Google Helpful Content Update rollout complete and TikTok adds regional trend analysis

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Show notes

Welcome to the Search With Candour podcast. In this week's episode, Jack Chambers-Ward is flying solo to discuss all the latest SEO and PPC news including:

• TikTok adding additional regional trend insights
• Google's helpful content update has now finished rolling out
• Helpful content update analysis from SISTRIX
• The latest SectorWatch all about barbecues

Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to Episode 35 of Season Two of the Search With Candour podcast. My name is Jack Chambers-Ward, and I am all on my own this week. No Mark, no guest. But I'm here to give you a quick little update on the latest SEO and PPC news, including TikTok adds additional regional trends insights, Google's helpful content update has now finished rolling out, and we've got an update on the analysis and the impact of the helpful content update from our friends over as SISTRIX, as well as the latest Sector Watch, which is all about barbecues. Search With Candour is supported by SISTRIX, the SEO's toolbox. Go to sistrix.com/swc if you want to check out some of their fantastic free tools, such as their SERP Snippet Generator, Hreflang-Generator, being able to check your site's visibility index, and, especially with the helpful content update recently, the all important Google Update Tracker. Go to sistrix.com/trends to subscribe to Trend Watch and sistrix.com/blog for all of the latest updates and data analysis, including Sector Watch, which I'll be talking about later on in the show. So as I said at the top of the show, no Mark, no special guest this week. It's just me with a very, very quick episode. Expect this to be a lot shorter than we've come to expect in recent weeks. But I have already recorded a few episodes with some fantastic guests and I've got a few lined up for recordings next week as well, including some very interesting topics. So covering everything from SEO audits, to digital PR and SEO, to forging your career path in SEO and even talking about being a person of color and running your own agency in the SEO industry. Lots of interesting topics coming from a variety of guests, including Alex Hickson, Oga Zarzeczna, Jenny Abouobaia, Luce Rawlings, Jamar Ramos, Maddy Osman, Myriam Jessier, and many more planned in the pipeline as well. So get excited for that in the coming weeks and months. But until then, like I said, just a quick little update from me this week.

TikTok adding additional regional trend insights

I'm going to dive into some TikTok information, because we talked a lot about the Creative Center when I had Annie-Mai Hodge on the show a few weeks ago. We did our TikTok-centric episode, which we recorded back in August, and we talked a lot about the Creative Center, as I said. So you get some really interesting insights here and you get an idea of basically data for all your users from age groups, to viewer types, to industry events and years and all that kind of stuff. You are able to look at TikTok insights and get an idea of the kind of people that are viewing your adverts on TikTok.

Now, looking at the Creative Center, you can actually narrow things down a lot more to look at regional trend insights. So you can really, really fine tune and target those things. So you can look at countries and industries within those countries, holidays that might be affecting the trends in those industries as well. There's a real kind of extra layer of data here you can really dive into, especially looking at things like purchasing information. So how the 4th of July or Black Friday affects things in the US and sales there. You can even look at increase or decrease in, oh, a celebrity mentioned this thing and that caused an increase. So if you know there is a particular sporting event, or a big event, or anything going on in the world coming up, you can kind of get an insight, an idea of the trends coming off the back of that. And like I said, you can filter that by country and by region there as well. So you can see how that's affecting users in those different countries who you're advertising to.

Some of the examples we have here include, as I mentioned from the US, 73% of respondents made a 4th of July purchase in the last year. 81% of TikTok users who made a back to school purchase said the platform played a role in purchasing and gift bought. Again, tying into what we're talking about with TikTok as a search engine, we know people are purchasing stuff or at least doing research and reviewing things on TikTok, so you can get an idea of what's out there essentially at that very, very early stage of inquiry and research. So, that real kind of top funnel entry point for a lot of people is starting on TikTok and then verifying that information by going off onto Google as well.

So looking at tech as well. So tech purchase journeys with TikTok have 18% higher spend than those without. And every three weeks after exposure to an ad on TikTok, 72% of people polled agreed that the brand is memorable. So again, a mixture, I think, of useful and not so useful information. They do cite their sources there as well. And like I said, you can access all of this in the Creative Center and looking at the insights part of that, and basically you get a insights tab you can have a look at and see what your brand is up to and filter by there as well. And you actually don't have to be advertising on there as we speak. You can actually use this completely independently without a TikTok account. You can just go on and filter around and have a look, including filters for the generations. So you can say, "Gen Z, millennials, Gen X."

Thinking about advertising creators, people, what kind of industries. So everything from gaming, to apps, to travel, and food and all that kind of stuff, and then thinking about the holidays and events as well, and even looking at the years gone by, the last couple of years there as well. So if you're planning a sale for... Halloween's coming up at the end of October, and, by the way, I have a very special Halloween episode planned out that I started writing the other day. So there's a lot of stuff going on that can affect people's habits and journeys throughout this digital space, especially with purchasing journeys as well. So having these kind of regional insights can be really, really helpful for you navigating around TikTok and trying to advertise and understand users a bit better on TikTok. So, yes, highly recommend. This is available, like I said, without a TikTok account. I will put a link for this in the show notes at search.withcandour.co.uk, and you can get all your TikTok for Business insights in one place.

Google's helpful content update has now finished rolling out

Of course, the hot topic in the SEO industry right now is the recent announcement of the helpful content update from Google. And Google have confirmed, they're finished rolling out as of Friday the 9th of September, 2022. The rollout began on August the 25th, and, like I said, has now completed as of the 9th of September. We're starting to see some impact. There's been a lot of hesitancy, a lot of inconclusive data, essentially, from a lot of people looking at the trends and researching the impact of this update. Google has claimed it's going to be a very big update, it's going to have a big impact on sites and domains across the world, but we have not seen much until the last few days. And as of this rolling out, we have seen some updates. And of course, our good old friends over at SISTRIX, who sponsor the show, Steve Paine from SISTRIX, has dived into some of the data and basically using SISTRIX's Visibility Index, he can get a pretty good idea of who's been affected in terms of their visibility.

So during the first check, Steve looked at Lexico, which has now been redirected to dictionary.com. It used to be a dictionary site, it has now been redirected. We've not seen a huge amount of movement in the SERPs. We have seen a fair bit of movement in some of the more spammy, duplicate content kind of sites, a lot of lyrics sites. So I don't know if you know, the internet is full of these websites that just publish song lyrics because song lyrics get a heck of a lot of search volume, and they're just trying to churn their way through that and grab every click they can by publishing often incorrect song lyrics. So, that happens a lot. And these sites get some pretty serious traffic, things like Genius Lyrics and plenty of other stuff, Lyrics Junk as well. There's plenty of those. And we have seen some pretty significant downturn.

So taking Lyricsjonk as an example here, it has seen a 47% reduction in visibility since the rollout began on the 25th of August and then completed on the 9th of September. So we are literally analyzing that section, that timeline from beginning the rollout to completing the rollout of the update. And as Steve carefully says here, "Be aware, some of the domains may contain adult content." If you do have a look at the list that Steve has provided for us, there are some adult websites on this list, that's for sure. There is plenty of other stuff as well including sort of spammy online game sites and things like that. So I don't know if you guys remember Miniclip back in the day, that kind of thing. There's things like funnygames.org has seen a 39% reduction. TeePublic, which I know has gotten in a lot of trouble for using copyrighted material in the past, has seen a 41% reduction. So a lot of these kind of spam puzzle games, crosswords, dictionaries, all that kind of stuff. You see a lot of people churning out these more spammy sites. We've seen some pretty significant impact. Steve has listed out 100 domains for us. You can, of course, sort them by percentage loss, so you can see the most affected there as well. It's very interesting to see. I would like to catch up with Mark in the next few weeks as well and see how his little canary in the coal mine spam site is doing. I'm very interested to see basically what Mark has been doing. If you haven't heard us talk about this before, Mark has got a tester, an experiment website where he's basically churning out AI generated scraped FAQ data onto a website and basically seeing how Google and Bing react to that. And so far, he's seen a lot of clicks. He's got indexed, he's seen impressions, he's seen clicks, and we've not seen anything negatively affect that in any particular way. So I think it's very interesting to say that we are finally seeing some impact because we've not seen that for so long now. A lot of people have been skeptical about the size and the depth of the impact that was going to happen from this update. We have actually got some data to hand from Steve at SISTRIX. And I will put a link to this in the show notes, like I always say, at search.withcandour.co.uk. You can find the blog post there from Steve at SISTRIX, who gives you the full rundown of what we've seen affected by the impact so far.

There is also a linked Twitter thread, which I'll also put a link for in the show notes, from the one and only Aleyda Solis. She talks about basically how to check if your site has been affected, and she goes through the process of analyzing if you've seen any keyword drops, if you've seen any impact and any shift in SERPs from where you were before to where you are now. You can use it to basically identify patterns. And if there's only a general decline on your site, you can get an idea of that essentially from a tutorial there. And of course, SISTRIX have their own tutorial as well. If you are logged into SISTRIX, you can check your site's visibility index there and get a pretty clear idea. And there is a tutorial from them to check how to do that over that time period. So you can basically recreate this test and analysis that Steve has done on your own websites and essentially see how much the helpful content update has affected you and your sites.

Last but not least, like I said, very quick episode this week, let's talk about some Sector Watch. So sticking with SISTRIX here, we're going to talk about some barbecues. The wonderful Charlie Williams, the data journalist, one of the data journalists over at SISTRIX, has dived into the industry of barbecues. Interestingly, as is often the case with these things that Charlie dives into with Sector Watch, it's pretty competitive. You get the generalist kind of retailers, a lot of supermarkets here in the UK, such as Tesco and Asda and things like that, then the bigger department stores like John Lewis and those kind of things, specialist more DIY kind of stores you have in the UK, like BQ and Homebase as well, and then even specific manufacturers and diving into that as well. There's even some specialist barbecue e-commerce sites like Barbecue World and stuff like that as well.

So it's a real kind of coming at it from a few different angles, because this sector is wider than you think it would be, if that makes sense. A lot of different types of sites sell barbecues in a variety of different ways, and there is some pretty significant search volume around them. And of course, Charlie dives straight into the search intent. So we're looking at the different types of search intent here. And the top three domains for the DO, which is essentially the transactional, the commercial intent the user would like to buy, analyzed from more than 1,200 keywords, Amazon ranks top there, you've got Argos coming in next and the aforementioned specialist site of bbqworld.com.

So talking about the barbecue DO intent, we get the full list here of the top 20 coming in from Charlie. So even diy.com, which, for those of you who don't know, we've talked about it before. That is the B&Q website. Specialist sites, I already mentioned BBQ World is number three. eBay comes in at number four. Weber, which is one of the brands, one of the manufacturers, actually comes in at number five. And then diy.com at number six, which is, like I said, the B&Q website.

We can even dive into some content as well. I know I was talking to Steve from SISTRIX the other day, funnily enough, talking about some examples, because we talked about fantastic performing high-performance content examples a few weeks ago. They are interesting, to say the least. Argos, B&Q, The Range and Homebase are all in the top 10 most visible domains, and they're these big high street retailers that are now shifting over to this more online approach and are seeing success there as well. Of course, Amazon dominating because they are so visible online.

I think a particularly interesting example, and something I highlighted when I spoke to Steve a little while ago as well, was what the B&Q website is doing from their end of things. They've got a lot of informational content. They've built a fantastic hub and a resource hub of information that really caters to all of this informational intent. There is no intent rather than the DO intent of the transactional pages. Whereas, for the specific transactional keywords, so the DO keywords, Argos is one of the big boys here. It is pretty dominant, getting nearly six and a half percent of available organic market share for those keywords analyzed. Like I said, it's number two behind Amazon itself. So you really see the main barbecue page for Argos really dominates a lot of the SERPs. It's doing fantastic stuff, including nearly 800 keywords on page one, it's ranking for there. The Argos example here is a PLP, which is a product listing page. So think about this as a type of category page, essentially. It is a list of products on a page. The other type we typically see rather than a PLP is a CLP, which is a category listing page. So you'd essentially get these kind of parent category pages that would list out other subcategories and essentially create a hub of links there to help the user go and find more subcategories and stuff like that. The example here from Argos, which is their main barbecue page, is a PLP, which is just a list of products, essentially.

So why is this page ranking so well if it's essentially just a list of products? It does indeed have introductory copy. Interestingly here, and I've been talking about this a lot with some other clients recently, a lot of e-commerce sites I see have introduced more copy onto their category pages, and it seems to be working. I know that's a controversial thing to say. From my experience, it seems to be making an impact from some of the competitor research I've done in some niches we've been working in recently. Obviously, you've got all the titles and the meta descriptions. They seem to be pretty well-crafted from Argo's point of view. But their introductory copy, like I said, is interesting in that it is below the products. And this comes from a couple of different perspectives, at least from how I see it, is you want that copy there and present to essentially tell users and tell search engines what the page is about. That gives you more opportunity to write about those products in broader terms, so you're able to target those broader terms you want to aim for with this kind of PLP page rather than the more specific keywords you want to target with the individual product pages. However, with it being below the products, to me, and as Charlie says here in the analysis, it suggests it is written perhaps more for search engines than it is for users. It's there to, like I said, do some of that targeting and do some of the legwork there, include some relevant phrases, include some keywords and write about the products in a bit more detail.

There is a side from it from a user experience perspective, though, I think personally, from me using a lot of e-commerce sites over the years and thinking about getting access to those products. You can see a lot of sites that have a lot of copy above the products and you have to do a lot of scrolling to get to those products. And if I land on that page, like we're saying, we're talking about search intent so much, this is a DO intent. I am here to buy something. As a user, I am landing on this page, it's full of products, I want to buy something. So, why am I reading this huge paragraph of text? And I have to scroll down, especially on mobile. This can be particularly egregious on mobile, having to scroll past all of this copy that is just essentially fluff to try and get some keywords and stuff before I get to my products.

So it's very interesting to see they're putting it below that. I can totally see the reasoning behind it. I've seen it be really, really successful on some fantastic sites. An example I used in a conversation with a client the other day is the Dreams website, the mattress and bed company. Their website has some fantastic category introductory copy and it is all well below the fold, all the way below their products, but it is so clearly targeted for FAQs and laid out with very clear, targeted headings and keyword focused titles. It's fantastic stuff from Dreams. And it is chock-a-block in a good way, not overstuffed, but really nicely full of internal links. Argos also link out to their buying guide. So again, talking about informational intent rather than transactional intent here. So, that's the NO rather than the DO intent. They have a Choosing the Best Barbecue article, which is essentially their hub for all the different resources and especially linking out to all these key product pages and subcategory pages here as well that is linked to on that product landing page there as well, that product list page.

So, yeah, I think it does a lot of things right and I totally agree with Charlie's analysis here. He actually dives into what they could do to improve it. What I really like about this analysis from Charlie, you get pros and cons, you get positives and negatives. And I think, as I said, I agree with him here about this Argos page because the PLP could link out to its child categories, its subcategories. It's working as the overall barbecue parent category page but does not currently link out to gas barbecues and portable barbecues and charcoal barbecues and dual fuel and all the different types there. You've got the filters, of course, but there are not specific internal links to those landing pages that serve those specific purposes. I think the informational hub does a much better job of that. That is full of internal links. And I think they could perhaps, and I agree with Charlie here, this is very much his analysis I'm kind of agreeing with and nodding my head with, is on those category pages, you could do an improved job of internally linking to those subcategories there as well. So not only if you are in the barbecue industry, you're in that niche, I think there's a lot of great advice from Charlie here about e-commerce SEO in general, talking about building pages that answer different intents, or whether you're, like I said, aiming for informational or transactional, whether your user is at the research stage, and the best practice ideas for what are the big sites around the world doing for this kind of stuff? Are they including copy on their category pages? Are they including links to the subcategories on their category pages? All that kind of stuff. So lots of general good advice, and I highly recommend going and checking out this latest episode of Sector Watch. Like I said, links for this will be in the show notes at search.withcandour.co.uk.

Outro

So, that's it for me this week. Like I said, nice and quick, hopefully. Quick by my standards, at least, since I tend to talk for about an hour with the guests we have on. But as I said at the top of the show, I have a plethora of fantastic guests coming up over the next few weeks. I've got them all ready to go, and I'll be recording a lot of episodes coming up in the next few weeks. If you would like to be on the show yourself and you work in SEO, you have something interesting you'd like to talk about, please do let me know. I am @JLWChambers on Twitter. Of course, links for that will be in the show note as well. Please just tweet at me or send me a DM and we'll get connected and we can record an episode.

If you have something interesting to say about SEO or PPC, I'm interested in talking with you, because even if you've never been on a podcast before, I am more than happy to guide you through that process and help you get your voice out there. And if you've got something interesting to say, then it should be shared, in my opinion. So, yes, please do get in touch if you'd like to be a guest on the show. And like I said, hopefully you won't get any more of these kind of solo episodes from me over the next few weeks. Mark and I will be doing a live LinkedIn Q&A later this month in September as well, so stay tuned for that. And as I said, in between that and after that, we'll have lots of fantastic guests talk about lots of different fantastic topics as well. So, thank you very much for listening, and I will see you next week.