December 2022 Fishing SEO Report

Last Month’s Action

Nearly all of November was spent by some SEOs hiding from rough conditions as Google continued to throw unpredictable curveballs. The black hats were out in full force whining and moaning about their houses of cards toppling—but Page One Fishing held its ground.

We monitored the weather and adjusted our strategies as needed—which really wasn’t much since we focus on sustainable, long-haul SEO tactics, rather than short-lived tricks and gimmicks. (You know, like those Helicopter Lures you can buy on eBay for 30 cents still sealed in their original 1994 packaging.)

Quality will never be penalized by Google, and by staying true to that ideal, we’ve been able to consistently see good results. We continued to write thousands of pages of quality, engaging content—for humans, not Google—and expand our clients’ reach through PPC campaigns.

Ultimately, despite the choppy waters last month, we made even better-than-expected progress in improving local and organic search engine rankings for our clients as the Page One Fishing team helped them ride out the storm. With multiple Google updates in the rearview, and no more expected before the year’s end, the forecast for the rest of the month looks like smooth sailing. We’re looking forward to an even better month of digital marketing for our fishing industry clients.

Break out the buzzbait—because we’re headed to the top.

December SEO Update Round-up

A couple of very interesting changes happened in the world of SEO last month. As mentioned, Google rolled out several updates:

#1: Content Ideas

Google began rolling out an update to Search Console with a new, experimental “Content Ideas” feature, which provides data-driven insights that can help you improve your content and target the most relevant keywords. In other words, they give you a list of ideas you can write about on your web site.

Unfortunately, we’ve found this feature to be lacking so far for our clients, as Content Ideas doesn’t seem to understand fishing-related topics and keywords very well. The suggestions are often irrelevant, but our team is still exploring this new feature as it is released to more Search Console properties, and seeing if it will eventually be a valuable tool for our clients in the fishing industry.

#2: E-A-T Became E-E-A-T

Google also made a significant change to their Quality Rater Guidelines, adding another “E” to their previous E-A-T acronym. This acronym stands for “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness,” but it’s now been expanded to include “Experience.” This change applies greater weight to the personal “life experience” of content authors for certain topics.

In other words, Google is now rating your “life experience” as well as your “expertise” when you write content. Obviously for certain search queries (i.e. medical or legal topics) Google’s still going to apply more weight to “expertise” than “experience,” and it’s easy to think of many situations where these two factors will overlap quite a bit.

However, this change certainly affects our clients in the fishing industry, since much of their content is written by experienced anglers. You may be an expert fisherman, but it’s probably because you’ve spent countless hours out on the water—not because you have a Master’s in fly fishing or published a peer-reviewed paper on bream. So if anything, this change may actually help our clients in the fishing industry since their personal experience can now be accurately reflected as a positive in Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines.

The Bottom Line

We’ve welcomed the holiday season (and the cooler weather) here at Page One Fishing this month, and all of our clients are getting the gift of improved search engine rankings, PPC success, and more bookings/conversions. We’re continuing to work hard through the end of the year, and we’re expecting even better results next month.

As always, our team is here to help your fishing business with the best possible digital marketing strategies possible for your business. And don’t forget to follow our DIY Marketing blog for the latest tips on SEO, PPC, Content Marketing, and Social Media Marketing strategies for fishing guides and others in the fishing and marine/outdoor industries.

Happy holidays from the Page One Fishing team—wishing you a successful new year!