Is Relevance the Most Important Google Ranking Factor? Interview with Gerry White

We’re back with a new guest for our cognitiveSEO Talks series, Gerry White, an SEO expert with broad knowledge in analytics, digital and search marketing strategy, social marketing and a lot more. With almost 20 year experience in digital, Gerry is a technical marketing consultant that has worked with companies such as BBC, McDonald’s, Gordon Ramsey, Premier Inn or DirectGov. Gerry has been creating, promoting and analyzing websites and more recently apps for companies across the world and he is also a speaker on international conferences. At the moment he is working at Just Eat.

Working with so many companies and big-name brands, Gerry acknowledged a vast experience. As Gerry mentioned in the cognitiveSEO talks, he’s always testing and does case studies on the go. For him and his team, it is very important to offer the user a great experience and always look at all the different ways people are navigating a site. He gives a rule of a thumb: 

Everything has to be super simple with site architecture. The bigger the sites, the more complicated things are. You need to make sure the SEO basics are right.
	Gerry White
	SEO Consultant at JUST EAT and Co-organiser of ConferenceTakeItOffline.co.uk @Dergal / TakeItOffline.co.uk

In his spare time, Gerry helps organize the TakeItOffline digital round tables with businesses, consultants and agencies. You should listen to this interview with Gerry White as you’ll get lots of insights and tips for creating better websites and make them loved by the user and Google. We wouldn’t want to spoil the talk for you so go ahead and discover it yourself. 

Improving the title tag will have a significant impact on SERP.
	Gerry White
	SEO Consultant at JUST EAT and Co-organiser of ConferenceTakeItOffline.co.uk @Dergal / TakeItOffline.co.uk

Tackled Topics:

• The biggest challenges in scaling your SEO efforts;
• How Gerry White uses testing for his clients;
• Strategies for increasing your rankings;
• Google Tag Manager Pros and Cons;
• What ranking factors still matter in 2019;
• The importance of relevance in Google rankings;
• The impact of anchor texts as a spam signal for Google;
• The importance of sitemaps;
• Most valuable SEO techniques used by Gerry White.

Top 10 Marketing Nuggets:

1. The larger the website, the more things like crawl budget are absolutely critical. 4:12
2. It’s very important to make sure to solve any issues when using JavaScript for enriching UX; especially when releasing new features and technologies. 7:53
3. Every couple of quarters we look at all the different way people are navigating our sites. 8:43
4. Keyword research is one of those things that every SEO person hates to do. But it is a critical part of the job. We are using Data Studio to helps with this and it is one of the most valuable tips for business owners. 9:09
5. For keyword research, we are using relevancy and the good-old-fashioned keyword volume as our main metrics. 9:39
6. Google tries to interpret every query and optimize the results based on your search. 12:55
7. Brand search can impact a website’s rankings. I think traffic alone doesn’t have a direct influence in rankings. 14:33
8. Google is still using link architecture as a key ranking signal. 16:27
9. In order to rank well for a particular page, you don’t need to have a minimum number of keywords for a piece of content, but you do need to have enough keywords to show intent and relevance. 18:18 
10. Putting images in the sitemap is a quick win. 22:59