Popularity spikes and Google rankings
Heading off to Big Digital Adelaide this week where I’ll be presenting on brand and SEO plus the auDA direct registrations proposal and what it means for your business. I thought it an opportune time to collate some of the data from our auDA campaign as a comparison against previous results.
What I learned
• News coverage resulted in massive increase in page crawls
• Backs my theory of popularity as a metric
• Google must display the most relevant results
• Native video on LinkedIn and Facebook is a must
Transcript
Hey welcome back Rankers, hope you’re having a good week, I’m going to be in Adelaide Thursday and Friday, at Big Digital Adelaide, come say hello. I’m delivering two presentations. The first presentation’s going to be all about the direct registrations auDA, and what it all means to businesses. Some of the things to watch out for. And also, how we put our marketing together around that whole campaign. And we’ll also, on Friday, be talking about how brand relates to SEO, and how you can do some simple things around your brand to improve your SEO.
Search Spike
But I wanted to show you a couple of things from that auDA ad campaign. So what I’ve got here is a list of the articles we were able to get in the last eight weeks. So this is all the news ones, and you can see here, around the 11th, 12th of March, we’ve got the 3AW and also ABC National News.
Now when we go into Google Search Console, and we’ve seen this before with other phrases, and other clients, and other sites, is that on that date, we had a massive spike in the number of pages that Google came in and crawled on our site. So this is not the first time that we’ve seen this, so we talked about popularity as a metric before, but when Google sees an increased interest in your brand, and in this case, the phrases that Google would have seen a spike in the search for, were all around my name and the name of the company.
And to give you an idea of that, so this is sort of taking it out of … putting in extreme highlights if you like, this phrase here is “Jim’s blog” with an apostrophe. No one types it in, well 10 people did. But what’s interesting for me in this, is that the ranking comes before the demand. So the demand comes first, ’cause these are impressions, but it’s not ranked anywhere, it’s zero. And then we see the demand for it with the impressions, around this same time period. And we can see it immediately goes and it gets ranked.
So not a competitive phrase, I understand, but the point I’m making here is that Google has to provide the results that are most relevant. And in this case, and this is just for Australia, so we’re only talking a smaller sub-set of people who would actually be searching for “Jim’s blog”, of which there were only 10 in that timeframe.
Relevant Results
But it would make sense for Google to share the one with them, or show the one in the results, that’s probably going to be the most relevant. And I would say, on those days for those 10 people, I may have been the most relevant because I was getting talked about in the media, in different areas.
So we’ve seen this happen before. Around the same timeframe, we went to number one for marketing speaker, from about number six. We didn’t do anything for it okay. Now I don’t know whether we have picked up backlinks, we probably have a couple over the last eight weeks. I don’t think they’re anything major though. A few people have linked to a couple of blog posts from different forums and those sorts of things.
But apart from that, we have not gone out to ask for backlinks, or try to get backlinks, or anything to do with backlinks. But traffic has doubled. And the traffic has doubled from a couple of external sources as well, so certainly from LinkedIn, certainly from Facebook. And the reason for that, has been that I’ve been doing native video on LinkedIn, I’ve been doing native video on Facebook. And that’s been doing a lot better than simply throwing a link up to a blog post or to a YouTube video.
Hopefully that’s helpful. Hopefully we will see some of you this week in Adelaide. And thanks very much and we’ll see you then, bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
