Rank Ranger Blog

As a result of COVID-19 there are a significant number of changes to the SERP, to Google My Business listings, to Google Ads, etc., that arise from the current pandemic. So we'll get to that.

At the same time, Google has made other serious changes to the SERP including the migration of right-side Featured Snippets and the release of stricter FAQ markup guidelines. So we'll get to that as well.

This is the April 2020 edition of the SERP news.

We welcome the podcast’s first-ever repeat guest, the one the only, the magnificent and always pleasant Carolyn Lyden joins us to chat it up about the pros and cons of confirmation bias in digital marketing!

• How can confirmation bias both help and hinder your digital marketing efforts
• How far can you push confirmation bias in your marketing without being unethical? Where are the lines?
• How does confirmation bias impact our favorite search engine?

Plus, they’re here, they’re there… Google is spraying COVID-19 results around everywhere…. We dive into what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what it might mean for you!

There's a lot of advice out there on how to recover from and even prevent your site from being hurt by one of Google's core updates. Some of the advice is pretty good... some of it is a bit cliche. So let's go down the rabbit hole a bit by analyzing the data on the core updates, some site-level patterns that the updates have produced, and what you might want to consider for your site as a result.

Here's a data-packed (yet holistic) look at what you can do to prevent ranking and traffic losses at the hands of a core update.

Rachel Slovin of Kahena Digital chats with us all about how to push your SEO agency and/or SEO team forward:

• How to handle hard times while maintaining a growth trajectory
• How to best allocate resources and teams and stay current so your team doesn't become stale!
• And when times are good... how do you know when it’s time for your SEO team to grow?

Plus, we get into life under the weight of COVID-19 and some tips on working at home from two serial remoters… our own hosts!

You really don't want to give a potential consumer an excuse not to trust you. This makes knowing what shows on the SERP for your brand extremely important. Nothing can be worse for brand trust than a branded query that yields negative sentiment. With that, I am both happy and proud to present Rank Ranger's new Reputation Management Rank Tracking Suite designed specifically for tracking brand sentiment on the SERP!

Amy Toman is here to chat about apps stealing your local traffic away!

• What threat do on-demand apps pose to local search traffic?
• Which niches are most susceptible to losing local traffic to apps?
• How can local businesses recapture traffic lost to apps?

Plus, we dive into how rank tracking has changed and how you might want to reconsider how you monitor your rankings.

When it comes to search engine optimization, there are seemingly endless tasks to complete. You have both on-page and off-page considerations, as well as content audits, competitor research, tracking and monitoring, and technical issues. Of course, once that is done, you’ll have to do plenty of research on keywords, find out what the competition is using, and much more.

There are some really great tools every marketer decides on paying for but you can find some of the best SEO tools for free, which can help with a variety of tasks.

Special guest Kelly Stanze joins the podcast to talk mental health in the SEO sphere.

• How to create a work/life balance
• How to deal with the demands of an SEO life while struggling internally
• What needs to change in the SEO world for there to be a better mental health environment

Havoc.

That's how you might describe the February SERP, particularly the unconfirmed update that hit mid-month. With reversal upon reversal, the rankings resembled the sort of discombobulated u-turn a 16-year-old would make on their way to failing their driver's test for the umpteenth time. Throw on such SERP spectaculars like new entity pairings and a new multi-image carousel for Google Posts and you have yourself a month of SERP changes to remember.

This is the March 2020 edition of the SERP news!

Super awesome, craft beer drinking, link profile analyzing guest for you today! Cass Downton is here to get your bad backlink profile expunged:

• To disavow or not to disavow, of course, we asked that question!
• At what point does Google say enough is enough when looking at low-quality links? What’s the deal with links and authority?
• How links factor into the E-A-T equation!

Plus, if you want to avoid being clobbered by a core update, here are some content creation tips for you!

So you've won a Featured Snippet... let the traffic flow, right? Not so fast there! What other SERP features are showing alongside your Featured Snippet? What other features are competing for a user's attention? What SERP features most commonly appear with Featured Snippets? How strong is a Featured Snippet win... really?!

You've got questions... we've got data...

TF*IDF for SEO... depending on who you talk to it's either the most over-hyped thing in Search since the last over-hyped thing in Search or it's a great way to boost your SEO efforts.

What I'd like to do here is take a look at both sides of the argument and show you how you can use TF*IDF analysis for your benefit in a legitimate way... all while highlighting Rank Ranger's new TF*IDF tool!

Sounds like a plan to me!