Video Transcript – SEO 2016 – State Of Search

SEO 2016 – State Of Search – original post here

Hey. Welcome back, Rankers. Just finished a live Periscope doing SEO audits live on a daily basis now. Just go to the #SEOaudit on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter and when I’m doing the live SEO audits you can just jump on the link and come and throw your site into the ring and we’ll have a look at it for you. We’re getting good feedback on it. We had 100 people yesterday; I think we had about 60 people this morning so that was good. That’s on Periscope so you don’t need the app to watch, but you do need the app to leave comments so you need to do it on your phone or iPad unfortunately. If you’re sort of just watching then you can just do it either way.

Speaking of Twitter–and by the way, this morning I was watching the Tweet’s stream State of Search so you can go and have a look at that as well. It’s a conference in the U.S. and one of the speakers was Gary Illyes of Google who sort of–they replaced Matt Cuts essentially with two people: Gary Miller and… Oh sorry, Robert Mueller and Gary Illyes.

The State of Search this morning–I just want to take you through some of the things that are coming out of State of Search. First of all, apparently, in 2016, structured data’s going to be big and this is from the mouth of Google. You should already be doing structured data especially if you are an e-commerce site. Structured data is when I–I’ll just put a search in here. We’ll call it Canon 7D pro kit and you can see here we’ve got videoguys.com.au. It’s got some structured data in there. It’s showing us a price. Portus Digital’s got it, showing how many items they’ve got. Don’t know if that’s that helpful. Surprisingly, not too many of those sites on the front page actually have structured data, but Google’s saying it’s going to be big. Does that mean it’s going to become a signal? I would think quite possibly for e-commerce sites it would be.

Here’s an interesting stat for you that they brought out. I’m getting most of this too. I should point out and give credit where credit’s due to Jennifer Slegg of thesempost.com–an excellent resource and Jenn’s being, once again, a star and you can find her at Twitter @Jenstar. I’ve been following her Tweets this morning and she’s–she had a lot of great stuff. One of the things that she shared was that Gary from Google said that there’s been 120 million pages that Google knows of on the web–sorry, did I say 120 million? It’s 120 trillion pages that Google knows of–and 60% of those are duplicates. There’s a Panda issue for you right there. If you do have a lot of duplicate content you’re not alone then, seriously fix your duplicates.

40% of pages–sorry, 40% of people abandon pages that take more than three seconds to load. I’m just going to bring over my notes so I’m not always turning away from the camera. That gets down to speed, right? If your pages are taking three seconds to load, you’re losing 40% of your business. The faster you are, the better. People always say, “Well, how fast do I have to be?” Lightning fast, faster than everyone else.

The structured data one is interesting in that a lot of people thought that the featured snippets–or rich answers as they’re sometimes called–had something to do with structured data. I did too. I was amongst those who thought that. To show you what I mean, if you do the search, ‘make money’—‘make money’. Just on the search ‘make money’ and here you can see savethestudent.org is the number two result organically, but it has this massive thing up here, all this information. Forbes is actually above them organically, but Forbes doesn’t get this massive thing here.

The reason for that, according to Gary, has nothing to do with structured data. It’s that you’ve got to ask and answer the question, implicitly or explicitly. You think of the Google Hummingbird update a couple of years ago. That was to take into account the way people would ask questions like, you would say, of Siri. Or you might–a lot of people just Google a question now. Where’s the best place to buy something? How do I make a…? How do I change the tyres on a…? A lot of searches are going that way now. They’re just looking at Google as the answer of everything. This here is evidence of that, that people are doing that. It’s not structured data, you’ve got to be asking the question, and you’ve got to be answering the question. I’m going to be trying one in a couple of blog posts, that’s for sure.

The other curious thing here, though, this morning, was that Google has announced they’re trying to launch–or they’re working on a–just on that. Just forgot something here. Just looking at Jenn’s Tweet here. This doesn’t involve any structured data, but in the future, it may. Anyway–but, ask the question, answer the question. The interesting thing that Google’s working on at the moment is an assistant type app–I guess like Siri–don’t listen, Siri. They said they want it to be like the Sam in the movie Her.

If you didn’t see that movie or if you only got halfway through that movie like some of us, basically this character in this movie is this artificial intelligence played by Scarlet Johansson I think–sorry, you never get to see her–and basically asks questions of the computer owner rather than the computer owner asking questions of the device. It’s like, “Hey, I’ve got all this stuff. I can see you’ve got all these e-mails you never opened. Do you want me to just go and delete it?” Google is saying it’s working on an assistant as clever as that. “I’ve just noticed that you’ve got conflicting appointments” or “You’re not going to make it to this other appointment because you’ve got this other appointment over here. You haven’t left enough time.” All that sort of stuff like an artificial intelligence. It’s kind of exciting and kind of scary, but that’s what to look out for in 2016. Google’s Her–or I think they’re calling it something else. I think they’re calling it Google Assistant. And structured data’s going to be big.

That’s it for this week’s show. Love to see you at our webinar next Thursday, the 26th of November, 11 a.m. and we’ve still got seats available. It is–we’ve got 20 seats left, yes. I’m getting a nod over here, yes. It’s on site migration so if you’re going from an old site to a new site and how to do that in a way that it doesn’t destroy your business because we see a lot of businesses doing it. We’ll see you next week or we’ll see you tomorrow on the SEO audit. Just go, follow me on Twitter and we’ll see you there. We’ll give you a free audit live in front of the whole world. See you. Thanks very much. Bye.