SEO of Today, Tomorrow and Beyond

Core Web Vitals

“Google ranking factors that revolve around the user experience while on your site.”

Real-World Experience Metrics

  • Page load time
  • Sit stability
  • Site security
  • Intrusive interstitials (Pop-ups)

Impact

  • Ranking on mobile and desktop
  • Rank in Google’s top stories
  • Must meet minimum score

Google Lighthouse

  • Diagnose issues
  • Recommend fixes

EAT & YMYL (Your Money, Your Life)

YMYL

“Effects sites that affect someone’s health, wealth, happiness, safety, or financial stability.”

  • Any site allowing a customer to make a transaction or pay bills
  • Financial: investment advice, retirement/estate planning, tax advice, etc.
  • Medical: dieting tips, mental health, nutrition, health conditions, drugs, etc.
  • Legal: legal advice, divorce/marriages, wills, child custody, etc.
  • Official information: government information, policies, disaster preparedness, etc.
  • Other examples: child adoption, real estate, car safety, etc.

E.A.T

  • Expertise
  • Authority
  • Trust
    • Are you and your website authors experts on the subject?
    • Is the author or website an authority on the topic presented?
    • How trustworthy is the content that is presented, and the website itself?

Expertise

  • Publishing high quality content
  • About page addressing your credentials
  • Author bio pages
  • Links to media mentions

Authority

  • Links and citations from press and media
  • speaking gigs
  • Often shareable content
  • Branded search volume
  • Wikipedia pages and mentions

Trust

  • Clear and accurate contact information
  • Clear about policies, shipping info, terms, and conditions
  • HTTPS is extra secure
  • General sentiment – positive or negative
  • Look at reviews
  • Register with the BBB (Better Business Bureau; specific to US only)

Google Evaluations

  • Human quality raters for EAT review
  • Manually review your site to determine your EAT score
  • Position “0”
  • Snippets for voice search questions

Featured Snippets Example Featured Snippets Example

Pros

  • Good branding
  • Good if you want to obtain the voice search results

Cons

  • You get less shelf-space for page one ranking
  • The result may answer a query and prevent them from clicking to your website

Average CTR of Featured Snippets Average CTR of Featured Snippets

Impacts of CTR

  • Query type
  • Target audience behavior
  • Specific industry
  • Type of featured Snippets
  • Your search position

Click and traffic

  • Optimize for the featured Snippets?
  • Determine if the queries have a featured snippet
  • Featured snippets are growing

Though Leadership and Branding

  • Ideal
  • Position yourself as a thought leader
  • Not intended to drive people to your site

Rich Snippets/Results

  • Having clear distinction from others
  • Have
    • Star ratings
    • Data
    • Clickable navigation

Schema

  • A markup to your existing content around specific data
  • Visually appealing in search results
  • Availability
    • Schema for everything
    • Visit schema.org
    • Obtain rich results
    • Integrate into your website’s code
    • Use JSON

BERT (2019)

  • Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer’s
  • Neural Network technique
  • One of the biggest updates
  • Impacts 1 in 10 search queries
  • Helps Google understand human language better
  • Determine context of search query

Specifics

  • Now pays attention to context words like
    • To
    • With
    • by
    • AT
    • On
  • Sentiments of phrases and discussions
  • Sentence is positive, negative, sarcastic, etc.

Optimizing for BERT

  • Well written articles
  • Write in the voice, language, education level of target audience
  • Articles should clearly explain what you’re trying to solve or teach them
  • Include relevant details

Impacts

  • Social listening tools
  • Chat bots respond and interact with users

Evolution of Keyword Optimization

  • Algorithms are constantly updated to help remove websites with no user value
  • Algorithms analyze documents to determine usefulness
  • Topic modeling allows search engines to gauge relevance
  • Algorithms use topic association AND semantic relationships between keywords
  • Knowledge of topic association will help in crafting engaging content
  • Algorithm updates bring new SEO challenges
  • SEO has become complex and difficult
  • No longer enough for SEOs to adhere to simple checklists
  • Require more holistic approach with a knowledge of relevant signals
  • Optimized content now relates to overall page concept not keywords
  • topic association and semantic analysis allow for better content
  • SEOs must deal with the shifting methods of keyword research and optimization

Strengthening Your Keyword Strategy

Topic Association

“Used by search engines to determine relevancy and trustworthiness”

  • Search engines analyze contextual meaning to find relevance to topic/theme
  • Page should contain keywords relevant to focus keyword, rather than repeating the focus keyword, Examples;
    • Winemaking: wine, vineyard, wine growing, wine production
    • Support: learn, instructors, students, tuition
    • certification: course, class, lecture, program, certificate
  • Long-tail optimization
    • Where can I learn to make wine?
    • How do I get a certificate in winemaking?
  • Focus keyword can be broken up into synonyms and other elements
  • What other ways can I describe the theme?
  • What other words would be relevant?
  • What other words support the page topic?
  • Page should contain supporting keywords
  • Having content that has a cohesive theme results in “long tail keywords”
    • Long-tail keywords are longer words or phrases – difficult to predict but very targeted
  • Algorithm was updated to check for relevancy and semantic relationships
    • Semantic analysis looks at how words are related
    • After Hummingbird, semantic and related results were even clearer

How Does Branding Influence Website Rank?

Branding

  • Important to marketing strategy
  • Can support and boost SEO efforts
  • Brand is becoming more Important to Google’s relevancy Algorithm
  • SEOs must consider which factors separate brands from untrustworthy shops or spam sites

How to identify a Brand?

  • Active social media presence
  • contact information
    • Address
    • Phone number
    • Email
    • Contact form
  • Established history (domain registration time) and visible intent to continue doing business
  • Receive search volume for their specific brand
  • More mentions around the web, including social media
  • Bidding on paid keywords for brand names is a strong signal
  • Brand keywords drive better conversions in paid search

How to do SEO for a Brand Recognition?

  • Consider which external quality signals improve legitimacy
  • Value leads to quality signals
    • Social presence
    • Contact info
    • Established history
  • Branding and SEO are not mutually exclusive, two strong tactics that work well together
  • A large part of SEO involves raising brand awareness
  • Clear, value focused goals
  • Help grow your brand
    • Create great content
    • Develop social presence
    • Acquire links
    • Helps to cultivate branded search