Video Transcript – SEO & Social Proof
SEO & Social Proof – original post here
Welcome back, Rankers. I’m looking for a penguin. Have you seen him? I haven’t and no one else has, either. Who knows where it’s going to be? Once again, Google has alarmed everyone and still nothing. It’ll probably come as soon as I finish this show. It’s probably being rolled out right now that I’ve said that.
I wanted to talk to you a little bit this week about correlation versus causation because I don’t know what I’m looking at here. I’d be interested in your feedback and let you look at some of your own data and see if you’re seeing similar things because it’s quite interesting.
During the week there was a bit of a story that emerged of people claiming increased bot activity across their sites was somehow correlated to a Google update. John Mueller of Google came out and said, “No, it’s not.” Just because the bot is more active on your site does not necessarily mean there’s a Google update coming. However, over probably the last 12 months I’ve been noticing certain trends within the Google search console and also when you look at the data back in Google Analytics.
For instance, what I’m looking at here is we’ve got at the top here Google Analytics data, and then we’ve got some data out of the Google search console which is showing pages crawled per day. What this graph, the last one here, is the average position across the board of every keyword out of Google search console search analytics. The client that we’re looking at here is skinnymixers. You can see here this is New Year’s Day or New Year’s Eve here. You can see this is all traffic. It is a good uptick in January with traffic. What’s she averaging there? About 20,000 user sessions a day, so she’s doing quite well. Before that, before Christmas she was only doing about 6,000 user sessions per day.
You can see it’s quite pronounced there, that difference in that graph. If I go and have a look at where that’s coming from, we can see it’s most significant here in Google organic traffic. Google organic traffic was about three and a half a day. Now we’re at eight and a half a day. That’s really interesting. That’s great for her, obviously. This date, so this is still New Year’s Eve, and this is New Year’s Eve, and this is New Year’s Eve. You can see here across these three graphs we’ve got a bit of correlation happening. Essentially, we’ve got low on this side of the graph and we’ve got high on this side of the graph, up until this point here anyway.
This is interesting for a number of reasons. I am seeing this across more than one client site. Generally what I’m seeing is when a client site is busiest, there seems to be a correlation with how much crawling Google does of the site. Basically, the busier that you are the more often and the more Google comes to have a look at it. Because of the rubbery dates that Google has across all their products, I’m not sure what’s chicken and egg here. This could be prior to the rankings going up. It could be pre the rankings going up.
What I’m looking at down here, I’ve got an average ranking across the site of around 10 in December. Then, come January we’re up at seven and a half. There’s been a ranking increase across the whole site at the start of the New Year. This is all this extra crawl activity here. My gut feeling is that the ranking boosts are coming after Google sees that the site is really busy, not necessarily before.
Let me show you one other thing here. The other thing that Google can tell you, of course, is how popular a bricks and mortar business is and the time of the day that it is most popular. How does it do that? Well, Google has a wonderful thing called Location History. What we think here, I haven’t read anything to confirm or deny this, is that our location history, which Google will track if you have it switched on, will then influence this graph here. Google knows enough about people using the Google Maps, Google Android, all these other things they have access to know how many of their users are in that shop at any given time.
I think this is just another signal of popularity. It has to be a signal, because to me it is social proof. It is backlinking, essentially. That’s what backlinking was. Backlinking was essentially one web page saying, “You know what, this web page over here is really good, you should get on it.” That’s what backlinking was. Social proof also is kind of that. Sure, it could be manipulated just through sales or big TV ads or big campaigns, but I think it nevertheless is a signal.
If you’ve seen that similar sort of data, if you’ve got a business or a site where you know that there are certain spikes at different times of the year, go and have a look at the data. We’ve just finished getting through Valentine’s Day. I probably shouldn’t say it like that. It was a lovely day. That data is not yet in Google search console. Google search console has a lag of about 48 hours. This data is only kept for 90 days. If you want to see it, you probably should go and have a look at it this week.
If you are in the gift industry or the restaurant industry or anything that is going to have a spike when it comes to Valentine’s Day, go and have a look and see if you’ve got a spike in your traffic, number one. Hopefully, you did if you’re in that industry. Then go and have a look and see if you got a spike in pages crawled per day within 24 hours of that Valentine’s Day because I’d be very interested in those. We’ve got a couple of clients we’re going to have a look at specifically for that as well. I’ve got probably four or five we’re going to have a look at. But I’d love to get some feedback from you on that whether there is an increase in the Google bot crawling your site at the times when you’re most busy.
Before we go, I’ve been doing a live video SEO help show every morning at 7:30, every weekday at 7:30. It’s been available on Periscope, which is a live streaming service, and also it’s been going recently live through Facebook. I’m trying to work out what’s a good time for you if you wanted to ask me a question live or have a look at your website live. Can you just let me know what’s a good time for you? At the moment, 7:30 weekdays Australian Eastern Standard time is when I’m doing it. I might change the time. It seemed like that was the best time to do it because we can get people from different time zones all coming in and joining up.
I’m going to keep doing them. Probably won’t be doing it every day now, though, because I’ve done that since about November and it’s quite frankly wearing a bit thin. It’s hard to keep coming up with topics to talk about every day. I think we’ll be doing it weekly. If you’d like to join in, just make sure you follow me on jimboot. Make sure you like our Facebook page which is facebook.com/melbourneseo. We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.