Update – What have I been up to?
12SHARESFacebookTwitter It has been a while since I posted on here, but I’m actually writing up all of my content / editorial on Mr Jonathan Jones. This is my resume website, as well as my blog where I’ll be talking about all of my digital activities. I am also running an energy comparison website called Energy Switching. It has been doing great actually, and it is what has prompted me to setup a company in the name of ‘Switching Limited’. Paid search I am also getting into the paid search space, which is interesting as I’ve always mainly focused on search engine optimisation. However, it is proving to pay some good dividends, as I’m able to quickly get into spaces which are fairly competitive. Below is for the term [energy comparison]: Arguably, I’m not showing up all of the time — and I am definitely in the testing phase at the moment, but so far the site is making a profit, and I’m keen to build it even more. This, and my laziness to post, is the reason why I’ve not posted too much on the website here....
![Can I rank for the term [Jonathan Jones]?](https://vlexo.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/MrJonathanJones-240x240.png)
Can I rank for the term [Jonathan Jones]?
14SHARESFacebookTwitter So just last week, I created a vCard website, which also has a blog on it called Mr Jonathan Jones. Why did I create this website? Well, first of all, I’m looking to up my game on freelance & consultancy. Having a memorable domain and more professional named service is something I’ve struggled with, with this domain name and others that I own. It’s quite easy for me to say, go to ‘MrJonathanJones.com’ if I’m at a conference, and that can be easily remembered given it is also my name, so will come up often when speaking to potential clients/contacts. I can also use the website as a point of reference in the future if I decide to do any presentations at any sort of conference and try and earn recognition within the industry that way as well. I eventually want to develop this out a bit more (freelancing) and now that I have my own office, I can do this with more comfort, let’s just say. You can see a picture of my home office below: I want to rank for my own name The second reason why I’ve created MrJonathanJones.com is because I want to rank for my own name. My ambition is at some point in the future, I’ll be able to either Google ‘Mr Jonathan Jones’ or ‘Jonathan Jones’ and my website will appear. That’d be impressive in my honest opinion. However, I do have some competition – the likes of a Guardian journalist who shares my common name. Using, ‘howmanyofme.com’, I can see that my surname is the 5th most popular in the US, and my first name being the 119th most popular, so a good indicative guide as to how popular/common my name is. You can see from the search results below that the journalist appears to dominate, but also there is someone who works for the Civil Service, and they have their own page on a government domain – so tough competition! I am looking to consolidate my blogging effort to Mr Jonathan Jones I have about 3 blogs, and I’ve got to that point where I no longer have time to update any of them. If I can consolidate, then it’d give me more time, as well as an extra push to update my blogs more frequently. I’m off to a very good start with Mr Jonathan Jones, as I’ve gone somewhat viral with a post I published on Twitter last week on Thursday around a Google Data Studio template I created that anyone can use – which sort of aides and replaces the new Google Search Console, Search Analytics...
Catching up with Google’s Gary Illyes in Brighton
15SHARESFacebookTwitter If you headed over to Brighton SEO this September, you’ll have seen that the keynote speaker was Gary Illyes at Google. Jennifer Slegg asked some really good questions during the keynote Q&A! Though as Gary can’t really give away much, there were not very many actionable things you could take away. Other than it is pointless to ‘chase the algorithm’, off the back of the comment that 95% of algorithm updates are not actionable. I walked up to Gary after for a chat, and managed to get a picture too, but also attempted to ask some questions and listen to others questions. The answers he gave were a little more detailed than what was stated up on stage, so it was a real good bit of insight that most others didn’t get. Gary was previously an engineer for the search ranking team, so he does know a thing or two, but whether he gives anything away is another detail however. Does AdWords interaction have any sort of impact on Organic Search? My question to Gary was around AdWords impacting Organic search. At first when I asked this question, he stopped me before I could complete the question. The question was not whether the AdWords team interacts with the Search engineers, but rather, do the Search team at Google recognise a relationship between AdWords behavior impacting/influencing click-throughs to organic results. Gary’s answer was an immediate no to AdWords impacting organic search. I had to clarify and follow up with a more detailed question off the back of that question, which I did.. There are not too many public cases where site owners have given away the fact that AdWord results has had an impact on the results in organic search, with specific regard to the brand in question appearing. There is a case study with eBay, in fact, from 2013 showing the CTRs for brand searches, and what the impact on organic CTR looks like when turning off AdWords. You can guess that it increases, as people will look for the brand in the organic results. But what about for generic results, and how does impact rankings over-time? The interesting thing for me is that Gary mentioned at the conference that Rank Brain, the mysterious machine learning algorithm, is an algorithm that looks at “historic trends” in Gary Illyes’ own words. As an aside to this, outside of the Q&A on stage, I was with others asking questions, and whilst I did not bring the up the question, he did bring up the terms ‘head tail’ and ‘long tail’, which makes me think that Google categorises their data sets in this way...
The Growth of Featured Snippets (2016 – 2017)
9SHARESFacebookTwitter Featured Snippets was a pretty hot topic back in 2016, especially in the Finance sector, an area that I work in. It’s only just begun in terms of the topic really as we’ve experienced 700% growth in terms of Answer Box/Featured Snippet appearances in this area. Google are making further changes to these snippets, which I’ll dive into a little below. This article will effectively look at Featured Snippets from my point of view, which is an area that I’ve been working on since 2015. The Featured Snippets came to light in Google’s search results for a relatively small number of queries back in 2014, but then only really impacted my area at the end of 2015. Google Trends Research You can see ‘featured snippets’ has seen its interest over time in Google Trends grow, and that’s likely due to the higher number of appearances and therefore interest in these types of results: Featured Snippet Growth from 2016 to 2017 Across 10,000 or so of the top finance related keywords I am tracking, Featured Snippets show up for 33% of those keywords. This is huge growth of around 700% when looking at February 2016 to February 2017. We’ve only seen the number of these Featured Snippets growing from last year, even for highly commercial search terms, which don’t appear to even have questions showing up that you would think would trigger a Featured Snippet. Either way, I think the growth is quite startling and can even be overwhelming when trying to optimise your content for these queries. You can see the growth visualised in the chart below. We first really spotted them becoming a much bigger thing back in October 2015, and it looks like in October 2016 there has been further growth from that point on wards: What’s the Biggest Challenge with Featured Snippets? As an in-house SEO, my biggest challenge with these is that they change all the time. One day they’ll be there, the next they’ll be gone, or you’ll appear in one, then someone else will, then you will again. You purely take turns with others. However, there are some lucrative terms that have maintained a Featured Snippet presence, and we’ve done some analysis to identify what uplift that brings whenever we do appear in one of the long-term Featured Snippets, and it’s roughly a 2% increase in Click Through Rate, which can mean a huge difference if it’s for very large commercial search terms. This can obviously pay off for the all the work you’ve been doing around it, if you’ve managed to land a highly commercial term. The Future of Featured Snippets We’ve seen huge...
Google Search Console vs Google Analytics (2017 Edition)
12SHARESFacebookTwitter Russ Jones at Moz recently came out with an article around the reliability of Google Search Console data – listing examples of where they had tested some of the platform’s features versus what they saw as the realities. It’s a really interesting read, and it poses the question whether SEOs should even be using the data from Search Console if we aren’t getting the correct information from the tool in question. I am an extensive user of Google Search Console, but also use other tools to validate the work that I do, so reading Russ’ article really does pose many questions. However, in this article, I am purely going to focus on the aspect around the reliability of Google Search Analytics data – the part of the tool that provides web owners with what I consider to be highly valuable keyword data. I am going to keep things really simple, and will compare Google Analytics session data with Google Search Console click data. Comparing Sessions and Clicks If we take Google’s article on comparing AdWords data with Analytics data, then comparing these two metrics, Sessions and Clicks, they will never match 100%, as the two metrics are calculated differently. And that’s just from an AdWords click and Google Search Analytics click comparison, not an Google Organic Click perspective. I think it is safe to assume that PPC Clicks and Organic Clicks might be measured similarly in nature, but perhaps there might be more filtering in PPC to remove fraudulent clicks etc. Either way, comparing Search Analytics Clicks to Google Analytics Sessions, should show a fairly close correlation between the two data sets. In short: Google Analytics Sessions data records when a user enters a site, but the browser must first download the Google Analytics JavaScript file, then that must be interpreted by the browser. A session also lasts for 30 minutes, so if a user does a search, lands on a site, then does the same search again, and lands on the same page, then that counts as 1 session. Google Search Console records a click whenever a click is conducted on a listing in the search results – pretty straight forward. Unlike sessions, there are no 30 minute timers, and a Click is classifed as multiple clicks, if even from the same person. From this, you’d expect any data in Google Search Analytics to be higher than Google Analytics. Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7042828#click Examples of high correlations First comparison – a relatively low volume page: I decided to pick and compare a page with a low click count, as Russ mentioned that in their tests, they did analysis that looked at a...
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