Jack Treseler | SEO Marketing Manager | Square, Inc.

Identifying Changes in User Intent with STAT

First, a message from the captain...

@JackTreseler

So basically… be useful?

Incase you’re interested:

https://goo.gl/oFgnBL

@JackTreseler

A little background before diving in...Being useful is a key focus for our appointments product because there’s a LOT of competition.

@JackTreseler

We thought we found a gem…

Scheduling software had 8100 monthly searches

It perfectly described our appointments product

But no appointments products ranked.

It was all hourly employee management tools.

Google didn’t agree. Yet.

@JackTreseler

So we decided to track the SERPs over time.

@JackTreseler

What we decided to do…

We wanted to see if market changes matched google’s changes.

Basically, is this legit?

1. Track the keyword’s SERPS (using top 20 reports from STAT)

2. Analyzed link fluctuation over time

3. Look at on-page SEO changes made by competitors

4. Look at internal search results of product review sites

@JackTreseler

Looking at referring domains over last 4 months

Largest outliers who lost most traffic were appointments websites.

We took out the largest outliers and saw appointments websites still lost the most referring domains

@JackTreseler

Look at SEO changesCase Study: Acuityscheduling.com

Jan 2016 August 2016 Feb 2017

Ranking increases started in Jan ‘17 Top 5 ranking occurred in Feb ‘17 “We steal your SOUL….!”

- people giving you money

@JackTreseler

Similar changes in product review sites? Case Study: Capterra

August 2016 February 2017

100% employee scheduling products

9 of the top 20 results are appointment scheduling products

Top result:

appointment scheduling

@JackTreseler

So what did we see?

Appointment based products began ranking consistently towards the end of 2016 and beginning of 2017

Referring domains to appointments products that began ranking in the top 10 decreased

No significant on-page changes were made during the months prior to or during the time of the largest ranking increases

The market changes matched Google’s change in semantic understanding of the keyword

@JackTreseler

Conclusion? Conclusion?

@JackTreseler

Recap of what we saw

Google’s understanding of user intent changed.

@JackTreseler

Things we could do to improve and scale these learnings

Identify other aspirational keywords

Use STAT API for continuous ranking changes + featured snippets to help infer intent

Use Majestic API for on-going link analysis

Crawler API for tracking competitors’ SEO changes (Deep Crawl, SEO Radar, etc)

Last minute thoughts...

@JackTreseler

Q and A

@JackTreseler