Happy Friday everyone! Let’s learn something together, shall we?

If you are reading this, then odds are good you probably have a website and you’re looking for ways to make it really stand out in a macro way. If not, read on anyway because this week was a barn burner for information that might just spark an interest in taking your website to the next level. Each Friday our team connects at the office to dive into what is new and exciting in the world of digital marketing to advance our collective knowledge. With that in mind, let’s launch right into what we were talking about this week.

Site Kit by Google for WordPress

If what you’ve come here for is breaking news about the world of SEO then congratulations because we’ve got the inside track on something you’re going to love. Google is currently in the beta stages of their latest WordPress plugin tool “Site Kit”. It’s a plugin that will put all of your crucial digital information into one easy to use place. If you’ve ever tried to find your vital statistics before, you’ll know that it’s an exercise in frustration. Information like your search console, your analytics, your AdSense, and your PageSpeed insights are scattered to the winds and if you don’t have a crank and three golden keys then you might not find them at all.

“Site Kit” is aiming to change that into an easily digested format that we are certainly excited for. Again, this is, unfortunately, all in beta currently, but from what we have seen this could be a game changer for the casual SEO enthusiast, and we know that’s you all over.

Google Search Console sending alerts for big ranking, traffic drops

For those of us who don’t check their analytics often enough, which is probably all of us, Google is coming out swinging with a solution. If your site features a substantial drop in clicks from one week to the next, Google is going to tell you about it, and not in a passive aggressive note kind of way, but how funny would that be? Instead what you’ll get is a friendly notice to you that something is changing dramatically in your ranking and that you should be aware.

Internal Pagerank and You

We’d recommend reading the article itself on this one because it does an excellent job breaking down what this is, why it matters to you, how to do it better, and it does it all in an easy to read way. Having said that, let’s try and boil it down. Pagerank is one of the algorithms that Google uses to rank web pages, and in the case of multiple similarly relevant pages, an Internal Pagerank has a hand in which of those pages Google views as most important. Basically, a consistent internal organization can really do wonders to boost your ranking. It has to do with how well you structure your page internally, and if you’re struggling to do it intuitively there are a host of useful programs you can use to break down your site, view your internal structure, and rig it up so that the most important things within your own site come to the fore.

If you’re thinking of a way to take your SEO game from the “beginner” to the “advanced” category this is the kind of thing that will get you there. Give this article a read!

Keyword Cannibalization

Our big topic was Keyword Cannibalization, and it comes down to more than one keyword on your website competing for the same spot in the rankings. This typically comes about when you have a page that is similar to another page on the same site. For example, if you have a blog post about your favourite brand of frozen treats and another talking about exactly what you would do for a Klondike Bar, Google may view those two as being similar enough in terms of content to at best place them together and at worst confuse them enough to change their places in the ranking, causing chaos. If there is one thing about SEO we hope you’ve picked up by this point it’s that chaos in your ranking is bad news for your website.

Cannibalization tends to manifest in one of two ways. The first is when two or more keywords are both just full on competing for the same place in the ranking. Now, this isn’t necessarily the worst thing that can happen to your SEO, but it can have its pitfalls. For example, of course if both pages that are eating each other are on the first page of Google then it’s less of a concern. It doesn’t really matter after all more real estate on the SERPs means more traffic for you regardless of where they actually land. However, in the back pages, it can be possible with two pages that one page that you really want ranking begins to lose its position to the other as Google does its best to put the best page forward without knowing your intent. This kind of wild fluctuation can also cause Google to see both of the sites as less relevant which may hurt your rankings even further.

The second way that cannibalization can manifest is when two or more of your pages begin flip-flopping for the same keyword. Which, again, if they are #1 and #2 may not seem super tragic, but if they are flipping back and forth between #1 and #40 on the rankings then, again, Google may see that chaos as an indicator of the site being less relevant.

So what do you do about this? Well, there are a lot of options both obvious and otherwise, but we’ll let you take a quick look through that article itself for the rundown. There is a lot more to this than our little blog can adequately cover, so give this one a read.

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So, that’s what we talked about in this week’s Education Friday. We hope you got your interest piqued and took a look at what’s shaking in the world of SEO.

Next week: How the imaginary food from the 1991 Robin Williams’ movie ‘Hook’ might just be exactly what your business needs.