We’re halfway through 2020 (yeah… we can’t believe it either), and a lot of unexpected change has happened already this year. But there was one VERY expected change that happened recently—that’s Google algorithm update.
The May 2020 Core Update followed the January 2020 Core Update. This time around, Google seems to be drilling deeper into what quality content really is and how they can work their algorithm around it. Quality content has been Google’s mission for quite some time now, but a few searches as a Google user can show you that they’re not always hitting the mark.
Cue the algorithm to make mysterious changes we’ll spend the next few months trying to figure out. 😅
Since we don’t have direct intel from the Google SEO team, we’re going to go over these core updates based on what we’re seeing in the SEO world.
Here are the 3 updates marketers need to know about SEO in Q3.
#1: Your Pages Need to Have A Clear Focus
If you want your pages to rank—you need to cut the fluff. This Google Core Update seems to be hyper focused on pages that are… hyper focused. What’s been working really well at DigitalMarketer is having articles dedicated to pillar posts like Everything You Need To Know About Digital Advertising and Everything You Need To Know About Content Marketing.
To the SEO bots, these pages have one purpose: create long-form content that ranks for a keyword (ex. Digital marketing, content marketing). The longer the content, the more time people spend reading, the higher our page duration time, and the lower our bounce rate. The Google bots are happy, and we can breathe a sigh of relief.
Even MORE importantly, these pages also have a purpose for our readers. Seeing the high page duration and low bounce rate on these pages is great, because it tells us our readers are liking what they’re reading. We want to use these pillar posts to build brand awareness, create engagement, and turn readers into subscribers so website visitors move through the Customer Value Journey.
We’ll venture to guess this is why these pillar posts are working so well for us right now. As Google keeps honing in on the ever-changing answer to “What IS great content?” we’re just as focused on creating great content for our readers.
Win, win baby. 🎉
#2: Quality Is Starting to Outrank Authority
Quality content is cool… what’s even cooler is when quality content outranks similar content from an authority website. This SEO update is exciting for marketers and businesses who geek out on publishing high-quality content. You don’t have to be Forbes or HuffPost to get that first-page ranking anymore… you just need to write something really good (and get a decent amount of traffic to it).
This new update is definitely a viable reason as to why the pillar posts we mentioned above have been doing so well in the search results. Humble brag: they are quality content. Readers love them. Google loves that readers love them. Google ranks them.
We can outrank pages that we used to struggle with before.
