With all the algorithm changes and new SERP Features that Google has released, and now the addition of Magi, Chat GPT and other AI, Digital Marketers, SEO's & PPC specialists are likely all struggling with imposter syndrome - at least to some degree. This presentation includes information about what causes SEO Imposter Syndrome and how you can facts to fight against it.
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WHAT IS IMPOSTER SYNDROME IN
DIGITAL MARKETING?
Feeling anxious about your ability in digital
marketing, especially SEO, in a way that limits your
sense of personal fulfillment and satisfaction with
your job. Feeling like a ‘fraud’ or a ‘phony’ when you
are working or talking about work with clients,
colleagues & stakeholders.
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WHO CARES?
• Choosing Projects
• Avoiding Burn Out
• Building Tools
• Designing Systems
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• Retaining Employees
• Motivating Employees
• Anticipating their Pain Points
• Adapting Communication
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BUSINESS CULTURE &
IMPOSTER SYNDROME
Limited Budgets
& Dev Time
Business Goals
Conflict with SEO
Needs
Job Role –
Agency, In-House,
Freelancer
Professional CYA
by Teammates &
Managers
Misunderstanding
of Limitations
Mistrust of SEO
Lack of
Promotion/
Recognition/
Feedback
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GOOGLE’S BUSINESS INTERSTS
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THE NATURE OF ALGORITHMS IS ‘IT DEPENDS’
• Query
• Locations
• Languages
• Devices
• Time
• Industries
• Levels of Competition
• Platforms
• Site Problems
• Dev Capabilities
THE NATURE OF ALGORITHMS IS ‘IT DEPENDS’
SEARCH RESULTS
CHANGE BASED ON:
SEO RECOMMENDATIONS CHANGE
BASED ON
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GOOGLE’S BUSINESS INTERSTS
MobileMoxie.com
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THE NATURE OF ALGORITHMS IS ‘IT DEPENDS’
• Query
• Locations
• Languages
• Devices
• Time
• Industries
• Levels of Competition
• Platforms
• Site Problems
• Dev Capabilities
THE NATURE OF ALGORITHMS IS ‘IT DEPENDS’
SEARCH RESULTS
CHANGE BASED ON:
SEO RECOMMENDATIONS CHANGE
BASED ON
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GOOGLE’S BUSINESS INTERSTS
MobileMoxie.com
@Suzzicks
THE NATURE OF ALGORITHMS IS ‘IT DEPENDS’
• Query
• Locations
• Languages
• Devices
• Time
• Industries
• Levels of Competition
• Platforms
• Site Problems
• Dev Capabilities
THE NATURE OF ALGORITHMS IS ‘IT DEPENDS’
SEARCH RESULTS
CHANGE BASED ON:
SEO RECOMMENDATIONS CHANGE
BASED ON
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• More Click
Options =
Decrease in Click
Volume
• GA & GSC Count
this as Organic –
But What about
other SEO Tools?
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Real Results Show what
Analytics Cover Up –
Especially If:
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You are not
looking at real
search results
You are not
looking at
mobile search
results
You are not
looking at local
search results
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KNOW YOUR SITES ‘NORMAL’
• SEO Problems
• SEO Histories
• Web
Platforms
• Developers
• Content
Teams
• SEO Budgets
• PR Resources
• SEO Tools
• Social
Support
• PPC Support
• Data Resources
• Brand
Awareness
• Testing Sites
• Partner Sites
• C-Level Support
• SEO Teams
• Hosting &
CDNs
• Legacy Code
• Business KPIs
• Offline
Marketing
• SEO Strengths
• In-Links
• Products &
Prices
• Competitors
• Reputations
Competitive Analysis is Great, But Don’t Take the Comparisons Personally –
They All Will Have Different:
117. REMEMBER:
THERE ARE LIMITS TO WHAT
SEO CAN DO
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Set Realistic Goals
Sometimes, it will be easier to rank content on another site – rather than your own
People are more productive when they are happy and feel empowered.
People are less productive when they feel like imposters.
Just like you can optimize it,
3/178,234 = 0.0016%
If there are actually 30, that is 0.016%
Even if there are 12-15, that is still 15/178,234 = 0.0000841590 or 0.008%
And this is tough because of you are skating to where the pick is going…
It is now EXPONENTIALLY further out than it has ever been, and it is still picking up speed.
Normal Anxiety
Juniors & Novices
Know-it-alls
True Experts/Specialists
There are always going to be people who feel anxious and inadequate in any situation…. And the opposite. There are also people who are just really comfortable with their skill levels, and don’t feel imposter syndrome. Maybe you think you might be the one person in the room who has never felt imposter syndrome, and now you have Imposter Syndrome about not having imposter syndrome…. And you are wondering if you are the real jerk in this situation. No.
Everyone is approaching their job with different backgrounds and situations. Different strengths and different weaknesses. Some people might feel confident about work but have Imposter Syndrome about other aspects of their life. You can really never know what everyone is up against on any given day. This talk is to let people know about the ways that Imposter Syndrome could be impacting you, or people on your team or people that you work with so that we can all come to every situation with more ….
Business Culture
Limited Dev Budgets/Time
Mistrust/Misunderstanding
Balancing Business Goals
Misunderstanding of Limitations
Different Job Roles – Agency/Inhouse/Freelancer/Specialist
Limited Feedback/Rewards/Recognition
Professional CYA - Not Admitting Mistakes
Manager CYA & Condescension
Dev CYA & Condescension
Industry Culture
Twitter
New & Shiny Things
Popularity, GroupThink & Gatekeeping
Bad/Old Advice
Poor communication – AKA Boasting & Shit Talking
Speakers & Popularity
-You don’t have to speak, write or do anything publicly to be a great SEO. But if you are not doing things publicly, don’t expect the public recognition. That is just not how things work. If you have great thoughts and ideas that you are not sharing, that is fine, but you can’t expect to get recognition for it.
On the other hand if you want to be more public about your knowledge and ideas, that is great. If you want help – all you have to do is find people who are already doing what you want to do – or some variation of it. Most people in this community, and especially at this conference, are incredibly nice.
Bad & Expired Advice - Things are constantly changing, and there are many different levels of understanding with SEO. You really have to know who to trust, and even then, ask questions, and do your own research.
So much of the process of SEO is nuanced but the nuances can seem vague, imprecise, or risky. I think a lot of the problems come from people who are writing and speaking, and they have to gloss over details, other things that were going on, other things that they tested, or other things that could have impacted results. That doesn’t make a good talk. I can tell you that 100% - my case studies are simplified to make sure that my point is clear. I want you to understand the logic and thought process much more than I want you to focus on the details. Every situation is going to be different, so at some level, the details would make the story more confusing. But this is exactly why you should be really considering the quality and goal of the communication – It is always going to be designed to be simple and easy to digest for people at all different levels of SEO understanding.
Poor Communication – Bragging / Shit Talking
Google Tells You What they Want to be True – Not Necessary What is Actually True
Links Don’t Work
Link Disavows Don’t Work
Big Brands Don’t Get Unfair Ranking Benefits
Schema doesn’t Drive Rankings
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/big-tech-revenue-profit-by-company/
And when we think about how good some of Google’s technology is, it seems obvious that they are not working hard to give us more insights with their technology.
Google gives us just enough so that they can say that they are not ignoring us, but it is not great, and they only sort-of think they owe it to us, since we are basicllay just making their lives harder \ .
And when we think about how good some of Google’s technology is, it seems obvious that they are not working hard to give us more insights with their technology.
Google gives us just enough so that they can say that they are not ignoring us, but it is not great, and they only sort-of think they owe it to us, since we are basicllay just making their lives harder \ .
Even when people are paying for ads, Google is not bending over backwards to even help people evaluate their ad spend with Google – recently disabling some of the attribution models for ads that companies have relied on for years.
So they don’t give us the best technology, though in fairness, it is free, and they give us the Webmaster team – the most well known of which are shown here – Garry, John and Martin, – and their may be as many as 15 or 20 people that are actually in roles like this for different languages, populations and products, BUT, these guys are stretched very thin, and don’t seem to be super empowered to help or explain things beyond the basic party line.
In fact- if you do the math, assuming 15 people on the Webmaster Team,
Even if there are 12-15, that is still 15/178,234 = 0.0000841590 or 0.008%
It is still only 0.008% of their work force.
I hate to say it but it is a bit of a fig leaf – Just so that they can say that they tried.
I hate to say it but it is a bit of a fig leaf – Just so that they can say that they tried.
Google has more massage therapists at just their San Jose office….
Or at least they did – before the most recent round of layoffs, when 24 massage therapists from the San Bruno office.
Before the most recent round of layoffs.
But maybe that helps put things into perspective – Historically, Google cares more about easy access to massage therapy than they do communicating about SEO to webmasters.
So Google has to protect their best interests, and for SEO, the main thing is not helping SEO’s but Preventing Manipulation of Results.
To this end, they end up giving us
Vague & Unclear Guidance
Self-Interested Instructions & tools
Minimum Viable Responsiveness
And if you think SEO would be hard even if we hard better tools and guidance – you are absolutely right!
It is hard by design. Algorithms intentionally have many variables to make the system hard to game. That is by design.
And the search engineers have admitted that they don’t always know how things will pan out when they make changes. When Mobile-First Indexing launched, they thought it would take a long time for their crawler to speed up the time between the first and second phase of indexing, but Martin said they were all surprised at how quickly it improved.
There is Machine Learning in the systems that …. Makes predictions just that – a best guess, but there is also an element of wait and see. So if they don’t know exactly what will happen when they make changes to the algorithm, how could you know with certainty that making certain changes on your site will have the exact impact that you want or are hoping for.
A lot of the feedback I got on the internet is that you can know you are not an imposter if you are driving result – and this can be true over time, in a macro way, but it is more about trying and failing until you get it right, rather than failing and giving up. It is about Persistence and making the right educated guesses over time – but you will never get it right every time.
In game theory that you might use for a strategy game like poker, there is this concept called RESULTING & it is useful here.
Judging a decision based solely on the outcome or the result is RESULTING – it is seductive but not useful, because it is a near statistical impossibility for you to win every hand of poker you play. You will lose or have to fold some hands.
SEO is like this. You have to plan on making the best educated guesses you can with the data and resources that you have. The goal is to keep making good educated guesses, to beat the odds and win the most over time. Your goal is only to know the odds, and make the best guesses you can – even when you might get it wrong. You are playing the odds, and not expected to be perfect. There are just too many unknowns.
So if you make a good educated guess, even if you get it wrong, you have still done your job, and you just move on to the next best educated guess.
Algorithms by their nature are full of different variables, and that is why the response ‘it depends ‘ is stock and trade, to the point of being a joke.
It is not a simple, linear equation, where you only need to know X to solve for Y – you need to know LOTs of things to make a guess about how well any one strategy will work.
So let take a moment to understand and embrace this idea – The only reasonable way of conceiving our job is in a best guess model. You can know what is likely to be causing problems or what will likely solve problems, but you can’t know for sure.
And after you have been in the industry long enough just hearing Google say things like “Just make great content” feels like gaslighting – especially to the people who are really trying hard at SEO and not succeeding, because you know what you are up against, and you are already doing your very best, and you’re like
Hey Google – Can you please be a bit more specific? ‘Cause I already know that I’m awesome, my content is a awesome and my website is awesome – so your advice is just not working.
And what I mean here, is sampling from Google – in Search Console.
Pages can rank consistently in position one but not get consistent traffic. Why would that be?
And why would something that is consistently ranking in the same position, or nearly consistently, get different CTRs – ranging anywhere from 62% up to 87%?
In PPC that would be a pretty variable CTR, but we just write it off in SEO – why? Maybe it has to do with the day of the week – or something like that. Could be.
So this is kind of a problem - you are super stressed out.
What are you going to do
How are you going to explain it
And why did it take this long for you to notice?
But if we take a look at the actual result, we can learn a lot more that Google might not be telling us about that ranking.
The same page is ranking with a different presentation – in this case different every day for 4 days in a row. Maybe they were testing things? But the page itself didn’t change.
Now FYI – on desktop, the images are usually the second one – from 4/2. In this period that one occurs from the 1st-3 and it switches to the blue image on the 4th. Also, on desktop, this result is consistently above the map pack instead of below.
And FYI – ranking in position 1 organic doesn’t tell us as much as it used to when it was a predictable size and a predictable distance from the top.
Google changed their contextual understanding of this keyword, and it had nothing to do with your site, the competitors site or the algorithm. It had to do with the context.
16-27 – Knowledge Graph
16-27 – Knowledge Graph
16-27 – Knowledge Graph
What if it is a change in Understanding?
Lets say you are the SEO at Home Depot, and you see this – A clear increase in rankings on one of your top keywords, ‘lawn mower’ – Awseoms
But then you check and see that your direct competitor Lowes saw about the same thing. - That is weird. Why?
Check the news and see that the Product Review update rolled out then. Ok – win. Not a lot of tracking tools showed changes even though some sites were hit hard by the updated. Weird, but we did well, so that is still a win for us. Right?
Here is the problem – when you look over time, organic traffic is trending down, while organic keywords are trending up. How can that be?
Even on this specific keywords – Rankings go up while traffic goes down. Maybe it is seasonal?
So it is critical that both you and they really understand the data.
Because data is absolutely not the same as understanding.
Our rankings didn’t seem to have changed so…… First thought – easy win – blame PPC.
You got to look at some historical search results to see if there are more PPC ads than normal… But that is not it – there are also WAY more refinements in the search, and way more ‘Shopping Packs’ that people can click on and get to a product Knowledge Graph.
So ya, sometimes PPC is taking up lots of space, but there is something else.
But Google is taking up more and more of the SERP when they understand it, and are trying to understand your Journey. All the things here in Yellow are Google journey refinements or Google content, like maps.
Google is building out the shopping experience with loads of filters and refinements that appear to be part of MUM – potentially the multi – task aspect of it. Search + Click on Filter.
Google is filling the result with shopping packs grids, and with all these collections, filters and refinements.
Shopping grids look like PLAs, which we know get more clicks than regular PPC, because of the images & stars
It is part of the Journey, but it is also something that they can monetize, even with a free listing were they don’t get a cut – the data is valuable.
But these Are Organically Ranked (aka, ‘placed’) & DO Drive Organic Clicks – BUT when there are this many options on a page, it will drive down the click volume – potentially for all listings. BUT these May or May Not get tracked in rank tracking tools like SEMrush & others.
Google Maps
Google Shopping
Clicks are lumped in with organic in GSC & Ga – so you might miss this, if it is not a large enough % of traffic to impact averages.
You can mess it up, and if you are not watching it, you might wonder where the Clicks went.
If You Are Not Optimizing for it, You Might Not Even See It
What if it is a change in Understanding?
Just like you can optimize it,
Lets say you need something simple like a navitation update.
You tell the devs that you need the nav to be made of Crawlable links that are HTML & not JS.
Google says they can crawl JS, but we know it is only so-so.
Just like you can optimize it,
They sort of did it,
Sometimes, you might need to go into history & look at screenshots & rendered/unrendered source code.
You all of a sudden notice a loss in rankings to your Los Angeles page. Dev’s say that they haven’t touched it.
Just like you can optimize it,
Just like you can optimize it,
Track Changes to your Pages & Code
Makes Attribution After the Fact Much Easier
Gives You Proof When You Need It
MobileMoxie has these tools.
Looking at real results will give you better proof that really resonates with your audience.
It will also help you feel less like a snake oil sales person – and you won’t have to say ‘it depends.’
It will also help shift your expectations and predictions to be more realistic.
MobileMoxie can help
