GitLab Inbound Marketing, 15 Dec 2020

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From YouTube: Search Marketing Update 2020-12-15

Description

Quick updates on:
- search engine impressions
- redirects
- dynamic site mapping for public product pages

A

Hey everybody um shane rice here with danielle and I'm just sharing with her an update on a call we had with salt, our seo agency and so I'll just jump right into it. um So on the call today, daniel one of the things we looked at was um not last week, but the week before um google made an algorithm update, a core algorithm update and so anytime that happens, there's always a chance that your domain can see big impact, I'm either positive or negative.

A

So you just kind of have to monitor and see, um and so it's not something you can really look at uh in you know a day or two and see what's happening. You have to have a little bit more space, so um the good thing we're seeing is that impressions are way up for us. So that's somebody searching for a term in our domain coming up uh in google. Those have increased a a really nice amount since the score algorithm update.

A

um So you know what that tells us is that we're rising in the rankings, um but because we're not seeing a similar lift in clicks. Yet that tells us that we're not hitting the rankings high enough where we're going to start to see. You know that one to three position where you really start getting the bulk of clicks.

A

um So that's exciting, uh because you know we we it's the first time we've had this change happen and we can see a demonstrative positive impact uh on about. um So I think that speaks to the work that the team is doing here internally, as well as uh the support we're getting from salt um and the other side of it too is we had the core algorithm update come through and there's no flip-flop, so we didn't go from about.getlab.com when you search for our brand.

A

um So that's positive as well and shows that you know the work we put in uh around september october to fix that is holding and having the intended impact, so really excited to see, um see that right now.

B

Shane, are you able to show any kind of visual of the impressions? I know I don't know how to see that in google analytics.

A

Yeah hold on just one. Second: um salt made a presentation and I'll share my screen, so you can see uh what they have there, um just a sec and so what they did is um they pulled this data from a google search console from the api, and so oh no. This is a different software uh hold on. Let me find the right um salt uh slide deck from this morning.

A

That was for the um domain migration. So, let's see here, where did I put it.

A

Here we go all.

A

Right all right, so this is impressions, so this looks back to uh october one, and then you see the red dot. That's when the algorithm update happens and then the following week. You see our impressions really spiking, and so um you can see on this uh chart here. You can see kind of the trend line um and then um here's what we see for click so.

B

A

And clicks was that which that is good, um you know, and then year over year. This is the impact really of making sure that the about sub domain is served for the result for get lab. um You know last year at this time we were not. um We were not that first result, and so you can see the difference that makes just to getting people to about sub domain, um so so yeah good things there um you know clicks.

A

You know, I think, are still something we're focused on, um but this just shows that the momentum of the changes we're making. um So that was one update.

B

So that I can make sure to connect this back to our okr, so you've got this okr about growing traffic 20 year over year. Obviously we want to do that by producing awesome content, but the truth is momentum around our domain and our authority kind of in our space. That's going to be our big ticket right. So when you think about this, my question is okay. I love that impressions are going up. What what can we do or what do we have control over? That makes the click-through rate go up.

B

So if someone else is watching this video but they'd be wondering well, how do we capture more of that? Do you have any thoughts on just like what what we can be excited for, as we make an impact there.

A

Yeah absolutely so, I think um you know we want to focus on factors that draw people into the page right, so we want to have meaningful titles, meaningful meta descriptions, um and then you know over time as we have that in the lower area. Results and people are finding the answers to their queries.

A

um You know lower in the results, then we'll start to see our rankings go up. Impressions continue to go up and then clicks, as the trailing indicator will continue to to grow there as well. um The other side of the thing to keep in mind too, when we look at clicks right now, is that we're in a time of year, where clicks are traditionally down for sas products.

A

You know if we are in e-commerce, we would expect to see clicks going up right now, um but since we're in the sas space and a lot of our you know, uh customers or potential customers are you know in the hot going into the holiday season? Don't have a lot of plans, for you know changing tools or adopting any new practices. There's just not as much. um You know, click traffic from that so um yeah.

A

I think once we get into uh january and february, we start comparing you over here we can see, you know um how much those you know. Impressions are actually driving more interest in you know adopting gitlab.

B

Sounds great all right, so you said that was just update number one. So what else have you got for me? Okay,.

A

So update number two is, I know when we talked about um you know some of the challenges with um our you know: redirects being managed through fastly through the ammo file and some of the api issues. We've had around that, um and so you know I asked fastly to kind of consider you know put together proposal for the work uh to integrate.

A

You know their sloth tool for seo um tooling and integrate that with fastly, because right now it only uses cloudflare and so dan reported back today that you know they're in a position where looking at um their tool and then talking too fastly. um There are some changes, but it's not a whole scale uh rewrite. So it's only gonna take a couple of days worth of time and can fit into our existing agreement.

A

So we're not gonna have to get a separate agreement, for you know some massive amount of work, yeah right so um yeah at some point, uh early in 2021 we're yeah 2021.

A

um we're going to sit down with salt, uh my team infrastructure team and fastly and we're going to just talk about what we need and what it takes to get us there and then the the other great thing about that is that may remove a blocker to move us from cloud flare from fastly to cloud flare because, as part of the blocking is oh, we've got all these redirects running through fastly and it's you know, pain for us to you know have the time to get ready to migrate from fastly to cloudflare.

A

Then that may unlock the ability for us to do that some. So I don't know if that holds any benefit for it for us, um but it's just something that I thought about when you know when dan was telling us about this. So that's update. Number two update number three yeah. This is something super concerning for me, so I'm gonna share again what we're seeing here. So uh when I was looking at um get lab.com- and let me just sit here hold on- let me just get everything lined up, so I can share this.

A

I think yeah great, all right so.

A

So I was looking at uh the get labs you know product domain, like you, know the root domain and the traffic there, and when I was looking at this like man, what what happened on the 24th of october, why do we have like? You know, 240 000, clicks and then so you know you dive into this and you can see okay. So it's these issues which are now off dead and the queries that we're driving this we're all hold on. I know it's hard to see.

A

Let me zoom in a little bit uh the queries that were driving. This were all um ufc fight, queers.

B

A

People were, you know, looking for a live stream and they were hitting a gitlab issue, and um so you know that is um not really surprising and we know that there's an issue with spam, um but that the thing about this is that you know I when I saw this. The thing I asked dan was: you know like based on your experience with a number of different brands. What is the risk to gitlab with this right?

A

Because you know we've invested so much in seo and in content and it's you know, a big driver for our business. You know if, if for some reason you know google decides to penalize this because of something like this. Let's say it's not this ufc thing, but what? If we have another event, that's even bigger and google notices and we get some kind of you know, penalty or notice.

A

When users visit us he's like you know, it can absolutely happen, he's seen it happen to other domains and he's you know like you know, it depends on how severe it is. But if it's you know, if you get that, you know red alert when you try to visit our domain, that you're visiting a domain that hosts spam and it could be malicious like he said it takes five years plus to recover from that.

A

So um I think this is just a really um key example of why we need to create dynamic site maps and make sure that we are disincentivizing people from using our platform for spam by making sure that the value they get from trying to spam us is as low as possible. um So uh talking to dan, you know he's working on the dynamic site map issue uh with the product team, and so looking at ways. We can do that.

A

So thinking about, like you know, so, can we create a mix of signals that tell tell us like okay, this account is legit and we want to get them indexed and discovered in google as soon as possible, their profiles, their issues, their groups, um and this is somebody that is likely to be a spammer and we're just gonna, watch them and make sure that everything lines up with them. uh So uh I can tell.

B

You have a question I keep going so before you keep going just for someone who's watching who doesn't know what a dynamic site map is I'll. I think I'll try to rephrase what you're saying in like non-seo nerd terms, and then you tell me if it's right just because I think I love that people watch these videos. So if you think about social networks like facebook or twitter, have all these profiles like some profiles, are better quality than others right. I've got a profile 10 years old.

B

Full of you know real tweets by a human and then there's also, of course, like bots and spammers all sorts of stuff, the dynamic site map. My understanding is, it allows us to set some rules around kind of what we consider to be quality and then make sure we're feeding that to google so that google's getting um kind of our idealized view of like what a good profile is.

B

What a good issue is, what a good epic is and those things get indexed and ranked first, and by giving them that guidance they can actually based on those site maps. They can actually programmatically make additional decisions because we're kind of training them is that fair to say, shane.

A

Yes, so, and, and so yeah- that's that hits it on uh exactly what we're looking for is a way to identify um those meaningful accounts and then give google a list of those. um So your site map is just an xml list of pages that you want crawled and then also helps us conserve our crawl budget to make sure that when google tries to consume our site with their crawler, that they're going to the places that are the highest value for google highest value for our users and the highest value for us.

B

Awesome is there anything else you want to put in this update or should we? What else do you want to put here? That's.

A

All the early christmas presents, I have we.

B

Got impressions we got redirects and we covered the dynamic site map and the crazy ufc spike which I chuckle at, but I don't want, you know, don't want it to happen.

A

All right, I'm.

B

Gonna, stop the recording here anyone who's watching thanks for watching all the seo updates. I hope you've learned a bit about what we do in search marketing this year.