student loan and the page is what is a student loan and it never addresses how to apply because you haven’t segmented and broken off those pages, sure you might be ranked for temporarily on both keywords but your engagement and your bounce rates, if somebody’s looking to apply and you have no dot, no connection, no rock, no CTA to get you to apply somewhere very visible, they’re going to bounce off. They didn’t want to know what a student loan is. They’re far beyond that. They know what the heck it is, they need one and they need it within the next two weeks because school started. So, yeah, absolutely. That’s the connection between those.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s so fascinating and I guess, it makes inherent sense that whoever lands on your page, you want them to like what they see, you want them to stay with your brand, you want them to feel that trust with your brand and everything.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, you mentioned something really interesting about the brand, the other opportunity is about branded queries, branded search volume. This is something that often gets overlooked. We always talk about non-branded because that’s acquisition, that’s driving growth to the strategy of everything you’re doing. We all want that, I completely understand but what I can tell you this that a branded query is up near the 40 percentile of a click-through ratio on a data metric where non-branded is about 18 percent. So, it’s almost 2x or more for a branded query, which makes sense. If I’m looking for XYZ brand and then the product name, clearly any other query that comes up is going to be subpar, I want that brand. Now, the critical thing here is you have intent, you have purchasing lower funnel. Somebody knows they’re looking for this. Now, if you’re mapping and your keywords aren’t matching the journey that somebody’s coming into, for example, if your branded queries are grouped together and you have too many keywords on one page or you don’t have enough content about that brand modifier, it’s going to leave somebody very frustrated and they may, well, go out to somebody else that actually offers your product.

There’s a lot of distribution models, a lot of different aggregators, third-party people that actually will carry your product as well that you’ve partnered with and they’ll bypass your own brand to go to them because they couldn’t find it on your own brand. That is absolutely the worst-case scenario. You do not want to do that, you need to avoid that.

 

Jason Hewett: Oh, absolutely. I’ve seen that happen a lot in my experience as well, where somebody finds it from another retailer or something like that and it’s definitely important to make sure that your brand is the authority on its own brand.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, absolutely. So, after we kind of did all this research and we talked about how do we get some opportunities, mining, existing and new and we want to look at the journey connection. We kind of have to get to a point where we got to get pen and paper, we need to come up with a strategy plan and what do we do. How do we get started to plan this?

[20:02 – 25:00]

Wayne Cichanski: What I like to do is come up with those different work streams that we just talked about. Let’s look at your existing assets that you have. Map all of those, what pages, what hero term. When I say hero or primary keyword, there’s always one high-volume term that represents the intent of that page and that’s the thing that you want to kind of represent and map to that. And then you want to be able to sort this by highest volume and lowest volume and then you can kind of create a threshold of where you want to stop that and I do the same thing for net new and I look at existing and I look at net new. And why I segment those differently is I create a master content plan that will integrate both existing and net new but typically, those work tracks are running at different paces. I can modify an existing page in most CMS’s a lot quicker than bringing a brand-new page to market.

Most large enterprise companies need to bypass or get through legal and compliance, brand owners, stakeholders, product owners. There’s a lot more hoops to jump through on a net new asset than there is an existing that’s already been approved, you just need to modify it. So, I do look at those tracks separately, but from a small business standpoint, you don’t necessarily have to. You can do both at the same time. If I had the choice, I would do them almost equally. If I could only do five or ten per month content pieces, I would work on five existing, five net new.

You want the net new, it’s kind of like planting seeds in a field. They’re not going to grow overnight. You want those net new to get into market, get some authority, get some longevity, connect the dots with the internal linking, get some external link equity to them so they can kind of grow and prosper. That’s not going to happen overnight, especially if you’re trying to forecast your mathematics and your numbers on traffic, which equates to your revenue that you can’t count on the brand-new stuff providing good results overnight.

 

Jason Hewett: That makes a lot of sense. I love your analogy about planting new seeds in the field and giving them time to grow. I’ve also heard of philosophy that if you’re optimizing existing pages that already have some traffic, it’s kind of like starting with an account and it has the value of compounding interest like compounding traffic. Is that something that’s relevant to 2022?

 

Wayne Cichanski: No, I haven’t heard that one but I like that analogy as well. It does because you’re building engagement metrics. You’re building equity, which I call, you know, when people talk about links, the old term was link building, we talked about more authoritative equity and how authoritative that page is, how authoritative the domain is as that equity or that authority relates to your topic. It doesn’t do you any good for a car company to link to you about student loans. Car Company doesn’t belong in your space so that link doesn’t do you any good.

You could have talked to me five years ago, eight years ago, I might have had a different opinion that probably would have been an okay link and you would have gained some equity out of that. Today, the algorithm doesn’t really allow for that. So, you definitely want to have it topical and when I look at this content plan, I then move to this authority plan and I don’t treat all pages equally and I don’t treat all plans one catch-all. I have a plan for existing, I have a plan for net new and then your authority is going to be different as well. So, I may be working on the existing page A but existing page B has a larger authority gap that I need to bridge. So, my authority plan for my priority number one might be page B where page A might be the priority number one in my content plan, if that makes sense. So, those are definitely independent triggers that I work on and your strategy needs to include both. It needs to look at all of these signals independently and create a master plan that you can kind of execute against each one of these gaps and you need to know what the gaps are in order to do that. And lastly, the last plan I do is technical, which again is completely separate from authority and content or the relevancy. I look at the technical. The biggest things on the technical is get your page speed in a good comfortable, two to three second load time. Get your mobile response high, some good metrics, good numbers that I like to say on your desktop, page speed scores from Google’s developer index. You should be in the 80s, mid 80s at the very least, preferably 90s would be great. Most mobile scores I see are really lacking.

[25:01 – 30:02]

Wayne Cichanski: They’re in the teens 15, 17, 20 maybe. Those should be more in the 50. Ideally, if you can get those in the 60s, that would be a good index as well. So, from a technical standpoint, I would make sure and get those page speeds. Google has always said they want to reward the most relevant, most authoritative result as quick as possible to the user and they believe very heavily that everything is moving into mobile, it always has been but I think our mobile is going to look very differently. Right now, we think of mobile as a cell phone but in the years to come, mobile could be your car, it could be your refrigerator, it could be the pair of glasses that you’re wearing, the metaverse, all of the stuff that’s happening. Mobile is going to change what mobile means from today versus tomorrow.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s so fascinating. I feel like that’s not talked about enough that you’re absolutely right, like already, if you need directions to a restaurant, you’re in your car, you want to be able to plug that right into your GPSs and it would be really cool if my glasses could do have a SERP on them. Do you think that in the future that with these different types of mobile, is there going to be more of a technical complication, you know, like a lot of websites sometimes struggle with optimizing their sites for mobile? Is it going to create another layer of work for them to have to optimize for these different technologies?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, I believe it probably will. I think that in order for things to respond at the timely manner that when you’re querying it, if you’re looking at it, Robert Downey junior’s, you know, the Eddie glasses and you ask them what something is, it needs to respond instantaneously. So, that means big data has got to be sourced instantly over several different databases, different IPs, different networks, different bridge hops and it’s just a magnificent lift. So, the styling and the query, I don’t know as if in my personal belief that the look in the field is going to be as important as the data will be. I think in the years to come, data is going to be the key and how quickly you can access that and mind map that data together is going to be the critical component. And then you overlay GUIs and visuals on top of that.

 

Jason Hewett: Oh, yeah. Of course. It sounds like in order to get ahead of the game, you want to have as many insights as possible because like you were saying earlier, you treat every page differently as a case-by-case basis and I guess, the more insights a company has, the better they’ll be able to formulate a good strategy both today and in the future.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. One of the things we’re seeing that we haven’t seen before is some requests, I’ve always heard about voice search but one of the requests I’ve been getting is voice assets, voice content, which is strange that that is kind of something that surfacing knew that somebody, it’s still the same web page but they want to be able to click an audio file that it’ll actually read the content to you. So, that that’s a shift. That’s something different.

I think that our content assets, everybody’s getting a little stickier. They want video. Tiktok doing, what tiktok does and everybody’s doing quick small snippets of rich media, rich content. And I think that that’s going to be the same with your data near your web pages and on how that kind of goes but so it’ll be interesting to see how this evolves.

 

Jason Hewett: Yeah. It’ll be really interesting for sure. I know, I personally love to hear content read out loud if I’m just reading through articles all day. Sometimes, it’s nice to have a change of pace.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. Now, I’ve had people ask me what’s the latest book you’re reading or what’s the last books you’ve read and I’m like, read, like can you define that because I don’t actually pick up a book to read anymore.

 

Jason Hewett: Do you think that someday that there will be keywords coded into voice? Like, we’ll have to, you know, it auto creates a transcript or something like that and it’ll look for that within an audio file.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. I think that’s actually kind of already here. I think that behavior, you know, looking at the transcripts and what I think is going to be different keywords, google will tell you keywords are kind of dead. There’s keyword topics, that’s a great topic we should really drill into as well. But the cliff notes on the keywords are they’re directional. They’re directional for the intent, that we no longer actually put keywords in, we’re not looking to stuff keywords and content but keywords will identify in kind of a shorthand way of what somebody’s looking for or what their intent is behind their cognitive behavior. And I think that as that evolves and that masters, I’m really fast forwarding but if you could ever get to a point where something’s reading your thoughts or reading, you know, obviously, there’s no key word in there. So, again, I think everything comes down to intent. What is it that somebody’s looking for and what do they mean by what they’re looking for and can I answer that question to the best ability to match exactly what they want. And that’s really the ultimate goal. Keyword just happens to be a directional term that allows somebody to kind of segment that off.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s a really useful distinguishment that it really is all about intent and keywords are just evident of that and so is the data, I guess.

 

[30:03 – 35:04]

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, you know that it’s funny because that is actually a really good transition. We did not pre-plan that but when you look at the 2021 differences of what happened in 2021 versus 2022, intent is probably one of the largest things that happened. There were more core updates in 2021 than I’ve experienced in any period of time. We had core update after core update. Now, core algorithmic update means that google says it’s not you, it’s me, it’s the good old dating line, right? That you don’t have to change anything, it’s us.

An example that that Mueller and other people use is if I were to ask you what were the top 10 movies of 1985 and I asked you that in 1985, you would have a list of 10 movies. Now, fast forward to today, if I asked you today what are the top 10 movies of 1985, your list is going to be different. Does that mean that the movies in 1985 in in that year were bad and the ones now are good? No, it’s not bad and that’s what Google’s trying to say with their core update is it’s not bad, it’s just people’s opinions have changed. What we think is the answer used to be one thing but now it’s different based on kind of a peer-to-peer crowdsourcing type of behavior pattern and that’s what you need to understand is that these core updates is google shifting and changing, how intent is actually perceived and interpreted.

 

Jason Hewett: That’s so fascinating. And just on my own personal curiosity, would you say that a lot of these updates are based around people’s individual search history and like you and I could have a different SERP just like we had the difference with the student loans. If we both typed in just student loans, we would get a completely different serp experience because of our past queries or?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, that hasn’t but I’ve been predicting that one for years now too that I don’t think that there’s going to be a number one rank in the years to come. I think we’re all going to have a different number one rank and it’ll be interesting to see if that actually comes to fruition but right now, there still isn’t but yeah, I do think that our behavior patterns, our proximity, our geolocation, all of those are going to take into play of what actually comes out.

It’s a slippery slope because that’s getting into some data privacy but it’s definitely, you know, kind of goes back to the age-old, would you rather have an ad that actually is something that interests you or would you rather have something completely off the shelf that has nothing to do with what you’re looking for.

 

Jason Hewett: It sounds like a twilight episode in the making or black bear.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. So, I wanted to talk a little bit more about some of the shifts in 2021 and how you have to adapt in 2022 for your strategy.

And I mentioned that intent but here’s an example. I’m going to read off a series of keywords and they’re all going to sound somewhat similar and I’m going to break this apart in a second. So, we have the keywords. The following keywords; credit cards, apply for credit cards, credit card offers, credit card application, apply for credit card online, sign up for a credit card, new credit cards, secured credit card and credit cards to build credit. Now, when I look at that and hear that, at face value, you’d think that the intent of that thing was about credit cards. However, and if somebody maps that to one page, which often happens, I see it over and over with brands that that’s one page. If you were to actually dissect that, I come up with four different pages in four different intents and here’s how I see it. Apply for credit cards, credit card application, apply for credit card online and sign up for credit card. They all mean the same thing, they all mean that I am looking to get a credit card. I’m looking to sign up or apply for a credit card. Now, that is very different in my eyes and google would agree to the general term credit cards, new credit cards or compare credit cards. So, I look at that as a completely different page. That intent has to do with I want to see what type of credit cards are out there and oftentimes, it kind of has a prefix of best credit cards, right, which nobody can actually say that they have the best credit card but there are different ways around some of that too so we can ask someone that relevancy, you’ll have to DM me for that answer. Then the next set, the next page is secured credit card and credit cards to build credit.

[35:05 – 40:09]

Wayne Cichanski: That is a very different intent as well. Credit card to build credit is the definition of what a secured credit card is. So, the last one is about credit card offers and that credit card offers is very different than the secured credit card or applying for a credit card. Somebody’s looking for a deal. They want to know what offers are out there.

So, when I look at the two sets of data, in the 2021 algorithm, I saw these shifts. I saw these exact keywords shift, matter of fact. And I’ve seen very similar that you might have been ranked for a position three or four in the large set and then you might have been ninth or eighth in another keyword and maybe 13th in a different one. Now, after the algorithm update, you might be third or fourth for the page still but the 8th, the 9th and the 13th dropped to like 50 or they dropped a 70th position or 33rd position. That is an indicator that there is a shift in algorithm, that that page is no longer relevant. Your 1985 movies are no longer the best movies today as they were back then. So, you have to shift with this.

And ideally, if you really want to protect yourself against algorithmic shifts, just do this strategy, the correct way to begin with. This is what google wants to do. It doesn’t keep changing its mind over the years. The person that had this credit card mix, if this was your credit or if this was your keyword mix was getting the benefit of a poor algorithm for years. They were getting positions and traffic on a page that they should have never ranked for, to begin with, and then they question why did it drop? Well, it drops because it’s not relevant to what the page is talking about. You just happen to be a huge brand with a lot of authority and you mentioned credit cards and you got the benefit of that. Those times are gone. That was 2021. 2022 is a whole new year, new algorithm. You got to break the stuff apart.

 

Jason Hewett: Wow. It happened that quickly. That’s such a fast but important shift because like you said, it’s getting more and more relevant and Google’s trying to get better and I guess, people had a lot of time to work on it in 2021, working remotely and everything. So, we’re seeing that changes happen.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. Another change and shift that we’re seeing is the different types of media assets. We talk about long-form content on a web page, which is great but as you move up funnel, which everybody wants to do. We want to get that full student loan journey that we talked about earlier. That requires different type of media. We talked a little bit about video. Now, if you don’t have video assets or infographics, you might be losing an audience segment and they all have a role to play in this big strategy. For example, if I start at the upper funnel, the high end of informational educational, I’m going to look for video in infographics. I use video in my comparison or my research. I’m trying to understand what this is recent weird off topic candle making. I’ve taken candle making up with my daughter. She wants to do make some candles, okay? I started doing research and video on what is candle making, what do I need to know? I’m not in a purchase state yet but I’m being educated. Now, if you don’t have content such as that and I don’t want to just read content because we’ve already clearly defined I’m not a reader so I want to watch, I want to listen, I want to be engaged and videos doing that for me. So, if you’re a brand that is not doing video and you’re not assigning that video asset to the role of mid to upper funnel informational content, you’re missing out. You’re missing out on people like myself, especially the Gen X, the millennium, the younger generations. They’re quick. They’re not doing this, picking up the newspaper and let’s read all of the articles.

Data’s flying million miles an hour in front of them and you have to capture that attention. So, video and infographics for mid to upper funnel and then as you move down funnel, when you get into a comparison set and I’m saying okay, well, I want to look at the best credit card for cash back. Well, also now, I probably want to see a chart or a pdf or a white paper, I want to be educated a little bit more. I want to know the features and the benefits, I want to compare A to B and a chart makes sense. Now, again, I don’t want to read a thousand words just to try to interpret what’s the difference between product A and product B. So, again, you need to incorporate more media assets into this and google recognizes this. This is part of that core algorithm. This is part of those shifts. And it recognizes and will reward you based on all of this. And then of course, when you get into the bottom funnel, you can get into those lists or those features or benefits of what somebody’s buying and that’s going to help somebody as well.

 

[40:10 – 45:25]

Jason Hewett: Absolutely. I totally empathize with all the steps that you’re mentioning and what I’m looking for, different parts of my journeys for things I’m comparing or wanting to learn about.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we didn’t talk about too much but again, we can have a whole another episode on this is how do you even score these gaps of the deficiencies?

We do have a product called ALPS, that is just mind-blowing. It’s definitely different. It’s not just a reporting tool, it’s not a research tool. It actually allows you to score the gap deficiencies in all three algorithmic pillars and be able to give you a printout of data and quantifiable results to know where your content is or where your authority gaps are at a URL level and a keyword level. I use that to prioritize a publishing plan.

So, then I’ll look at the smallest gaps to the largest gaps. I’m looking for quick wins, things that I can make an impression in the impact for a brand that are very relevant to the business, high volume, that’s going to make a good ROI case. And then eventually, a lot of my strategies will be concurrent, and I’ll do a short term on these quick wins but I also want to whittle away at the long term gaps. I can’t save those to the end. You can’t bite all of that off overnight, so you need to kind of to take those in strides month over month and eventually get that but you’re going to need some way to score that and understand what those gaps are in order to create this publishing and the strategy plan for it.

 

Jason Hewett: Yeah. I have to agree with that, like ALPS is just an amazing tool to be able to get those insights and all in one place and to really make some high-level decisions.

 

Wayne Cichanski: It is. And I’ve heard the ALPS teams recently won several awards. There’s a patent on it. It’s one, you know, different search drum awards and forester list and all kinds of stuff. So, a fantastic tool, definitely worth looking it up.

The last part of the strategy plan is how do you measure this? A plan is only as good as you can kind of measure, engage this. When I look at the metrics of an SEO channel, it absolutely can and should be ran as its own performance channel. It’s not a black box per se, it’s not something that people only invest into paid because we don’t know how to do SEO. You only don’t know how to do it because you’re not hitting the right conversation with the right people and it can very well be done and when I look at an executive or kind of a metrics of how to gauge this, I look at this in two folds; what the executive team looks for at a senior leadership and those metrics are very different. They want overall performance, they want macro improvements. They want to know if anything’s declining. What are the trends happening? They’re kind of upper echelon things. Now, whoever’s running the channel, they need more than that because you’re responsible for those results and if you looking at those, it’s already too late to make any changes in course direction because those are the outcomes of everything else and as a channel manager, you want to look at primary and secondary KPIs. You want to look at your ranks and your share of voice, you want to look at your authority and relevancy scores, you want to keep an eye on the competition, what are they doing, how much content are they producing, how much authority, what type of backlinks are they getting. Are you as active in the community or in that industry as they are? Those are all the pulses and things that you need within the dashboard and be able to kind of manage those metrics.

 

Jason Hewett: Absolutely. Those are just so useful to be able to have with Alps.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah. So, that’s 2022 strategy and I mean, you do all of that, put it all together and you’re going to have a sound program.

 

Jason Hewett: Oh, absolutely. And in case anybody has further questions for you, Wayne, is there anywhere that they should go to get in touch with you or with iQuanti or?

 

Wayne Cichanski: Yeah, absolutely. My email is wayne.c@iquanti.com. So, you can go ahead and use that one and we’ll monitor it. Email me directly. Hopefully, on the podcast, you can do some questions, you can email our info line, you can leave a comment on our website, any of that information but we like questions. I’m here. I want to educate, I want to help, I want to inform, kind of move this industry forward. There’s a lot of good people. The SEO over the years kind of got a bad rep and needs change. So, happy to contribute in any way again.

 

Jason Hewett: Absolutely. And I can’t stress enough that we really do love questions for our podcasts and next episode or so, we’re definitely planning on having an episode where Wayne answers common questions from his webinars and for whatever else people send us. So, feel free to ask away anything that we can answer for you. We’d be happy to do so. But Wayne, thank you so much for joining us today.

 

Wayne Cichanski: Thank you.

 

Jason Hewett: And thank you all for tuning in and this has been iQuantified. See you guys next time.