It has been quite the journey over our past 49 episodes of Here’s Why. We could not be happier to bring you a special, 50th edition episode. Mark and Eric look back and discuss tips and trends from the past year, as well as taking a look at Here’s Why’s past!
The digital marketing landscape has and will continue to evolve in 2016 and you can rest assured that Mark and Eric will be there bringing you the best advice as to how to maximize any campaign that comes your way.
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Links Mentioned:
- Here’s Why Google Authorship Might Return
- The Definitive Guide to Google’s Rich Answers
- Why Doesn’t Google Use Social Signals?
- Content Effectiveness Optimization: Interview with Eric Enge
- Why Does Your Content Need to be Unique?
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Full Transcript:
Mark: Hey Eric, congratulations on turning 50!
Eric: I’m not turning 50; I thought you were turning 50.
Mark: I’m not turning 50!
Eric: Are you 50?
Mark: Oh wait, I remember, Here’s Why is 50; this is our 50th episode.
Eric: And Mark and I are so excited to bring you this episode. And we’re going to talk about some of our favorite moments from the first 50 episodes of Here’s Why.
Eric: And now, we’re going to share 6 of our favorite moments from the first 50 episodes.
Mark: So number 1, I talked about Author Authority. Google did away with Google Authorship last year in 2014. Did that mean the end for authors mattering to Google? I don’t think so at all. I think Google still cares about that. We hear Google representatives talk about it. We see patents coming out that have to do with it. Google still cares about who are the authorities on a given topic. Now we don’t know what that will look like for the future. We don’t know exactly how that will affect search. What you should be doing is doing everything possible to become and establish yourself as the best expert in your topic and produce content all around that so Google has no doubts who the authority is in your area.
Eric: Number 2. We talked about featured snippets, based on the study we did here at Perficient Digital, and features snippets is a new type of SEO that you can leverage to vault right to the top of the search listings, above the natural search results, even if you’re not currently ranking number 1 for that given search result. You really ought to be trying to learn how to do this, and we shared a video on that and an article in one of our earlier episodes.
Mark: And number 3. I talked about social signals and SEO. A lot of people assume that when you publish something on Twitter or Facebook or Google+, that it’s going to increase your search rankings, that Google must be using that to influence their search rankings. But everything that we see from our extensive testing, as well as what we hear from Google representatives indicates that that’s highly unlikely. The social signals are still just too noisy, too messy for Google to get good signal out of. But, that doesn’t mean that social doesn’t affect SEO; it affects it indirectly. As you’re out there exposing your brand, exposing your topics, your expertise, you create the opportunities for the real signals, such as links, that do affect your search engine, optimization.
Eric: And number 4, I talked about content effectiveness optimization, which is another area of new SEO. We know that Google is measuring some form of user engagement and/or content quality. We don’t know exactly what, but the way you need to think about that is in terms of what we call today “task completion,” or what Google in their very recently published search quality rater’s guide called “needs met,” where Google actually confirmed for the first time that this is something they’re looking at actively, and we talked about it long before that came out.
Mark: Number 5, I shared with you the importance of humanizing your brand. You need to connect with people in the way that people connect with other people. Hard to do as a brand right? You’re a faceless logo, but it can be done. You can take steps to make your brand more human, more appealing, come across on the emotional side, the stories, the ways that real humans connect. It’s so important because that’s when people become involved in a brand. People say that can’t be done; it can totally be done and we see it all the time where people care about brands almost in the way that they care about their friends. What are you doing to humanize your brand?
Eric: And finally number 6, we just want to celebrate just how far along we’ve come with these videos, we’re so excited to share them with you. Just for fun, take a look here at a brief clip from our very first Here’s Why…
Eric: And now, for something completely different.
Eric: Thanks for joining us for this special edition of Here’s Why. We hope you’ve enjoyed these last 50 episodes of Here’s Why and you can find them on the archive linked on the screen now.
Eric: And I wanted to take a moment and thank Mark Traphagen, for being such a good person to do these videos together with, it’s an honor and a privilege. And also, to congratulate Carter Elkin-Paris on the fantastic job he’s done as our video producer, and you can see how much our capabilities have grown from the very first video to where we are today.
Mark: He’s back there behind the camera; I’m waving for him.
Eric: There you go.
Mark: We’ll see you next time.
