SEM: 4.17.23 Daily SEO Newsletter
an interesting look at the kind of in-article language that got rewarded during the Feb product reviews update vs. those that lost ground.
Hello!
This is SEM: your daily SEO inspiration, where I curate/summarize one valuable item related to SEO and send it your way M-F.
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Since Google just released another reviews update, I thought it’d be a good time to look at an analysis of the February product reviews update to get a sense of what might be in store with this new one.
Mordy Oberstein noticed something about the language differences on the pages that did well vs. did poorly when analyzing winners and l:
To me, it seemed as if Google has become a bit more aware of language structure as it pertains to reflecting firsthand experiences of products.
Is this simple conjecture on my part? You be the judge.
Here are just two cases as a sample of what I saw and why I think Google is profiling language to determine the likelihood of actual product usage during the review process.
The first example looks at the different language on both The Balance and Wirecutter.
To start, the information it offers would have to, all things being equal, come from some sort of intimate knowledge of the product and could not have been pulled from a user manual
It also aligns with Google’s guidance where Google says to “Evaluate the product from a user’s perspective.”
The second thing that stood out to me was the spattering of first-person (plural) language. There is a lot of “we” and “our” placed throughout the page:
In other words, the language structure of the page via the pronouns used (among other things) would seemingly indicate firsthand experience with the product.
In the second example he looked at two dog carrier reviews and saw a similar pattern of the more generic review losing spots, while the reviews that use first person plural POV and cover information that strongly suggests they handled the product themselves vs. grabbing generic info from the manufacturer’s site.
My Take:
Yeah, it’s only a data point of two, but it’s probably worth keeping an eye on specifically this, and checking to see if a page you were watching (or YOUR OWN SITE) loses/gains and how the POV shakes out.
While I’m not sure I would say that the immediate takeaway from this is “just change your boring 1st-person direct-address POV (e.g. you might like this waterproof shotgun if you’re really bad at fishing) to some first person plural POV (e.g. in our tests, we like preferred the vanilla candle to the ‘freshly removed leg cast’ scent), the POV you choose to use can really change the vibe of an article.
Use where appropriate.
I can tell you that I’ve been working on a site with a lot of info/educational content and I’m having the authors write in the first person POV, giving the reader a fresh take with their direct experience. The articles come across much more relatable and, in a world of AI-generated boring-ass Wikipedia-clone content, having a human with actual experience writing an article as if they’re speaking to their friends instead of formally addressing some amorphous internet stranger really changes the vibe and can come across as much more genuine.
Obviously you can fake this. And, to the best of my knowledge, POV is not yet a ranking signal. However, I think it can be a powerful tool. If you haven’t given much thought to what POV you’re using and what it is saying about your site to your readers—it might be a good time to at least keep that top-of-mind.
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That’s it for today’s newsletter. Check out some of my current favorite resources/tools:
Resources And Recommendations
Content At Scale (AI content engine):
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Smash Digital (link building):
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A Weekly(ish) Longform SEO Newsletter:
📖 It’s me, I’m the weekly-ish writer. Check out my newsletter, Rank Theory, for "emerging theories, illuminating experiments, and occasional shitposting."
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Thanks for reading!
Until Monday…
Sean Markey
sem@seanmarkey.com
PS — LMK what you thought of this quick SEO email. Good? Bad? As clever as a Fall Out Boy lyrics? I’d love to hear from you (and thank you to those of you who read
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