Wave Issue 25

First...

Ouch...

And that's what your search impressions and rankings can look like when you get hit by Google's Product Review Update. That's the Site 1 Case Study.

The image shows the first full week after the Update and the full week prior. The solid lines are April 8-14th and the dotted lines are April 1-7th. You can see that it wasn't a sudden drop on Day 1 of the Update, but it was gradual and is flattening out. Let's see if this is the lowest it'll drop or if the 2nd week of the Update will bring it down some more.

The funny thing is that the majority of the positions didn't drop all that much. My Position 1-2s dropped to 6-12. The 6-12s went to 15-25. The 15-25s went to 30-50+. I didn't see any keywords that dropped completely out of the SERPs. So even though the rankings for individual keywords didn't drop that large, it was enough to lose a lot of clicks and traffic. Position matters.

In other news...Ezoic Site Speed Solution: Leap is out there now. Check your Home Dashboard if you're with Ezoic already. I haven't had time to play with it much, but I do like that they'll show me the tech (themes, plugins) that's not optimized for speed.

There appear to still be a few bugs. Ezoic says there're plugins affecting my site, but they don't exist on my site. I requested a rescan of the site, but not sure it actually performed a scan, because their optimization suggestions didn't change. But I do like that they offer Alternatives for various plugins and themes that they suggest need improvement.

I can see they're trying to make it as user-friendly as possible. Worthwhile to check out.

SEO

Changing Dates on Pages Won't Improve Rankings

According to Google's John Mueller, there's no point to purposely change the dates, because you won't receive a rankings benefit.

"Changing publishing dates on web pages, without making any significant changes, will not help to improve rankings in Google search results."

Periodic updates product review

Glenn Gabe asked Google's Danny Sullivan if sites need to wait for the next Product Review update and Danny replied back that "there's a periodic refresh...and keep working" on the sites inbetween the updates.

If you're like me and your site was affected, look at which sites jumped above yours in the SERPs and try to figure out what you're missing.

Tools and Resources

Keyword Hero

This is a super handy tool to see the actual Search Queries that resulted in getting the Visitor, inside Google Analytics (GA).

Yes, you can see it in Google Search Console (GSC) itself, but I'm not sure why Google doesn't just show the search queries in GA too. 90%+ of Organic Searches show up as (Not Provided) and (Not Set). Keyword Hero solves this issue. Now, I only get between ~3 to 4%, Huge difference. There's a setting to connect GSC and GA within the GA settings, but I still get 90%+ NP/NS.

It's good to know what keywords resulted in traffic that stayed on the site longer, for example. What queries resulted in more clicks. Those are GA metrics that can already be tied to Pages, but now you can also link it to keywords.

Note: Since GSC's stats are delayed by ~3 days, the data you see each day on Keyword Hero is actually for 3 days prior. So if you're looking at April 5th on GA, the queries and numbers you see are for April 2nd. I was confused at first when I was wondering why the numbers didn't match up.

Conversion.ai Pro Unlimited Plan Available For Limited Time

Conversion.ai has easily received the most recognition out of all the AI content generators lately. I've been using it for a few weeks now and I do have to say I'm getting a lot of value out of the Unlimited plan at $99/month (price is being raised in a couple of weeks).

Jarvis, the AI, offers a great jumping off point for blog articles. Jarvis won't write the full article for you and you'll need to make edits, but it does make writing articles faster than starting from a blank page.

It's not suitable for all types of articles. Jarvis is great for informational articles, but not so much for Best Of buyer-intent articles and any scientific/research articles. The data/statistics that it gives you is unreliable. You'll need to research and use your data. Jarvis only knows what it's been taught and that information can be outdated or incorrect.

In the end, it's definitely worth a trial for 7 days with their Money Back Guarantee. You also get 3 team members in an account, so you can share it with your writers, VAs, etc.

Content

No Alphabet Soup For You!

Income School is dropping their new blogging course on May 3rd and changing up the way they do things.

I've never taken their course, but based off their old videos, it does seem they've disrupted themselves. They're even using Search Volume now, something they used to say they didn't care about. What's good to see is they're looking to improve.

There are many courses out there, because there are many ways to go about building affiliate websites. Heck, how many "How to Find Low Competition Keywords" articles have you read? (here's my keyword research article).

What I like to see is if the course creators are going back and updating their strategies and processes. Any good blogger, affiliate marketer, business owner, and course creator should be looking to improve their strategies and processes. Especially with how fast things change in this world.

If a course is being pitched as Evergreen, I'd be very wary of it. If the course hasn't been updated in a couple years, I wouldn't touch it.

Link Building

The Evolution of Link Building

This is a good look through the History of Link Building and the evolution of different tactics that have appeared through the years. Take a look at this to understand what's worked and not worked through the years.

"Link building has come a long way from its pre-Google days. Read on to better understand modern link building today, and how we got here."

Education

How To Build Perfect SEO Silos on Wordpress (Step by Step)

This is the best Site Architecture guide I've seen yet for those building affiliate sites. It's the most informative and easiest to understand.

The YouTube video is a great overview, but you should check out the full step-by-step article that goes with it.

Note: If you already have a site that's ranking, I'd be very careful to change your whole site to follow a certain site architecture. Your site is already ranking, so don't break it.

Using Regex in GSC to Find Longtail Keywords and Questions

Now that Regex (regular expressions) is available in Google Search Console, you're able to more easily parse and filter out the data that you want. It's more flexible. Steve Toth has a nice tip here to show how to find longtail keywords that you're ranking for.

Here’s the regular expression for finding questions that begin with “who, what, where, when, why, how, was, did, do, is, are, aren’t, won’t, does, if.” ^(who|what|where|when|why|how)[” “]

He starts with a simple regex: ([^” “]*\s){7,}?

That'll return all the queries that are 7 words or more. What can you do with all those longtail keywords?

Well, you could write a blog post for ones that are getting a good number of search impressions, because you know people are searching for them. If the keyword won't result in enough content for a blog post, you could make it an H2 or FAQ in a related article, or combine some of the related keywords into a listicle post.

Site Speed Optimization: How To Optimize Your Website in 2021

In-depth guide on optimizing your site speed. This gets into many of the same things that other complete/ultimate/definitive guides get into. So if you've read others before, you can skip down to the checklists, starting with Simple Site Speed Optimization Checklist (Getting To FAST).

This article definitely gets into the weeds more than others with their Advanced Optimization Checklist. There are some interesting things to look into, like Prerendering and converting database tables to Innodb. Probably overkill for most affiliate sites, but it's interesting to see how deep you can go with optimizing site speed.

How To Prepare for Core Web Vitals Update in 2021 [Study]

Semrush conducted a research study aiming to discover any trends and dependencies that the upcoming Google Core Web Vitals update may bring, as well as figure out what impact on websites it could have. In this post, you will see the key findings, get actionable tips on how to analyze a site’s Core Web Vitals, and learn what you should do to improve them.

Almost 84% of Core Web Vitals for the URLs that rank in the US in the top 10 on the mobile SERP scored either as all “Poor” or “To improve”.