June 2023 SEO Industry Updates

Industry News
Jun 21, 2023
By multiple authors
6 minutes read

Google and the search industry had some major announcements roll out in June 2023. Here are the things you need to know from the Conductor Customer Success team.

How Google’s New Search Generative Experience Will Rank Content

By Harris Owusu

The what:

With Google starting to invite more users to try its Search Generative Experience (SGE), people are wondering how this new experience will start to rank their content.

Overall, E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) will still be the main criteria that we need to take into consideration when we are creating content on our website.

The why:

With the launch of Google’s SGE, the way people search is going to change, with more similarity to voice search or being more conversational.

Marketers are now going to need to adapt the keywords we are targeting and the content we are creating to match the customer’s voice and the way they want to consume content.

With the rise of AI, we need to make sure we are creating content for humans and make sure that our content is relevant to satisfy their needs.

For everyone

Wait to see what happens as this can drastically change the search engine result pages forever.
Take a proactive approach and try to scope out how much of an impact the roll out of SGE will have a change on your business. If you’re responsible for the SEO of an affiliate site, travel, eCommerce - try and figure out other ways to diversify your traffic sources.
Start planning how to repurpose existing content but for different mediums such as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc.
Prepare your business for potential changes in organic traffic, clicks, and rankings as SGE begins to roll out.
As new A.I. features begin to be released, monitor your clicks, impressions, rankings, and traffic in GSC and analytics
Moving forward, it could be helpful to have different types of content or media formats to help answer a question on your site as they might all be surfaced in the search results

For Conductor customers

Nothing to do but wait and see what happens in search.
When Google does release it, we need to monitor our priority keywords and pages.
Set up keyword groups and page groups to monitor if there is any decrease in rankings and traffic.
We can also use Explorer to do keyword or competitive research to identify either new content to create to show up in this experience.
We can also use Content Guidance to identify different ways to improve our existing content to make sure we rank high for our target keywords.
You can also use ContentKing to monitor the technical health of your website to identify page speed issues, broken links, and any other technical issues.

Read more about this:

https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-search/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/staying-findable-how-new-googles-search-generative-experience-stone/

Google Debunks The “Index Bloat” Theory

By Alex Carchietta

The what:

Google debunks the "Index Bloat" theory on the latest Search Off The Record podcast. John Mueller mentioned that there are no limits to the number of pages indexed per site and rather than worrying about excessive indexing, focus on providing useful pages for indexing.

Index bloat refers to the idea where search crawlers might index pages that are not necessarily good for search results and therefore it can impact our search rankings overall.

The why:

The theory of index bloat is related to crawl budget or the number of URLs a search crawler will crawl during each visit.

In the past, marketers had to be aware of duplicate content, thin content, incorrect robots.txt files or other issues that might accidentally cause more pages on our site to be indexed then what we wanted.

Google now has a clear stance where index bloat is not something we should be concerned about.

For everyone

Make sure we are creating high quality content for our users.
Monitor our content on a consistent basis to make sure it’s ranking for its intended keywords and getting organic traffic.
Identify using a technical monitoring solution or Google Search Console if there are any issues with our content from being indexed.

For Conductor customers

Create high quality and relevant content for our users that satisfy their needs and matches the intent of our audience.
Utilize ContentKing to determine if the pages on our site are indexable.
Request a Content Audit in the Marketplace to consistently benchmark how our content is performing.
Create Page Groups & Keywords Groups for our priority pages and keywords to understand how they are ranking and generating traffic for these indexable pages.
For underperforming content, use Explorer and Content Guidance for insights on how to improve our indexable pages.

Google's Topic Authority System for News

By Francisco Arnaudo

The what:

Google recently posted an article on its Search and SEO blog to explain how news topic authority works.

Danny Sullivan clarified on Twitter that this system has been in use for several years. The system helps in identifying expert sources that are most useful for users' news related queries in areas such as health, politics and finance.

The why:

While the Topic Authority system isn't new, Google's decision to bring more attention to it holds importance.

The signals that Google looks at related to topic authority are:

How notable a source is for a topic or location
Influence and original reporting
Source reputation

This is helpful for news searches from a local, regional, and global perspective as it allows the user to get the most relevant information they might need based on their search. This will help make sure that the readers are shown the local news results in both Top Stories and other news features based on their queries.

For everyone

Ensure you are writing original content around the event, topic, or story.
Monitor your content and the keywords you are targeting to ensure they are generating traffic.
If you are a publisher, continue to provide great coverage and create content for people first.

For Conductor customers

Create content that is relevant for your audience and provides great coverage.
For additional keyword or competitive research, use Explorer for domain research as you can narrow down the keywords to use in your content.
For competitive research, use Explorer to compare yourself vs a second domain to understand who is stronger at a keyword level, how much and what type of content competitors are producing.
Additionally, in Explorer, move over to the Pages tab. You can apply Keywords Containing filters to view how many pages are ranking for a specific topic. Find content gaps with competitors and assess your coverage around specific topics at a page level.

About the authors

Alex Carchietta

Alex is a Customer Success Manager on Conductor's Customer Success team.

Harris Owusu

Harris is a Customer Value Consultant with a passion for transforming and analysing data. Telling customers compelling stories using data while proving actionable insights. In his free time you'll find Harris supporting his favourite football (soccer) team or out of city hiking and biking.