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SEO updates you need to know
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Search with Candour podcast
Tracking user journeys for SEO
Season 4: Episode 14
Jack Chambers-Ward is joined by guest Grace Frohlich, SEO Senior Manager at Brainlabs, to explore how to map user journeys and understand customer paths in search.
Grace also shares insights into using AI to create detailed user personas and map motivations behind searches and practical steps for tracking user journeys and keyword tagging to enhance search strategies.
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This week's solicited tips:
Valuable analysis comes from humans, not LLMs
You can't use an LLM to write an analysis of your SEO report.
If you're ✨ lucky✨ , an LLM will correctly describe what has happened in the data, but this is not an analysis.
An analysis will include things such as:
🤖 The context of these movements, for instance with recent Google updates you know have happened - or actions that you or competitors have recently taken that you know will impact this.
🏃 Is it strategically relevant? Does anything need to change, or does the course need to be adjusted?
🔀 Knowing what resources you have (time, people, budget), what are the options from here?
Most of the value is outside the scope of what the LLM is doing.
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How much does your content contribute to traffic?
Google still uses a modified version of PageRank, and the link graph of the web is still hugely important for ranking documents. 📄
🧙♂️ PageRank rarely gets talked about now, but it is still fundamental in understanding the underlying concepts of how search engines think about relationships between pages.
🎙️ Last week, on the SEO Patent Podcast, we covered "Method For Node Ranking in a Linked Database" AKA PageRank: so you can get an easy to listen overview of how it importance scores to documents based on the quantity and quality of links pointing to them, essentially a recursive system where a link from a highly-ranked page carries more weight.
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AI Overviews are changing user behaviour
While not reliable, AIOs will undoubtedly change the expectation of interaction cost for content. With this in mind, I would consider moving gated content to ungated if there is a competing AIO. 🔓
Apart from maybe not even being present in the AIO (so missing out on the click entirely), even if you attract a click, I think the amount of people willing to do this is going to drop over time. 📉
It's still important to get your potential customer into "your" systems, but I feel acquisition needs to add more value. Would love to hear your thoughts.
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How handle discontinued products correctly
Here is a flowchart we devised at Candour that you can use to give general guidance on how to handle discontinued (not temporarily out of stock) product URLs ⤵️
🔃 Direct replacements: If a product has a ‘direct replacement’ (for instance, a cooktop that’s just released a new version with some updated electronics, but it functions the same, fits the same, and serves the exact same purpose), then usually a redirect directly to the new product is acceptable.
It can be a good idea (especially if there is search volume for the old model) to add a clear notice that this is the new version of the discontinued model to let searchers know they are in the right place. You can even be super smart and only show this if the user has followed the redirect from the old version of the product.
🔚 No direct replacements: If a product is discontinued and you only have similar products, it’s usually a good idea to leave the product page up and explain that it was discontinued. If you simply remove the page, a user may then return to search and try and find it somewhere else, perhaps losing you a sale and increasing their frustration.
You can use this opportunity to link to similar products, categories, or even a guide to alternatives to catch new search terms as audiences become aware that this product is discontinued.
↔️ When to redirect/410: At this point, it is worth reviewing every few months to see how search traffic has evolved. If searches for that product persist, it is worth keeping the page live.
In almost all instances, the traffic will gradually die off as demand reduces. At this point, investigate and decide whether the page has any valuable backlinks. If there are no good links, letting the page 4xx (410 Gone) is completely fine, as redirects do add overhead. If there are links you wish to keep, it’s usually best to redirect the page to the most similar asset for the user, whether it is a product, article, or category.
🔄 Update your site: Whenever you’re doing redirects, you want to make sure those pages are removed from your sitemap and you have updated all of your internal links as well.
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Easily digest SEO patents as a podcast
Being aware of patents involved in SEO is a great way to "ground" your knowledge and theories. While not all patents may be used as-written in search, it gives fascinating insight into how challenges are being solved.
🎙️ I run the SEO Patent Podcast, which provides NotebookLM overviews of SEO patents that are easily digestible. This week it's covering the "Using concepts as contexts for query term substitutions" patent which details a system for enhancing search queries by using concepts, which are groups of words with a unified meaning, as contextual clues for suggesting better search terms.
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