10 Tips for improved guest blogging in 2020

As link building becomes a more cautionary practice it’s necessary to get a clear idea of how to acquire the best links for your website, in light of this guest blogging in 2020 can be a good method. 

Although Google has openly placed more scrutiny on guest blogging, there is undoubtedly still value in acquiring a link from a recognizable high-authority site in your niche. That being said, it’s not easy to secure links from top sites-especially when you need to scale up your efforts. Many sites only offer nofollow links and with growing competition, there is no shortage of good writers to populate these blog sites with high-quality articles.

This doesn’t mean that all hope is lost in the world of guest blogging. It just means your efforts need to be planned and strategized. Here are some top tips to get the most out of your guest blogging in 2020.

1. Create a master list of guest blogging sites
2. Qualify relevance
3. Qualify authority
4. Check search visibility
5. Combine outreach tactics to land opportunities
6. Research your target sites blog
7. Strategize your topic
8. Create an enticing storyline with your headings
9. Submit infographics
10. Make your links count

1. Create a master list of guest blogging sites 

Be extremely organized with your approach to guest blogging to streamline the process. Create a master list on a spreadsheet in order to keep track of your efforts. Record the sites you’ve made contact with, the dates you’ve submitted articles or pitches and any notes on the efforts you’ve made to help you avoid duplicate efforts.

Start with a pre-existing list 

There are dozens of sites that have created a list of the top guest blogging sites for multiple industries. You can start your master list with the most popular authority sites in your niche by exploring a few pre-existing lists. 

A few examples that offer a list of guest blogging sites are Lilach Bullock, Izideo, Advanced Web Ranking, and Solvid. This will start you off with a solid base of top sites to work from that are well known within your niche. 

Scrape Google

It’s impossible to know about every website that offers guest blogging without doing some background research. One method of discovery is to use command operatives to scrape Google.

Use the following commands paired with a keyword to find guest blogging sites:

• “inurl” will tell Google to look for keywords in the URL
• “intitle” will find sites with the keyword in the title

Mix and match commands to produce different results:

Inurl: “digital marketing” + “write for us”

Intitle: SEO + “guest post”

Check out guest post sites from your competition

It’s no secret that you can use any backlink report to get the inside scoop on the strength of your competitions backlink profile. Use Moz, SEMRush, Ahrefs or any tool of your choice to produce to see what links your competition has acquired. In the digital marketing space, a typical backlink profile will yield a number of guest blogging sites your competition found in which you can also submit an article.

2. Qualify relevance

If there were no authority transferred by links, what sites would you link to? This type of approach to link building will help you seek out the sites that are highly relevant to your website without being blinded by domain authority.

It happens quite often that at first glance a website DA will influence your perception of the quality of the link which is not always an accurate indication of whether that link will benefit your site. 

Make sure the website you are submitting to is in your niche or a direct vertical. Confirm they are publishing content similar to yours so that a clearly defined relationship can be established that indicates relevance to your content.

3. Qualify authority

The DA of a site is the first indicator of a quality link. Although it doesn’t provide the entire picture of what makes up a quality link, you can use this indicator to prioritize your submission sites. 

Use the Mozbar for a quick view of a website’s metrics before making a submission.

Target sites that will have a positive impact on your authority. Certain keywords will require links from higher DA sites and others you can get away with links from lower DA sites. 

4. Check search visibility

The search visibility of a website indicates how well the site is performing by ranking for keywords and driving traffic. A site that has good metrics won’t necessarily be a good link if it doesn’t have any visitors reading its content.

The authority gained from a link is an important aspect of link building, but the overarching goal behind the practice is to build streams of relevant traffic and awareness of your website. 

5. Combine outreach tactics to land opportunities

Not every site will advertise that they accept guest posts but that doesn’t mean they won’t be happy to publish some great content you’re offering. Adam Envoy was able to secure 8 DA60+ sites in 15 days in his guest-posting project and attributed a portion of his success to targeting site owners with an outreach email before proposing a guest post. 

Use LinkedIn and Facebook to make initial contact with content managers and editors and let them know you’re interested in link building and guest blogging. In most cases, you will get a response that will lead you to the right person and a link building opportunity. 

Even if you don’t get the desired response, making contact is the first step in building a mutually beneficial relationship further down the line.

6. Research your target sites blog

One of the top reasons why site owners don’t respond to an outreach email is because “They didn’t read my blog”. Get a feel for the type of content they’re publishing by scanning through titles and reading relevant content. You can pick up on trends and characteristics that will make your pitch much more targeted to your prospect’s website.

7. Strategize your topic

Choose a topic that hasn’t been covered in-depth on your prospects’ blog. This presents more value for a blog owner to be presented with the option of adding content their site is lacking. 

The topic you choose to write about should be something suited to your strength. Apart from making a list-style article, dive deep into a relevant topic that can be broken down and optimized for a specific keyword topic. Writing optimized SEO content is a bonus for publishers when the article is already primed and ready to rank.

8. Create an enticing storyline with your headings

Most online readers are scanners by nature, in fact, 43% of people admit to skimming through articles when they read them. which is a trait you can capitalize on with an original title and descriptive subtitles. Your outline should reflect a storyline that clearly describes the content of your article.

The first impression of your article an editor (and their audience) will have is the headline of your proposed article. This should clearly convey to the reader what they will get from reading your post and how will it will benefit them. Use headline strategies that are proven to improve click-through rates by appealing to the various types of readers.

Follow up the headline with your main points emphasized as subtitles. Make your article actionable and complete for a person who scans through your content.

9. Submit infographics

Although the numbers will show that infographics peaked in 2014 and 2015, they are still an effective means of creating backlinks. In many cases, infographics receive exceptional consideration as a guest post because publishers know that the potential to attract backlinks improves tremendously.

Image source: Moz

Use an infographic tool from companies like Venngage, Visme or Piktochart to add more appeal to your article submissions.

10. Make your links count

The links you insert in your article should provide value to the reader by taking them somewhere that enhances their understanding of a particular point or topic. 

Contextual links are more valuable than the link in the author’s box. Make sure to give yourself a link to content that is relevant to your article. Avoid being overly self-promotional by making sure the links you give yourself are truly beneficial to the reader. 

Keep in mind excessive anchor text to the same page will result in a negative effect on your ranking. Mix up your links to appear natural with a brand link, long-tail, and naked URL wherever applicable.

Promote previously published articles

Link to previously published articles to increase the DA of those pages and create more powerful links to your site. 

Linking to articles you’ve published is less conspicuous than linking to your own site, which gives you more leeway in the number of links you create. 

The value of your work as a future guest author increases when site owners see you link to your published work thereby promoting their site as well.

Link to prospects and influencers

Make it a point to link to the people who are in a position to help you in your backlinking strategies. Separate yourself from the masses by showing an influencer quality links you’ve sent to their work. Keep track of the links you accumulate and make it part of your outreach strategy to build powerful alliances and partnerships.

Enjoy the benefits of guest blogging

There is no doubt that despite the scrutiny placed on guest blogging by Google, it is still one of many effective methods of link building. 

A well-executed strategy will provide your site targeted referral traffic as well as improved authority and ranking ability. Use guest blogging opportunities to brand your business, demonstrate thought leadership and build mutually beneficial relationships through your link building efforts in 2020.

Christian Carere is an avid contributor to the digital marketing community and a social media enthusiast. He founded Digital Ducats Inc. to help businesses generate more leads and new clients through custom-designed SEO strategies.

The post 10 Tips for improved guest blogging in 2020 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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Better Site Speed: 4 Outside-the-Box Ideas

Posted by Tom-Anthony

Most of us have done site speed audits, or seen audits done by others. These can be really helpful for businesses, but I often find they're quite narrow in focus. Typically we use well-known tools that throw up a bunch of things to look at, and then we dive into things from there.

However, if we dig deeper, there are often other ideas on how site speed can be improved. I often see plenty of opportunities that are never covered in site speed audits. Most site speed improvements are the result of a bunch of small changes, and so in this post I’m going to cover a few ideas that I’ve never seen in any site speed audit, all of which can make a difference.

A different angle on image optimization

Consider optimized SVGs over PNGs

I was recently looking to book some tickets to see Frozen 2 (because of, erm, my kids...) and so landed on this page. It makes use of three SVG images for transport icons:

SVG images are vector images, so they're well-suited for things like icons; if you have images displayed as PNGs you may want to ask your designers for the original SVGs, as there can be considerable savings. Though not always better, using an SVG can save 60% of the filesize.

In this case, these icons come in at about 1.2k each, so they are quite small. They would probably fly under the radar of site speed audits (and neither Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix mention these images at all for this page).

So you may be thinking, “They're less than 5k combined — you should look for bigger issues!”, but let's take a look. Firstly, we can run them all through Jake Archibald’s SVG compression tool; this is a great free tool and on larger SVGs it can make a big difference.

In this case the files are small, so you may still be thinking "Why bother?" The tool compresses them without any loss in quality from ~1240 bytes to ~630 bytes — a good ratio but not much of an overall saving.

However… now that we've compressed them, we can think differently about delivering them…

Inline images

GTMetrix makes recommendations around inlining small bits of CSS or JS, but doesn’t mention inlining images. Images can also be inlined, and sometimes this can be the right approach.

If you consider that even a very small image file requires a complete round trip (which can have a very real impact on speed), even for small files this can take a long time. In the case of the Cineworld transport images above, I simulated a "Fast 3G" connection and saw:

The site is not using HTTP2 so there is a long wait period, and then the image (which is 1.2kb) takes almost 600ms to load (no HTTP2 also means this is blocking other requests). There are three of these images, so between them they can be having a real impact on page speed.

However, we've now compressed them to only a few hundred bytes each, and SVG images are actually made up of markup in a similar fashion to HTML:

You can actually put SVG markup directly into an HTML document!

If we do this with all three of the transport images, the compressed HTML for this page that is sent from the server to our browser increases from 31,182 bytes to 31,532 bytes — an increase of only 350 bytes for all 3 images!

So to recap:

• Our HTML request has increased 350 bytes, which is barely anything
• We can discard three round trips to the server, which we can see were taking considerable time

Some of you may have realized that if the images were not inline they could be cached separately, so future page requests wouldn’t need to refetch them. But if we consider:

• Each image was originally about 1.5kb over the network (they aren’t gzipping the SVGs), with about 350 bytes of HTTP headers on top for a total of about 5.5kb transferred. So, overall we've reduced the amount of content over the network.
• This also means that it would take over 20 pageviews to benefit from having them cached.

Takeaway: Consider where there are opportunities to use SVGs instead of PNGs.

Takeaway: Make sure you optimize the SVG images, use the free tool I linked to.

Takeaway: Inlining small images can make sense and bring outsized performance gains.

Note: You can also inline PNGs — see this guide.

Note: For optimized PNG/JPG images, try Kraken.

Back off, JavaScript! HTML can handle this...

So often nowadays, thanks to the prevalence of JavaScript libraries that offer an off-the-shelf solution, I find JavaScript being used for functionality that could be achieved without it. More JS libraries means more to download, maybe more round trips for additional files from the server, and then the JavaScript execution time and costs themselves.

I have a lot of sympathy for how you get to this point. Developers are often given poor briefs/specs that fail to specify anything about performance, only function. They are often time-poor and so it's easy to end up just dropping something in.

However, a lot of progress has been made in terms of the functionality that can be achieved with HTML and or CSS. Let's look at some examples.

Combo box with search

Dropdown boxes that have a text search option are a fairly common interface element nowadays. One recent article I came across described how to use the Select2 Javascript library to make such a list:

It is a useful UI element, and can help your users. However, in the Select2 library is a JavaScript library, which in turn relies on some CSS and the JQuery library. This means three round trips to collect a bunch of files of varying sizes:

• JQuery - 101kb
• Select2 JavaScript - 24kb
• Select2 CSS - 3kb

This is not ideal for site speed, but we could certainly make the case it is worth it in order to have a streamlined interface for users.

However, it is actually possible to have this functionality out of the box with the HTML datalist element:

This allows the user to search through the list or to free type their own response, so provides the same functionality. Furthermore, it has a native interface on smartphones!

You can see this in action in this codepen.

Details/Summary

LonelyPlanet has a beautiful website, and I was looking at this page about Spain, which has a ‘Read More’ link that most web users will be familiar with:

Like almost every implementation of this that I see, they have used a JavaScript library to implement this, and once again this comes with a bunch of overheads.

However, HTML has a pair of built-in tags called details and summary, which are designed to implement this functionality exactly. For free and natively in HTML. No overheads, and more accessible for users needing a screen reader, while also conveying semantic meaning to Google.

These tags can be styled in various flexible ways with CSS and recreate most of the JS versions I have seen out there.

Check out a simple demo here: https://codepen.io/TomAnthony/pen/GRRLrmm

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve with HTML instead of JS, check out these links:

• https://ift.tt/2dty0QU
• https://ift.tt/2ZK0LAw

Takeaway: Examine the functionality of your sites and see where there may be opportunities to reduce your reliance on large Javascript libraries where there are native HTML/CSS options.

Takeaway: Remember that it isn’t only the size of the JS files that is problematic, but the number of round trips that are required.

Note: There are cases where you should use the JS solution, but it is important to weigh up the pros and cons.

Networking tune-ups

Every time the browser has to collect resources from a server, it has to send a message across the internet and back; the speed of this is limited by the speed of light. This may sound like a ridiculous thing to concern ourselves with, but it means that even small requests add time to the page load. If you didn’t catch the link above, my post explaining HTTP2 discusses this issue in more detail.

There are some things we can do to help either reduce the distance of these requests or to reduce the number of round trips needed. These are a little bit more technical, but can achieve some real wins.

TLS 1.3

TLS (or SSL) is the encryption technology used to secure HTTPS connections. Historically it has taken two round trips between the browser and the server to setup that encryption — if the user is 50ms away from the server, then this means 200ms per connection. Keep in mind that Google historically recommends aiming for 200ms to deliver the HTML (this seems slightly relaxed in more recent updates); you're losing a lot of that time here.

The recently defined TLS 1.3 standard reduces this from two round trips to just one, which can shave some precious time off the users initial connection to your website.

Speak to your tech team about migrating to TLS 1.3; browsers that don’t support it will fallback to TLS 1.2 without issue. All of this is behind the scenes and is not a migration of any sort. There is no reason not to do this.

If you are using a CDN, then it can be as simple as just turning it on.

You can use this tool to check which versions of TLS you have enabled.

QUIC / HTTP 3

Over the last 2-3 years we have seen a number of sites move from HTTP 1.1 to HTTP 2, which is a behind-the-scenes upgrade which can make a real improvement to speed (see my link above if you want to read more).

Right off the back of that, there is an emerging pair of standards known as QUIC + HTTP/3, which further optimize the connection between the browser and the server, further reducing the round trips required.

Support for these is only just beginning to become viable, but if you are a CloudFlare customer you can enable that today and over the coming 6 months as Chrome and Firefox roll support out, your users will get a speed boost.

Read more here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/http3-the-past-present-and-future/

Super routing

When users connect to your website, they have to open network connections from wherever they are to your servers (or your CDN). If you imagine the internet as a series of roads, then you could imagine they need to ‘drive’ to your server across these roads. However, that means congestion and traffic jams.

As it turns out, some of the large cloud companies have their own private roads which have fewer potholes, less traffic, and improved speed limits. If only your website visitors could get access to these roads, they could ‘drive’ to you faster!

Well, guess what? They can!

For CloudFlare, they provide this access via their Argo product, whereas if you are on AWS at all then you can use their Global Accelerator. This allows requests to your website to make use of their private networks and get a potential speed boost. Both are very cheap if you are already customers.

Takeaway: A lot of these sorts of benefits are considerably easier to get if you're using a CDN. If you're not already using a CDN, then you probably should be. CloudFlare is a great choice, as is CloudFront if you are using AWS. Fastly is the most configurable of them if you're more of a pro.

Takeaway: TLS 1.3 is now very widely supported and offers a significant speed improvement for new connections.

Takeaway: QUIC / HTTP3 are only just starting to get support, but over the coming months this will roll out more widely. QUIC includes the benefits of TLS 1.3 as well as more. A typical HTTP2 connection nowadays needs 3 round trips to open; QUIC needs just one!

Takeaway: If you're on CloudFlare or AWS, then there is potential to get speed ups just from flipping a switch to turn on smart routing features.

Let CSS do more

Above I talked about how HTML has built-in functionality that you can leverage to save relying on solutions that are ‘home-rolled’ and thus require more code (and processing on the browsers side) to implement. Here I'll talk about some examples where CSS can do the same for you.

Reuse images

Often you find pages that are using similar images throughout the page in several places. For example, variations on a logo in different colors, or arrows that point in both directions. As unique assets (however similar they may be), each of these needs to be downloaded separately.

Returning to my hunt for cinema tickets above, where I was looking at this page, we can see a carousel that has left and right arrows:

Similarly to the logic used above, while these image files are small, they still require a round trip to fetch from the server.

However, the arrows are identical — just pointing in opposite directions! It's easy for us to use CSS’s transform functionality to use one image for both directions:

You can check out this codepen for an example.

Another example is when the same logo appears in different styles on different parts of the page; often they will load multiple variations, which is not necessary. CSS can re-color logos for you in a variety of ways:

There is a codepen here showing this technique in action. If you want to calculate the CSS filter value required to reach an arbitrary color, then check out this amazing color calculator.

Interactions (e.g. menus & tabs)

Often navigation elements such as menus and tabs are implemented in JavaScript, but these too can be done in pure CSS. Check out this codepen for an example:

Animations

CSS3 introduced a lot of powerful animation capability into CSS. Often these are not only faster than JavaScript versions, but can also be smoother too as they can run in the native code of the operating system rather than having to execute relatively slower Javascript.

Check out Dozing Bird as one example:

You can find plenty more in this article. CSS animations can add a lot of character to pages at a relatively small performance cost.

...and more

For more examples of functionality that you can achieve using pure CSS solutions, take a look at:

• https://ift.tt/2dty0QU
• https://ift.tt/2Q6PmZy

Takeaway: Use CSS to optimize how many files you have to load using rotations or filters.

Takeaway: CSS animations can add character to pages, and often require less resources than JavaScript.

Takeaway: CSS is perfectly capable of implementing many interactive UI elements.

Wrap up

Hopefully you've found these examples useful in themselves, but the broader point I want to make is that we should all try to think a bit more out of the box with regards to site speed. Of particular importance is reducing the number of round trips needed to the server; even small assets take some time to fetch and can have an appreciable impact on performance (especially mobile).

There are plenty more ideas than we've covered here, so please do jump into the comments if you have other things you have come across.

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Google Analytics glitch in an ad-filled internet

Ad blockers are a constant of the internet, but what does that mean for us? After comparing two different sources for one KPI, I noticed a significant difference. This piece covers the observations made about the Google Analytics glitch.

A strange disparity

Whilst collecting our monthly KPIs I came across an interesting error.

One of our KPIs, demo requests, which we track in two ways – with Google Analytics events and through a custom Zapier integration that inserts the prospects’ details into a Google Sheet and our internal Attio account.

After comparing the two datasets, I noticed a significant difference in the month’s numbers. The number of requested demos on our Google Sheet was 22% higher than the number of recorded demo requests on Google Analytics.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to tell which demo requests weren’t recorded due to the Google Analytics glitch but we can say for certain that a significant proportion of this month’s demo requesters were somehow subverting Google Analytics.

The Culprit

What can disrupt a websites’ tracking, is used by a considerable number of people, and is applied to websites indiscriminately?

Ad blockers.

Like almost the entire population of the internet, I hate ads. Especially the in-your-face, unskippable, make-me-hate-your-website ads. So I use an ad blocker. I’ll happily disable ads on websites that serve unobtrusive and relevant ads but as a general rule of thumb, I’ll be loading a site with ads blocked. My behavior pattern is certainly common. And consequential. Since the most common permissions for ad blockers is to opt-out, rather than in, then visitors to your website will be automatically blocking ads.

It’s not until delving into this problem that I realized that it’s not just ads that your average ad blocker is blocking. Almost anything that can track or identify you is being blocked. Google Analytics included.

Our customers vs the general public

I found a variety of studies that put the percentage of internet users using an ad blocker at 20-27%. Since it’s reasonable to assume that if you use an ad blocker you’re more technologically-savvy than the average internet user, and as a power-user centric, Web 3.0, SaaS application, you’d expect our prospects to exhibit a higher percentage of ad blocker usage.

However, the similarity in our 22% dataset disparity and ~24% of global internet users blocking ads suggests that the potential customers landing on our website are no more likely to be using an ad blocker than a random selection of internet users.

It would be an interesting extension to see if the ad blocker usage changed when browsing in a professional setting.

A cause for concern

From a data analysis standpoint, it might seem like the issue of ad blockers and blocked analytics tracking would be a problem, a misrepresentation of actual events is never good surely?

In actual fact, it’s not an issue at all.

Whilst it’s true that the demo request events aren’t tracked, neither are the page view, demo form open, or demo form close events. Holistically, our dataset in Google Analytics is exactly the same, on a relative basis, as if the blocked events were also tracked.

Now you could look into differences in user actions based on their usage of an ad blocker but the likelihood of finding any meaningful correlation is close to nil. If someone installs an ad blocker, are they more likely to request a demo for a SaaS product? Potentially, but I doubt it.

The only downside to ~24% of your visitors using ad blocking software is that it reduces the absolute value of our KPIs. When comparing year-on-year growth or conversion rates this doesn’t matter, but when presenting absolute values to potential investors it would certainly be nicer to have them 22% higher.

Alex Vale leads the growth efforts at Attio, the next generation of intelligent relationship workspace.

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How to utilize holiday season traffic for 2020’s Q1 growth

Q4 is the most competitive time period for ecommerce businesses, deals and promotions offered to capitalize on holiday season traffic bring hordes of potential purchasers to your site.

One of the most valuable groups of users that comes out of the holiday season is net-new users, who could have found out about the product from an ad, friend, influencer, or some other referral. These users are more expensive to acquire because they have no knowledge of the brand, so they need more touchpoints when compared to your current customers.

Whether or not you convert those new users into customers in Q4, convincing them to be long-term customers should be an important part of your Q1 strategy. In this post, I will walk through the value of some of these different holiday audiences and how to engage with them in Q1 to turn them into paying customers.

Holiday audiences

Often, the largest and best-converting Q4 audiences are current customers who are loyal to the brand and looking for some type of discount during major holiday times like Cyber Monday and Black Friday. These audiences are highly valuable, and you don’t have to pay much to bring them back to your site, but there are other audiences you should consider to help you reach your goals in Q1. These pointers will help you figure out how you can engage them.

1. Potential customers who visited but didn’t convert

Plan to re-engage potential customers who visited the site but didn’t purchase.

This could be for a variety of reasons:

• They didn’t find the product they were looking for
• Increased competition
• They didn’t think the deal was enticing enough, and others

With this audience, your lowest-hanging fruit is the group of users who added something to their cart or added payment information but didn’t convert. I recommend getting in front of them with special promotions or discounts.

2. First-time purchasers from Q4

First-time purchasers from Q4 will be even more valuable if converted into long-term customers. Consider two segments: those who purchased during Cyber weekend and new customers in general. You can infer that customers that purchased during Cyber weekend are more inclined and driven to purchase when there is a deal, so make sure to target them with ads that speak to this.

All of the audiences above represent retargeting audiences. In order to help reach acquisition goals in Q1, I recommend using data from these audience segments to build acquisition audiences as well – notably, building Facebook lookalike audiences from your segments of highest-life-time value (LTV) and most frequently engaged customers.

Other interesting LAL audience tests for Q1 could include building audiences off of first-time customers and potential customers who visited the site but didn’t convert.

Messaging

Now that you’ve established the holiday customers to re-engage in Q1, it’s time to develop the messaging and offers to advertise to those users. Since many of these customers converted because of the discounts and sales offered in Q4, messages to consider would be incorporating Q1 holidays into the media plan and offer another discount or sale.

Audiences to target with these ads include

• First-time purchasers
• New users generated from lookalike audiences
• Users who visited the site without converting

For longer-term customers, consider showcasing new products or top products to retarget customers. To see what resonates the best with users test these with a variety of creatives – carousels, videos, and single images that feature these different product groupings.

Another strategy is to showcase complementary products to users who purchased a specific product or product type during the holiday season. For example, if someone purchased an Xbox, retarget them with Xbox games in Q1.

The holiday season brings increases in traffic, new customers, and site revenue. Don’t just celebrate these wins, use the data to keep winning by building strong audience segments and messaging to help push growth in Q1 2020.

Lauren Crain is a Client Services Lead in 3Q Digital’s SMB division, 3Q Incubate.

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The Not-So-Secret Value of Podcast Transcripts - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by NikiMosier

What are the benefits of transcribing your podcasts and what's the best way to go about getting them on your site? Niki Mosier breaks it down into 8 easy steps in this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Here's another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Niki Mosier, a senior SEO account manager at Two Octobers, and I'm here today to talk to you about the not-so-secret value of podcast transcripts.

I got the idea to play around with podcast transcripts after hearing Moz's Britney Muller talk about machine learning and podcast transcripts at TechSEO Boost last fall. 

+15% increase in organic traffic, +50% keyword lift

I ended up getting the opportunity to play around with this a little bit with a pro bono client we had at a previous job, the Davis Phinney Foundation. They do Parkinson's research and Parkinson's education. They were already podcasting, and then they also had a pretty robust blog, but they weren't adding their podcast transcripts. After about three months of adding a couple of podcast transcripts, we saw some pretty good value for them. We saw a 15% increase in organic traffic to the website and a 50% increase to some keyword lift around the keywords that we were tracking.

Google is now indexing podcasts

Why we think this is relevant right now, as you may know, Google announced, at I/O 2019, that they are indexing podcasts. If you do a search for your favorite podcast, you'll see that come up in the Google search results now. So adding that podcast transcript or any audio transcript to your website, whether that's video, a webinar, or anything, just has some really good value.

How to transcribe & optimize your podcasts

I'm going to walk you through the process that I used for them. It's super easy and you can turn around and apply it to your own website. 

1. Download your audio file

So obviously, download the audio file, whether that's MP3 or MP4 or whatever you have, from your video, podcast, or your webinars if you're doing those. 

2. Transcribe it

You need to be able to get that text transcript, so running it through either Temi or Otter.ai, both two resources that I've used, both really good. Otter.ai seems to be a little cleaner out of the gate, but I would definitely obviously go through and edit and make sure that all of your text and speaker transitions and everything is accurate. 

3. Figure out which keywords the content should rank for

Next up is figuring out what keywords that you want that content to rank for, so doing some search volume research, figuring out what those keywords are, and then benchmarking that keyword data, so whether your website is already ranking for some of those keywords or you have new keywords that you want those pages or those posts to be ranking for.

4. Get a competitive snapshot

Next up is getting a competitive snapshot, so looking at who's ranking for those keywords that you're going to be trying to go after, who has those answer boxes, who has those featured snippets, and then also what are the people also ask features for those keywords. 

5. Get your content on-site

Obviously getting that content on your site, whether that's creating brand-new content, either a blog or a page to go with that podcast, video, webinar, or whatever it is, or adding to it to existing content.

Maybe you have some evergreen content that's not performing well for you anymore. Adding a transcript to that content could really kind of give it a lift and make it work better for you. 

6. Optimize the content

Next up is optimizing the content on your site, so adding in those keywords to your metadata, to your image alt tags, your H1 tags, and then also adding any relevant schema, so whether that's blog post schema most likely or any other schema type that would be helpful, getting that up there on the page as well.

7. Make sure the page is indexed in Search Console

Once you've done all the hard work, you've got the transcript up there, you have your content and you have it optimized, you obviously want to tell Google, so going into Search Console, having them index that page, whether it's a new page or an existing page, either way, dropping that URL in there, making sure Google is crawling it, and then if it is a new page, making sure it's in your sitemap.

8. Annotate the changes in Google Analytics

Then the last thing is you want to be able to track and figure out if it's working for you. So annotating that in Google Analytics so you know what page, when you added it, so you can have that benchmark date, looking at where you're ranking, and then also looking at those SERP features. Have you gotten any featured snippets?

Are you showing up in those answer boxes? Anything like that. So that's kind of the process. Super easy, pretty straightforward. Just play with it, test it out. 

If Google is indexing podcasts, why does this matter?

Then kind of lastly, why is this still important if Google is already indexing podcasts? They may come out and do their own transcription of your podcast or your video or whatever content you have on the site.

Obviously, you want to be in control of what that content is that's going on your site, and then also just having it on there is super important. From an accessibility standpoint, you want Google to be able to know what that content is, and you want anyone else who may have a hearing impairment, they can't listen to the content that you're producing, you want them to be able to access that content. Then, as always, just the more content, the better. So get out there, test it, and have fun. Thanks, Moz fans.

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Voice search optimization: The why and how

Voice search optimization is a hot topic in the digital marketing industry. A few years ago, voice search seemed like a far fetched idea that was limited to some science fiction movies. But today, its popularity is increasing day by day.  

If you’re a Star Trek fan, you would definitely recall the scenes when actors used to speak to computers for answers. It all looked like something that would never come into existence. Yet here we are.

Today, voice search has become so common that, according to Google, it is the fastest-growing form of online search. 

So what does this new search trend mean to marketers and business owners? Why should business owners focus on building voice-search-optimized websites? Let’s see. 

The rise of voice search in numbers

Voice search basically allows users to say their queries out loud rather than typing them into the search box to get the results. 

The speech-recognition technology precisely understands what users are saying and then delivers the best-matching results orally. 

Reports estimate that about 41% of adults perform at least one voice search every day. According to ComScore, 50% of the total searches will be voice searches by 2020. 

Let’s check out some of the critical voice search statistics:

• 61% of 25-64 and 57% of 18-24 age groups say they’ll use voice search more actively in future (PwC Research)
• Almost one-third of 3.5 billion searches performed on Google every day are voice searches (TheeDesign Research)
• More than 30% of the web browsing will be done without a screen by 2020 (Gartner)
• 55% of households will own smart speaker devices by 2022 (OC&C Strategy Consultants)
• More than 53% of smart speaker owners say that it feels natural talking to smart devices (Google) 

Well, stats don’t lie. It is quite clear that consumers are getting more and more familiar with voice search and using it for day-to-day online searches.

Google Now, Alexa from Amazon, Siri from Apple, and Cortana from Microsoft are some of the major trendsetters in the voice search. Considering the increasing popularity, Google and other tech giants are investing heavily in voice-operated digital assistants. 

How voice search impacts your website’s ranking?

So how does voice search affect your rankings (and ultimately the business bottom line)? 

You see searchers want faster answers to their queries, and Google heavily values user experience. 

Voice search improves user experience by delivering faster and more accurate search results at convenience. This is the main reason why Google has started really emphasizing voice search optimization. 

Although the search engine giant hasn’t officially confirmed it yet, it’s just a matter of time until Google adds voice search to their algorithm, and starts prioritizing websites that incorporate the voice technology.

The role of SEO and voice search optimization 

The primary goal of SEO is to rank a website for specific search terms so that users can get the best information as fast as possible. However, you need to understand that voice search SEO and conventional SEO are quite different. 

Optimizing your website and content for voice search can help you increase your website’s visibility and credibility. This ultimately improves your website’s ranking and traffic through Google. 

How to optimize your website for voice search?

Users who perform voice searches typically want to complete a particular action such as playing a song, finding a restaurant, or finding information on a specific subject.

When people use voice search on mobile, Google will only deliver one top result. This top result is known as “position zero” or “featured snippet” or “answer box”.

Reports estimate that half of the searches will be voice searches. It means that roughly 50% of your potential customers won’t be able to see your website even if you’re ranking in the third or fourth position.

The solution here is to rank for number one and secure position zero. 

How to secure position zero, so your website appears in voice search results? Here’s how. But, before we start, here’s a pro tip for you.

Pro-Tip

In addition to the tips mentioned below, here’s an alternative way you can try to feature in the answer box. 

It’s lately noticed that Google favors websites that provide interactive web tools such as BMI calculators, recipe guides, price estimators, etc to the users. If you’re an enterprise business, you can develop an interactive web app for your corporate website to increase your chances of hitting the answer box. 

1. Implement Structured Data

Structured data or schema markup is one of the ranking factors used by Google search algorithm to determine the relevancy and position of a page in the search results.

It’s a code or metadata that’s added to the website’s source code. This code helps search engines better understand your content and classify it accordingly. 

It also gives you more control over how you provide specific blocks of information to search engines and how machines interpret it.

Implementing structured data doesn’t guarantee top ranking, but it gives you a competitive advantage for sure. It increases your chances of getting into the answer box or featured snippet, and thus in voice search results.

Here’s an example of how a rich snippet looks like. The highlighted sections of the search are automatically picked up by Google with the help of schema and shown in the search results.

How do you implement structured data? If you’re using WordPress, search for “schema” plugins, and you’ll see hundreds of plugins that enable structured data functionality in WordPress. 

You can also implement structured data manually on your website using specific schemas from the schema.org library.

2. Improve the page speed

You might find this tip in almost every SEO guide out there. 

Page speed is one of the most significant ranking factors. It decides whether or not your page will rank in the top search results. 

If you want to rank for position zero and appear into the voice search results, you need to ensure that your website loads quickly. 

People use voice search to get faster results; thus, Google gives high importance to page speed when it comes to voice search. 

Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check your website’s loading time. The best thing about this tool is that it gives numerous suggestions on how to improve the page speed. 

Make sure you

• Minify HTML & CSS
• Prioritize visible content
• Optimize images
• Remove unwanted theme elements and plugins
• Enable data compression
• Implement browser caching

One way to drastically increase your mobile website speed is by implementing an AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) feature. It helps your mobile pages to load instantly by pulling only a few necessary blocks of content.

3. Understand the user’s search intent

Optimizing your content around user intent is crucial for ranking high in voice search results. 

You need to understand whether people are looking to buy something or want some information when they type in a search query. User intent or search intent helps you understand why the person typed a specific question in the search engine. 

The user intent is often clearly expressed in queries using words such as “price,” “buy,” “download,” “how to,” “what is,” and so on. Other times, the intent is not clearly expressed at all.

But, thanks to the Hummingbird update, Google can now find out the context behind a search query and then deliver the best matching results. 

For example, when a user searches for “Oscar winners,” he/she is most likely interested in the latest award ceremony, not the one that happened ten years back. Google understands this context and ranks the websites that provide information about the most recent award ceremony and news from the latest Oscars.

Therefore it’s crucial to structurize your content around the user intent. It increases the relevancy of your page for specific search queries. 

So how do you write and optimize your content around user intent? Ask yourself the following questions: 

• Do you provide the most accurate and immediate answer?
• Is the answer structured in a proper format? 
• Is the content on your website easily accessible by Google?
• Is your website credible enough?

If you work towards the outcome of the above questions, it might help you increase your chances of getting into the answer box for specific search terms.

4. Target long-tail keywords in the content

Long-tail keywords are quite specific in nature. As the name suggests, these are the search terms and phrases that are longer than a typical search query. 

People act like they’re talking to real humans when they perform a voice search. They’ll naturally ask longer questions rather than short keywords. For example, while typing a search query, a person might use highly relevant words and enter something like – “best pizza in NYC”

Whereas to perform the same search using voice, a person might ask – “Hey Siri (or Ok Google), where can I eat the best pizza?” 

Therefore, it’s important to find out and use the conversational search terms that people would use while speaking. You need to treat these terms as the long-tail keywords and incorporate them into your content. 

You can use tools like Answer the Public or KeywordTool.io to find out long-tail search terms and questions. 

Targeting long-tail keywords is one of the effective strategies for voice search optimization. 

The fun fact is that 70% of all search queries are long-tail, yet the majority of the sites tend to overlook these keywords while chasing shorter and more competitive search terms. Long-tail keywords are less competitive, yet they are equally important.

Again, make sure you answer the searcher’s question as accurate and direct as possible. You can create H2 or H3 headings of the questions (long-tail search terms) and provide answers in the body text.

To wrap up

Voice search is slowly becoming mainstream. People have already started using it, and more will join this trend soon. 

The potential of voice search is yet to be fully uncovered. 

There are many ways marketers and business owners can take advantage of voice search, build and optimize a voice-friendly website, and drive traffic and increase sales. Whatever you do, make sure that voice search is included in your SEO and website campaigns going forward.

Michael Georgiou is the CMO and co-founder of Imaginovation, a full service, turn-key digital solutions company serving Raleigh, NC and Charlotte, NC. 

The post Voice search optimization: The why and how appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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They're the Best Around: The Top 25 Moz Blog Posts of 2019

Posted by FeliciaCrawford

Well, folks, it's that time of year again. It's hard to believe we've already gone another turn around the ol' sun. But I've consulted my analytics data and made my SQL queries, and I'm here today to present to you the list of the top Moz Blog posts of 2019!

For a little perspective, we published 207 blog posts, averaging out to about 4 per week. Out of those 207, the twenty-five I'm sharing with you below were the most-read pieces of the year. If you're strapped for time (and who isn't in our industry?), survey says these are the articles that aren't to be missed. And bonus — a good chunk of them are videos, so bring out the chocolate popcorn and settle down to watch!

(If chocolate popcorn sounds new and unfamiliar to you, I implore you to check out the Cinerama in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood the next time you're in town for MozCon. It is life-changing. Get the mix of regular and chocolate and never, ever look back.)

I'll be sharing the top keywords each post ranks for according to Keyword Explorer, too, to give you some idea of why these posts have continued to be favorites throughout the year. Gotta love that "Explore by Site" feature — it makes my job way too easy sometimes! ;-)

(For the Keyword Explorer nerds in the audience, I'll be filtering the rankings to positions 1–3 and organizing them by highest monthly search volume. I want to see what we're ranking highly for that gets lots of eyeballs!)

Ready to get started? I sure am. Let's dive in.

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The top 25 Moz Blog posts of 2019

1. On-Page SEO for 2019 - Whiteboard Friday

Britney Muller, January 4th

57,404 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: seo 2019 (#3, 501–850), seo best practices 2019 (#3, 501–850), homepage seo 2019 (#1, 0–10)

On-page SEO has long been a favorite topic for y'all, and the top number-one winner, winner, chicken dinner post of 2019 reflects that loud and proud. In this expert checklist, Britney Muller shares her best tips for doing effective on-page SEO for 2019.

And if you want a hint on one reason this puppy has been so popular, check out #10 in this very list. ;-)

2. The 60 Best Free SEO Tools [100% Free]

Cyrus Shepard, June 10th

51,170 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: seo tools (#1, 6.5k–9.3k), free seo tools (#1, 1.7k–2.9k), free seo (#1, 501–850)

This post is a testament to the power of updating and republishing your best content. Cyrus originally authored this post years ago and gave it a sorely needed update in 2019. There are literally hundreds of free SEO tools out there, so this article focused on only the best and most useful to add to your toolbox.

3. The Ultimate Guide to SEO Meta Tags

Kate Morris, July 24th

42,276 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: seo meta tags (#1, 501–850), 1-page meta (#2, 501–850), what are meta tags (#3, 501–850)

Here's another vote for the power of republishing really good content that you know your audience craves. Originally published in November 2010, this is the second time we've asked Kate to update this article and it continues to deliver value ten years later. SEO certainly changes, but some topics remain popular and necessary throughout all the ups and downs.

4. The One-Hour Guide to SEO

Rand Fishkin, throughout 2019

41,185 reads for the first post (143,165 for all six combined)

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: moz seo guide (#2, 201–500), moz beginners guide to seo (#3, 101–200), moz guide to seo (#2, 11–50)

A "best of the Moz Blog" list wouldn't be complete without Rand! His six-part video series detailing all the most important things to know about SEO was originally published on the Moz Blog as six separate Whiteboard Fridays. We've since redirected those posts to a landing page in our Learning Center, but the first episode on SEO strategy earned over 41k unique pageviews in its time live on the blog.

5. A New Domain Authority Is Coming Soon: What’s Changing, When, & Why

Russ Jones, February 5th

38,947 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: moving a 60 da to a 90 da seo (#1, 0–10), moz da update 2019 (#1, 0–10), upcoming domain change(#1, 0–10)

When we upgraded our Domain Authority algorithm in March, we knew it would be a big deal for a lot of people — so we put extra effort into education ahead of the launch. Russ's initial announcement post introducing the coming changes was the foremost source for information, earning ample attention as a result.

6. How Google Evaluates Links for SEO [20 Graphics]

Cyrus Shepard, July 1st

38,715 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: free google picture of created equal (#2, 0–10), google 1 page 2 links (#2, 0–10), google top rankingillustrations (#2, 0–10)

All right, I admit it: we did a ton of content updating and republishing this year. And it seriously paid off. Cyrus revamped a perennially popular post by Rand from 2010, bumping it from ten graphics to twenty and giving it a much-needed refresh almost a decade after the original post. The top keywords are kind of weird, right? Check out the title on the original post — looks like we've got a little work to do with this one to get it ranking for more relevant terms!

7. Do Businesses Really Use Google My Business Posts? A Case Study

Ben Fisher, February 12th

32,938 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: google my business posts (#2, 201–500), how to post on google my business (#3, 101–200), google business post (#3, 51–100)

Even a couple of years after Google My Business Posts became an option, it wasn't clear how many businesses are actually using them. Ben Fisher asked the important questions and did the legwork to find the answers in this case study that examined over 2,000 GMB profiles.

8. Announcing the New Moz SEO Essentials Certificate: What It Is & How to Get Certified

Brian Childs, May 1st

32,434 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: moz certification (#3, 101–500), moz seo certification (#2, 51–100), moz academy (#3, 51–100)

One of our most-asked questions from time immemorial was "Does Moz offer an SEO certification?" With the launch of our SEO Essentials certificate in May of this year, the answer finally became yes! 

9. Optimizing for Searcher Intent Explained in 7 Visuals

Rand Fishkin, March 23rd

29,636 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: user intent moz (#2, 0–10)

What does it mean to target the "intent" of searchers rather than just the keyword(s) they've looked up? These seven short visuals explain the practice of intent-targeting and optimization.

10. 7 SEO Title Tag Hacks for Increased Rankings + Traffic - Best of Whiteboard Friday

Cyrus Shepard, June 7th

26,785 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: title tags for landing page (#2, 11–50), moz free hack (#1, 0–10), title tag hacks (#1, 0–10)

Title tags can have a huge impact on your click-through rates when optimized correctly. In this Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus shares how to use numbers, dates, questions, top referring keywords, and more to boost your CTR, traffic, and rankings.

11. E-A-T and SEO: How to Create Content That Google Wants

Ian Booth, June 4th

25,681 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: eat seo (#2, 201–500), eat google (#2, 51–100), eat google seo (#1, 11–50)

Ian Booth covers the three pillars of E-A-T and shares tips on how to incorporate each into your content strategy so that you can rank for the best search terms in your industry.

12. 10 Basic SEO Tips to Index + Rank New Content Faster - Whiteboard Friday

Cyrus Shepard, May 17th

24,463 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: how to index a link faster (#2, 11–50), blog seo index (#1, 0–10), fast on-demand seo (#2, 0–10)

When you publish new content, you want users to find it ranking in search results as fast as possible. Fortunately, there are a number of tips and tricks in the SEO toolbox to help you accomplish this goal. Sit back, turn up your volume, and let the Cyrus Shepard show you exactly how in this episode of Whiteboard Friday.

13. Page Speed Optimization: Metrics, Tools, and How to Improve - Whiteboard Friday

Britney Muller, February 1st

24,265 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: page speed optimization (#1, 51–100), page speed metrics (#3, 11–50), optimize page speed (#1, 0–10)

What are the most crucial things to understand about your site's page speed, and how can you begin to improve? In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Britney Muller goes over what you need to know to get started.

14. How Google's Nofollow, Sponsored, & UGC Links Impact SEO

Cyrus Shepard, September 10th

24,262 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: how to send my publishers no follow links (#1, 0–10), moz nofollow links (#2, 0–10), rel= sponsored (#2, 0–10)

Google shook up the SEO world by announcing big changes to how publishers should mark nofollow links. The changes — while beneficial to help Google understand the web — nonetheless caused confusion and raised a number of questions. We've got the answers to many of your questions here.

15. How to Identify and Tackle Keyword Cannibalization in 2019

Samuel Mangialavori, February 11th

21,871 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: keyword cannibalization (#2, 201–500), ahrefs keyword cannibalization (#3, 11–50), what is keyword cannibalization (#3, 11–50)

Keyword cannibalization is an underrated but significant problem, especially for sites that have been running for several years and end up having lots of pages. In this article, learn how to find and fix keyword cannibalization before it impacts your SEO opportunities.

16. How Bad Was Google's Deindexing Bug?

Dr. Pete, April 11th

17,831 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: google de-indexing again (#2, 11–50), google index bug (#3, 11–50)

On Friday, April 5, Google confirmed a bug that was causing pages to be deindexed. Our analysis suggests that roughly 4% of stable URLs fell out of page-1 rankings on April 5, and that deindexing impacted a wide variety of websites.

17. What Is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Britney Muller, November 8th

16,797 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: what is bert (#2, 11–50), moz wbf (#2, 0–10)

There's a lot of hype and misinformation about the newest Google algorithm update. What actually is BERT, how does it work, and why does it matter to our work as SEOs? Join our own machine learning and natural language processing expert Britney Muller as she breaks down exactly what BERT is and what it means for the search industry.

18. How Do I Improve My Domain Authority (DA)?

Dr. Pete, April 17th

16,478 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: how to build domain authority (#2, 501–850), how to increase domain authority (#2, 501–850), how to improve domain authority (#1, 11–50)

Written to help research and inform his MozCon 2019 talk, this article by Dr. Pete covers how and why to improve a Domain Authority score.

19. How to Get Into Google News - Whiteboard Friday

Barry Adams, January 11th

16,265 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: how to get on google news (#3, 101–200), google news inclusion (#3, 51–100), getting into google news (#3, 11–50)

How do you increase your chances of getting your content into Google News? Barry Adams shares the absolute requirements and the nice-to-have extras that can increase your chances of appearing in the much-coveted news carousel.

20. Topical SEO: 7 Concepts of Link Relevance & Google Rankings

Cyrus Shepard, April 1st

15,579 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: link relevance (#2, 0–10), read more on seo (#2, 0–10),relevant links (#2, 0–10)

To rank in Google, it’s not simply the number of votes you receive from popular pages, but the relevance and authority of those links as well.

21. The 5 SEO Recommendations That Matter in the End

Paola Didone, March 26th

13,879 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: seo recommendations (#1, 11–50), 10 seo recommend (#1, 0–10), seo recommendations report (#1, 0–10)

What are the most steadfast, evergreen SEO recommendations you can make for your clients? These are the top five that this SEO has encountered that consistently deliver positive results.

22. An SEO’s Guide to Writing Structured Data (JSON-LD)

Brian Gorman, May 9th

13,862 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: json structured data (#3, 0–10), seo json content (#3, 0–10), seomoz structured data (#3, 0–10)

This guide will help you understand JSON-LD and structured data markup. Go beyond the online generators and prepare your web pages for the future of search!

23. A Comprehensive Analysis of the New Domain Authority

Russ Jones, March 5th

13,333 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: does post clustering build domain authority (#2, 11–50), who invented domain authority (#3, 11–50), domain authority curve (#1, 0–10)

A statistical look at Moz's much-improved Domain Authority. Find out how it performs vs previous versions of Domain Authority, competitor metrics, and more.

24. The Practical Guide to Finding Anyone's Email Address

David Farkas, November 26th

13,263 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: N/A in positions #1–3

The never-ending struggle with link building begins with finding contact info. David Farkas outlines a few simple and easy ways to discover the right person to reach out to, plus some tips on which tools and strategies work best.

25. How to Use Domain Authority 2.0 for SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Cyrus Shepard, March 8th

12,940 reads

Top keywords according to Keyword Explorer: domain authority 2.0 (#2, 11–50), thought domain authority keywords (#1, 0–10), domain authority for seo (#2, 0–10)

Domain Authority is a well-known metric throughout the SEO industry, but what exactly is the right way to use it? In this Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard explains what's new with the new Domain Authority 2.0 update and how to best harness its power for your own SEO success.

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That's a wrap for the top posts of 2019! Did we miss any that were on your own must-read list? Let us know in the comments below. We can't wait to see what 2020 has in store!

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Content optimization using entities: An actionable guide

They’re by no means a secret, and entities’ role in SEO has been heavily documented – entity optimization just isn’t the trendy topic you might see every time you check your Twitter timeline.

We’d much rather discuss less impactful concepts, like whether content within a subfolder will rank better than a subdomain or whether it’s important for an SEO to learn Python (am I right?).

But entity optimization should be getting the same amount of press as the other topics and concepts we SEO’s drive into the ground week after week. I want to help us understand why, and how to approach content with entities in mind.

What is an entity?

Google defines an entity as, “A thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable.” An entity can be an event, idea, book, person, company, place, brand, a domain, and so much more. You might ask, “Isn’t that the definition of a keyword? What’s the difference?”

An entity isn’t bound by language or spelling, but rather a universally understood concept or thing. And at the core of an entity is its relation to other entities. Google uses an illustration of “nodes” and “edges” to explain entities, with entities as nodes and relationships as edges. Let’s look at a search to see how this plays out:

A search for “Justin Trudeau” displays a knowledge panel where he carries the title “Prime Minister of Canada”. And a search for “prime minister of Canada” displays a knowledge panel of Justin Trudeau. So we know that Justin Trudeau is associated with Prime Minister of Canada and vice versa. Trudeau is the current prime minister, so what if we search for the same entities with a different relationship?

Here we see a different set of results, based on a different relationship between the nodes.

How are entities used by search engines?

We believe Google uses a model called Word2Vec (referenced in this patent regarding keyword extraction) to break down entities, map them to a graph, and assign a unique ID. In a sense, Word2Vec turns language into a mathematical computation, allowing Google to properly identify concepts and map them appropriately – regardless of language – in a way traditional models simply can’t.

We don’t know exactly how entities fit into search results right now but based on a model introduced in a patent titled “Ranking search results based on entity metrics“, we know one of the biggest factors is relatedness.

Relatedness is judged primarily by something called co-occurrence (the linked patent is still pending, but helpful in understanding co-occurrence). Co-occurrence judges the strength of relationships based on the frequency of the entities appearing together in documents around the web. The more frequently two entities are mentioned together, and the more authoritative the document that mentions them, the stronger the relation.

Are entities a ranking factor?

Entities aren’t necessarily a ranking factor – at least in the traditional sense. And we don’t really know exactly how much weight they carry as quality signals. But we know there are two key categories of ranking factors (among many others) heavily influenced by the entity graph.

Content

Keywords have historically been the judge of the relevance and quality of content. Keywords aren’t dead, but entities give better insight to search engines on the relationship between words in a search.

For example, let’s look at the search “best shoes for basketball in Atlanta.” Sure, we could create a post and stuff it with the keyphrase. But in a world of entity-based indexing, Google is looking for semantics around each of these entities, and signals that indicate their relationships.

You might recall the explosion of “LSI keywords”. Whether or not latent semantic indexing is used in Google’s algorithm, this fascination with semantics is rooted in entities. All search is now semantic.

Links

It’s pretty common knowledge in the world of SEO that not all links are created equal. Entity-based indexing amplifies this sentiment. A post aiming to rank for “best shoes for basketball in Atlanta” needs links and references from authoritative sources on shoes, basketball, and the city of Atlanta in order to really own that SERP.

How long have entities been used in algorithms?

We’ve seen patents on entities surfacing for over ten years, and most believe entities have played a role in search algorithms for quite a long time. The question is when did entities become core to indexing?

Cindy Crum of Mobile Moxie wrote a brilliant five-part series on entities. She makes a strong case for entities becoming a strong ranking signal at the same time as Google rolled out Mobile-First Indexing. In fact, she terms the entire update Entity-First Indexing.

BERT and entities

Did BERT have anything to do with entities? Though I believe BERT got a little more attention than it probably deserved, its use in Google’s algorithm can help us understand the importance of entities.

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a Natural Language Processing model that Google introduced in 2018 and began rolling out in October 2019. BERT has the ability to consider the full context of a word based on the words that come before or after named entities.

We won’t dive deep, but we’ll look at an example Google gave to help us understand what BERT means for search. Google called out the query “2019 Brazil traveler to USA needs a visa” in a recent post. The preposition “to” is crucial here, and more crucial is its relationship to the entities found before and after it. Before BERT, Google would have returned results about US citizens traveling to Brazil. Post-BERT, Google can recognize that nuance and return a more relevant and helpful result:

Source

Entities are at the core of Natural Language Processing models like BERT.

How to optimize content for entities

Before we dive into some actionable tips, know that entities have far more implications than content. Entity optimization is crucial for building brands, establishing domains, and all kinds of other online endeavors. Having said that, there are massive implications for content.

*Quick preface: I’ve used this approach to rank articles and have seen success, but this is by no means foolproof and battle-tested. I don’t at this time have or know of research that proves a direct correlation between an approach like this and high rankings. Nonetheless, I believe in it and believe a knowledge of entities gives SEOs a leg up.

Choose and research a topic

For starters, we need a topic and keyphrase for which we want to rank. We won’t dive into how to do keyword research or topic research, but let’s stick with our example above and aim to rank for “best shoes for basketball.”

If we want to aim to rank for this keyphrase, we need to gather insight on what other topics and concepts Google deems related in their entity graph. Where can we gain insight like this? A few places:

Wikipedia: We know entities are the foundation of Google’s Knowledge Graph – and we know Wikipedia fuels a lot of their knowledge on entities. We can assume that if Google leans on Wikipedia to help them understand topics, the attributes and sources found within Wikipedia may help guide our content.

Google images is another goldmine for entity insight:

Beneath the search bar, we find entities Google positively associates with “best shoes for basketball.” These aren’t the shoes or attributes of shoes you must list in your article, but logic would say the mentioning of these topics will help Google associate your article with them.

“People Also Ask” is another helpful source for entity optimization. These are the other topics and questions Google associates with your target keyphrase:

Use Google’s NLP API demo to analyze the competition

Identify the top two or three ranking articles for your target keyphrase. Now we will look at how Google views the entities found within their articles. We’re going to use Google’s NLP API demo:

This is just a sample demo of their NLP cloud product. Nonetheless, it provides really valuable data. Before we dive in, we need to define a key term.

Google’s API demo looks at a handful of things: salience, sentiment, syntax, and categories. We’re really only focusing on salience in this article.

Salience is a score of how important the entity is in the context of the whole text. The higher the score, the more salient the entity is. We’ll use salience to help guide our content. Here’s what to do:

1. Click on one of your competing posts in the SERP
2. Copy and paste the content into the demo editor
3. Click “Analyze”
4. Check out for which entities Google reveals high salience

We see the entities with the highest salience are “player,” “best basketball shoes,” and “basketball shoes.” Seeing as Google ranks this page well for the keyphrase we desire, we can conclude these are entities we should seek to optimize for in our post.

Provide context throughout

How can you optimize for these entities? As you begin writing, your goal should be to establish the relationship between the entities you’re targeting in your keyphrase and give Google all the context you can to associate your target keywords with their entity graph. This isn’t done by keyword stuffing, but by using some of the language and semantics we’ve gleaned from the above sources.

Google Images and Wikipedia should help you choose semantically related keywords and language to use throughout your article, while “People Also Ask” can help guide your overall topics and headings. Again, the aim is not to stuff keywords in, but to have a toolbox of individual words, phrases, language, and topics to guide our writing in a way that prioritizes our target entities.

Once you’ve finished writing, run your own article through Google’s NLP API demo to get a feel for how you stack up. If the desired entities show low salience, it may be worth going back to the drawing board. At the very least, you can analyze articles that show more entity success to gain insight into how Google associates your targets.

Update content as needed

Because entity optimization is a bit more complex than keyword optimization, there’s a stronger case for updating content on a regular basis as new topics arise around your entities. For example, as new basketball shoes come out, and Google establishes their place in the entity graph, it would help the salience of your entities to add them to your post.

BERT is another great example. As it blew up across the internet, if you had a post on Natural Language Processing, Google would expect to see mention of it.

The future of search

There is still a lot myself and the industry have to learn on the topic of entity optimization. And again, the implications expand far beyond content optimization.

But I do believe a focus on entities has already begun, and the signals will only grow in prominence for Google and other search engines.

Here’s to better content, more relevant SERPs, and the future of search.

Brooks Manley is a Digital Marketing Specialist and SEO Lead at Engenius, a marketing agency in Greenville, SC. When he’s not panicking about ranking drops and algorithm updates, you can find him watching NBA games and eating tacos.

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