Google Core Algorithm Update - What does this mean for your eCommerce business?

Solo episode from Ryan Martin, Host of eCommerce Australia and Founder of eCommerce SEO Agency 'Remarkable Digital'. 

Unlock the mysteries of Google's core update and its implications for your eCommerce venture with our latest podcast episode. 
 
I dissect the March 5th rollout of Google's core and spam updates, discussing how these changes could shape the search generative experience and your website's visibility. The conversation revolves around the significance of E-E-A-T—Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust—in crafting content that resonates with both your audience and search engine algorithms.

Prepare to elevate your content strategy as I share actionable tips on producing distinctive material that Google loves, particularly highlighting the growing importance of video in SEO. 

I tackle the challenge posed by AI-generated content, providing insights on maintaining authenticity and authority in a landscape where originality is key. Through real-world examples, you'll learn how to demonstrate your brand's expertise and trustworthiness effectively. 

Whether you're a digital marketing veteran or a newcomer to the eCommerce world, our in-depth analysis offers valuable tactics to help your business thrive amidst the ever-changing SEO dynamics.

Join 'A Remarkable Newsletter' for weekly high performance marketing and content actionable tips.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:19

Welcome to the Ecommerce Australia podcast. For those of you seeking direct assistance, remarkable Digital is just a call away. Our mission is to be remarkable, doing great things for great people and great businesses. I understand how much choice you have and how many podcasts are out there, so I'm truly grateful you've tuned in. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or topics you'd like covered. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of eCommerce Australia. Nice, short, sharp one here.

Speaker 1: 0:47

You might have heard, or you might not have heard, about the latest core update that Google are rolling out at the moment, called the Google Core Update. Funnily enough, it started on the 5th of March, and here is the absolute lowdown on what is happening. They also released on the same day a spam update, which has just been completed. The core update is still rolling out and will most likely take around a month, so should be finished by the second week of April, and I'll also touch on SGE, the search generative experience, and see where that's up to. So what does the core update? What does this mean? Well, what does Google want? Let's start here. They want users to have the best experience finding the best answers to each individual search query. Fundamentally, this is what they want. If each user or person who uses searches the search engine finds what they're looking for in the quickest amount of time, everybody wins. I'm sure Google would love nothing more than to have all Google ads on the first page. It would massively increase their revenue but wouldn't enhance the user experience and it would not build trust to the user from Google. So this is why they can't and they need that ultimate trust Users can find answers, otherwise people will go to another search engine. Anyways, they've been telling us for years about EAT, which is experience, expertiseise, authority and Trust. Originally it was just E-A-T, but they added the extra E in. So experience, expertise, authority and trust. As e-commerce business owners, we need to understand how this applies to our content, broadly speaking, which includes all of your website copy, your category pages, your product descriptions, your blogs and so on. This is so important to understand and, as I go into the specifics of the core algorithm update, keep this in mind so you can understand why Google is rolling out these updates and how you can improve your rankings and hopefully stay away from the penalties and loss of website traffic and impressions.

Speaker 1: 2:42

The March core update. In Google's exact words today we're announcing key changes we're making to improve the quality of search and helpfulness of your results. Dot point one improved quality ranking. We're making algorithmic enhancements to our core ranking systems to ensure we surface the most helpful information on the web and reduce unoriginal content in search results. The second dot point new and improved spam policies. We're updating our spam policies to keep the lowest quality content out of search, like expired websites repurposed as spam repositories by new owners and obituary spam.

Speaker 1: 3:23

Let's unpack these in simplistic terms that make sense and how we can use these to ensure your econ business continues to rank well. They said surface the most helpful information and reduce unoriginal content in search. What does that mean? It means they want genuinely helpful content. They want original content from people of authority who have the expertise and the experience to help users specific search queries. This is how your e-commerce business can stand out by creating this type of content. This is also where YouTube, seo and video will greatly assist moving forward, especially with SGE, which I'll get into a little bit later, but video is the ultimate way to highlight authority, trust and experience. This also means they'll not love anything that's generated by AI. 100%. You can use AI and you can use chat GPT, but you do need to make it original, play around with it, change it a little bit. You can't simply copy and paste. This would fall under unoriginal.

Speaker 1: 4:29

Google's line here is reduce unoriginal content. In search, ai generated content will be penalized. It is getting harder and harder to tell what is being generated by AI and that is a risk you take when using chat, gpt and AI software. The best way to avoid this is coming from a place of genuine care with your content, genuinely giving great customer service by the words. Advice content, images, videos, podcasts. Any content you create needs to be genuinely helpful. Google also goes on to state we believe these updates will reduce the amount of low quality content on search and send more traffic to helpful and high quality sites. Based on our evaluations, we expect the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low quality and original content in search results by 40%. 40% is a massive number, so hopefully this again solidifies that content needs to be written for the user to be helpful in them finding information about your brand or your products. Really understand user intent. What would the user be wanting to find when they type in that search query in relation to your category or your store or your products.

Speaker 1: 5:47

And lastly, I briefly touched on video, or YouTube SEO. With the introduction of SGE, which stands for Search Generative Experience, looking likely to be rolled out in Australia sometime in 2024, it's time we started to look at what this will do for search. Sge is aimed again at enhancing the user experience and assisting people looking for information. It has shown that it will pull through a lot more media than just search listings, incorporating plenty of content from YouTube as well as other social media platforms, in particular, short form videos. Brands, e-commerce brands that have a great content, suite to include video and regular social media will benefit from more exposure. Content creators and, even more importantly, content creators in your exact category will be the big winners. So if you haven't created content, especially video content, it's time for a strategy here. Otherwise, you'll lose impressions and clicks and be relying on paid traffic to try and get visibility on the SGE SERP. That's it for now. I hope you found this episode valuable and informative.