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Beyond keywords: What really matters in SEO content

this tool is not for amateurs newbies don't click this

Just when we thought the saying “Content is king” was gone for good, there it goes showing its sneaky little face again in the search engine optimization (SEO) world.

Bearing in mind also that “Content is queen,” it appears that content is, in fact, pretty danged important — so important that a new sub-industry has squeezed its way into the search engine world: SEO content writing.

Otherwise referred to as “SEO copywriting,” SEO content writing has a bad reputation for being chock-full of keywords and little else. Though this may be more of a stereotype than reality, there is something to be said for going beyond keywords to write high-quality content that attracts new customers AND is SEO-friendly.

What’s the deal with ‘high-quality’ content?

The focus is typically on “high-quality” content — a term that becomes more subjective by the minute. It leads to questions like

What really makes SEO content “high-quality?”

Is it measurable?

More importantly, can it be recreated again and again?

The standard formula of:

keyword research + good writing + on-page SEO = high-quality content

may not be the move anymore. It’s simply not enough. In fact, keywords may be even less important than we all think.

Uh-oh.

Beyond keyword research

Being consistent with great SEO content writing doesn’t mean it should be formulaic.

Depending too much on robust keyword research and on-page SEO will result in dry content that appeals more to search engines than it does your target audience. Mastering the art of SEO content writing can be the difference between attracting a few website visitors and creating dedicated customers

That all being said, there is a sweet spot between creative content and “content” as we know it. The key lies in going far beyond keyword research and really understanding how words can be used to both attract traffic and drive conversions.

1. Keyword research, the right way

Though this post is all about going beyond keywords, it’s worth addressing what level of keyword research should be done before hopping into content writing. Keywords are still a component of SEO content — but perhaps shouldn’t be as important a component as traditionally thought.

First, your approach to writing new content should fit in with your existing SEO strategy. This should be a no-brainer, but it is a frequent issue I see in SEO content.

For instance, many business owners and SEOs outsource copywriting with little collaboration with the writer on what keywords are to be used. And, even if keywords are provided, it is unlikely that the writer really understands the fundamentals of using keywords in their writing beyond “keyword density.” This results in content that is incohesive and not SEO-friendly.

Second, when it comes to performing keyword research for your new content, look beyond the data. Sure, SEO tools can tell us a lot in terms of search volume and competition level, but can they tell us what content is really engaging to users? Doing a Google search on your target terms and seeing what post titles come up and how many comments and even social shares they get will give you some ideas as to what content is drawing people in and enticing them to engage.

Finally, SEOs and copywriters alike can spend far too much time focusing on terms they think are relevant without stepping back to see the full picture.

Sure, your rankings may increase due to great SEO, but there are many other factors to consider. Is your audience reading through the entire post? Are they sharing it? Are they opting into your calls to action? These elements of your writing should be your main focus. Be sure to have an outline in place, along with your keyword research, to ensure that you aren’t skimming over what matters most: what is going to help you drive conversions.

2. Get organized

How often have you had a new content idea pop into your head and instantly put fingers on the keyboard?

As much as I am a fan of writing when you feel inspired, there needs to be a structure for your content from the very beginning. Content that is too “stream-of-consciousness” or unorganized simply doesn’t convert well. There is a difference between having a conversational tone and writing whatever comes into your brain. I’m here to say that there is a way to capture that creative flow, all while putting out content that works.

Create an outline of the potential post or page, including the title and headings. Organize your content into sections that are cohesive and keep the reader interested. Figure out if and where the content fits into your website overall and what purpose it serves. You can even go as far as to decide what internal links will be used. Having a plan will both help in overall organization and ensure that it fits into the framework of your existing site.

3. On-brand is your best friend

One component of SEO content writing that is rarely, if ever, talked about is branding. As more SEO experts become aware of the intersection between SEO and a larger marketing strategy, it becomes apparent how big a role branding plays in a business’s success.

Your website content is no exception. This is why hiring out for copywriting outside of the brand, or even the industry, can be a risky move. For one, you risk having the overall tone of the writing shift and become incohesive with the rest of the brand message, and even the most subtle variations can be picked up by readers.

A good way to ensure that your content is on-brand and stays true to the business message is to utilize language that is used throughout the existing site and marketing materials.

For instance:

Does the brand use the word “passionate” rather than “driven?”

Are there elements of their tagline that can be broken down and used throughout the text?

Does their About page have a conversational tone or a professional one?

These are all subtleties to look out for that can make all the difference.

A great SEO copywriter will be able to pick up on the tone, vocabulary and message a brand is putting out and capture it in the posts and pages. There should be no question from the target audience who the content came from and what the message is.

On-brand content means that users can come to depend on the brand acting and sounding a certain way. It ultimately comes down to trust. If a user trusts a brand and understands its core mission, then they are more likely to buy.

4. Integrity & authenticity matter

Integrity and authenticity may seem like “fluffy” words that have no place in the often formulaic world of SEO. But when it comes to writing content that drives more than just traffic (i.e., sales), then these two elements can be the difference between website visitors and paying customers.

There are many SEO and marketing strategies that can drive traffic to a page. What matters is what actions users take once they get there. No amount of strong-arming will convince a user to buy. It takes integrity and authenticity to get them there.

People are becoming more and more aware of shady marketing tactics, and traditional methods of manipulation simply don’t work anymore. A website that makes it clear what the brand’s message is, the service it provides and how it can help potential customers truly has a leg up on the rest. Your content should be authentic, honest and in line with the ethics of your business. Otherwise, you will lose your customers before you even get them.

5.Know your target audience

Creating great SEO content goes beyond writing what you think your target audience wants to read to truly listening to what they want to know.

Are you in tune with their needs? Are there questions in the comments section that should be addressed? Are you writing down their common concerns and pain points? If so, these all open the door to creating solid content that will meet their immediate needs and drive them to seek out your services.

It is not enough to do keyword research to see what they are searching for. If that is the foundation of your content, you are likely to attract some readers but little else. But if you are able to keep them on site longer by creating a vast web of information, you are more likely to get them hooked from start to finish.

Even more, if you engage with them using language they understand and bring up their pain points, you are likely to convince them to fill out that contact form, subscribe or pick up the phone.

If you are struggling to think up fresh and engaging content ideas, be intentional about paying attention to what your customers and potential customers are telling you and asking for. Then, do a quick search to see if any other sites have addressed this issue, and how.

If you aren’t snatching up those opportunities, and another business is, you may be leaving money on the table.

6. Micro-engagement makes the difference

Long-form content can be a bore. For that reason, keeping readers engaged throughout the content can be quite difficult. However, mastering the art of micro-engagement can take your SEO content to the next level.

When it comes to informative content that can be a bit of a yawn, it’s a good move to try some different tactics to keep users engaged. Micro-engagement, as I refer to it here, means incorporating elements in your content to keep readers clicking, scrolling and reading more.

This is where a solid understanding of your target audience really comes into play. You should have a sense of what kind of content keeps your audience engaged. Testing different approaches and looking at the results can be a great data-driven method for seeing what works and what doesn’t.

Here are some suggestions to boost micro-engagement:

Numbered or bulleted lists.

Engaging photos (that are relevant to the text).

Funny GIFs or memes.

Informative and interesting videos.

Infographics.

Quizzes or surveys.

Visually appealing design.

Calls to action.

Block quotes.

Bold text.

Thought-provoking questions.

Stories.

Examples.

Helpful tips.

Incorporate a few of these ideas into your SEO content and see the difference. Over time, you will get a sense of what your audience likes, what keeps them engaged and what entices them to perform certain actions on your site. This list is by no means exhaustive; feel free to get creative with it and see what happens!

7. Content ‘freshness’ and competitive analysis where it counts

“Freshness” usually refers to having fresh new content on your website, but I believe this should extend beyond that. In other words, you should be putting unique ideas out into the world. How do you do that? By making competitive analysis a part of your SEO content strategy.

Scroll through any SEO or digital marketing site, and you are likely to find the basic posts and pages: “What is SEO?,” “Why You Should Hire an SEO Expert” and the like saturate these sites, and these topics are covered ad nauseam.

What these sites, and others outside of the SEO industry, fail to do is proper competitive analysis when coming up with new content ideas. That is, they are rewriting and reworking the same content that their competitors are using. This is not a good move.

What takes businesses to the top is looking at what competitors are doing and doing it better. Sometimes this even means doing something different. Whenever you are about to write a new piece of content, look to see what your competitors are doing, and consider how you can take it up a notch.

Your best approach is to stay ahead of the curve.

8. Data is everything

You simply can’t create great SEO content without looking at the data.

With a vast array of tools, SEOs and business owners alike should be looking to see what content is performing well, and why. They should be tracking conversions everywhere users are performing an action and seeing what works. This data will indicate the kind of content they can and should create in the future.

Staying on top of your analytics will not only show you the numbers in terms of traffic, but time on page, bounce rate and other valuable metrics that indicate how your content is performing. Through these, you can learn from your mistakes and imitate the strategies that are working. Without this knowledge, you are essentially flying blind and are again playing the guessing game.

Following the data throughout the process will help ensure that you are on the right track and that your utilization of the above principles is working for your business.

To close

There is no cookie-cutter approach to SEO content, but the fundamentals are still there. Write content for people, structure it for search engines and create an experience that is engaging and bound to drive the traffic you deserve.

don't click this link and less you really want to make google puke

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SearchCap: Voice assistant study, SEO audits & PPC budgets

GSA Search Engine Riker Is the All-Time King of Black Hat

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Surefire tactics to get the most value out of budget-limited campaigns Apr 27, 2018 by Amy Bishop

Since few people have money to burn, contributor Amy Bishop shares how to get the best return on your AdWords campaigns by understanding what is valuable and trimming wasted spend.

The first steps of your SEO audit: Indexing issues Apr 27, 2018 by Janet Driscoll Miller

Even a magic SEO wand will not get a web page to rank if the page has not been indexed. Contributor Janet Driscoll Miller suggests that making sure web pages can be indexed is key during an SEO audit.

Search in Pics: Parrots at Google, VHS tape library & scary client masks Apr 27, 2018 by Barry Schwartz

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more. Google uses this scary client masks: Source: Instagram Girl scouts meet at Google: Source: Instagram Parrots

Study: Google Assistant most accurate, Alexa most improved virtual assistant Apr 26, 2018 by Greg Sterling

While one new study on voice assistants compares the quality of different providers’ answers, the other drills into Google’s data sources for 22 verticals.

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Sprinklr adds AI to its customer experience platform

Customer acquisition on social media — with your own data

Facebook impervious to scandal as Q1 results of $12 billion easily beat expectations

Search News From Around The Web:

Baidu Announces First Quarter 2018 Results, PR Newswire

Content for Answers: The Inverted Pyramid – Whiteboard Friday, Moz

Duplicate content: causes and solutions, Yoast

Google app replacing Assistant’s ‘What can you do?’ section, 9to5Google

How to Build an AdWords Account – Campaign & Network Settings, Portent

The Difference Between Page Speed & Site Speed for SEO, Adam Riemer

What’s Better Google: Wrong Hreflang Or No Hreflang?, Search Engine Roundtable

This is another great pure SEO spam tool that still works in 2017

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The first steps of your SEO audit: Indexing issues

if you are can you can you know if you might try your hand at GSA

Indexing is really the first step in any SEO audit. Why?

If your site is not being indexed, it is essentially unread by Google and Bing. And if the search engines can’t find and “read” it, no amount of magic or search engine optimization (SEO) will improve the ranking of your web pages.

In order to be ranked, a site must first be indexed.

Is your site being indexed?

There are many tools available to help you determine if a site is being indexed.

Indexing is, at its core, a page-level process. In other words, search engines read pages and treat them individually.

A quick way to check if a page is being indexed by Google is to use the site: operator with a Google search. Entering just the domain, as in my example below, will show you all of the pages Google has indexed for the domain. You can also enter a specific page URL to see if that individual page has been indexed.

When a page is not indexed

If your site or page is not being indexed, the most common culprit is the meta robots tag being used on a page or the improper use of disallow in the robots.txt file.

Both the meta tag, which is on the page level, and the robots.txt file provide instructions to search engine indexing robots on how to treat content on your page or website.

The difference is that the robots meta tag appears on an individual page, while the robots.txt file provides instructions for the site as a whole. On the robots.txt file, however, you can single out pages or directories and how the robots should treat these areas while indexing. Let’s examine how to use each.

Robots.txt

If you’re not sure if your site uses a robots.txt file, there’s an easy way to check. Simply enter your domain in a browser followed by /robots.txt.

Here is an example using Amazon (https://ift.tt/2FlZrZS

The list of “disallows” for Amazon goes on for quite awhile!

Google Search Console also has a convenient robots.txt Tester tool, helping you identify errors in your robots file. You can also test a page on the site using the bar at the bottom to see if your robots file in its current form is blocking Googlebot.

If a page or directory on the site is disallowed, it will appear after Disallow: in the robots file. As my example above shows, I have disallowed my landing page folder (/lp/) from indexing using my robots file. This prevents any pages residing in that directory from being indexed by search engines.

There are many cool and complex options where you can employ the robots file. Google’s Developers site has a great rundown of all of the ways you can use the robots.txt file. Here are a few:

Robots meta tag

The robots meta tag is placed in the header of a page. Typically, there is no need to use both the robots meta tag and the robots.txt to disallow indexing of a particular page.

In the Search Console image above, I don’t need to add the robots meta tag to all of my landing pages in the landing page folder (/lp/) to prevent Google from indexing them since I have disallowed the folder from indexing using the robots.txt file.

However, the robots meta tag does have other functions as well.

For example, you can tell search engines that links on the entire page should not be followed for search engine optimization purposes. That could come in handy in certain situations, like on press release pages. Probably the two directives used most often for SEO with this tag are noindex/index and nofollow/follow:

Index follow. Implied by default. Search engine indexing robots should index the information on this page. Search engine indexing robots should follow links on this page.

Noindex nofollow. Search engine indexing robots should NOT index the information on this page. Search engine indexing robots should NOT follow links on this page.

The Google Developer’s site also has a thorough explanation of uses of the robots meta tag.

XML sitemaps

When you have a new page on your site, ideally you want search engines to find and index it quickly. One way to aid in that effort is to use an eXtensible markup language (XML) sitemap and register it with the search engines.

XML sitemaps provide search engines with a listing of pages on your website. This is especially helpful when you have new content that likely doesn’t have many inbound links pointing to it yet, making it tougher for search engine robots to follow a link to find that content. Many content management systems now have XML sitemap capability built in or available via a plugin, like the Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress.

Make sure you have an XML sitemap and that it is registered with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. This ensures that Google and Bing know where the sitemap is located and can continually come back to index it.

How quickly can new content be indexed using this method? I once did a test and found my new content had been indexed by Google in only eight seconds — and that was the time it took me to change browser tabs and perform the site: operator command. So it’s very quick!

JavaScript

In 2011, Google announced it was able to execute JavaScript and index certain dynamic elements. However, Google isn’t always able to execute and index all JavaScript. In Google Search Console, the Fetch and Render tool can help you determine if Google’s robot, Googlebot, is actually able to see your content in JavaScript. In this example, the university website is using asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), which is a form of JavaScript, to generate a course subject menu that links to specific areas of study.

The Fetch and Render tool shows us that Googlebot is unable to see the content and links the same way humans will. This means that Googlebot cannot follow the links in the JavaScript to these deeper course pages on the site.

Conclusion

Always keep in mind your site has to be indexed in order to be ranked. If search engines can’t find or read your content, how can they evaluate and rank it? So be sure to prioritize checking your site’s indexability when you’re performing an SEO audit.

This is another great pure SEO spam tool that still works in 2017

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SearchCap: Google new video ad format, SEO checklists & more

GSA Search Engine Riker Is the All-Time King of Black Hat

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Google launches Outstream Ads to boost video reach beyond YouTube Apr 18, 2018 by Greg Finn

A new video ad format brings video to mobile devices, in locations where no YouTube videos currently exist.

The 40-point SEO checklist for startups Apr 18, 2018 by Pratik Dholakiya

Startups can’t afford to miss a SEO trick when it comes to launching a new site, says Contributor Pratik Dholakiya. Here’s a checklist to help keep you on track.

Compare 15 marketing automation platforms Apr 18, 2018 by Digital Marketing Depot

Marketing organizations of all sizes are being inundated by data from multiple digital marketing channels and an increasing number of consumer devices. Faced with challenging market dynamics and increasing ROI pressure, more B2B marketers are using marketing automation platforms to manage complex multitouch buyer ecosystems. The latest edition of MarTech Today’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms:

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Facebook reopens review process for Instant Games & Messenger apps

Facebook’s ‘Premieres’ video format will let publishers post prerecorded video as live footage

Tech companies organize two efforts to support personal data management — both called Open GDPR

Adobe gets more serious about voice interaction with purchase of Sayspring

Snapchat broadens its ad options with new Shoppable AR Lenses for brands

Senators introduce privacy ‘bill of rights’ to protect consumer data

Are your ads pointing to the right domain? Here’s a script to find out.

Want to target position 0? Here’s what you need to make that happen

Here’s how to use Twitter to dominate the Google search results

Search News From Around The Web:

Google Algorithm & Ranking Update Kicking Off, Search Engine Roundtable

Google’s New AI Head Is So Smart He Doesn’t Need AI, Wired

Marissa Mayer Is Still Here, New York Times

Meet the Woman Who Leads NightWatch, Google’s Internal Privacy Strike Force, Gizmodo

Review Spam Hits the Earth’s Most Famous Landmarks, Sterling Sky

Sad Lack of Visible Progress on Google Earth for Chrome and Mobile One Year Later, Google Earth Blog

What to Expect from a SEO Report, Craig Campbell

while all of the other SE Nuke's are dead GSA is king

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The 40-point SEO checklist for startups

GSA Search Engine Riker Is the All-Time King of Black Hat

Whether you are in the process of taking your startup site public or honing your on-site search engine optimization (SEO) post-launch, it’s important to have a process in place to make sure you aren’t missing anything.

To that end, we’ve collected 40 factors we recommend incorporating into your checklists and processes to ensure that your SEO stays ahead of the game.

The following checklist takes into account SEO factors related to your:

Server setup.

Indexation.

Technical content factors.

Site architecture.

Mobile factors.

Keep this on hand the next time you need to evaluate your site.

Server-side SEO

During the process of developing a website for your startup, you will need to make sure you have your server and hosting issues covered. Here are some considerations to watch out for leading up and after your launch.

1. Monitor site uptime: Use a free uptime monitoring tool such as Pingdom or UptimeRobot to verify that your site’s uptime is reasonable. In general, you should aim for an uptime of 99.999 percent. Dropping to 99.9 percent is sketchy, and falling to 99 percent is completely unacceptable. Look for web host uptime guarantees, how they will compensate you when those guarantees are broken, and hold them to their word with monitoring tools.

2. Switch to HTTPS: Set up HTTPS as early as possible in the process. The later you do this, the more difficult the migration will be. Verify that hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) always redirects to hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS), and that this never leads to a 404 page. Run a secure sockets layer (SSL) test to ensure your setup is secure.

3. Single URL format: In addition to making sure HTTP always redirects to HTTPS, ensure the www or non-www uniform resource locator (URL) version is used exclusively, and that the alternative always redirects. Ensure this is the case for both HTTP and HTTPS and that all links use the proper URL format and do not redirect.

4. Check your IP neighbors: If your internet protocol (IP) neighbors are showing webspam patterns, Google’s spam filters may have a higher sensitivity for your site. Use an IP neighborhood tool (also known as a network neighbor tool) to take a look at a sample of the sites in your neighborhood and look for any signs of spam. We are talking about outright spam here, not low-quality content. It is a good idea to run this tool on a few reputable sites to get an idea of what to expect from a normal site before jumping to any conclusions.

5. Check for malware: Use Google’s free tool to check for malware on your site.

6. Check for DNS issues: Use a DNS check tool such as the one provided by Pingdom or Mxtoolbox to identify any DNS issues that might cause problems. Talk to your webhost about any issues you come across here.

7. Check for server errors: Crawl your site with a tool such as Screaming Frog. You should not find any 301 or 302 redirects, because if you do, it means that you are linking to URLs that redirect. Update any links that redirect. Prioritize removing links to any 404 or 5xx pages, since these pages don’t exist at all, or are broken. Block 403 (forbidden) pages with robots.txt.

8. Check for noindexing and nofollow: Once your site is public, use a crawler to verify that no pages are unintentionally noindexed and that no pages or links are nofollowed at all. The noindex tag tells search engines not to put the page in the search index, which should only be done for duplicate content and content you don’t want to show up in search results. The nofollow tag tells search engines not to pass PageRank from the page, which you should never do to your own content.

9. Eliminate Soft 404s: Test a nonexistent URL in a crawler such as Screaming Frog. If the page does not show as 404, this is a problem. Google wants nonexistent pages to render as 404 pages; you just shouldn’t link to nonexistent pages.

Indexing

Run your site through the following points both before and after your startup goes live to ensure that pages get added to the search index quickly.

1. Sitemaps: Verify that an eXtensible markup language (XML) sitemap is located at example.com/sitemap.xml and that the sitemap has been uploaded to the Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. The sitemap should be dynamic and updated whenever a new page is added. The sitemap must use the appropriate URL structure (HTTP versus HTTPS and www versus non-www) and this must be consistent. Verify the sitemap returns only status 200 pages. You don’t want any 404s or 301s here. Use the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) validator to ensure that the sitemap code validates properly.

2. Google cache: See Google’s cache of your site using an URL like:

 https://ift.tt/2qIaB5X URL here].

This will show you how Google sees your site. Navigate the cache to see if any important elements are missing from any of your page templates.

3. Indexed pages: Google site:example.com to see if the total number of returned results matches your database. If the number is low, it means some pages are not being indexed, and these should be accounted for. If the number is high, it means that duplicate content issues need to be alleviated. While this number is rarely 100 percent identical, any large discrepancy should be addressed.

4. RSS feeds: While rich site summary (RSS) feeds are no longer widely used by the general population, RSS feeds are often used by crawlers and can pick up additional links, useful primarily for indexing. Include a rel=alternate to indicate your RSS feed in the source code, and verify that your RSS feed functions properly with a reader.

5. Social media posting: Use an automatic social media poster, like Social Media Auto Publish for WordPress, for your blog or any section of your site that is regularly updated, as long as the content in that section is a good fit for social media. Publication to social media leads to exposure, obviously, but also helps with ensuring your pages get indexed in the search results.

6. Rich snippets: If you are using semantic markup, verify that the rich snippets are showing properly and that they are not broken. If either is the case, validate your markup to ensure there are no errors. It is possible that Google simply won’t show the rich snippets anyway, but if they are missing, it is important to verify that errors aren’t responsible.

Content

Put processes in place to ensure that the following issues are handled with each new piece of content you plan to create post-launch, and check each of these points on your site before you launch.

1. Missing titles: Use a crawler to verify that every page on your site has a title tag.

2. Title length: If you are using Screaming Frog, sort your titles by pixel length and identify the length at which your titles are getting cut off in the search results. While it is not always necessary to reduce the title length below this value, it is vital that all the information a user needs to identify the subject of the page shows up before the cutoff point. Note any especially short titles as well, since they should likely be expanded to target more long-tail search queries.

3. Title keywords: Ensure that any primary keywords you are targeting with a piece of content are present in the title tag. Do not repeat keyword variations in the title tag, consider synonyms if they are not awkward, and place the most important keywords closest to the beginning if it is not awkward. Remember that keyword use should rarely trump the importance of an appealing title.

4. Meta descriptions: Crawl your site to ensure that you are aware of all missing meta descriptions. It is a misconception that every page needs a meta description, since there are some cases where Google’s automated snipped is actually better, such as for pages targeting long-tail. However, the choice between a missing meta description and a present one should always be deliberate. Identify and remove any duplicate meta descriptions. These are always bad. Verify that your meta descriptions are shorter than 160 characters so that they don’t get cut off. Include key phrases naturally in your meta descriptions so that they show up in bold in the snippet. (Note that 160 characters is a guideline only, and that both Bing and Google currently use dynamic, pixel-based upper limits.)

5. H1 headers: Ensure that all pages use a header 1 (H1) tag, that there are no duplicate H1 tags, and that there is only one H1 tag for each page. Your H1 tag should be treated similarly to the title tag, with the exception that it doesn’t have any maximum length (although you shouldn’t abuse the length). It is a misconception that your H1 tag needs to be identical to your title tag, although it should obviously be related. In the case of a blog post, most users will expect the header and title tag to be the same or nearly identical. But in the case of a landing page, users may expect the title tag to be a call to action and the header to be a greeting.

6. H2 and other headers: Crawl your site and check for missing H2 headers. These subheadings aren’t always necessary, but pages without them may be walls of text that are difficult for users to parse. Any page with more than three short paragraphs of text should probably use an H2 tag. Verify that H3, H4, and so on are being used for further subheadings. Primary subheadings should always be H2.

7. Keywords: Does every piece of content have a target keyword? Any content that does not currently have an official keyword assigned to it will need some keyword research applied.

8. Alt text: Non-decorative images should always use alt-text to identify the content of the image. Use keywords that identify the image itself, not the rest of the content. Bear in mind that the alt-text is intended as a genuine alternative to the image, used by visually impaired users and browsers that cannot render the image. The alt-text should always make sense to a human user. Bear in mind that alt-text is not for decorative images like borders, only for images that serve a use as content or interface.

Site architecture

It’s always best to get site architecture handled as early on in the launch process as possible, but these are important considerations you need to take into account even if you have already launched.

1. Logo links: Verify that the logo in your top menu links back to the homepage, and that this is the case for every section of your site, including the blog. If the blog is its own mini-brand and the logo links back to the homepage of the blog, ensure that there is a prominent homepage link in the top navigation.

2. Navigational anchor text: Your navigational anchor text should employ words for your target keyword phrases, but should be short enough to work for navigation. Avoid menus with long anchor text, and avoid repetitious phrasing in your anchor text. For example, a dropdown menu should not list “Fuji apples, Golden Delicious apples, Granny Smith apples, Gala apples” and so on. Instead, the top menu category should be “Apples,” and the dropdown should just list the apples by type.

3. External links: Links to other sites in your main navigation, or otherwise listed on every page, can be interpreted as a spam signal by the search engines. While sitewide external links aren’t necessarily a violation of Google’s policies on link schemes, they can resemble the “Low quality directory or bookmark site links,” and Google explicitly calls out “Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites.” It’s also crucial that any sponsored links use a nofollow attribute and a very good idea to nofollow your comment sections and other user-generated content.

4. Orphan pages: Cross reference your crawl data with your database to ensure that there are no orphan pages. An orphan page is a URL that is not reachable from any links on your site. Note that this is different from a 404 page, which simply does not exist but may have links pointing to it. Aside from these pages receiving no link equity from your site, they are unlikely to rank.  Orphan pages can also be considered “doorway pages” that may be interpreted as spam. If you do not have access to database information, cross reference crawl data with Google Analytics.

5. Subfolders: URL subfolders should follow a logical hierarchy that matches the navigational hierarchy of the site. Each page should have only one URL, meaning that it should never belong to more than one contradicting category or subcategory. If this is unfeasible for one reason or another, ensure that canonicalization is used to indicate which version should be indexed.

6. Link depth:  Important pages, such as those targeting top keywords, should not be more than two levels deep, and should ideally be reachable directly from the homepage.  You can check for link depth in Screaming Frog with “Crawl depth.” This is the number of clicks away from the page you enter as the start of your crawl.

7. Hierarchy: While pages should be accessible from the homepage within a small number of clicks, this does not mean that your site should have a completely flat architecture. Unless your site is very small, you don’t want to be able to reach every page directly from the homepage. Instead, your main categories should be reachable from the homepage, and each subsequent page should be reachable from those category pages, followed by subcategories, and so on.

8. No JavaScript pagination: Every individual piece of content should have an individual URL. At no point should a user be able to navigate to a page without changing the browser URL. In addition to making indexation very difficult or impossible for search engines, this also makes it impossible for users to link directly to a page they found useful.

9. URL variables: URL variables such as “?sort=ascending” should not be tacked onto the end of URLs that are indexed in the search engines, because they create duplicate content. Pages containing URL variables should always canonicalize to pages without them.

10. Contextual linking: Google has stated editorial links embedded in the content count more than links within the navigation. Best practice suggests adding descriptive text around the link,  your site’s internal links will pass more value if you include contextual links. In other words, internal linking within the main body content of the page is important, particularly for blog and editorial content. Even product pages should ideally have recommendation links for similar products.

Mobile

Virtually every modern startup should start right off the bat with a mobile-friendly interface and infrastructure. Check for and implement the following as early on as possible.

1. Google Mobile-friendly test: Run the Google Mobile-friendly test to identify any issues that Google specifically finds with how users will experience your site on mobile.

2. Implement responsible design: Your site should be responsive, meaning that it will function properly and look aesthetic to users no matter what device they are accessing your site from. If this is outside your wheelhouse, look for a theme labeled “responsive template.” Responsive themes are available for nearly all platforms, and some free options are almost always available. Be sure to eliminate any extraneous visual elements that are unnecessary to see from a mobile device. Use in your CSS to block these elements.media rules.

3. JavaScript and Flash: Verify that your pages work fine without JavaScript or Flash. Use your crawler or database to identify pages that reference small web format (.swf) and  JavaScript (.js) files and visit these pages using a browser with JavaScript disabled and no Adobe Flash installed. If these pages are not fully functiona,l they will need to be reworked. Flash in general should be entirely replaced with cascading style sheets (CSS). JavaScript should only be used to dynamically alter HTML elements that are still functional in the absence of JavaScript.

4. Responsive navigation: Verify that your drop-down menus are functional on mobile devices and that the text width doesn’t make them unattractive or difficult to use.

5. Responsive images: Even some responsive themes can lose their responsiveness when large images are introduced. For example, placing the following code between your tags will ensure that images size down if the browser window is too small for the image:

img { width: 100%; height: auto; }

6. Responsive videos and embeds: Videos, and especially embeds, can really bungle up responsive themes. For example, if you are using the HTML video tag, placing this code between your tags will cause your videos to scale down with the browser window:

video { max-width: 100%; height: auto; }

7. Interstitials and pop-ups: Verify that any pop-ups or interstitials you use are fully compatible with any device, and consider blocking them for devices below a certain pixel width. It should always be possible to close out of an interstitial or pop-up, and button sizes should always be reasonable for a touch interface.

Conclusion

As important as innovation and personalized strategy are to an effective launch, without a foundation of processes to ensure the basics are taken care of, it can become easy to chase new SEO trends and neglect what we know works. As you develop your startup launch strategy and followup SEO work, refer to this checklist and build your own processes to ensure that this doesn’t happen.

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Google’s mobile-first index has set sail. Are you on board? 5 SEO essentials

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After a relatively lengthy wait, Google has started to roll out its mobile-first index. First announced back in 2016, the mobile-first index is a direct response to one of the most significant shifts in consumer behavior over the past few years.

Last year, research revealed mobile devices now account for 57 percent of all traffic, so it stands to reason that Google should use a mobile user agent to crawl and index content.

Google’s aim is to launch this index worldwide, in a move that will see the search giant access the mobile version of a website to index and rank content. Even if a consumer searches on a desktop device, Google will query its index of mobile content to find the most authoritative, relevant response. The mobile version of your site will become the primary version once the index switches over.

There has been a lot of speculation about this seismic shift since the initial announcement, but we are past the point of conjecture now. Search marketers need to be at their most vigilant to ensure their sites are optimized for mobile and in prime position to benefit from this development.

The five tips below should be the first ports of call for all search engine optimization specialists (SEOs) as we enter the mobile-first age.

Monitor Google’s crawl activity

Google will send a notification via your Search Console when your site has been switched over to the mobile-first index. This is welcome news, but site owners will want to dig deeper to see Google’s crawl activity in more detail, both before and after the switch occurs.

By monitoring log file data, it is possible to see how search engine bots access a website and what they see when they get there. This will flag any increased activity from smartphone user agents and highlight any decreases from their desktop counterparts. These patterns may not necessarily be conclusive, as there will be fluctuations as Google performs tests. A rise in smartphone user agent activity could be followed by a fall in the number of uniform resource locators (URLs) it visits each day while Google tries to calibrate your site’s performance.

That said, we know that Google will test each site’s readiness in isolation, so this analysis will help you identify and resolve any crawl issues you observe. If there are significant differences in the internal linking structure of your mobile and desktop versions, for example, this will be an essential task.

The mobile-first index is coming, so it’s best to keep an eye on this if you want to maintain and grow visibility when it inevitably does arrive for your site.

Understand the mobile user journey

Attention spans among audiences are even shorter on mobile devices than they are on a desktop, so it is vital to understand the concept of the micro-moment.

During these short windows of opportunity, brands can engage customers just as they express their desire to know something, go somewhere, or even be inspired by content.

This requires brands to meet users at the source of demand, which can only be achieved through a data-driven strategy. By incorporating intent signals into your content marketing plan, you can go beyond keywords to get to the heart of what your customers are really asking for.

This demand landscape is fundamentally different on mobile, so each brand should make this one of their first considerations for the mobile-first world.

Mobile devices also create and share more data than desktop devices, which creates new opportunities for content to partner with other marketing channels to create innovative mobile experiences. This could involve a voice search strategy to target specific micro-moments.

All of this data should be used to map out the structure of the mobile user journey, which can then be populated with increasingly personalized content.

Deliver tailored content for mobile

One of the great fallacies about the mobile-first index is that if you have a responsive site, there is very little you need to do in preparation.

For some, that may be the case, but only if your content already caters to a mobile audience.

If your content is the same across devices, there are no guarantees your rankings will remain steady, too. BrightEdge (my company) research found that 79 percent of keywords return different results across mobile and desktop, which points to the fact that users expect different content depending on their context.

Many brands will view the mobile-first index as an opportunity to provide a better experience for their audience, which may see them rewarded with higher rankings. Without necessarily doing anything wrong, those who don’t take the time to tailor their content could lose out.

Sophisticated marketers will use their mobile customer journey map to pinpoint the stages at which mobile is of the highest importance. Combined with analysis of current content performance across all devices, it will then become possible to tailor specific content assets for the mobile-heavy stages of the journey.

On mobile devices, content needs to help users achieve their goal quickly. That can mean incorporating progressive web apps into a mobile content strategy to provide the fastest experience possible, for example. Start with the data to understand where the demand lies, then devise the most appropriate strategy to delight customers.

Cover the technical basics

The greatest content in the world will still need to follow some technical best practices before it can be served in response to a text or voice query. A quick checklist to prepare for the mobile-first index would include:

Structured data. This markup helps search engines understand and retrieve your content, making it one of the cornerstones of a successful SEO strategy this year.

Verify the mobile site.  Add the robots.txt to your mobile site and verify in Google Search Console that it can be crawled, if you are still using a “m.” site.

Hreflang. Ensure that any hreflang tags on your mobile site point to the mobile versions of your URLs.

Metadata. It is worth revisiting metadata to see if you can optimize for higher click through rate (CTR) on mobile devices.

User experience. Analyze your data to see where the bottlenecks are within your site journey. These tend to occur when users have to wait a long time for a site to load, when content is simply too long to read on a smartphone or when they have to pinch and zoom to read text.

Test for speed. Use Google’s much-improved mobile site speed test to identify any areas you can accelerate. If in doubt with mobile optimization, make the site faster.

Set up a new measurement framework

Marketers need to know if their content is nurturing leads from awareness to research through to conversion and retention. Looking at this through the lens of a last-click attribution model will miss much of the picture. The industry is growing in sophistication in a lot of areas, including performance measurement. The mobile-first index is an opportunity to bring new metrics to your reports and go beyond conversion data.

By attributing some of the “credit” for each conversion to earlier stages of the purchase journey, you can start to understand the real value of those micro-moments in attracting new customers.

Combined with metrics like customer lifetime value, marketers can start to develop a much more nuanced picture of their audience. This approach helps to integrate content with other marketing channels, too, which only enhances its impact.

Of course, it is also essential to monitor your rankings across mobile and desktop. Performing a share of voice analysis both before and after the switch to the mobile-first index will reveal the positive impact of following these handy tips to get your site in shape.

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SearchCap: Google loses RTBF case, local pack report & schema SEO

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case in UK High Court Apr 13, 2018 by Greg Sterling

Decision likely to spark other appeals to courts by those denied de-listing.

Want to target position 0? Here’s what you need to make that happen Apr 13, 2018 by Karen Bone

Hey Google, how do you become the answer people hear on their voice assistants? Contributor Karen Bone explains how to make that happen by doing your homework on featured snippets.

4 underutilized schema markup opportunities that impact SEO Apr 13, 2018 by Tony Edward

Contributor Tony Edwards recommends taking advantage of little-used brand, image, app and person schema that indirectly help position a website for better rankings.

Research: Google local algorithm uses 2:1 clustering formula Apr 13, 2018 by Greg Sterling

Study identifies Local Pack results distance pattern.

Search in Pics: Dog chases Google street view car, Google dumbbells & lots of clocks Apr 13, 2018 by Barry Schwartz

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more. This dog chases after a Google street view car: Source: Twitter Google sourdough: Source: Instagram Dumbbells

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Did your ad work? The ABC’s of People-Based Testing

Google’s ‘International Women’s Day’ spot was most watched ad on YouTube in March

Gmail’s upcoming redesign to include more app integration, smart replies & offline support

Here’s why 6sense bought ZenIQ

YouTube to stop supporting third-party ad serving in EU in May, citing GDPR

Search News From Around The Web:

Google AI can pick out voices in a crowd, Engadget

Mobile-First Indexing: The Debrief, Seer Interactive

SEO for Small Business – The Topics, Tactics & Tools, Portent

Ask Yoast: Optimizing for audio podcasts, Yoast

Google Granted Patent for “Predicting a User’s Needs for a Particular Context, Go Fish Digital

Google: Order of H Tags & Search Rankings in Google, The SEM Post

How To Add Google Search Console To Your Google Shortcut Menu, Search Engine Roundtable

Improve PPC Call Quality With Call Conversion Tracking, Metric Theory

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4 underutilized schema markup opportunities that impact SEO

GSA Search Engine Riker Is the All-Time King of Black Hat

Structured data in the format of schema markup can have multiple benefits when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). While it is not a ranking factor, it does indirectly help position your website for better rankings.

Some of the benefits of utilizing structured data are:

Improved crawling of the content on your site. Structured data serves up your content in an understandable format the search engines can easily read and recognize.

Potential to have rich results (e.g., rich snippets, knowledge graph) appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs), which can improve your organic search visibility and organic click-through rate. Certain schema markup, such as product reviews and aggregate ratings, can be used in paid ads within Google.

Certain social platforms, such as Pinterest, recognize schema markup. Pinterest utilizes markup, such as product and recipe schema markup, to power rich pins.

There are many schema markup opportunities now, as the schema community and the search engines have worked over the years to expand the compatibility of different content types.

The majority of websites on the internet are using some level of schema markup, however, there are some underutilized schema markup opportunities that can have great benefits if leveraged.

Here are four schema markup opportunities to take advantage of.

1. Brand elements within Organization schema markup

Organization schema markup is one of the elements Google uses as a reference for brand information in knowledge graph panels.

There are quite a few things you can specify within this markup to further enforce your branding and have more items appear on your knowledge graph panel.

Alternate names. If your brand name is searched often with different variations, this is a great way to help Google understand these variations and ensure your knowledge graph appears for these variations.

Example: AZEK utilizes alternate names of items within its Organization schema markup to highlight different brand name variations.

Phone number & email address. Highlighting a customer service or sales number in the organization schema markup can make it more likely to appear in your knowledge graph panel, which can lead to more customer engagement and conversions. Email addresses also have the potential to appear in knowledge graph panels and branded featured snippets.

Example: Roomandboard.com highlights an 800 number and email address in their organization schema markup.

2. ImageGallery schema markup

The ImageGallery schema markup is a great opportunity to mark up all images within a gallery. This can be impactful for product pages which usually have an image gallery displaying four or five images. It allows Google to easily recognize the different images and utilize them for different types of results.

Example: Roomandboard.com utilizes the ImageGallery markup to highlight all images on individual product pages.

3. App schema markup

With more smartphones being used, many companies now have mobile applications. However, many sites do not leverage schema MobileApplication markup on their sites. Most websites have a dedicated landing page for their mobile applications.

Example: Macy’s app landing page

Example:  MobileApplication markup

4. Schema person markup on employee profiles

Many websites list employee profiles for their executive teams and others. There is an opportunity to mark up this information, which often includes the employee’s name, title and photo, and sometimes a short description, with schema Person markup. This can help your site to power knowledge graph results and appear in certain rich results for your employees.

Example: Direct answer with employee info

Example: Healthfirst utilizes schema Person markup on its Leadership page.

Conclusion

So, there you have it: four schema markup opportunities you may not currently be using and can leverage if applicable to your site.

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Become an SEO rock star: Evolve your SEO skill set

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During my career, several executives have asked why so many of my search engine optimization (SEO) team members are poached by other teams in the organization.

The answer is always the same: True SEO professionals evolve quickly and are in a constant mode of progressing their skill set. Successful SEO is less about what you know and more about what you can get done.

Talented search professionals are not only experts at evolving their skill sets and adapting to the rapid changes Google makes on a recurring basis, they are also experts at understanding how an organization works across the numerous functions in their organization.

Every manager is looking for an individual that can learn quickly on the job and already knows how to work cross-functionally to achieve objectives. These are core characteristics of a rock star or a star on the rise in any company.

In this article, I am breaking out the core areas of self-improvement SEO professionals should be focused on to continue to progress in SEO and increase their value to the organization.

Most of these are not the run-of-the-mill SEO required skill sets, but obtaining these skills can place you in a different league in the search space where driving organic growth is only one value you are delivering.

The more you understand about areas outside of SEO that impact SEO, the more impact you can drive across the entire organization.

Marketing list for SEO rock stars

Marketing is a great place to start, given the common split of SEO professionals coming from either a marketing or technology background.

Below are some of the areas you should have a solid understanding about today that are marketing-centric or closely tied to the marketing function:

1. Copyright and trademark law.  No need to be a lawyer, but you should understand how copyright and trademark laws work to protect intellectual property.

SEO can provide guidance to internal or external legal teams by demonstrating how individuals are capitalizing on our intellectual assets. Demonstration of the primary rule around capitalization, as well as where a violator is creating consumer confusion, is fundamental in resolving copyright and trademark issues. Infringements occurring online are likely having an impact on our SEO traffic and/or potentially how Google evaluates our website.

2. Domain management and strategy. Building on copyright and trademark law and understanding what options are available to protect against trademark infringement and resolve trademark use issues with your legal team in the domain space can be extremely helpful in fixing traffic leaks and/or preventing these leaks from occurring.

Traffic leaks are what I define as entities that exist online that are designed to siphon traffic destined for your domain. For example:

What are common typos for your domain?

Do you own those typos?

Is a large portion of your affiliate revenue coming from redirected typo domains?

Every dollar spent marketing your brand either offline or online should be driving traffic to your website. When that is not the case, you have a traffic leak.

3. Affiliate networks. In a company I worked for previously, we had what we called the weekly thief report. The name of the report was a bit of a joke, but the report’s purpose was simply to identify where the affiliate channel was cannibalizing existing spend or efforts from other marketing channels.

Understanding how affiliate networks function and how affiliates utilize the system to make their money makes it much easier to identify where cannibalization is occurring, and more importantly, where the affiliate is failing to provide value in the customer journey.

A typo domain redirect, utilizing IFrames (Inline Frames) to duplicate content on their domain without bringing unique content or a value to the customer is just one trick that occurs in the affiliate space. There are numerous other tricks affiliates use to redirect traffic from your website to another website where they are being compensated for orders or leads.

A percentage of this traffic should have arrived at your website as an SEO referral source. Spend time with your affiliate manager to review the program so you can identify traffic leaks that are negatively impacting your SEO program. Use the information you obtain about how trademark and copyright law works to determine what options are available to resolve and prevent future traffic leak issues.

4. Paid search. Simply put, you should know exactly what is working in your paid search programs. For example, what products perform well in product listing ads (PLAs)? These are likely the best product page targets for SEO given these product uniform resource locators (URLs) have already demonstrated the ability to convert traffic. Understanding how paid search is driving clicks through their creative can help you rewrite titles and descriptions that will result in a higher click-through rate for SEO.

What keywords are bid to be visible versus bid to win? SEO and paid search should be aligned on keywords identified as bid to win to ensure both teams are fighting for top positions for these keywords. Aligning with paid search on brand term strategy can reduce spend on branded terms and allow paid search to go after traffic where it is more difficult for SEO to compete. 

5. Campaign calendars. Search engine optimization does not participate in every campaign the traditional or digital marketing teams launch. Depending on timing and/or how long the campaign will run, it may not make sense to focus SEO efforts on campaign support.

It is important to be able to review a campaign calendar and identify which campaigns are going to drive search demand and what keyword searches these campaigns are going to trigger. For long-running campaigns or where the campaign has an extended reach, SEO teams should make sure there is an effort to capitalize on increased search demand versus allowing competitors to benefit from their marketing spend.

If you are new to evaluating campaign calendars, we can improve the impact of SEO participation by working with paid search teams to learn how each campaign impacted demand in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and how the paid search teams capitalized on the increased demand.

6. Creative. While this is not always present in the marketing department, marketing personnel typically work together with the creative teams on deliverables for a campaign.

Every SEO professional should place a focus on improving their creative writing skills. Spend time with your creative teams and review what content pieces resonated with the target audience and learn from their successes. Variation in content types to drive a different consumer behavior is critical when developing a content strategy for your SEO program.

Do not forget to be a good partner. SEO has access to information and tools that help us determine what keywords and questions are trending in the search engines. Share information with the creative team so they are contributing to SEO as part of their process of developing content for the customers. Every piece of content you do not create in SEO is a win in terms of scaling your program.

7. Forecasting. We can’t create an SEO forecast without understanding the objectives and process for the entire marketing channel forecast. The desired outcome for the entire marketing mix, along with knowing the objectives around cash flow after marketing, is critical to understanding what is expected from your SEO channel.

Each quarter, the percentage of revenue contribution for your channel may need to shift to allow for the entire marketing mix to be successful. Using the information you have on how your SEO program performs as it relates to cost versus revenue, current run rate and percentage of revenue contribution, take a crack at a full marketing forecast across all channels.

To refine your forecast process, obtain the same information from the other channel managers and compare your forecast to the company’s forecast quarterly, as well as the actuals reported.

Performance trends for other channels will have a direct impact on future forecasts for SEO. Marketing is a team effort: When one channel is down, another channel must step up and pick up the slack.

Wear a lot of hats

When evaluating job opportunities, always look for a position that will allow you to grow beyond your current SEO skill set. Exposure to other functional areas in the organization, and/or even responsibilities to manage other groups as part of your role, will help build you into a well-rounded professional.

With that said, let’s take a look at the technology list of self-improvement areas. The technology areas of concern in this section are focused on deeper levels of tech that can help you mature your SEO program through enhanced training for technical personnel, a more thorough analysis of both the bot and user experience and how to leverage technology to simplify routine SEO operations.

Technology list for SEO professionals

8. Front-end development. The ability to read and audit front-end code is an essential skill for SEO. Brush up on:

The American with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance best practices.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) validation.

Markup languages.

Develop in the areas of cascading style sheets (CSS), JavaScript and linked data.

My recommendation is to always have a website you own and are maintaining. Where possible, create a website and register as an affiliate through one of the affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Rakuten LinkShare or ShareaSale.

The more you explore on the marketing and tech side with your own site, the easier it will be to evaluate websites you are optimizing. The goal you should set is to reach a point of competency that allows you to speak fluently with the front end developers about code requirements and reach the level where you can conduct SEO courses for front-end development.

9. Load balancing. Business growth is a good thing, but it requires website scaling to accommodate increases in traffic. A firm grasp of how load-balancing technologies work to route traffic gives you a significant advantage in SEO.

For example, you may be looking at massive log files conducting your log file analysis to determine how crawlers are interacting with the website, issues they are encountering and visit frequency. Load balancing allows for the creation of a replicated bot farm where bot traffic is offloaded to a group of servers running the exact code base as the customer. Segmenting this traffic allows for more crawler activity without the consumption of resources used to serve the customer.

The technology team will agree to the segmentation because offloading bot activity to dedicated servers makes it much easier to achieve consistent page load times given that the random crawl activity consumes resources that could be more efficiently serving a customer.

10. Log file analysis. Why do we want bot traffic segmented from customer traffic? One advantage is the ability to analyze logs that are serving a specific need.

Analyzing logs without having to parse out non-bot user agents to get a thorough understanding of the experience a crawler encounters as part of their crawl simplifies the process immensely. Analyzing samples of logs from the farm of servers serving the customer can help you glean information about issues with the customer experience, issues that will eventually show up in the bot logs.

Start out using applications like Screaming Frog’s log analyzer and Deep Log Analyzer, and then build up to utilizing log aggregation systems or importing logs into a database that can be queried.

Log aggregation systems may become more critical if traffic is not segmented by a user agent. Larger websites do not always create separate resource pools for customers versus crawler, but log aggregation systems allow for advanced exports where specific user agents from the logs can be targeted for export.

11. Linked data. This is an area where you can leapfrog over SEO professionals that have “rested on their laurels” while the web was moving forward.

Today, most SEO professionals fully understand how webpage linking works to provide value for a visitor and how it impacts SEO. Linked data is the next step, where data can be aggregated from multiple sources into a single resource for the customer.

Most of us are aware of linked data technologies like JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) because Google has been clear that it’s a preferred markup language for providing additional descriptive data around elements in our websites.

Spin up on linked data to understand the end game: a connected web where information sharing is much more fluid for the customer. Instead of providing a single content page that links to other pages presenting useful information on the same topic, you can use linked data to bring that content into your page.  It will also acknowledge the creator and build a more useful page for your visitor.

Beware of building pages where you have not provided added value and are just aggregating other sources. If you are an Excel user, imagine being able to perform a VLOOKUP across the web to create a single data set from numerous data sources.

Linked data is powerful, and we are only beginning to see propagation of use.

12. DNS and content delivery networks (CDNs). I am combining these two tech areas because they overlap.

For example, nearly all websites today have access to content delivery networks that help scale the website to handle more traffic. CloudFlare, Fastly, Instart Logic, Amazon S3 and Akamai are just a handful of CDNs that are in use today that have an impact on SEO.

Leveraging these resources for SEO purposes can ease the work placed on internal technology partners and allow for faster execution for the customer.

One example would be redirects. Certainly, you want to be fully aware of any domain level redirects that are set in DNS. Typo domains are a great example where domain name systems (DNS) should be used at domain level to redirect traffic, as long as the appropriate 301 response code is returned to the crawler.

Other redirects we work with for platform migrations, hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) migrations and the handling of routine redirects to accommodate discontinued content are handled much more easily at the CDN than by the internal servers.

Every task your internal servers do not have to handle makes room for the efficient execution of tasks it must handle. Offloading redirects to CDN partners eliminates bloat in configuration files, and the right CDN partners make mass redirects a breeze.

Best of all, consolidating redirects at the CDN allows both tech and SEO access to the redirect rules.

13. Website performance. I hammer home website performance in nearly every article I write because Google is always going to consider speed as a critical component of the user experience.

Focus on learning how to identify performance issues, find out who to work within your organization to resolve performance issues and learn about the performance tools of the trade. If you are working for an online retailer, and you do not know the service level agreements (SLAs) assigned to your technology team for page load times and page types, you are already behind the curve.

If your technology team does not have assigned SLAs, they are behind the curve. Work with your tech teams to track core metrics like:

Response time.

Top-of-fold load time.

Overall page load time.

Once core metrics are set, be sure to set goals that can be converted to SLAs. While performance is essential to SEO success in a mobile-first world, driving performance forward is a customer win regardless of traffic source.

Homework

Working in SEO always comes with significant homework.

The challenging part of SEO has always been adapting to changes and the ability to envision where Google is going next. Certainly, if we are focusing on improving the experience from the search engine to the fulfillment of the user’s intent, we are already working ahead of the Google algorithm.

Understanding where Google is heading next in their endeavor to measure the user experience can help us to prioritize improvements in those areas ahead of where Google will be heading later.

Find a good teacher

Keep in mind learning on the job works very well when you have the right teacher. If you do not have the right teacher, there are many resources online to help you develop your skill sets.

I frequently find myself switching from iTunes to Lynda.com to listen to a course while I’m working. If I’m focusing on a tech skill improvement, I often use the resources at O’Reilly, as the monthly cost is very reasonable and the technology areas are covered in more detail. Lynda.com’s cost is also very reasonable, but I have found it more useful for diving into the areas of marketing and analytics.

Conclusion

Regardless of your source of learning, make self-education a priority. Keep on top of the articles on Search Engine Land, and stay up to date on what is happening in SEO today to help inform your curriculum decisions. Never stop learning.

SEO revolves around change, and change always has a learning component. Embrace the journey, set personal development goals, and if you work in a company where a teacher does not exist, become the teacher.

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How to align SEO and sales teams so everyone benefits

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It’s no secret that marketing and sales don’t always see eye to eye.

The sales team gets mad at the marketing team for lack of leads and marketing gets mad at sales for not closing deals.

For two areas so closely tied to one another, the lack of cooperation is pretty amazing.

In fact, according to a recent study from InsideView titled, “The State of Sales and Marketing Alignment in 2018,”  only 37 percent of salespeople reported meeting with marketing to discuss lead scoring.

Even more telling, Hubspot’s State of Inbound 2017 report noted only 44 percent of marketers feel they are aligned with sales. Yikes!

Breaking down silos isn’t simple, and it certainly isn’t a new concept. We’ve been talking about this for years, and while technology has made it much easier for sales and marketing to align, many companies still treat these departments separately.

How can we better align our sales and marketing efforts, specifically when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO)?

Obviously, there isn’t one answer, and for each organization it will be different. However, when thinking about SEO and sales, there are a few things we can do:

1. Set up monthly integrated meetings

When I worked in-house, the marketing team held weekly calls with the support team. The goal was to discuss common issues facing customers, identify problems or gaps on the site and ensure the marketing and support team were aligned with communication.

The same thing can apply to sales and marketing.

Set up monthly meetings to discuss goals, strategies, results and campaigns. The key to being successful is ensuring everyone knows what is happening, why it’s happening and how to address it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a marketing team launch a campaign without telling the sales team. How are they supposed to sell something they don’t know anything about?

Consider creating a Slack channel for the teams to communicate. Open lines of communication and shared knowledge equate to a more cohesive team.

2. Use sales data to inform SEO tactics

When we bring a new client on board, we spend a considerable amount of time talking through the sales process, evaluating existing sales materials, and in many cases, sitting through product demos and sales pitch decks.

We ask questions like:

Who is the target buyer?

Who is the decision-maker?

What are key issues you hear during the sales process?

While these questions may seem basic, they help determine how and where buyers search and what type of content we need to give them.

For example, if a client only sells to companies with over $100 million in revenue, addressing the challenges facing small business doesn’t make any sense. If the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is the decision-maker, their main concern is likely tied to how your product or solution will help them financially.

Understanding the nuances of the buyer, the sales process and everything that comes with it is key to creating an SEO strategy that helps drive sales — which leads us perfectly into our next point.

3. Map your keywords to the customer journey

What is the goal of an SEO program? To be found by the right people, at the right time, in search results. More or less.

Easier said than done. We need not only to understand the buyer but also to understand the keywords our buyers are using and the search intent behind them throughout the entire customer journey.

That feels like a lot!

Fortunately for us, the data found in the material used to bring on a new client, the sales process, the pitch deck and common problems can help form the keyword research process.

A keyword research process must also adapt. It has to focus on themes and intent and can no longer be about selecting a few phrases and calling it a day.

Once you have your keyword themes, you can review with your sales team, start mapping them to the customer journey, and more importantly, begin applying them to the overall content and SEO strategy.

4. Create assets that work for everyone

As an SEO, you typically have firsthand knowledge of what content is needed, what content is being created and where that content lives. That isn’t the case for every department.

A few days ago, a client mentioned she found a bunch of really great content on the site that wasn’t linked from anywhere and was only being used for sales. The marketing team didn’t know about it, and we didn’t know about it. What could we do with it?

Understanding what is out there and how it can be used across marketing and sales can be beneficial to your overall strategy.

Let’s take webinars, for example. Most companies hold a webinar, and then you never hear about it again. But what if we took that webinar and used it across departments? What if we took that one piece of content and turned it into several? We could have:

A blog post summarizing the webinar which can be optimized for search, shared across social and sent out to everyone who registered for the webinar to re-engage them.

Short clips from the webinar which can be shared on YouTube, added into the blog post and embedded into landing pages for the sales team to utilize.

When creating assets, we have to think beyond search and consider how we can create something that benefits the organization as a whole.

5. Use SEO data to inform sales

We already talked about using sales data to inform your SEO strategy, but it also works the other way around.

As SEOs, we spend a lot of time in analytics working to understand how our site is performing, what our visitors like, what they don’t like and where we can improve. We also spend a lot of time looking at search results and competitors.

How much of that are you sharing with your sales team?

During the monthly meeting I mentioned above, make sure your sales team is aware of the following:

Top-performing content themes. They don’t have to know the exact pieces of content, but if specific areas are resonating with visitors, they can push that topic during calls or share the materials with prospects.

Competitor updates or campaigns. Very few people are looking at one solution and one solution alone. They are also looking at your competitors. The team should be aware of how competitors are performing, the type of messaging they are using and any other updates coming from them.

Customer reviews or complaints. What are people saying about you on the internet? What are the positives and the negatives? By sharing these with the sales team, they can proactively address potential concerns and promote positive reviews.

Sharing information between departments will go a long way in helping the organization. While the three bullets mentioned above may not seem significant to your efforts, they could be to someone else’s.

Tying it all together

Aligning efforts across the organization, specifically between SEO and sales, can make both teams better and drive growth faster. It may not be easy to get a process in place, but if you start with communication, the rest will follow.

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Already doing SEO? Add these two things to optimize for voice search

GSA Search Engine Riker Is the All-Time King of Black Hat

How do you optimize content for voice search in 2018?

That’s a popular search engine optimization (SEO) question these days as everyone looks to take advantage of the surge in spoken queries. Take a look at recent trends:

The answer to the popular question, “How do you optimize for voice search?” is this: Do what you would do for traditional search engine optimization and that should cover it.

Really?

Yep! Let’s move along now.

OK, so not exactly. I’m joking to prove a point.

There are a few things you can specifically do to optimize for voice search. For the most part, things you hear about optimizing for voice search are things that will help your site in general.

After doing some research on Google to find “how to” articles on voice search optimization and how SEO changes for voice search, I made a list of tactics to help get more organic traffic from spoken queries.

Many of the articles suggested the same tactics, so from the dozens of top-ranking articles I reviewed, here are the 12 best practices and corresponding tactics you can use to optimize for voice search:

1. Optimize for conversational keywords

Create question-and-answer pages (FAQs) or write individual blog posts answering customer questions.

Add questions to product pages.

Use Answer the Public (free), Question Samurai (signup required) and StoryBase (paid) to find popular questions around your space.

Questions from Answer the People

2. Optimize for local queries

Claim your Google My Business listing.

Add “near me” phrasing to your pages.

Write descriptions to show up in the local knowledge panel.

3. Try to get your site a featured snippet

Use structured data.

4. Make your content mobile-friendly

Improve your site speed for mobile.

Use Google’s mobile-friendly testing tools.

5. Make your site secure

In July 2018, Google will mark non-HTTPS sites as non-secure in Chrome browsers.

HTTPS warning in Chrome 68

6. Make your answers short and concise

7. Make your domain authoritative

8. Share your content on social media frequently

9. Create simple, easy-to-read content

10. Make long-form content

Will make you look like an expert in your field!

Increases engagement and sharing.

11. Rank high in core search

12. Create Actions for Google 

Most of the articles really just focused on these four:

Optimize for conversational keywords.

Optimize for local search.

Optimize for mobile.

Use structured data.

The other best practices were mentioned infrequently, if at all.

But when you look at these 12 optimization tips in terms of whether they help SEO in general or help specifically with voice search, they’re really more general best practices than voice search SEO tips. They might be important for voice search, but if you do these things well, they’re going to help with typed queries on mobile and desktop, too.

So, if you’re doing SEO already, you only need to do these two things additionally to be optimized for voice search, per the articles out there:

If you were feeling overwhelmed about optimizing for voice search, your job just got a lot easier. Focus first on optimizing for conversational keywords and implement Actions for Google to get more traffic from voice search.

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SearchCap: Google SEO patents & Search Engine Land Awards

GSA Search Engine Riker Is the All-Time King of Black Hat

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Google patent on related entities and what it means for SEO Apr 5, 2018 by Dave Davies

Contributor Dave Davies pulls key points from a newly awarded Google patent on related entities and points out the ranking benefits of strengthening entity associations in your SEO and link-building efforts.

Final call to enter the 2018 Search Engine Land Awards Apr 5, 2018 by Search Engine Land

Time is running out to wrap up your submissions for the 4th annual Search Engine Land Awards! That’s right – the final entry deadline is just a little more than a week away, Friday, April 13th at 11:59PM PST.

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Bing Ads launches price extensions

State of Digital Marketing Analytics in the Top 1000 Internet Retailers

Gartner offers first Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing tools

Taboola launches Apple News-like service for Android

How to use the Knowledge Graph for higher rankings

7 ways to turn a webinar into a stream of link-attracting content

President Trump: Save us from the GDPR horror show

Facebook updates terms and data collection policy to be more ‘clear’

Facebook is now giving users the option to remove apps in bulk

Search News From Around The Web:

Gary Illyes – From 28K to Reinventing Search (Google Land | Episode 5) by Kwasi, soundcloud.com

Why Your XML Website Sitemap is Important for SEO, Search Engine Guide

Expert Insight: How Small Businesses are Making the Most of SEO, KoMarketing

Five SEO Questions with Pete Meyers of MOZ; Algorithms & Mobilegeddon, SEM Rush

Google Uses Many Signals To Determine What & If To Show Dates In Snippets, Search Engine Roundtable

Nuclear Physics Degree to PPC, Hallam Internet

Retailers: Improve your category pages before building links to your site, builtvisible.com

The Google Patents & Ranking Factors that Will Change SEO with Bill Slawsky, cognitiveseo.com

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Google patent on related entities and what it means for SEO

GSA Search Engine Riker Is the All-Time King of Black Hat

I read a lot of patents, many of which may or may not apply to search engine optimization (SEO) or be used by Google at all.

But that’s not the case with the recently granted Google patent “Related entities.” I believe this patent is being applied and it gives us significant insight into how Google identifies entities and the related entities people are searching for.

Let’s look at some details I think are interesting and get a general understanding of the patent and its intent. Understanding how Google associates entities will help us grasp and use the connections to SEO.

Related entities

Let’s start with understanding related entities, especially in the context of Google patent US 20180046717A1.  

If you search on the phrase “presidents of the united states,” this is what you may see:

The presidents shown are “related entities” and listed because the general phrase “presidents of the united states” was searched on. Different people are shown, but all share a common denominator, being President of the United States.

How does Google know to show these particular people when a general phrase is queried? That is what the patent explains. It essentially discusses how these related entities are selected and how they are displayed.

Let’s look at another example. If we click the image of Donald Trump on the page, we are taken to a query for his name that appears as:

When I search his name without previously searching for anything President-related (and being logged out), this is what I see:

We can see the breadcrumb navigation at the top of the results which started appearing in February of 2018, but in addition, we see the context carrying forward.

When we searched for presidents, a carousel of presidents in chronological order was presented, and when we click an image, the context is carried with it, something that does not occur when we search a president in isolation.

So, what does this mean, and what does it have to do with the patent? Let’s begin by digging into a few core areas, and I will highlight the key points.

Entity database

One of my favorite takeaways is the idea there is an actual entity database.

Essentially, this is a separate database which is only tasked with understanding the various entities on the internet, what attributes they have and how they are interconnected.

For our purposes here, we need to remember that an entity is not simply a person, place or thing but also its characteristics.

These characteristics are connected by relationships. If you read a patent, the entities are referred to as “nodes,” and the relationships as “edges.” Some of the clearly prominent entities and relationships involved with Barack Obama are:

Has name Barack Obama.

Has position President of the United States.

Has birthplace Honolulu Hawaii.

Has spouse — Michelle Obama.

Has net worth $12.1 million.

And so forth.

According to this common logic and other patents, there is a separate database outside of the general search index:

I believe this is important, and we’ll get back to it after looking at relatedness.

Determining relatedness

The patent touches on the important subject of determining relatedness.

We discussed how relatedness applies to other areas when optimizing for voice search. There are a few key ways that Google determines the relatedness of entities, but one key mechanism that comes up repeatedly is the co-occurrence of the entities in the same resources.

In our example above, this would mean the various presidents would appear on the same page often, thus indicating to Google they are related.

Alternatively, one can assume each entity appearing in the carousel would be there regardless of whether they occurred frequently or infrequently on the same page together. Even if President Jimmy Carter did not ever appear on the same page as Donald Trump, they would be associated by the phrase “president of the united states” because each man is connected to that phrase.

This is an incredibly important idea for content marketing and general SEO outside of the patent we’re discussing.

Determining priority

An area of the patent that applies less to general SEO but is still worth discussing here is that Google needs a mechanism for determining which entities and relationships are most important.

Currently, Donald J. Trump is President of the United States, but he’s also a businessman and could be connected to that entity by the relationship “has/had job.” And yet, when searching his name, we see results for him as president and not a businessman.

Here’s another example: Ronald Reagan was an actor for far longer than he was a politician or president. And yet, when we search his name, his presidential information is returned first:

Why was either man not shown as a businessman or actor when only their names were searched?

One of the key mechanisms Google uses to determine which entity and relationship are the most important is the freshness (how recent are the co-relations we discussed above), as well as the click-through rate on related queries combined with what users type in after a query.

Basically, if people typed in “president of the united states” more often than “business person”  or “actor,” the importance of that relationship would be increased.

Overarching factor

Authoritative sites, especially those related to a specific subject matter, are given a higher priority in determining the relationships between entities.

For example, a Wikipedia page on Ronald Reagan that discusses his role as president would be considered authoritative and strengthen the relationship between his name and the term “president.”

If we were talking about technical SEO, Search Engine Land would be considered an authority since it is associated with the process and a flagship publication in the SEO industry.

Think of it as PageRank for entities, even though there’s no green bar to tell you when you’re on the right track.

Now, let’s look at the question, “What does this mean for SEO?”

The core of the patent

A lot of what’s in the patent applies to general SEO, and not just by displaying related options within search results.

The idea of an entity database separated from the general search system reinforced in yet another Google patent strikes a chord with me. You can think of it as a database that maps all the links across the web to pass PageRank — only more powerful.

Instead of simply keeping a record of all the links and anchors from around the web, it’s taking things one step further and includes an understanding of the relationships between entities.

If you operate a hotel in New York City, and that hotel name is frequently referenced on pages with the entity “hotel,” the relationship between the brand and the word “hotel” will be strengthened.

Further, if the hotel also exists on pages optimized for “New York City,” that entity relationship will be reinforced whether there is an active link or not. Even if topically unrelated pages use the phrase “New York City” and the name of the hotel, the relevance score goes up.

Interestingly, being included on a page with other brands that are already strongly related to New York hotels would aid your efforts as well, essentially piggy-backing on the relatedness of their brand and passing it off to yours.

And unlike PageRank, which reduces based on the number of links, I have read nothing about diminishing returns related to entities. But that isn’t to say it doesn’t happen. It’s worth considering.

Competing brands

Continuing with my hotel example, having said “hotel” on a page with competing brands would, by my logic, assist in boosting the strength of the relationship for “hotels.”

But if the page is also about dining and activities in New York, the relationship may soften.

There is no information I know of to suggest whether entity association is an on-and-off, relative-or-not scenario or whether the more entities referenced, the less any one is valued. This would make sense, and if that is the case, then pages with a focus would logically reinforce a specific entity association more than a general page.

We do know the patents suggest that proximity to an entity is a signal, so the closer two terms appear on a page, the stronger the relationship association is.

As with PageRank, authority matters. Unlike PageRank, the link doesn’t and if there’s a link. Whether it uses a nofollow attribute or not would be irrelevant.

Now, to be clear, I am referring to entity relationship building and not PageRank. PageRank and links are still powerful signals, but they are not what we’re talking about here. I’m not telling you to ignore link building or that nofollow links are as powerful as followed links, but for what we’re covering here, nofollow would not play a role.

Wikipedia uses nofollow attributes on its outbound links, yet those links pass a powerful signal.

Some might even argue sites that using nofollow links still have a high value, provided the content and structure is presented in a way that the entities can easily be associated.

Takeaways

This patent gives us some idea of how to strengthen the association of our site or brand with specific terms and entities.

The idea that we can push our rankings forward through entity associations, and not just links, is incredibly powerful and versatile. Links have tried to serve this function and have done a great job, but there are a LOT of advantages for Google to move toward the entity model for weighting as well as a variety of other internal needs.

Again, I am not suggesting you abandon your link building. Do this in addition to building links, or even better, focus your link-building efforts on ways that can accomplish both tasks at once.

If nothing else, you’ll be forcing yourself to pursue links on pages with a strong topical or geographic relevance to the attributes you want to be associated with.

Think about it this way: Even if this patent is rubbish, you’ll still be doing smart marketing.

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SearchCap: SEO angles, mobile conversions & April Fools’ Day pranks

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

April Fools’ Day 2018: Google, Amazon & more have fun over the weekend Apr 2, 2018 by Barry Schwartz

April Fools’ Day 2018: Google, Amazon & more have fun over the weekend

Lowest rates for SMX Advanced expire Saturday Apr 2, 2018 by Search Engine Land

If you’re craving a conference that skips the basics and dives right into the deep end of search marketing, look no further. Search Engine Land’s SMX® Advanced is coming to Seattle June 11-13. This conference has sold out every year for over a decade, and Super Early Bird rates expire this Saturday night. Book now

The power of podcasting: SEO keyword angles Apr 2, 2018 by Sherry Bonelli

In Part 2 of a three-part series, Contributor Sherry Bonelli dives into the details of optimizing a podcast for maximum SEO, link and brand-building benefit.

7 ways to increase mobile engagement Apr 2, 2018 by Kristopher Jones

The mobile search economy continues to explode. Contributor Kristopher Jones outlines several messaging and alternative marketing strategies to improve your mobile conversion rates.

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Lowest rates for SMX Advanced expire Saturday

To make every conversion count, count every conversion

YouTube’s new TrueView for Reach option makes bumper assets skippable

Helpshift unveils AI designed for customer service

In eBay’s DOOH campaign, the weather plays a starring role

Why we need to fight fake reviews

SEO for multi-language websites: How to speak your customers’ language

No search volume? No problem! 3 ways to improve low-traffic AdWords campaigns

Stop being a link snob and saying no to certain links

The power of podcasting: How to boost your reputation and search engine rankings

Recruitment SEO: How to create a well-optimized career section on your site

Search News From Around The Web:

Apple Maps gains statewide transit coverage in Arkansas, Ohio, Maryland & West Virginia, appleinsider.com

Google Search Engineer’s Approach to Algo Updates, The SEM Post

Google Testing Yellow Map Pin In Search Results Snippets?, Search Engine Roundtable

My Fifth Post About Context at Google: Adding Context Facts to Question Answers, Go Fish Digital

The Pros and Cons of PPC Bidding, PPC Hero

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The power of podcasting: SEO keyword angles

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This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 can be found here.

Once you are booked on a podcast, brush up on the host’s website, bio and about page.

Listen to recent podcast episodes so you can get a feel for the types of questions being asked, learn a little bit about the host and ask about audience demographics. You have an opportunity to speak with someone who is going to listen to you for 20 or 30 minutes of their time — you must make an impression!

Before the podcast interview, the host or one of their representatives will typically contact you to chat about what they want to cover on the podcast. If they don’t reach out to you, you should contact them and ask if you can schedule a time to talk about what they would like to discuss on the show.

Some will want the interview to be organic and won’t share the angle they are planning to focus on; some will strategize your interview so that you both can tailor a message that will best help the podcast audience.

As an example, when I was interviewed on Phil Singleton’s podcast, The Local Business Leaders Podcast, we decided I would talk about local search engine optimization (SEO). But as we talked, we also decided I would talk about a local SEO success story I had with a client who was an attorney. That gave both of us an angle for the podcast, and through our discussion, we’d get attorney SEO-related keywords that would be included in the transcript of the episode.

Remember, the audience trusts the show host, so as a result, you get an automatic “seal of approval.” And remember, the entire show is dedicated to you! You’re the person of the hour, and it’s costing you nothing but your time. SWEET!

Think SEO during the podcast interview

Prepare for the interview by brainstorming and writing down a list of keywords, influencers, companies, blogs, universal resource locators (URLs), books, etc. that pertain to the topic of the show and keep that sheet of notes handy so you can refer to that list and use those examples throughout the interview.

As you are being interviewed, think of how you can use those keywords naturally during the conversation with the host. If you mention links, make a quick note and be sure you provide the direct link to the host after the interview, so they can add them to the show notes.

When you’re talking, speak to their main audience. Now, like many speakers, you may use similar examples in almost every interview or presentation you give, but tailor those answers to meet the audience’s interests. Remember to teach and share your best information; don’t pitch your services. You’re there to teach, not sell your products or services.

Mention what you admire

During the interview, mention books, influencers or other companies you admire or like to work with. You can use these types of people and companies as examples.

Once the podcast is uploaded and available to the public, you can promote the podcast on social media.

Be sure to mention the influencer, his or her company, software or book on social media. You’ll likely get kudos or a thank-you for mentioning these people or companies. Just make sure you don’t sound like a sales pitch when you’re a guest on a podcast. Remember, you’re only there to share information, not to sell.

Use names, companies and keywords and examples naturally throughout the show, just as you would if you were writing an article.

Keep an SEO mindset

Throughout the interview, keep an SEO mindset. Think carefully about the words and phrases you are using. The content and information you share in the show will benefit you in multiple ways, so try to be strategic in what you say.

During the podcast interview, be very purposeful in how you mention your website or business. Don’t talk about your business too much. At the end of the show, the host will usually give you an opportunity to mention something about how people can learn more about you and your business. This is the time to mention your URL and work in a call to action (CTA) for a special offer only available to podcast listeners.

Plan ahead: Set up a special page on your site with an offer, pixel visitors and capture names and email addresses and give them something awesome in return.

Make your offer redeemable only on your site.

SEO benefits after the podcast

Once you’re done with your guest interview, you’ll breathe a sigh of relief and feel really good!

Don’t forget to send the host an email thanking them for having you as a guest, and be sure to provide the host with all the links you mentioned during the show.

Reach out to those influencers, let them know you shared their websites and books in your podcast, and then leave a link to the podcast. Many will share the podcast link with their fans and followers.

Getting these shares is just one more way to amplify your SEO benefits through social media. Be sure to social tag these people when you make your social media post like this:

You can also send them an email or direct message them on social media as well.

After the podcast recording is done, the host is going to do most of the work to promote the recording, driving people to visit your site so they can find out more information about you. However, you will also want to do your part to share on your social media channels as well. This cross-promotion between you and the podcast will benefit everyone from a search and social perspective.

Since podcast listeners are more active on social media, you can use that to your advantage to promote your podcast guest interview through your social media channels. This gives you a huge, well-rounded digital marketing strategy to help promote your podcast interview.

Links and asking for reviews

At the end of the show, be sure to send the podcast host a list of the links you mentioned during the interview, so they can easily put them in the show notes.

It’s been shown that Google considers online reviews in their ranking factors. At the end of every show, send an email, politely ask the host for a review based on your knowledge during the podcast interview, and offer to leave them a review on iTunes as well. This will lead to new reviews that can help you with rankings and credibility. The podcast host will be thrilled that you’re leaving a review for them as well.

Leaving great reviews may help you land more guest spots, so be sure to leave a review that is fair, informative and lets others know you are available as a podcast guest.

This ends Part 2 of our three-part series: SEO and podcasting. In Part 3, we’ll learn how to build personal and brand authority with podcasts, look at how podcasts generate backlinks and discuss how to transcribe audio files for more SEO-rich content. Stay tuned!

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Recruitment SEO: How to create a well-optimized career section on your site

GSA Search Engine Riker Is the All-Time King of Black Hat

When you are advertising and ready to hire top talent, it’s important to have a strong, consistent and well-optimized presence on job posting sites, high-traffic job boards and LinkedIn.

If a job candidate is interested in your company, he or she will immediately go into research mode and scour the Internet for more information. You should expect job seekers to visit your company website to learn more about leadership, culture, and other available jobs in their field.

For employers and site owners, you can improve the job seeking experience as well as your company’s recruitment pipeline by building out and optimizing a careers section on your site.

Google for Jobs

With Google for Jobs, Google prioritized helping both job seekers and employers by enhancing the search engine results page (SERP) user experience (UX) for job postings.

Now, job postings will have more prominent placement in SERPs for job-related search queries. You will see SERP features like a company logo, reviews, ratings, job details, and a dedicated job search user interface (UI) that lets searchers explore jobs without leaving the SERPs.

This new user experience enables job seekers to focus their search queries based on these specific factors:

Location

Department

Date Posted

Employer

It’s imperative hiring managers work directly with search engine optimization specialists (SEOs) to ensure each page can be found simply and easily, especially for corporate-level companies. With that in mind, take the time to update the architecture of your careers section and job postings for both discovery and conversion.

Careers section best practices

A discoverable careers section of a company’s website starts with an organized category architecture. Using a folder structure that incorporates location and department will segment job applications in a way that people will navigate naturally.

Take a look at what you have to offer with each job posting,  corporate-level companies with many global offices may need to have location be a prominent factor of the content, especially if departments are segmented by the office. In this case, it makes sense to lead category pages with location types.

Take the conversion funnel into the account, non-branded and branded search terms will bring in two completely different types of people. You can assume people who found the job posting via branded search terms are considering working with your company more heavily, but may also have other brands on their shortlist.

It’s important to keep your careers section well-organized so they can find the information they need quickly and easily. Most companies will simply need to break job roles down by department structure, group them together and branch out from there as needed.

Optimize your job posting

Job seeking is an incredibly personal journey, so it’s important to put yourself in the job hunter’s shoes by asking these questions:

What are they looking for in their first job?

What do they need from their next job?

If you’re looking for a natural leader, what types of titles are they drawn to?

The following example illustrates total monthly phrase match search volume for Lyft.  Specific modifiers were segmented (driver, jobs, careers, etc.), showing that roughly 11 percent of all of Lyft’s branded searches are employment related.

For people aware of the Lyft brand, that’s a significant amount of people looking for both day-to-day driver and corporate jobs all around the United States each month.

Just like other discoverable content, you need to build your careers pages with user intent in mind. To ensure your job posting is found, you need to treat it like you would any other landing page. It needs to have enough information to tell a good story and incredibly relevant keywords that are easy to understand in the title tags.

Since people typically search for a specific type of job, experience level, type of company, or type of industry, it makes sense to include that information in the title tags. For example:

Title (SEO Specialist) | Type of Company or Industry (Entry-Level Jobs in Digital Marketing Agency)

Title (Cosmetics Engineer) | Type of Company or Industry (Engineering Jobs in Beauty Industry)

Organize the job posting to meet a job hunter’s expectations. That means defining the purpose of the role, its day-to-day responsibilities, and providing a short summary of the general career path for the ambitious.

Depending on experience level, it becomes more and more applicable to integrate jargon, technical terms, or industry lingo. Weave in information about the company where you can.

Do what you can to make job postings as concise as possible. Every job description has a certain level of expectations in terms of format, it starts with requirements and ends with nice-to-haves. Assume a job hunter is looking at as many jobs as possible, so make it brief, easy to skim, and memorable.

That’s why using clear headings, video and bullet point lists are so common; here is an example:

How do I get my job postings to pop in the SERPs?

With the right page elements, you should have no problem appearing in Google SERPs.

It’s important to add job posting structured data to your jobs pages. Using structured data for job postings ensures that Googlebot can crawl your job posting easier as well as provide a signal that specific content is relevant and accurate enough to display on the search results page.

If you can’t add the schema markup yourself,  it should be easy to find a freelancer who can. Test and preview your structured data using this public tool from Google.

At that point, it’s just doing your due diligence to ensure Google can crawl the page. Double check and ensure that the job postings section are indexable, and submit new sitemaps whenever there are changes to your job postings. If a job is no longer available, make sure to use a noindex meta tag and say so on the job page.

Run authentic job postings

It’s important to remember job postings may be the first touchpoint a person will have with your company. Treat them like landing pages,  they need to be able to say a lot of information with just a few words.

It’s important to represent yourself properly so the applicant knows exactly what there is to know about your organization. Non-branded search terms such as “careers in SEO” or “SEO jobs near Phoenix” indicate that a potential applicant may not be aware of your company or are open to competing companies. Phrases such as “SEO jobs at ZOG Digital” indicate that a person is instead looking for a specific job type with your company, rather than a job type or a company.

That’s why your job content needs to be realistic, accurate and truthful in order to satisfy their job hunt needs. Your brand, experience-level, or industry can influence the tone of the job posting. Long-form, in-depth content about your company and departments is a great way to generate top-funnel visibility and begin a recruitment pipeline years in advance, even if a job description isn’t prepared yet.

Audience goals, business needs

In past pieces, we discuss aligning audience goals with business needs, and it remains true here.

For example, an entry-level account executive role at a Yelp has enough breathing room to allude to the team culture throughout the job posting and the fully-stocked Yelp kitchens certainly don’t hurt!

If the potential applicant gets curious about other sales roles or about how the team functions, they meet that need with category-level content for sales and account management.

What’s interesting is that they have two sets of identical job postings in different categories. One set specifically targets self-motivated, competitive college grads with their own category-level content and job postings that are more specific to launching a five-star career.

Their content is conversational even when discussing a robust training program, ensuring that people are willing to travel to one of their five U.S. offices. This category also siphons out the other sales and account management roles that may require more experience as well.

To ensure that your job posting is found by top talent, it’s imperative to do what you can to your career site to ensure it’s discoverable. If you’re eager to identify top talent and improve your recruitment pipeline, job search optimization is well worth the investment.

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