Webinar: Winning with EAT and Algo Updates in the Age of Coronavirus

The SEO apocalypse didn’t come with a bang, but with a series of algorithm updates.

E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) now sits at the heart of Google’s judgment system.

In our coronavirus world, this matters more than ever – especially for YMYL websites where misinformation can cause real harm.

But here’s what keeps SEOs up at night: Is Google silently expanding what counts as “Your Money or Your Life” content? Are these constant updates all E-A-T enforcers in different disguises?

Lily Ray has the answers you need. Join her, Nik Ranger, and Peter Mead as they decode the new SEO landscape and reveal how to build algorithm-proof websites that thrive through any update.

Full Transcript of the Winning with EAT and Algo Updates in the Age of Coronavirus Video

Peter Mead:
Welcome and hello, and welcome and good morning, good evening, good night—wherever you are. Welcome to Australian Search Marketing Academy. It’s Peter Mead, and today we have a special kind of topic. We’re all affected by COVID-19—how it affects SEO, how does it affect our E-A-T, what’s going on with algo updates in the age of coronavirus? It’s bewildering, but we have with us Lily Ray, who has focused on this and really worked a lot of this stuff out. So, this is going to be a fascinating and informative webinar today. But firstly, let me introduce Nik Ranger, who’s an SEO specialist at Studio Hawk. She’s big on strategy, big on data analysis, and with data, and yeah, and big websites for big companies. So, welcome, Nik Ranger.

Nik Ranger:
Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely stoked. E-A-T is a really, really big topic, and it is going to become even more important as all this unravels. So excited to get into it.

Peter Mead:
Absolutely, and thank you so much for co-hosting. So, Lily Ray—welcome, Lily. We’re so excited for you to be here. Lily Ray is the SEO Director at Path Interactive, and she began her journey in SEO in 2010, working in a startup, moved into the agency world, and since then has been working with Fortune 500 companies. I have seen Lily’s presentations and her work and contributions to the SEO community, and I’ve got to say, I also love the DJ stuff that Lily does—always keen to tune into that. And also, it’s really important for the community because Lily’s raising a lot of money for people in need who are affected by COVID. So, thank you so much, Lily, for your work.

Lily Ray:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Peter Mead:
So, what is going on? I mean, I don’t know, Nik, Lily—it just seems everything’s up in the air so much, with everything changing. Before, we used to be able to see an algo update, and we could figure out what was going on. But now, search habits are changing, all kinds of things are changing. What’s going on?

Lily Ray:
Well, a lot’s going on. I think—I’ll talk about it in my presentation—but you’re absolutely right. There’s been a combination of Google’s results changing as a result of changes in search intent and search behaviour, as well as algorithm updates and other updates they’ve made related to coronavirus. So, it’s been a very hard year to track and monitor SEO success. We’ll get into the details a little bit today.

Peter Mead:
Yeah. How do you feel, Nik, with the things that you’re seeing changing, especially on some of those large sites that you’re working on?

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, well, I have the benefit of working with small SMBs, new kind of mom-and-pop shops, all the way to some of the biggest retailers and, I guess, seven space industries in Australia. Very honored to be one of their technical SEOs on that. So, like you said, the search intent has been very, very different to keep track of over the past few months, with COVID affecting a lot of Australians, especially here in Melbourne. So, just going to Search Console and seeing what kinds of keywords have been affected, seeing Google go in and test and see the fluctuations, and kind of have to think a little bit harder about what are the kinds of strategies that we can roll out that’s going to essentially future-proof some of our clients for this. It’s been definitely a little bit of a different dialogue with a lot of our clients. I think that they’re having to work a lot harder and have to kind of grapple with some of the concepts maybe a little bit more in a kind of immediacy sense. One, because it’s an exceptionally emotional time for a lot of people, and two, because I think with the amount of uncertainty, you kind of have to be their guiding light a little bit. So, you know, pressure on both sides, but this is what we’re here to do. This is what we’re here to help guide people and give them just a little bit more of, hopefully, that assurance that what they’re doing is going to really help them for the future.

Peter Mead:
Well, that’s—I’m sure any clients who are hearing that from you, Nik, will be reassured, because that sounds like you’ve really thought this through. So, Nik, what about—Lily, you’ve got a presentation for us. Shall we jump into that? Are you ready to start explaining that to us?

Lily Ray:
Yeah, let’s do it.

Peter Mead:
Great. So, I’m going to share my screen.

Nik Ranger:
Awesome.

Lily Ray:
Can you all see my screen okay?

Peter Mead:
Yes.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah.

Lily Ray:
Awesome. So, we’re going to be talking about being able to win in SEO with E-A-T and algorithm updates in the age of coronavirus. So, as Peter mentioned, my name is Lily Ray. I’m the SEO Director at Path Interactive. We are a digital agency here in New York City, although currently working from home and around different parts of the U.S. So, it’s been an interesting year.

So, what we’re going to talk about today—first, we’re going to get into Google’s algorithm updates in 2020, both related to just regular core updates as well as coronavirus updates as well. What’s the role of E-A-T in these algorithm updates? I do want to focus on something that happened on June 22nd of 2020, because that was a pretty interesting update. Some of the ripple effects that we’re seeing as a result of these updates across Google search results. Then we’ll talk about some good strategies you can use to do keyword research and content creation in 2020. We’ll talk a little bit more about the algorithm updates, some good examples of coronavirus content pivots that we’ve seen from some brands, and then really focusing on Google My Business, because there’s a lot happening there as well.

Lily Ray:
So, diving right in, I wanted to go through a brief synopsis of what’s happened in Google in 2020. As far as core updates go and some other major updates that we’ve seen on Google, we had the January 2020 core update on January 13th. January 22nd, we had the featured snippet deduping core update, so that resulted in the same URL not ranking in the featured snippet as well as the top result, so that caused some big fluctuations.

February 7th, we had an unconfirmed Google update, and then, really, March and as well as April, we had a lot of changes happening in the search results as a result of coronavirus. Here on the right, this was an article that I put together where I was analyzing visibility across various categories during April, or between maybe February and April, and you’re going to see a lot of changes in visibility to certain categories as a result of coronavirus and people’s changing behaviors, so we’ll get into that a little bit.

Then we had the infamous May core update, which rolled out on May 4th through about the 17th of May, and that caused some pretty extreme fluctuations as well. June 22nd, which I like to informally label the “wear a mask update,” and we’ll talk about why that’s the case. And then July 5th, we seem to have another unconfirmed update by Google.

So, there’s things that are happening naturally as a result of changes in search intent, and then we do have Google simultaneously rolling out a lot of updates at the same time.

So, what does that look like as far as coronavirus goes? What I did here was I scraped all of the Search Engine Roundtable articles that had the word coronavirus or COVID-19 in the title between March and July, and you’ll see that there’s dozens of updates that Google’s rolled out, both related to SEO as well as paid search, and a lot of different tactics that we should be implementing with SEO.

So, one thing that I think is really interesting to think about is there’s been a lot of discussion this year as brands have to close their doors or cut budgets about the importance of SEO and search marketing in their marketing strategy. One thing that I think is really important to think about is that these updates are communicated from Google to search marketers, right? The brands don’t usually know about these things; they don’t really necessarily understand how to use things like structured data or Google My Business announcements, but that’s where SEO expertise comes into play. In many cases, this is the official way that you communicate with your audience.

So, this is one of the many reasons why I think it’s so important to continue to engage in SEO, because if you don’t have someone kind of translating what Google’s recommending that you do from a communication standpoint, it’s going to be really hard to get that message across to your audience. So, a lot of updates have taken place this year, and in conjunction with that, we have drastic changes to the search results.

You’ve probably noticed that when you search for, of course, the exact match word “coronavirus,” but also really any query that contains the word “coronavirus” or “COVID-19” or anything that’s related to people’s safety or their health around coronavirus topics, Google has essentially created a very different type of search result or search first page of the search results than we’ve ever seen before.

Now we’re seeing these left-hand sidebars where we’re seeing options to look at statistics or health info, we have top stories as well as local news as well as videos. We also get this map of cases and some other statistics around coronavirus where you live that Google’s pulling in directly from websites like the World Health Organization as well as the CDC.

But that’s not it. We have a lot of different features that they’ve rolled out. So, they have COVID-19 announcements, which result in something that looks a little bit like FAQ schema, but for eligible websites, you get to add specific questions people might be asking or announcements related to coronavirus. You have these local and national resources which have to do with coronavirus news in your region. We have specific information coming from the CDC, additional resources, and beyond that, you might have seen common questions—almost like a People Also Ask box—specifically related to coronavirus.

So, this might be triggered even if you don’t type the word “coronavirus” into the search engine, you’re still going to get COVID-19 alert common questions, and just like People Also Ask, as you click on this, it continues to scroll, it continues to dominate page one.

So, really, if you’re trying to rank for queries containing the word “coronavirus,” it’s not going to be very easy for you. And also, if you have content that kind of gets into that Your Money Your Life category where coronavirus is involved, it’s going to be very hard to compete with companies and organizations that really have strong expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness in those categories.

We also had something that I thought was really interesting here in the US, which is that the White House—really our president and his people—are recommending that companies leverage schema.org and those new COVID-19 announcements. So that’s the first time in my memory that the government has encouraged using schema.org. I thought that was very interesting.

But that’s another example of, you know, you need SEO people to kind of help translate this information to companies, and now you have the White House recommending that they do this. So, I thought that was a really interesting point.

Peter Mead:
Lily, can I just ask you, why do you think government’s getting involved in this level of technical website—you know, I mean, clearly schema.org is more in the SEO world of things?

Lily Ray:
Yeah, I think, I mean, it’s the bonafide way of communicating with your customers at this point. People are searching for things on Google, and the COVID-19 announcement schema is, from my opinion, the most official way to convey to your customers what’s happening. That’s why the CDC.org has that markup on their page, and other really prominent health organizations are using that type of markup to tell people, you know, what are the rules around quarantining, what are the hours of operation at government agencies and things like that. Without that markup, it’s not easy to transmit that information to users in the place where they’re looking for it, which is predominantly Google.

Lily Ray:
Yeah, so you might notice a trend which piggybacks off of a topic I talk a lot about, which is E-A-T. So, E-A-T was already very important leading up to 2020, but from my perspective, it just got even more important. For anybody who doesn’t know, what is E-A-T? E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This comes from Google’s Search Quality Guidelines. It’s been around for a number of years, but if you’ve been paying attention, they’ve been focusing on it more and more, especially as it relates to recent core algorithm updates.

Pretty much every time Google launches a big core algorithm update in the past couple of years, they link back to a document that says how important E-A-T is. They also recommend that you read the Search Quality Guidelines, which mention E-A-T like 160-plus times or something, so it’s something to pay attention to if you work in SEO, and I don’t think it’s going away—I think it’s becoming increasingly important.

Google also published a white paper last year called “How Google Fights Disinformation,” and Marie Haynes is the person that made this connection, but it was a really, really great observation. There’s a specific sentence in here where they basically talk about, when something is happening, like breaking news or a crisis or something that’s creating a lot of potential for disinformation, Google’s going to surface results that have the strongest possible authoritativeness. So, when they have a crisis happening, they’re going to prefer authority over factors like recency or exact word matches while that crisis is developing. So, this is a way that they fight disinformation, which has obviously been a big problem during coronavirus, and I think that with some of the recent updates that we’ve seen on Google, we’re seeing this actually play out in the search results.

Lily Ray:
So on June 22nd, we saw a really interesting update where I logged in to Sistrix, which kind of reports back on who are some of the biggest winners and losers from the past week. I noticed a trend, which was that a lot of official government websites, health-related websites, and websites that really communicate about hospitalization or just new health updates and medical updates related to coronavirus, they’re seeing really, really big gains after June 22nd.

Some examples of that would be a lot of these are different hospitals around the U.S. We have Broward County, which is in Florida, which is one of the states in the U.S. that’s really suffering from coronavirus lately, the Australian Government Department of Health, and some other kind of official health organizations and websites saw a huge uptick in visibility. So we’re seeing like 120 percent, 170 percent visibility increase on Google compared to the prior week. So that’s a tremendous increase in visibility, and I’m going to talk about what that actually looks like.

So here in the U.S., what we saw on June 22nd was the Center for Disease Control, the CDC, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. Beginning around June 22nd, if you look here at the end of this chart, you saw these huge spikes in visibility compared to anything that we’ve seen pretty much since, you know, since this chart goes back to 2011.

So what does that actually look like in practice? I’m going to show some charts that demonstrate changes in rankings before this update was rolled out and then after. So the main thing to focus on is really what happened with the top couple of results.

So here, this is “hydroxychloroquine,” which is a pretty controversial keyword around coronavirus. There’s some speculation that this is a drug that can help reduce deaths from coronavirus. What was interesting was that before June 22nd, henryford.com was one of the websites that published a study that talked about the fact that hydroxychloroquine can help reduce deaths related to coronavirus. Then after that update was rolled out, you’re going to see this study move down to position eight from position two, and then the CDC and the FDA and WebMD take the top three positions. Those pages have different content than what you would see on the Henry Ford page, almost like debunking what was presented in that article. So I thought that was a really interesting development.

Peter Mead:
Is that more official information? I mean, is it more official sources, more trustworthy?

Lily Ray:
It depends who you ask. It’s a pretty politically charged question, but, you know, from Google’s perspective, what they appear to be doing is really prioritizing content from the CDC, the FDA, and the World Health Organization above almost any other site on the internet on topics related to coronavirus.

Peter Mead:
Interesting that Henry Ford article is still on the first page, theoretically.

Lily Ray:
Yeah, I think they make it very clear that they try to present both sides of an argument, and I think a lot of people do consider that a highly reputable article. So I think they’re just trying to show both sides, but I thought it was very interesting that they basically just replaced that with the CDC.

Peter Mead:
Wow.

Lily Ray:
And so this is true for many different queries. So here we have the query “hand sanitizer.” There’s been a lot of changes on this query this year, obviously, but if you look before the June 22nd update, you’re going to see Amazon, Walgreens, CVS, Office Depot—these are four different companies that sell hand sanitizer, so they’re transactional pages. After that update, you’re going to see the FDA ranking number one, Google’s People Also Ask ranking number two, and then the FDA also ranking number three. Then you start to get into a little bit more transactional queries, but it’s interesting because it was like it went from a transactional query to a query that Google considered almost like controversial and that they want official information to be prioritized.

Nik Ranger:
That’s—if I can just have a comment here—that’s really interesting because like when you look for these kinds of keywords here in Australia, we still get transactional results. One of our clients, Officeworks, is I think still in like the top one to two position for “hand sanitizer,” and it’s a massive driver of traffic and all things. So it’s really, really interesting that like for a keyword like “hand sanitizer” in the U.S., that it’s now like government.

Lily Ray:
Yeah, we did have some issues here where there were certain hand sanitizers that were labeled as dangerous, so that’s kind of probably one of the reasons why we’re seeing this now. But it is consistent with many other types of queries in which we’re seeing the FDA start to take up the first couple of positions, and this is yet another example of that.

So, you know, before the June 22nd update, we had for the query “best online pharmacy” a handful of different pharmacies that I guess naturally earn that ranking because they’re the best or they’re doing quite well. Then after June 22nd, we had the FDA ranking number one. So it was almost Google saying, you know, there’s obviously companies that should be listed here, but before all of that, we really want to make sure that the FDA’s article about how to buy medicine safely online is prioritized above all else. So that was interesting.

So those were some obvious keywords that you would expect to see things like the FDA and the CDC ranking in top positions, but these aren’t the only queries that we’ve seen this happen for, and this really has a ripple effect throughout what we’re seeing in SEO this year. It’s not only health sites who are affected.

So this one was interesting: if you type in the U.S. “frequently asked questions about” and you don’t finish that query, you just enter that query into Google, before the June 22 update, you’re going to see Wikipedia with a page about FAQs in general, you’re going to see Search Engine Journal with best examples of FAQ pages. Now, after the June 22nd update, you’re seeing the FDA as well as the CDC and the IRS, which is our tax department, ranking in the top three positions, and the first two have to do specifically with coronavirus. So we went from talking about the concept of FAQ pages specifically to FAQs about coronavirus, which I thought was really interesting.

Yeah, the same is true and I’ve seen this throughout the year. If you type “art course”—so I didn’t type the word “online art course,” I didn’t type “virtual art course,” I just typed “art course.” In January, we had Nelson Atkins, which I believe is like an in-person course that you can go to and take an art class in person. We had a couple like universities listed and places that you could go to take an art course in person, and we’ve seen most of those in-person classes disappear from the top ten, and we’ve seen sites that offer online courses as well as free online courses really dominate the top ten. So it’s very interesting because throughout the year we’ve seen Google determine that the intent was digital even though the searcher didn’t actually type that.

And the same is true for “grapefruit juice.” I thought this was very interesting. If you type “grapefruit juice” without any modifier, you know, without “nutrition information” or anything like that, previously you had some People Also Ask boxes, you had Healthline talking about the benefits of grapefruit juice, but now we have the FDA appearing in the second position and talking about why to not mix grapefruit juice with drugs. So yeah, so above all else, Google wants to almost like clear the air and make sure that people are not putting themselves in danger, and then we can get into the nutrition facts about grapefruit juice.

And lastly, we have “earn degree.” So kind of like “art course,” previously we saw college degrees and people really recommending like best colleges and universities to go to to earn a degree, and we’ve seen that same thing happen where Coursera here is an all-online course website that actually moved from position 18 to position one throughout the course of the year, and we’re seeing some other similar results where places that you can go to get a degree online are going to be prioritized above places that you do it in person.

So these are just a few examples, but you have to imagine this is happening on a very large scale across trillions of keywords. So if you’ve seen major fluctuations in your performance this year, that’s one thing to keep in mind is sometimes someone who Google just deems is more relevant for people’s current situation is going to outperform your content. So we’ll talk about how we can actually adapt to that.

Okay, next slide—there we go. So from my perspective, SEO is getting increasingly competitive. This is true year after year, but I do believe that E-A-T is more important than ever. I also think that especially when it comes to coronavirus, you can’t fake good E-A-T. You can’t pretend to be an authority on something that you’re not. Google’s pretty good at determining that, but you can identify where your site is a true expert and authority, and you can choose to focus your SEO efforts there.

So a good place to start is to really do some soul searching and ask yourself on which topics is my brand an actual authority on. So if you do want to dig into the details about how Google actually determines authority, I’m going to talk about some really boiled down, oversimplified ways of identifying that, but Bill Slawski has a much more robust, in-depth article about how Google might do this. So this was a 2017 patent about the mechanisms that Google might use to determine whether a website is an authority on a certain topic, so I’d recommend looking that up if you’re curious about the actual technical mechanisms that they’re using.

But if you want a quick and dirty approach, you can really start to dig into, among many other places, I do think that looking at your backlink profile is going to be a really good strategy. The reason for that is because Google has confirmed various times that E-A-T is driven by links to some capacity. So the people that link to your website, how authoritative they are in certain topics, what language and anchor text are they using to link to you, what pages are they linking to most or subfolders or things like that—I do think that it’s something that Google looks for when it’s analyzing the authoritativeness of a given website.

So what you can do using SEMrush is you can look at your referring domains. There’s this great new authority score that you can look at, so maybe you want to filter by something like 50 to 100 as far as authoritativeness goes, and then you can really dig into like which companies with high authority scores are linking to my site, what pages are they linking to, what anchor text are they using, and what themes kind of emerge from this analysis in terms of what my website is perceived to be an authority on. Again, this is highly simplified, but this process takes like five minutes, so if you want to start somewhere and kind of dig into what your website is an authority on, you can also export your inbound anchor text from the links that are pointing to your website. You can remove the branded keywords—there’s these awesome word cloud generators online or phrase cloud generators if you want to put it into a deck and send it to a client, make it look pretty—but really, like look at what—this is an example from Healthline.com—so what are the trends or the consistent keywords and trends that I’m seeing in this word cloud? You know, things like healthy, health, benefits, foods, blood—you can start to see the common patterns and how people are referencing your website, and that’s somewhere that you could kind of start from when it comes to thinking about keyword research and content ideation.

So I think it’s really important to note that as far as SEO strategy goes, I believe that 2020 is a different animal than anything that we’ve seen in the past. A lot of the processes that I’ve personally used and my team has used have changed this year, so it’s really important to think about how to update your SEO strategy for 2020 and potentially the years to come, just because consumer behavior and the way that people are searching has also drastically changed.

So let’s run through an example of what that looks like. Let’s pretend that we have a blog in which we discuss childhood education. Well, fortunately, we all have access to this free tool, which is Google Trends. I’ve been saying throughout the year, Google Trends is your friend right now. If you haven’t been using it, I do recommend using it a lot more intensively these days, and the reason for that is because there’s somewhat of a lag with a lot of the standard keyword research tools when it comes to emerging topics and breakout topics. Google’s going to be your best source of information as far as topics that are trending in the last day or even the last four hours.

So what I like to do is, let’s say for this example of the childhood education blog, we know that homeschooling is something that’s relevant to our company, we have authority, authoritativeness on this, we can see that it’s definitely a growing trend in 2020. So you’ll enter that into Google Trends, and there’s so many different ways to use this tool—I feel like it’s very underutilized—but one way that I like to use it is I like to export the related topics as well as the related queries, because that’s going to give you that full list of 25 different topics and queries that you could potentially write about.

So once you’ve exported that, you will have your topics as well as your rising topics, and you’re going to see a lot of different topics here. But what I really like to focus on is rising topics, just because things are changing so quickly these days that if something’s a breakout topic, you know that you have the potential to compete for that keyword because it’s something that’s breakout, it’s something that people are searching for right now, so you want to be there when searchers are looking for that.

So I like to look specifically at rising, especially if your website is eligible to appear in Google News. It’s very, very important to focus on breakout topics. So let’s take the example of “homeschooling schedule,” because I feel like that’s on brand for the example company that we’re writing for.

So one thing you can do is you can use SEMrush—I love the Keyword Magic Tool—you can enter in that keyword “homeschooling schedule,” and then you can click on questions. So this is a good place to start when it comes to content and keyword ideation for writing a new article, and I think it’s really important to get away from the thinking that we need to pick the highest possible search volume. I think that’s the way that SEOs have thought for a very long time. I like to focus these days more on trend, because if we see something like this where something’s spiking, I’m not necessarily as concerned about the monthly search volume, I’m concerned about the fact that this is something that people are extremely focused on right now, there’s probably a lot of content ideas where that came from.

So what we want to do is we want to start by entering in that query into Google and kind of assessing what the competitive landscape looks like. So, you know, I chose the keyword “how to plan a homeschool schedule.” I am seeing that people already wrote about this, but what I thought was interesting is that aside from this one right here, which has March 18th, 2020, I don’t see that any of these other competing sites are necessarily speaking to the searchers right now, and I know for a fact that at least here in the U.S., everyone’s talking about homeschooling, everyone’s borderline panicking about homeschooling. So if you can do something with your content that indicates we’re paying attention to August 2020 and your situation—so maybe you know what it’s like to balance a homeschool schedule with working from home or something along those lines—I think that you’re going to compete not only necessarily in terms of how you rank but in terms of your click-through rate, because people are really focused on these timestamps, you know, they’re really focused on is this content that actually speaks to my current situation or is this something that somebody wrote three years ago when we didn’t even know what coronavirus was.

And you can dig deeper with the Keyword Magic Tool. So what I like to do is, you know, let’s say we took the query “homeschooling cost,” because we’re seeing a lot of interest on that topic. You can enter that in, and then you can hit questions again, and you can look for common themes. So things like here in the U.S., I’m seeing a lot of people are searching specifically by state. You know, I’m not as concerned about these relatively low search volumes, I’m interested in the fact that people in Alabama and Tennessee and Missouri seem to have these questions about homeschooling costs. So maybe that’s a topic that we can get into.

And if you assess the competition, you’ll see I typed “how much does it cost to homeschool in California.” There is a featured snippet, there are some URLs that appear to be somewhat speaking about that, but I’m not necessarily seeing people talk about California specifically—even the featured snippet doesn’t mention the word California. So maybe there’s an opportunity to get in here and really talk specifically about what that looks like in California and outperform, you know, the 2018 article in terms of relevance, because I’m really speaking to what that looks like in 2020.

BuzzSumo is another great tool that I like to use for content ideation, so you can enter “homeschooling” into BuzzSumo or other similar tools that talk about trending articles. You can filter by past month, and then you can see what’s the most engaging content on social media as far as homeschooling goes. You can actually drill this down to like the past day or the past week, and that’s a really great place to see what specific topics related to homeschooling that people are interested in, and that can help inform your content strategy.

So another thing to note is that it seems like sometimes Google gets a little bit confused about E-A-T, particularly with the May core update. I think there was a lot of confusion there. So this is just several examples of sites that have seen massive fluctuations as a result of the core updates of the past couple of years, where it’s almost like Google can’t exactly determine if the site is an authority on a given topic or can’t determine if it should be ranking. So you’ll see things like the site drops off in 2019 and then it picks back up in 2020, or the inverse is true for this website, or this website did extremely well in 2019 and then kind of fell off this year.

So if you do get affected by a core update, I think it’s really important to stay the course, keep working on your site, and hopefully you’ll see an improvement as the next update rolls out.

This is one example of a news site called Epic or Epoch Times, and basically this is one really interesting example because over the past couple of years you’ve seen with core updates, again, Google can’t quite make up its mind about whether it wants this site to rank or not, and there’s a lot of controversy on this website. You know, it’s considered a right-bias website, there’s a lot of questions about Google’s political beliefs and whether they surface information from one end of the political spectrum or another. I thought it was interesting that the Wikipedia page for this brand outranks the actual homepage for their own branded term. So this is just an example of—I think that with a lot of recent core updates, Google hasn’t 100 percent figured out what good E-A-T looks like in some categories, or it’s struggling to understand when something is controversial or not. So that’s another thing to keep in mind if you’ve been affected by the updates.

Peter Mead:
I’m just interested about that, Lily, because that’s a branded search you’ve put in there for the Epoch Times, which I find very interesting, that traditionally we’ve thought of branded searches as being, you know, about the brand, but what you’re showing here is showing something.

Lily Ray:
Yeah, that’s why we thought it was interesting too. Someone on my team found this. I think that’s kind of illuminating—if Google is choosing to put your Wikipedia page above your brand name for your brand, there might be some content on the Wikipedia page that speaks to potentially a controversy or something that’s happened to your brand that they might want to surface above your own brand website. So that’s something to keep an eye out for from an E-A-T perspective.

Peter Mead:
Wow.

Lily Ray:
Yeah, so if you want to get into specific tactics around E-A-T, I have so much information online—just Google my name in quotes and then E-A-T and you’ll find dozens of resources out there. But I did really want to focus on kind of coronavirus and what’s happening with that today. But I do want to mention that as far as core updates go, it’s very important to remember that E-A-T is not the only thing that causes websites to get hit by core algorithm updates.

I like to quote my friend, the amazing Glenn Gabe, who says with core updates, there’s never one smoking gun, there’s typically a battery of them. I have to remind my clients of this all the time. It’s always like, “Why did we get hit? Oh, it must be this one page or it must be this one problem.” It’s never that. It’s always a lot of different things, so that’s important to keep in mind.

This is kind of like the five pillars of what we focus on when we’re addressing core updates, so we have content relevance as well as quality, technical issues, of course E-A-T, and even your backlink profile, especially as it relates to whether your competitors have a stronger, more robust, more authoritative backlink profile than you do. I do think that’s something that Google takes into consideration.

Now, something else to consider—a quick pop quiz here. So think to yourselves, what do these keywords all have in common? It’s kind of a trick question. So if you guessed that they all have monthly search volumes of over 250,000 searches per month and the fact that Google’s People Also Ask boxes now rank number one for literally all of them on mobile devices, you’d be correct. So it’s a little bit scary.

Nik Ranger:
I was not getting that.

Lily Ray:
Yeah, it’s kind of specific, but, you know, I wanted to dig in and see like this is so many different topics that we’re talking about here and so many extremely high volume keywords where if you look at the rankings on both desktop and mobile, they behave differently. So you have for “strep throat” a featured snippet, so you say, “Hey, maybe I can compete with this even though it’s the Mayo Clinic.” But what happens when you go to a mobile device? That featured snippet disappears, Google’s symptom card or knowledge panel here on the right becomes almost like the entire top result, where they break out these different tabs into like vertical results that push everything else down, and then People Also Ask becomes number one.

So there’s a new competitor in town, and that’s People Also Ask, especially on mobile. They’re not the most sophisticated search results in my humble opinion. I sometimes am not impressed with People Also Ask—like here we have “What are groceries items? Do groceries mean? Why are groceries called groceries?” Like, really, this should be outranking my content? I don’t know about that, but yeah, pay attention to it.

Peter Mead:
It’s difficult to, when you see those kind of results, it’s difficult because you’re sort of churning up inside thinking, “Oh, I’ve done better than that,” or “My client should be there.”

Lily Ray:
Yeah, exactly, it’s a hard feeling to beat, a pill.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, yeah.

Lily Ray:
So, you know, my famous philosophy is if you can’t beat Google, join them. So this is a great tool by Mark Williams-Cook called alsoask.com. It’s free, it allows you to scrape People Also Ask queries and to export them, so very quick and easy way to start to optimize for that content.

And then real quick, because we’re getting short on time, I just still want to talk about a few sites that have done amazing examples of content pivots in 2020 to account for coronavirus. Number one, we have this website called The Points Guy. This is a travel blog that previously talked about travel deals and the best credit cards for travel and things like that. This year, they’ve completely pivoted to talking about all the different updates related to travel and coronavirus, and I’ve noticed them throughout the year as someone that’s been really dominating the conversation as far as travel goes, so I thought that was a really great pivot.

This is a finance website called Fundera. They built a whole coronavirus section into the navigation. It’s the first thing on the navigation. When you click on it, it’s updates related to your finances and coronavirus, and it’s also a curated list of their articles that they didn’t necessarily write this year, but they’re relevant for people as they go through this coronavirus situation.

We have a tax company called Jackson Hewitt here in the U.S. We had a lot of unprecedented changes in U.S. tax law this year, and they took the opportunity to write a lot of current and interesting, relevant conversation related to some of the changes that have been happening with tax laws.

Similarly, we have a website called Hiscox, which provides small business insurance, and they didn’t necessarily talk about coronavirus on their blog, but they found peripheral searches that people had about their business and about insurance—grants for small business, federal tax deadlines—and they really kept their audience informed about what’s been happening.

And, you know, sometimes you just get lucky. So this is Zoom’s visibility this year. This wasn’t an algorithm update, this was just the fact that Google picked up on the fact that people need Zoom so badly that they moved them into top positions for a lot of very high volume keywords.

And then the last topic, real quick, is Google My Business. So Google My Business is one area—I mean, Google’s been doing a great job as it relates to coronavirus and offering a lot of solutions for website owners—but I do think that’s especially true for Google My Business. They’ve been doing a lot of new features that allow small businesses to communicate with their customers and to provide updates.

So they have, you know, if you log in there, you’ll see “Stay connected during COVID-19,” ways for you to update your business hours, update COVID-19 updates, which is basically just a new type of post that’ll get pinned to the top of your GMB profile. And I did want to shout out a new tool called Post-o-matic by Noah and the Two Octobers and Agency Automators team. It’s an amazing new tool, it’s completely free, Google Sheets add-on, and it allows you to schedule and automate Google My Business posts at scale across a variety of different Google My Business locations, and you can actually do that for COVID-19 updates. So if you have a lot of different locations, you can use this tool to add it onto Google Sheets and schedule out related or updates related to COVID-19 across a variety of different locations.

Nik Ranger:
I had no idea that existed.

Lily Ray:
Yeah, it’s amazing. I know, it’s a game changer. The URL—it says it’s a Google Sheets add-on, so I don’t know off the top of my head, but you can just Google “post-o-matic.”

Nik Ranger:
I’m already on to it, I’ve already got it, you’re Googling it, I will level up. That is so awesome.

Lily Ray:
Awesome.

Lily Ray:
Yeah, so real quick, last slide just to summarize: keep an eye on the search trends that are happening in your industry. There’s been a lot of fluctuations, a lot of new search features. Make sure you’re paying attention to what’s happening on the SERPs. Stay on your toes as it relates to your content strategies, so pivot your content to address your customers’ needs—not necessarily just about coronavirus, but about the unique situation that they’re in with quarantining and everything like that. Don’t just focus on monthly search volume, look at trends and breakout topics, and then really keep an eye on what Google’s doing with new COVID features. You can really set yourself apart if you’re an SEO expert and you’re leveraging those COVID features, because I don’t think they’re going away any time soon, but I do think that if your competitor’s not paying attention to them and you are, it gives you a unique opportunity to perform better.

So thank you, and I guess we’ll move on to questions.

Peter Mead:
That was amazing, that was so good, thank you so much.

Nik Ranger:
Oh, um, yeah, wow.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, it is, it’s—what, a quarter to nine there now?

Lily Ray:
It is indeed.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, that was awesome. I kind of have a comment, if that’s okay, before we get into questions, because I’m impatient and I’m here. I’m just fascinated with the level of work and in being able to pick up and pivot with all these changes that your clients have been able to do. Do you think that having the government literally come out and say that you need to, you know, look at doing, incorporating schema.org into your SEO strategies, do you think that that’s been a real massive help to being able to get them on board? Like, it’s not just you saying it, it’s not just your expertise and you saying it, it’s like also the government is coming out and saying that this is also exceptionally important for businesses.

Lily Ray:
I like using that in my conversations with my clients. I mean, it’s the first time I’ve ever been able to say the U.S. government is literally recommending SEO as a strategy, as far as I can remember. So, you know, it’s not every company is eligible for COVID-19 announcement schema, but at least we can say, like, are you paying attention to SEO because the White House is, and that gets the fire burning for people, for sure.

Nik Ranger:
That’s amazing. I kind of joked in the comments, like, could you imagine our government doing the same? And I think everyone was like, no, no.

Peter Mead:
I mean, I couldn’t imagine here, that’s for sure, but yeah, it’s interesting. It’s interesting when they do, when the government does get involved in SEO, it’s—I mean, I just feel like they really should be saying, you know, please speak to a professional, because it’s often this stuff about, oh, this is what SEO is, and it’s like, specifically for them, but as far as like major government press releases, it doesn’t seem like they’re anywhere.

Nik Ranger:
That’s a no. I’m glad, I hope that trend continues, and I hope we can see some of that here in Australia. And we’ve got some questions, so maybe we’ve got a few questions here in the chat here, maybe we’ll just start at the top.

Peter Mead:
Noa Lerner: So Lily, are you pulling trends data multiple times or once? I’ve heard about the impact of sampling on accuracy of the data that you normalize by pulling the data multiple times. Did John—what’s that about? Do you think that makes a difference to what you’re doing?

Lily Ray:
Not necessarily. I mean, usually what I’m doing with trends data is working really quickly, especially with websites that have Google News eligibility. So we actually work with a few clients where we wake up in the morning and we use Google Trends to see what people need to write about that day, and we send them what the breakout topics are. So we’re not as focused on the hard numbers to the point where sampling would cause a big problem, we’re more focused on what are the specific questions that people are asking in the last 24 hours and let’s try to write about that. So I haven’t really thought about sampling too much with that.

Peter Mead:
Well, that I guess follows on a little bit to the next question I always had in my mind about, you know, just—I mean, how do you show the data to the clients? You know, the search volume or the keyword difficulty, do you just sort of say, look, take this with a grain of salt now?

Lily Ray:
Yeah, what’s been interesting is we’ve had a few, with publisher clients especially, we’ve had a few examples where there was no data, there was no search volume data, there was almost no trend data, but we knew people were going to be searching this next month, and that’s just based on your gut. I mean, like in 2020, things are completely unprecedented, so you don’t always need to say this keyword has 4,000 searches a month, so we can expect to get this much traffic. If you know everyone’s talking about this topic and we know that it’s on brand for us, we know we’re authoritative on it, so we should have some content on that.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. Nik, what’s—what other questions do we have?

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, I think this next question is also mine. So my question was, do you use tools to sort of check—wait, what tools do you use to check trending keywords? And maybe is there anything that you check that maybe will trigger keywords that increase like X percent over some time? Is there—basically, is there any way you can automate this stuff rather than manual check?

Lily Ray:
Yeah, there’s a couple different tools that I use. So Google Trends is the first one, obviously. I like keywordtool.io, it’s a relatively inexpensive tool that has a couple different search engines on it, so it’s not just Google, it has YouTube, Amazon, Instagram, Pinterest, I think, and Twitter, which is really helpful because when you’re doing this type of research, you don’t just want to stick to Google’s search volume data, you really want to look at trends, and social media is a great place to look for that. So I think it’s helpful to look at those different—how people are searching across social media. Pinterest Trends is another tool that you can use if people are looking for something visual. But yeah, I think I’ve been more focused on social media metrics and social media trends and topic analysis this year than I ever have before, just because things are so volatile.

Nik Ranger:
Awesome, thank you so much.

Lily Ray:
Sure.

Nik Ranger:
Cool, well, the next question—yeah, do you want to take that one or shall I, Peter?

Peter Mead:
You go ahead, I mean, I have a similar question to back this one up, but I understand where Daniel’s coming from. Please, go ahead, Nik.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, so Daniel Chung’s question is: How is E-A-T applicable to a service-based small business where the owner has very little online presence and will probably not have much?

Lily Ray:
Yeah, Google actually just published something about this today. You know, E-A-T is, yeah, E-A-T is increasingly important the more that you get into Your Money Your Life topics. So if you talk about cancer treatment or you talk about coronavirus, you have the highest level of expectations as far as E-A-T goes. Beyond that, it’s not the most important SEO strategy. If you’re truly a small business and you have a name, address, and phone number, and you have some good reviews on Google My Business, you don’t need to be like the best bona fide expert in that category, assuming that you’re not doing like heart surgery or something that’s really life or death. But I do recommend that people that don’t have any online presence start working on it—like now is the time. Especially if you have authors that—a lot of people say, “Hey, we have an author that they don’t have any online presence, but they write for us.” I say, cool, make an author bio for them, talk about how long they’ve been writing for you, talk about why you hired them and what makes them special, maybe link that to the LinkedIn page. So the more you can do about getting that author or that owner’s expertise out there, I think the more that will help in those efforts.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, absolutely, it’s kind of—it’s, I really, really appreciate that you said that. That’s something that I’m working through with one of my clients at the moment, and literally the same kind of thing, saying like, if we’re going to be looking at having a real cracker and being able to leverage E-A-T with all of your content, we need to be able to have specific profiles for a lot of the lawyers that are at your firm, and this is something that we can add with kind of like a little bit of a short CV, we can link it again with LinkedIn, and we can use personal schema to be able to give Google that extra information about what’s on those pages, so that when we’re going through and reviewing all the content, then maybe we can have reviewed by schema or we could have authored by schema, which will actually associate that with their expertise.

Lily Ray:
Sure, and you can link it to things like Google Scholar if they’ve been mentioned in there, that’s a huge opportunity. Anything that you can do to get those people on the Knowledge Graph, which might be easier than you think if they are reputable in their field, that’s going to help improve the perceived E-A-T of your site for sure.

Nik Ranger:
100%. Cool. I think there’s another question from Daniel, do you want to take that one, Peter?

Peter Mead:
So Daniel has also asked how to apply to e-commerce sites that again, they prefer not to disclose their staff or their owners, they’re a transactional, you know, they’re e-commerce sales. What do we do because they don’t want to put that stuff on there, they don’t want to, you know, they’re not interested in the Knowledge Graph per se.

Lily Ray:
Right, right, right. So I think you don’t necessarily need to disclose the author names—that might be a controversial statement, but I think that that’s not especially true for e-commerce. Like, what’s more important for e-commerce as far as E-A-T goes is that the customer has a good experience on the website and they have a good experience with your brand. So one thing to keep in mind with structured data is that they actually, for the author structured data, they allow you to designate whether it’s a person or an organization. So some brands choose to write things on behalf of the organization. You know, if you sell hiking boots at REI, you don’t need to be the world’s best expert on hiking boots. People need to know that your brand has good hiking boots and a good return policy and good customer service and things like that. So focus on the brand E-A-T in that case if people don’t want to disclose their names.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, 100%. Again, like, I’m working pretty closely with one of our major e-commerce retailers here in Australia, and like exactly what you just said, like, I kind of don’t really worry about, you know, who writes the content necessarily, but it’s really like proving, you know, the brand authority, like, and that they’re trustworthy. So exactly what you said, like, this is where maybe I will be a lot more, I will scrutinize the product pages to the nth degree because I really want them to be able to have descriptions that resonate with their target audience, I want to have specification, I want to have reviews associated with that, and that’s where you can have like the aggregate rating schema associated with that. Trusted buyer information, return policies, like you also mentioned, like, have a product schema with nested manufacturer information, if you can be able to add that to that, that’s also a really, really great one. And this is now sort of like in the realms where with the client, we’re working through this really, albeit very slowly, but I’m also trying to encourage them to maybe consider things like, you’ve got “add to cart,” but you might also have a wish list, kind of what eBay here in Australia does. You know, especially during COVID where we’re having different waves come through, it’s really, really important that we give users a lot more options to be able to purchase, especially in so much uncertainty.

Lily Ray:
For sure.

Peter Mead:
Hey, Lily Ray, I have one more question for you. Now, I’m very interested because what I’m really interested in is this whole thing with coronavirus. Now, it’s a pandemic. Theoretically, this is all going to be over at some point, right? So where do you see—I mean, it feels like it’s going on and on and on, but I’m really interested in knowing what’s your crystal ball, like, what do you see in the future for us? Do you think, you know, is this going to continue for some time to come? What happens when it does all go back to normal? I mean, everyone’s done all this work to optimize for coronavirus, now they’re going to have to optimize for other things. What does your picture of the future look like?

Lily Ray:
It’s a big question, but as it relates to SEO specifically, I think that these processes that we’ve talked about today should be done for as long as things are in somewhat of an unstable place where people’s behaviors and attitudes and questions are rapidly changing. Even if it stops being around coronavirus, I imagine there’s going to be a lot of questions about health in the future and transportation and traveling and everything like that. So it’s really important to stay on top of the trends. I don’t think it’s going to be a situation where you have to undo a lot of things. Maybe if you built coronavirus into your main navigation, that takes a little bit of legwork to move it away eventually, but I think it’s important to stay on top of breakout trends and one step ahead of what your customer is searching for pretty much indefinitely, regardless of what happens with coronavirus.

Peter Mead:
Wow. Well, look, we’re almost out of time. Nik, do we have one more quick question?

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, we’ve got one more question, yeah.

Peter Mead:
All right, speedrun.

Nik Ranger:
Noa Lerner asks, what kinds of tools can be built out around web translate—anything sexy? Oh jeez, putting us on the spot.

Lily Ray:
We’re working on it. We have some visions of tools that will pull in breakout trends by category, so that we can kind of tell our clients these are the hot topics that are happening today, but we’re still working on it because the Google Trends API is a little bit complicated, so getting there.

Nik Ranger:
Oh my gosh, and will this be open source? Will I be able to use it maybe for Australian data just in the future?

Lily Ray:
We’ll see how things play out, but that would be nice for sure.

Nik Ranger:
That is so epic because at the moment it’s like, you know, what are your options? You’ve got Data Studio, you might have Exploding Topics, or you’re just kind of like manually going into Google Trends based on intuition. So I, and I’m sure everyone else that’s on the chat right now, is going to be really interested to see what that looks like.

Lily Ray:
Keep you posted.

Peter Mead:
We’ve had some great questions and thanks everybody for tuning in and joining in with the webinar with talking—excuse me, father, my story—and so thanks so much, Nik Ranger, for co-hosting and this fascinating topic. This is something—I think this topic and everything you presented, Lily Ray, we can really pivot off these topics and this can become a real central piece of how we can go forward, so thank you so much for presenting this for us.

Lily Ray:
No problem, thank you so much for having me, it’s been an absolute honor.

Nik Ranger:
Awesome, have a good day in Australia.

Lily Ray:
Thank you so much, and have a good night.

Peter Mead:
Awesome, take care everyone, see you next time.