I Improved Google Rankings by Over 57% (in Only 24 Hours)

you may have noticed some data like this.

You're gonna see your average position climbing.

Now, you might think you produced

some sort of amazing SEO result,

but the truth is this is not what it appears to be

because if you click on Impressions,

you'll see what's going on here.

We're seeing a huge decline in Impressions

and an increase in average position.

Clicks are staying about the same.

Nothing is gonna change there,

but these two data points are changing.

And it's because of the way that Google

is changing its settings within the search.

So you can go here and check this article out

from Search Engine Roundtable.

But basically what happened here is before,

when you were on Google, you could actually set it

so you could see the top 100 results.

And what this allowed tools like Rankability

and other SEO tools to do is they could scrape

the top 100 results.

Well, Google has basically put an end to that.

I don't know how long this will be,

but as of right now, they've made it

so that when you go into Google, for example,

just do an example, and we'll type in something like,

you know, say blue shoes, you'll see,

we'll go down here and there's no longer,

you know, the option for it to show additional results

outside of the top 10.

So you used to be able to just keep going

and it would show the top, you know, top 100.

You could change your settings to do that,

but that's not the case anymore.

So as a result, what has happened is now

all of these impressions have dropped dramatically.

And there's a few reasons for this.

Number one, and I've been saying this for a long time,

these impressions that you see here

in Google Search Console are not always humans, okay?

There's a lot of statistics out there that say

that anywhere between 50 to 60% of all traffic online

comes from bots or scrapers.

And so you've probably also seen some people saying

that this doesn't matter because, you know,

keywords that are ranking outside of page one

aren't that important.

This is why you wanna be able to see

the keywords that are ranking in the top 100.

And keywords that are ranking from positions 50 and beyond

are always the best opportunities for building

more topic support and to ultimately enhance that cluster

and make it stronger, okay?

So the initial seed that we are looking at here is,

you know, does Google penalize AI content?

So what we can do is I've sorted this by position

and I can start to look at some of these topics and see,

are there any topics here that would be

a great additional asset to build?

Or are there any topics in here that would be useful

to inject into that content itself, right?

To enhance it even more, okay?

So what I'm looking at here is a very simple question.

Does Google have an AI writing tool, okay?

So this is a good example of a keyword phrase

that wouldn't really be great for the primary topic

that we found this from,

but might be good for a dedicated asset, right?

And we look through this, another one here,

pure spam penalty.

This is another interesting topic that popped up here.

This could be a dedicated post.

And so what I do is when I'm looking

to build more topic support,

I love looking at these keywords

that are beyond positions 50 and beyond,

because there's almost always going to be a mismatch

between this topic and the page

that is surfacing this keyword.

And if that page was relevant enough,

it would rank better for these topics, right?

And more times than not,

unless it's a brand new page, of course,

but a lot of these topics,

usually it's an indication

that we need to build a dedicated page.

So people that are saying like,

oh, well, this doesn't matter

because the keywords beyond position,

beyond page one don't matter.

They do matter.

And they matter as far as your strategy,

not necessarily to like be tracking them per se,

but to continue to build topic support.

Now, on the topic of tracking, okay?

So tracking has become very complicated recently.

And there's a few things you should be doing to track.

Number one, you should be using Google Analytics 4.

And number two, you should be using Google Search Console.

They're both free.

So we've got plenty available data

we can play with completely for free, okay?

Now, one thing you can do in Google Search Console,

instead of looking at like the quantity of impressions

or individual keywords per se as far as tracking,

a better thing to do is look at it on a URL basis.

So right now I filtered this by URL on one of our websites,

and you can see I can track this performance over time.

You need to focus more on the overall growth of a page,

not just one individual keyword here and there, okay?

And so when I'm looking at a page like this,

let's say I wanna improve this page,

I'm not thinking about how do I improve the rankings

for this one individual keyword?

That's a very old school way of thinking.

What you wanna be thinking about is like,

okay, we've got this URL,

if we've got the content properly structured

and optimized, of course,

now how can we enhance this page

either by adding more relevant topics

or how do we build more support around this page?

So once again, nothing incredibly complicated here.

I'm just gonna go in here, I'm gonna filter,

I'm gonna look at the page itself,

and I'm gonna look at the keywords

where we're not doing particularly well and say,

okay, best agency rank tracking,

an ironic keyword to tackle here,

but for this particular page,

it's about AI search visibility tracking.

So this is kind of close, but not super close.

So building out a dedicated page

makes a lot of sense here, right?

One that we can truly target this keyword.

And this is the way that I start to break it out

and try to figure out, okay,

does this have different intent?

If I was gonna run paid ads to this page,

would it be relevant enough?

Would it convert?

That's where my mind goes and I'm thinking about that.

So if it has different intent,

it's a completely different topic

and you're not willing to run paid ads

on those keywords to that page,

that's a good indication

you should build out a secondary page, okay?

Now, also with the tracking,

I'll show you real quickly just a little preview of this.

This is a little Looker dashboard

that's specifically built for AI search tracking, okay?

So what we've done is we've integrated Google Analytics,

Google Search Console,

and we use this template that feeds into this sheet here,

okay, that can help us track AI generator responses.

Now, this is something that I show how to build

in my new AI Search Tracking and Analytics Certification

inside of Gotch SEO Academy.

So I show how to build this entire thing,

but regardless, anyone can do this.

You just have to sync up all the data from all the tools.

And with a little bit of work,

you can figure out how to do this.

But this is really important.

You wanna start to segment your AI search tracking

from your traditional, you know, organic search traffic,

like traffic, because we wanna segment those out, okay?

Because we wanna be able to see how we're performing

across multiple platforms.

So what we're looking at here is we wanna see

how we're performing basically in AI chat platforms, right?

Anything where there's AI generated responses.

But you also wanna have tracking specifically for SEO,

which means inside of Google Analytics,

you're tracking the organic traffic.

And like I mentioned, you're tracking performance

here in Google Search Console,

which is not always very accurate,

but it's still something you should use

because we have this available data, okay?

So anyway, if you're interested in my new certification,

you can go ahead and just apply.

I'll have a link below.

But I do wanna say one thing about rankability,

just to kind of reemphasize this point

about, you know, a lot of SEO tools breaking.

So you can see before with rankability,

the way it works is we go and extract the top 30 results.

Now, this has affected us slightly,

but not really that much because the way

that our algorithm works in the content optimizer

is that we front load all of the weight

towards the top 10, right?

And actually the further it goes up the top 10,

the more weight that's assigned to the topics

that those competitors use, okay?

So if you go over here and you click on competitors,

you can see, you know, most of the weight

that we're gonna assign

is gonna be towards these top ranking competitors

as far as the topics that they're covering.

So what you can see now is after this recent update,

this is a report that we ran

and you can see the difference is not that much, right?

We can still see all of the relevant topics

that the top competitors are hitting on, right?

All the relevant topics that they're hitting on,

which means if you model the top 10 competitors,

you're still gonna do incredibly well

because they're in the top 10

and they're already doing what you should be doing

as far as topic coverage, okay?

That's the beauty of this tool.

You go in here, you get to see the exact topics

that the competitors are covering,

which then tells you just to be able to play,

you've got to at least cover the same topics, okay?

You need to bring your own uniqueness

and do all that good stuff and, you know, make it your own,

but there is a certain level of relevance,

criteria or minimum that you have to hit, okay?

So that's what happens in RankAbility.

So you'll see the difference now

is this is something we're probably gonna expand out on,

but you can see we're only pulling from the top 10 right now

we'll probably expand out to the top 20, top 25

just to get more coverage as far as potential topics.

But we found no difference between

the just using the top 10 versus using the top 30.

There's really not that much of a difference

because at the end of the day,

you should model who's the best, you know,

for any particular keyword.

So just wanted to give you a quick update on that.

Not a huge, it hasn't really impacted us,

but it is something to pay attention to

and don't get too excited

when you see your average position climbing.

It doesn't actually mean too much.

So just wanted to give you that quick update,

hope that helps.

And if you're interested in my new AI search,

tracking and analytic certification,

go ahead and apply below.

Thanks for watching.