We’re halfway through the year! There’s been a ton written about the Google Search API Documentation leak this week, naturally. I’ll tease out some interesting tidbits that apply to SaaS owners.
News
Google Warehouse Documentation Leaks
The main thing to shakeup the SEO community, alongside Mike King’s analysis. We wrote a whole set of key takeaways for SaaS on this.
There’s a lot to digest but in case you’re short on time:
- A github fork that mirrors the Google Warehouse API Documentation accidentally captured some API documentation that had its fields and attributes documented. These comments involved around Google Search.
- Someone pointed out the accidental information to Rand Fishkin who broke the story while Rand shared it with Mike to do some analysis based on the field attributes and types
- Most of the analysis is based on the documentation and the names of the attributes, as this confirms that in some capacity Google is measuring or tracking these attributes.
The rest of the key take aways like content length mattering (no) or are clicks measured (yes) are summarized in our SaaS takeaways page.
Mike King on “What Do We Do Now?”
Mike goes on to detail what we can do now after this leak and mostly concentrates on how SEO should rally around a known set of ranking signals around content and clicks. He argues that we should reset our collective narrative around SEO and what works and what doesn’t, and we agree.
Google Fights Back on Reputation Abuse
Google announced that it’s going to crack down on major brands abusing it’s ranking power to outrank every variation of “best” queries. This has been a major issue for affiliate sites in the past but has also effected SaaS brands around their content marketing strategy.
Google Announces the Launch of AI Overviews
The leak story almost overshadowed the other major news: Google starts to roll out it’s AI Overviews feature across the US. We’ve been using this feature since Google had an open beta and it will definitely seem to impact informational style articles. SaaS companies will be impacted on its content marketing if you exclusively focus on content that AI can easily scan.
Case Studies
Growing from Nothing to $1000 MRR
A reddit user shares how we went from hearing a pain point to growing his SaaS to $1000 MRR. Starting simple, listening to your customers in pain and delivering quickly are always the key to success!
