Rank Ranger Blog

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!

We sat down with the magnificent Heather Physioc to discuss how to get your clients on board with your SEO program:

• How to get your SEO clients to invest more time into what you’re preaching!
• The nitty-gritty details of what good client communication looks like!
• How to get into your client’s head so that you know how to speak their language! Plus, BERT is back!

We pick apart Google’s segmented news carousels. What’s working, what’s not, and what’s really freaking interesting!

Is rank more volatile in 2020 than it was before the latest string of core updates arrived? Is the continued presence of both Google's confirmed and unconfirmed updates making rank stability harder and harder to come by? As machine learning progresses are we seeing more and more rank volatility? Has August 2018's Medic update put us on a new path of increased rank fluctuations?

Let's find out!

The great Jessica Levenson joins us to talk about how to actually doing what we say we ought to do when trying to create targeted content:

• How to take the dream of targeted content and then actually write it
• How to make sure your content actually aligns to your target audience
• Where targeted content is heading as SEO evolves

Plus, we put Google’s relationships on the couch as the search engine has taken yet another entity understanding advancement!

It seems like everything and everything that was once the Google SERP has been turned on its head in what has been a downpour of serious changes to the results page! Featured Snippet URLs have been pulled from the organic results, the desktop SERP started to look like the mobile SERP only for it to not look like the mobile SERP, and life just got a bit more complex for retailers with Google's Popular Products extravaganza. Oh, and we got our first core update of 2020 to boot!

Welcome to the February 2020 edition of the SERP News.

The one and only Navah Hopkins joins us to talk about the relationship between SEO and PPC:

• Dispelling the myths about SEO and PPC as marketing opponents
• How to create a unified approach to SEO and PPC
• How SEO and PPC work together uniquely in specific verticals

Plus, everything and more of everything on Featured Snippet de-duplication.

The wonderfully wonderful Jenny Halasz chats it up about Google’s ability to offer nuanced results on the SERP:

• Is Google living up to the hype? Does it consistently offer clear and nuanced results?
• How’s that whole BERT thing working out at this point?
• Where are the gaps in Google’s interpretation skills and what does that mean for your site?

Plus, we breakdown how Google uses its entity understanding and Story expansions for pure marketing genius!

Google's removal of the URL that appears within its Featured Snippets from the page one organic results has thrown the SEO world into a bit of tizzy. As things begin to settle down, one of the questions we have to deal with is how to consider Featured Snippet URLs when tracking our ranking progress. With only one instance of the URL on page one of the SERP many are now considering Featured Snippets as the new position 1. But tracking rank with Featured Snippets as the #1 organic result presents its own problems. 

Learn how to track rank with Featured Snippets as position 1 and how you can identify when a top-ranking result is a Featured Snippet vs. an organic result.

It did not take long for Google to release its first confirmed core algorithm update of 2020. Just two weeks into the new year, Google announced the release of what it has called the January 2020 Core Update. Right from the get-go, all signs pointed to this update being on the larger and more impactful side. Here is a look at the update's overall impact on rank stability, a per niche rank volatility analysis, and a comparison in scope and size to a recent unconfirmed update.

In other words.... How big was the January 2020 Core Update and who did it impact the most?

Cori Graft of Seer Interactive joins the show to talk about how to analyze the competitive field at the local level:

• What metrics should you focus on when analyzing the local competition?
• How to find, analyze, and track local competitors at scale!
• What going beyond proximity means for your local competition analysis! 

Plus, we have the data! Jump into the data on the recent Jan 2020 Core Update!

If you’ve logged on to any social media account recently, chances are you’ve seen confirmation bias in effect. Confirmation bias is everywhere nowadays though you may not always see its effects directly. As confirmation bias is often not easily observed, it can cloud our marketing decisions and cause us to treat our potential clients poorly. Keeping confirmation bias at the forefront of our decision-making processes is critical to being both an effective and ethical marketer.