How Has Google Search Changed WordPress SEO?

Jan 26, 2019 | PressTribe, SEO Tips, Webinars

How has Google Search changed over the years with its search ranking factors? If you’ve worked on SEO over the years you know that it’s grown more complex. Rebecca helps us identify how Google has changed. This video is a shorter clip from a longer webinar hosted by Kori Ashton from https://askkori.wpengine.com and special guest Rebecca Gill.

Full Transcript

Hey, y’all you have found a video on a YouTube channel dedicated to all things WordPress. And specifically, this video is going to be a section of a webinar, a longer webinar, that I did with Rebecca Gill. In the WordPress industry, she’s really looked at as one of the leaders in search engine optimization.

This particular section is all about what’s changed with Google’s algorithm. She highlights a lot of variations that have changed over the years. If you’ve been trying and trying and trying to grow your SEO in the last decade, what does it look like. This is about a 3 – 3.5 minute section from that longer 1-hour video. If you’d like to watch the full webinar I’ll put the link in the description box below. I’ll also put it up here and I’ll put it at the end of the video. Let’s jump into the video right now and catch this section.

How Google Has Changed by Rebecca Gill

[Rebecca] Okay, so in the old days SEO seemed so easy I started with SEO 15 years ago, sales and marketing 20 and it was like, you’ve heard about cowboys coding and that was us in the old days of SEO. I mean we did crazy stuff and magically you could just get to page one and rank.

But then things didn’t quite stick that way. But when we were there we could see page one we could get there. We had all of these dreams and we had all of these expectations, right. And we were given the keys to the castle and we could do really whatever we wanted to get to page one. And there was some crazy stuff that we did to get to page one. And it was really stinking easy back then to rank cause you just had to know a few of the basics.

Why was it easy? Well,

  • Desktop was the only search
  • People only searched for one keyword, maybe they searched for two but there was no more than that
  • We could rank with three hundred words and a piece of content
  • That whole, “not provided” and those Google reports didn’t exist
  • And when we actually saw on a report that we were ranked number one, we were actually number one

And like I said it was beautiful back then. Those were definitely the good days. But then life started to change, you know over the last, really I would tell you five, six years things have shifted.

I’ve run my agency for nine years and when I started with the agency SEO was still pretty dang easy. The economy wasn’t, but SEO was. And then things started to shift.

The technology and the algorithm that Google used became much more complex, Google continues to make updates, They’re updating the algorithm daily actually. They do make major changes a couple times a year but they do daily tweaks and that’s kind of hard to keep up with.

They started giving out penalties, that stinking knowledge graph came where it takes over the page one search results.

Voice search came out and people started to really shift the way that they’re using search.

Mobile indexing started, that just really hit and Google’s moving the way it indexes websites from the desktop versions over to the mobile version.

And then, finally, in just the last few weeks Google started rolling out a “not secure” warning in Chrome.

That’s a lot of changes and it can make people really feel overwhelmed with SEO. It can make you feel like you’re chasing that green dot and the Yoast SEO plugin that you’re not making any progress, that you don’t have any control, and that your life might be stuck with Pay-Per-Click and Facebook Ads.

But, even with all of that and downward slide that you may feel like you’re in, I’m going to show you that there’s a lot of upside to it. Even though we have to deal with things like lack of data and a focus on those plugins and all those Penguins and Pandas and the knowledge graph and personalized search and now semantics search and malwares. I mean there’s just so much, right?

But don’t feel like you are spiraling down a hill and you do not have control of your destiny. Because I want to show you that you really do. I want you to know that you can have a success with SEO and you really can excel with it. And I always want to remind people that they can move mountains with SEO they can win at search and they can bring in lots of traffic. And not just traffic but really highly targeted traffic that really pertains to your website and who you want to serve.

Kori Message

Pretty amazing, right? If you’re ready now to go forward with how to actually do onsite SEO it’s time to catch the full one hour webinar. I have that video totally for free right here on YouTube for you. I’m going to put the link right here. I’ll put the links in the description box below and I will se y’all next time. Bye, y’all.

Full Webinar with Rebecca Gill.