That means on the web as a whole, there are seven fewer links on mobile pages than desktop


#WhiteboardFriday: 21 Smart SEO Tips for 2021

pages, meaning a lot of link equity is being lost.


So do a study on your own website.


Make sure you have mobile link parity between your desktop and your mobile site so you're


not losing that equity.


Number 12, need you to invest in long-form content.


Now, I am not saying that content length is a ranking factor.


It is not.


Short-form content can rank perfectly well.


The reason I want you to invest in long-form content is because consistently, time and


time again when we study this, long-form content earns more links and shares.


It also generally tends to rank higher in Google search results.


Nothing against short-form content.


Love short-form content, but long-form content generally gives you more bang for your buck


in terms of SEO ranking potential.


And when you're doing that long-form content, make sure you do number 13, use more headers.


I'm talking about H2, H3 tags, break up your content with good keyword-rich header tags.


Why?


Well, we have research from AJ Genrich that shows that the more header tags you have,


generally you rank for more featured snippets.


Sites with 12 to 13, which seems like a lot of header tags, rank for the most featured


snippets of anything that they looked at in their most recent study.


So make sure you're breaking up your content with header tags.


It adds a little contextual relevance.


It's a great way to add some ranking potential to your content.


Number 14, leverage topic clusters.


Don't just launch one piece of content.


Make sure you write about multiple pieces of content around the same subject and link


those together.


When you do that and you link them intelligently, you can increase engagement because people


are reading the different articles.


You can add the right contextual inner links.


Have a great case study that I want to show you in the transcript below where someone


did this and produced amazing results.


So look into topic clusters for 2021.


Finally, bring your content out of tabs.


If you have content that is in accordions or dropdowns or you have to click to reveal


the content, study after study after study shows that content that's brought out of tabs,


brought into the main body so people don't have to click to see, generally performs better


than content that's hidden in tabs.


Now to be clear, I don't believe that Google discriminates content in tabs.


They seem to be able to index and rank it just fine, but I think people generally engage


with content when it's out of tabs and maybe some of those signals help those pages to


rank a little better.


All right, just a very few technical SEO tips.


We're going fast.


Number 16, this is the year to invest in Core Web Vitals.


These are some of the page experience signals that Google are bringing to the forefront


in 2021.


It's going to be an actual ranking factor very soon.


We're talking about cumulative shift layout, hard word to say.


Generally we're talking about site speed and delivering great page experience.


Now some of these things are very technical and Google has some tools like Lighthouse


to try to get you how to figure them out.


One tip I like to share, if you are on WordPress, I highly recommend using Cloudflare, in particular


their APO for WordPress.


It's a great way to speed up your WordPress website, help you score better for some of


these Core Web Vitals.


It's very low cost and it's easy to implement and it's a great way to speed up your WordPress


website.


Number 17, sitemaps.


Sitemaps you're allowed to have 50,000 URLs per sitemap.


This is always a question in every SEO quiz.


How many URLs per sitemap are you allowed?


Instead if you have a large site and you have indexing issues, tip number 17, limit your


sitemaps to 10,000 URLs.


You don't have to use all 50,000.


We have some evidence that using smaller sitemaps, compressing those into a limited URL set can


actually improve your crawlability of those.


It's kind of like Google might prioritize those in some way.


The data seems to support it.


You also get a little bit better data out of Google Search Console.


You can see what's being indexed, what's not.


Also leverage dynamic sitemaps.


Our friend Oliver shows that I'll link to in the transcript below.


Dynamic sitemap is a sitemap that changes based upon what you want Google to crawl.


So if you have a large corpus of URLs that you want Google to crawl, put the high priority


one in their own special sitemap.


Maybe you limit it to 1,000 URLs.


And as Google crawls and discovers those, remove them and put in additional high priority


URLs that you want Google to discover.


And keep the sitemaps small and tight and let Google know that those are the ones that


you want them to pay attention to.


Let's quickly talk about link building.


Link building tips for 2021 because everybody loves link building.


No kidding, everybody hates link building.


Link building is so hard.


There are some professionals, there are some great people in the industry who do love it,


who are great at it.


Personally, I'm not that great at link building, but I still am able to build a lot of links.


One way that I'm able to do that is number 19, passive link acquisition.


And what passive link acquisition means is creating content that passively earns links


as people discover it in the search.


It means I don't have to outreach to people.


It means that when they find it, when journalists find it, when bloggers find it, they naturally


want to link to it.


And you do that by creating the types of content that journalists and bloggers and web creators


are looking for.


These are generally data, guides, definitions, how-tos such as this video.


When you create that kind of content, it generally earns a lot of links as people find it.


Passive link building is one of the most sustainable ways to earn links over time.


Number 20, page level link intersect.


When you do have to do outreach, you want to do outreach to the pages most likely to


link to you.


Now, we've known for a long time.


One of the top SEO tips for link building is find websites that link to your competitors


but not to you.


I like to make that a little more specific and find web pages that link to at least two


of my competitors but not to me.


That means that they are generally a resource page if they're linking to multiple competitors


but not to me and more likely to link to me if I ask them.


We have a great tool here at Moz, Link Explorer, that does page level link intersect.


I think it's the best tool for this specific task in the SEO industry, not because I'm


biased because I actually use it.


Tip number 21 for 2021, be the last click.


What do I mean by that?


I mean satisfy your users.


Once you earn the first click, you want to get that first click that people click but


you also want to be the last click.


That means they found what they are looking for.


User satisfaction is ranking signal number one.


Your goal with all of this is to satisfy the user, to give them what they search for.


That's the magic of SEO.


They're searching for something and you're delivering it to them at the exact moment


they search for it.


When you can be the last click, you're almost guaranteed to raise in rankings and get the


traffic that you deserve.


All right, those are 21 tips.


That's your roadmap for 2021.


Hope you enjoyed it.


Please share this video and share your tips for 2021 in the comments below.


The Authoritative Content Funnel [Whiteboard Friday] — Amanda Milligan

Hi, everyone.


My name is Amanda Milligan.


I am the head of marketing at Stacker Studio.


And I am here to talk about something that I made up


but I hope is very useful to you all.


It is the authoritative content funnel.


So the reason that I put this together


is because of conversations I was having with folks about,


I'm always talking about authoritative content.


And I realized that there was a mismatch of what other people


thought I was talking about and what I was talking about.


And what I realized is that there


are so many different types, and we


need to be thinking about them in a certain context.


And I thought the easiest thing to start this brainstorm


was to think about it overlaid the typical content funnel


that we're all used to.


So what I'm going to do today is walk


through those different categories,


explain how I think about it, and then I


would love to hear your feedback after watching this


if there's something that I missed or anything else


that we should explore.


So let's start down here at the bottom with our favorite,


the decision stage.


I have written here, illustrate that your brand


is the best solution.


So in terms of building authority at the decision


stage of the funnel, you're trying


to reinforce that the person who's on your website


or really anywhere is making the right decision.


They're almost there.


They have pretty much decided they want to go with you.


Don't give them a reason to doubt themselves


or to back out.


The way you see a lot of people do this,


demos are a good example of this.


Even demos could almost be a little bit higher in the funnel,


but it's a way of reassuring people, OK, this tool


does what I thought it did.


I'm getting the validation that everything that I need it to do


is there.


I'm seeing it for myself.


I don't have to just base it off what they're telling me.


I get to see it firsthand.


That's helping to build authority.


Testimonials, especially in the B2B world,


you'll see oftentimes a contact form


will have testimonials listed next to them.


And that's a way of saying, you're right.


You do want to fill out this contact form or this lead form.


Look at these authoritative brands who


have trusted us in the past.


So they're leveraging the authority


of their previous or current clients


to show that they work with great businesses like yours


and to validate that you're making the right decision.


Same thing with reviews.


Whether it's your product reviews


or it's just the star ratings, the average star ratings


on a third party platform, you'll


see that come up a lot, third party validation.


And you also hear this reference as authority signals.


It could be client logos or places you've been published,


all that sort of thing.


Always are lingering around the conversion pages


because they're trying to validate to you, yes,


work with us.


It's a good decision.


So that is the decision part of the funnel.


Consideration gets a little more nebulous.


So you're trying to show that you understand


the nuance of your audience's problems


and that you could be a good solution for them.


It doesn't always have to include your product


or service, but it can.


However, what it does need to do is


reflect that you have a very good understanding


of your buyer personas and your potential customers.


So a lot of the examples are case studies.


That's a little more branded.


But you're showing, I know what your problem is,


and I can show you how we did this, again,


for other companies similar to yours


and how we were successful.


But then you also have more top, like higher in the funnel,


I don't know how to say that, higher in the funnel examples


of how-tos or guides.


So if you know, if you've done your keyword research


or your question research and you understand


what your target audience or even a little bit more


of a general audience is looking for in your space


and you're able to create content that answers


those questions, people are going


to start to trust you because you're helping them.


Again, we're talking about not just content.


If we zoomed out, there's other goals for content.


We're already talking about some of them, conversion.


But if we're talking about just authority,


the way that you're building authority


is by showing you know the answers to their questions,


period.


So the thought process here is, what


are the best questions for us to answer no matter where they


fall as long as we're showing that we care about them


and we're the best people to answer their questions?


Then we have awareness.


This is what my career has primarily been based on,


so I'm a little biased toward awareness,


because I think it's the biggest area of opportunity


for marketers.


It makes sense to focus here, especially in the beginning.


You know that you need to convert.


When you get the traffic, you know


you want to convert those people.


Completely understand.


But I think the biggest area of opportunity


and where a lot of people can start surpassing


their competitors is up here, building


awareness and authoritative awareness in particular.


The way to do that is to create content


that is not specifically about what you're trying to sell,


but about bigger topics in your industry


and doing it in a particular way.


So that's the other thing.


Whether you have somebody in-house


who is already an expert, definitely you


can leverage that.


But a lot of us don't have that.


A lot of us are not at companies where there is already


somebody who's kind of famous in the field,


and everybody already inherently trusts.


So you need to try to think about how


you can create content that's going to build authority


at the top of the funnel.


At Stacker, we're a newswire that creates stories.


Usually based on data, we create newsworthy content


on behalf of our brand partners.


So we operate in the top of the funnel.


And newsworthy content is essentially


anything that a news site would deem worthy of picking up.


So that's kind of a whole other strategy, whole other way


for Friday.


But any kind of original data applies as well.


A lot of companies will run surveys,


or they'll use internal data and share that.


And that's really interesting to audiences.


And again, you could do some digital PR


and get that picked up.


Or also really common are annual reports.


And that often does take internal data and supplies


information and trends to a broader industry


for their benefits.


But the difference here is you're


trying to show readers that you're


willing to invest time and money into creating content that's


not just about selling for you.


It's about helping the broader audience.


But it's also about showing Google this.


And the way that that happens is when


you're creating newsworthy content or any kind


of digital PR type content and earning great news mentions


and links, that signals to Google


that you're an authority too.


And that's why there's a lot of missed opportunity


if you don't do this part of the funnel.


So that's how I think about it.


I would love to hear how you think about it.


If this is a topic that's interesting to you,


I run a newsletter where I talk about stuff


like this all the time.


It's called Newsworthy.


And you can go to this URL here and subscribe and say hi.


If you reply to it, it's my email.


So please feel free.


But also, as you can see, I talk nonstop.


And I can talk about marketing forever.


So please feel free to tweet me.


I love to meet new people.


And to talk all things content, authority, newsworthiness,


all that good stuff.


So in the meantime, thank you so much for watching.


I really appreciate it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Alright, everybody feeling good?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Ready for the next speaker?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We're going to get started.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Next speaker has spoken at MozCon many times, always one of the most popular speakers we


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

have.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Dr. Pete Myers, a legend in the SEO industry.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

He created MozCast.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

He created the Google Algorithm search history.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

He has the most interesting job in the world as a marketing scientist.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

He gets to play with algorithms and data all day long.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Today he's going to talk about something that is really important in these modern times


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

of constant change, and that's keyword research.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Sometimes a boring topic, but not with Dr. Pete.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Excited what he has to say.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Let's watch Dr. Pete.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Thanks for joining us for MozCon Virtual.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is my ninth time on the MozCon stage, as it were, in my home office.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And I'll be honest, it's not how I expected to spend my ninth year here, and I'm sure


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

it's not how you expected it either.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We miss you.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We're probably not all here in person.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This has been obviously time of tremendous change.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I keep trying to avoid the word unprecedented, but the truth is, it sounds cliche, but I'll


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

be 52 weeks after MozCon.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm airing this a little early.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And I've never been through anything like this.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I remember the blizzard of 77.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

That makes me sound old.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

A couple of snow days.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But this is so different for us.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And this time of change, it can be difficult.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It can be painful.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It can be destructive in a lot of ways.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We've seen what businesses have gone through.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I know some of you have gone through a period of loss, and we're also facing the difficulty


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

and the sadness of decades of problems in our country that we're trying to fix.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And I don't want to make light of any of that, but I hope that there is opportunity in the


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

sense that I think we hear people say, when will we get back to normal?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And I hope we don't, honestly.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

The more I think about it, normal isn't very good for a lot of people.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so I hope we can do something better.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I hope we can put in the thought and the empathy and the work that it takes to be better.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so today I'd like to talk about how we deal with these things from a business perspective,


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

from a marketing perspective.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Again, I don't want to make light of anything anyone's going through.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I know businesses have been destroyed.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Businesses are dealing with economic loss.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Not sure if you're going to come out of this.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But I want to at least try to give you some of the tools to understand how to deal with


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

change from a marketing perspective, how to see these trends as they're occurring, because


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

things are changing so fast on a global scale that we just don't know what to expect next.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We don't know where the opportunities are, but I believe they're there.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And I want to talk to you about that a bit today.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So the story today starts on a little lighter note.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

About a year ago at London Search Live, I believe, I had a dinner with the SEO team


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

from Lego out of Denmark.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And thank you to Torben and that team for letting me share some of this.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

If you're familiar with Lego, you know that they have licensed products.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so they work with Star Wars, for example, with Disney.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And they have a lot of information in advance, which is pretty cool.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But they have a very difficult task that they have to start producing before a new title


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

comes out, let's say a new movie, TV series.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And they know they're not going to get it all right.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They know that they're not going to know necessarily what's popular, what really takes off, what


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

people, what ships, what planet, whatever it is, you know, the things that really capture


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

the audience imagination.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so they want to be able to track that as quickly as possible after release, and


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

adapt as fast as possible.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so they don't know, for example, if, you know, Rebel Princess Elsa or off duty trooper


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

or NASA astronaut Jedi, Mae Jemison are really going to be the big thing.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I may have made some of these up with the kids.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But this is the challenge they face, right?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They just have to be able to adapt.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They have to be able to gather this information.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And their existing keywords aren't going to tell them the story.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

As an SEO, that was really interesting.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But to be honest, I kind of put it in the back of my mind after a while and thought,


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

this doesn't affect most of our customers.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This doesn't affect most people.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And then I thought back to a conversation I'd had a few months earlier at MozCon last


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

year with a government organization.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And they were launching a new initiative.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And they knew that it was going to come under attack, frankly, in the sense of a disinformation


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

campaign, possibly a long disinformation campaign.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so they wanted to be able to know what questions people had, what keywords they were


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

searching as soon as it happened so that they could at least counteract this information.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They could put out their own information.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And this was a really unique, interesting problem that keyword tools and a lot of what


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

we do don't solve.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And again, it was interesting, but I kind of said, well, you know, that's true.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Great.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But they're not like everybody else.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And then this came along.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

March 11th, WHO declared coronavirus a global pandemic.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Obviously, it had already been in play.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But I think this was around the time where we really started to realize something different


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

was happening.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And behavior changed on a global scale, on a massive scale.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And it wasn't just schools being closed.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I have two kids.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

That was obviously a big thing.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It wasn't just staying home from work.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But consumer behavior changed, shopping changed, things we needed changed, the way we viewed


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

our lives changed, and search changed dramatically.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So massive shifts.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We've seen surplus outside of algorithm updates until about last week for two straight months.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Almost three.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We've seen massive surplus, massive ranking changes.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And as SEOs, we're not equipped for that.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We're not equipped for this rapidly moving world.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so when this happened, I thought back to these other problems and realized this


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

matters now.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is something we really do have to solve.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is something we really do have to face.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so I want to tell you a bit about that today.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

A little bit of good news.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

In May 2020, according to Adobe, year over year ecommerce sales were up 78%.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

If you see the little truncated graph on the left, up $52 billion from expectation.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

The pink is what we expected.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

The blue is where it's at.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

That gray dotted line is the holidays, 2019.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We are above holiday ecommerce spending in May of 2020.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This isn't all good news.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This obviously comes on the back of brick and mortar.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It comes because of drop in spending other places.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But as online marketers, there is a massive shift going on.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

There is massive spend.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

There is massive interest.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It's just not in the things that we thought it would be in.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so what are these new things and how do we find them?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is an extremely important question right now for our survival as businesses.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

A little warning.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

My seven year old saw the Lego slide.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

He said that's really cool.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

He helped me with the photo.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And he wanted to know how I did it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

He said I want to see this thing you're working on.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I said I got to tell you, there's a lot of graphs and stuff.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I don't know if you're going to be interested.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

No, no, dad.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I really want to see it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I got six slides in and he said I'm getting bored out of my butt and left the room.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So I've added some Lego slides.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Hopefully you will not be bored out of your butt because it doesn't sound very pleasant.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So let's talk about a tool we know and hopefully I'm going to give you a different way to look


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

at it and some new things you don't know.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is Google Trends.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I hope you've all seen this at this point.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Google Trends is great for tracking a trend when we know what it is.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

That sounds a little weird.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Don't we usually know what it is?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Well, lately, no.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We don't always know what we're looking for.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Well, let's say we do.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So Disney Plus, Star Wars released the show The Mandalorian last year.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Put a lot of marketing budget into it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Did pretty well, took off.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And if you type in Mandalorian, sure enough, you see what you expect, right?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Little bit of interest before it came out.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Big peak when it came out.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Slow down, but still some interest.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And I think the season's over now.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I haven't seen all of it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But the kind of thing you might expect to look for.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Here's where the story gets interesting.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is the Razor Crest, the ship from The Mandalorian, Lego set coming out in September,


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

a bit after the release of the show.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

In time for next Christmas.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I don't own this yet.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm just not saying should buy it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm just putting that out there.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But what's interesting, this looks really cool.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Is this little guy, Baby Yoda.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Obviously, Baby Yoda took off after the introduction of The Mandalorian was hugely popular.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Was a trend people didn't really see coming.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And merchandising lagged incredibly.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I mean, it was it was shocking how long it took, you could get t shirts and things because


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

those can be produced on demand.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But in terms of toys and things like that, it took a long time.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So why is that?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Why didn't they know this?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Well, it turns out that if you look at most Mandalorian character lists, Baby Yoda isn't


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

there.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

There's two reasons for this.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Number one is that he's a puppet.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so the normal structure of these are the human actors in our show.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They don't appear.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But the other problem is that Baby Yoda is not a character in the series.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

The character is named the child.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And this is not some pedantic Star Wars point I'm trying to make of well, actually, you


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

know, there's no Baby Yoda.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But think about this as an SEO.


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Think about if you were an SEO for Disney Plus.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And let's imagine a situation I doubt even they have this.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But let's imagine a situation where the SEO for Disney Plus has all the scripts, access


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

to all the writers can call them anytime they want, knows everything there is to know about


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

the show.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I doubt that's even true.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Now, we know how marketing departments work.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I doubt that's true.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Let's say it's true.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Nowhere in that wealth of information would Baby Yoda be mentioned.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And yet, Baby Yoda was a massive trend at this point and at some point in the middle


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

even eclipsing search for the Mandalorian itself.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Just this incredible spike in interest.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So how could we see that coming?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We're gonna get to that hopefully.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

The same with Coronavirus.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Okay, we all heard about Coronavirus as it was spiking, obviously big search spike in


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

mid March to be expected, leveled off a bit as we all kind of knew what it was.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But what about COVID?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis


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These terms at this point, and at the end of May had already reached the same level


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

as Coronavirus.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But these weren't words that anyone was using, anyone especially in the general public, when


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

the pandemic was announced, when it was first appearing, even when the WHO announcement


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

came out.


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So how could we see that coming if we were only looking for Coronavirus?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And then from a business perspective, here's the problem we face.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Let's say your hair salon or barbershop and you're tracking the trends and they went down.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

No big surprise.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is an issue of, we know this is not just correlation, it's causation.


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You were closed.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Everything was closed.


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We couldn't go places, obviously went down.


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But how would you know, other than your own internal logic and trying to see how things


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

were changing, how to cut hair would spike?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

How would you know that as this thing you cared about and were tracking in a traditional


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

SEO sense was falling, something else was rising?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And at some point, even past that, I was one of those people who video searched for how


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

to cut hair and I hope I didn't, you can tell me later how I did.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

My wife saved me a little bit.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But how do we know?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

How do we know what's coming?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And then a bit of a warning story, but interesting too.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is a trend for stuffed unicorn.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And stuffed unicorn had a holiday spike, which you might expect, people buying stuffed unicorns


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

for people, perfectly lovely thing to do.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And then around mid-March, there was a spike.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Why were people buying stuffed unicorns during coronavirus?


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And were they?


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And this is a problem we have with trends, right?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is a correlation in a sense.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And if we know something like with the hair salon, we can imply causation.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We can say, yes, it's very likely this is because of COVID.


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There's no doubt of that really.


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But in this case, why is this happening?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Trends don't really tell us that and Google Trends doesn't tell us that.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So I want to talk about how we get ahead of trends and how we can use these tools in more


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

interesting ways.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So let's go back to this.


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Let's say that we're midway through March.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We realize, you know what?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

People are going to have to cut their own hair.


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And we start to track this.


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If you go down, there's two sections I want to talk to you about.


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One is this related topics.


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And you see that second topic, hair clipper.


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And I'm going to click on it.


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It's up 200% at the time I made this.


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And let's take a look.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Way up.


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I may not be shocking to you.


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But what's interesting is this is a very different search than what we were looking for.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It's not something that would have come up if we were tracking those other terms.


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And it's also a commercial intent search.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So now we've shifted from this informational intent, how to cut hair, that maybe we could


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

write a post about or a video, to a commercial product, to something we could sell.


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And a B2C potential.


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And now as we see this, we can start to intuit and think about, wait a minute.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

People are going to need scissors.


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They're going to need beard trimmers.


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They're going to need combs.


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They're going to need certain kinds of product.


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And we started to see a different picture.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so I think that's really important, seeing those intent shifts so we know, how do we


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

switch this from informational intent to commercial or maybe commercial backed informational?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And then there's another one, Zoom.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Obviously, we knew Zoom had this huge spike.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I have a family of four.


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I have two kids.


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At three points, I think, in the last three months, we have all been on Zoom at the same


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

time.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So we are very aware of this.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And we saw the spike.


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We see it leveling off.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It's not anywhere down to where it was before.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But how can we work with that?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

What opportunity is there?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We look down at the related queries in Google Trends.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Backgrounds for Zoom, best Zoom background, Zoom bombing.


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In January, unless you were a security expert, what would you think Zoom bombing meant?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You'd have no idea.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And you would have no way to be tracking that search and to look for it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It would never occur to you to put that on a keyword list.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But now we're seeing what are people looking for?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

What's changing?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

What's this introduced?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

How has this changed our lives?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

What's cool about this is you might not know there's an export.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You don't just have to look at the five.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And if you export, I think you get 20 or 25, 25 of two different things.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So you get these top queries.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Kind of interesting, but it's stuff you'd expect.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

How does Zoom, Zoom meaning Zoom app, your average related search kind of stuff.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But you go down and you need these rising queries.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They're called breakout queries.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

The things that have really taken off.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Backgrounds for Zoom, best Zoom backgrounds, games to play on Zoom, Star Wars Zoom backgrounds.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Now you're getting into this commercial intent or at least to what people want and need.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You know they're using Zoom.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

That doesn't really help you.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Hooray for Zoom.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They're making a lot of money.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We might have our complaints, but hey, we're all using it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But it doesn't help the rest of us.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But some of these other things might.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Games to play on Zoom might.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Star Wars Zoom backgrounds might.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

These are opportunities.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

These are things that we can start to track and see how they overlap with what we do.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So stuffed unicorn.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Let's go back to that one.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Let's look down at that info at the bottom.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

First, if you go to the SERP itself, especially now, it's not going to tell you anything.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is what we would expect.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I can buy stuffed unicorns.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I can see some pictures.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Perfectly nice things.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

No idea why that would spike.


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We go down to that bottom and on the left we see Deadpool, fictional character.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I know Deadpool sometimes rides a unicorn because they have the T-shirt, but I still


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

have no idea what that has to do with COVID.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Then we look on the right and we see Fortnite Deadpool stuffed unicorn.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

In one search, I was able to find out that Fortnite launched a special edition Deadpool


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

stuffed unicorn.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It got a lot of attention.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It was kind of an Easter egg.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And that has nothing to do with COVID other than that a whole lot more people were home


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

playing Fortnite.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So this is a great sleuthing tool in the sense.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is also a way to dig into these trends, understand them, understand if we're just


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

looking at correlations.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We need to look at year over year.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We need to look at the seasonal stuff too, but this can really tell us, is this a fluke


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

or what's causing this and give us a way to investigate.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So I think that's pretty cool.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Google Trends has also launched some portals within it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They have one for coronavirus, protest for racial equity.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They have one essentially for Black Lives Matter.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They have one for Pride Month.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

These are really interesting because these aren't searches.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

These are actually telling you what's trending and giving you some information.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

The coronavirus one gets into some commercial terms and can be really worth checking out.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

All right.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I've already talked a lot about Google and working for an SEO company that's uncomfortable.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So we're going to do one more Google thing and then move on.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is cool.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is Think with Google.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They have a tool called Rising Retail Categories.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

If you look at it, you might miss some of its usefulness.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So I want to walk you through something.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You can set a handful of countries.


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There's not a lot, unfortunately.


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And weekly, monthly, or yearly change.


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Stick to monthly or yearly.


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Weekly doesn't have much data.


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And so I'd click something on top trending categories like household disinfectants and


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

see what we'd expect now, like soft spray, disinfectant wipes.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is interesting in the sense that if you had done this earlier, you'd probably know


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

something that seems obvious now but wasn't.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But if you look at those eight on the left, you're probably going to say, OK, disposable


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

gloves, bicycle parts.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I don't do any of that.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

What interest does this have to me?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You might miss that there's a little tiny gray scroll bar.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And for year over year change, I've seen up to 400 categories.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So 400 categories by 10 topics, 10 queries, we have just under 4,000 queries.


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Excuse me for a sec.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

There is no great way to export this.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

If someone were to want to try and scrape this, that would be interesting.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm not suggesting you do it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I would be happy to hear about it on the down low.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But there's a ton of information here if you're willing to dig through it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And that's going to be a lesson with a lot of this.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

There's a lot of work to be done, but there's a lot of great info out there.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is a weird site, Boing Boing.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They have a new site, covers a ton of topics, and they have a store.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I bought a Lego drone.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It's pretty cool.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It flies like a brick, but it's fun, from the Boing Boing store.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And if you've ever been there, they sell some really weird stuff.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And you might be inclined to dismiss it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Go to their store page and look at these categories with me.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Work from home essentials, online courses for making the most of extra time, do it yourself


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

deals to keep your mind busy, top at home fitness gear, kitchen appliances for eating


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

in, deals for staying entertained, and sane.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Every single one of these is targeted to quarantine.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It's targeted to our current situation.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And Boing Boing, it's a weird name, but they're an incredibly effective organization when


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

it comes to tracking trends.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so go check them out, see what they're selling.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Don't think about, do I want to buy this thing?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Think about why are they doing this?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

What trend does this reflect?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

What are people looking for?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm going to give you an example.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

When you see six cam mini fridge and wireless speaker combo, you might think, why the hell


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

do I need that?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And why would I pay $60 for it?


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And that's fine.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm not going to tell you to buy this, but look at that byline.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This cooler lets you drink up and rock out almost anywhere.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Okay.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Not bad copy.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Let's think about it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Where would people use this?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They'd use it on their porch, on their patio, in their backyard.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Where are people spending more time during quarantine?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

On their porch, on their patio, in their backyard.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is incredibly laser targeted to our current time period and what we're going through.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so go to the site, see the things they're selling and think about why.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And I think there's tremendous, especially from a B2C, if you deal with consumers, tremendous


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

opportunity to learn from that.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Pinterest trends.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Thank you to my friend, Sean, on our team.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It's still in beta.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It's missing a lot of data.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And please understand, if you don't use Pinterest, the Pinterest audience is very different from


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

the Google audience.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But a couple of cool things about this.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

One is that you can browse, you can look at trends.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We can look at things like fashion, food and drink.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Obviously, again, Pinterest has a very particular bent.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But again, very consumer focused.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So a lot of things people are interested in.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But what's cool is if you start a search in Pinterest, it's not a regular search.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It's essentially an auto-suggest.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And what you get is not only a list of topics, but these sparklines, these trends that you


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

can compare to clients.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so if I type in cut hair, I see things that are going down like hair up-do's for


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

long hair.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Because frankly, we're not going out.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We're probably not going to put a lot of trouble into our up-do's.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I haven't been able to do an up-do for a while.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But then we see cut your own hair and we see the spike.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And we see even hairstyles for long hair length.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Kind of spiking before all this came in.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

As people are starting to realize they need haircuts.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So you can click on these.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You get a trend much like Google Trends.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You get suggestions a little bit below that and you can start to layer those in.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So here's how to cut your hair.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

No big surprise.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

How to cut your own bangs.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

That's interesting.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You know, that's a more long tail query.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Maybe there's too much info on how to cut your own hair.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Videos and everything else competitive.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But maybe how to cut your own bangs or how to cut your own sideburns or how to do a certain


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

kind of cut.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

There's still opportunity and still something you could do.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So this is a really cool tool for exploring.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is also great for I think Will Reynolds was the one who used to talk about this a


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

lot for that kind of auto suggest see what happens approach.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So in this case, I typed in at home.


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Pretty vague.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Doesn't really tell them much and saw what they completed.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

At home anniversary ideas.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

At home butt workout.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Why not?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

At home CrossFit.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

At home spa day.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

What's going on right now?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

People can't go to the gym.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They want to exercise at home.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

People can't go to the spa.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They want a little quality time at home.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

People are celebrating birthdays and anniversaries at home.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is only seven, eight queries that come up on the screen I think got cut off.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And already I can see they're all trending and there's just wealth of information about


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

what are people doing at home.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So play with this.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And it's spotty.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

There's data is weird in some cases, but there's all this cool stuff if you kind of let it


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

auto complete and see where it takes you.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And finally, a tool that you probably given up on because if you use it the normal way,


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

it kind of sucks.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And that is Twitter search.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And it kind of sucks because if you type in a search like Mandalorian, you will get absolutely


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

everything in the world that everyone is talking about right at this moment, whether or not


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

they should be talking about it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I have two tweets in Russian here.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I don't know Russian.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

No offense to people who do.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I hope these are bots because according to Google Translate, they're kind of offensive.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So this is not really useful, right?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I have a little high school Spanish.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I might be able to get through that.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But this is just things that whoever just said this in the last few seconds.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But you could get on those dots, you pull up advanced search, and advanced search and


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Twitter has gotten very powerful and really useful.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So just one keyword.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm going to put in Mandalorian.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm not going to worry about whether it's exact or not because it's one word.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm going to restrict English.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I think this is actually more interesting and useful if you don't speak English because


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

you can get rid of all the nonsense we're saying and focus on your own target market.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So this is useful to be able to pin down, but I'm going to stick with English queries


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

for now.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm going to go to Google and I'm going to ask when did the Mandalorian air and they're


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

going to tell me November 12.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm going to put that in at the bottom.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm going to say show me what happened between November 12 and November 30.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I want to go back and look at time.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I want to take a little trip through time.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And I'm going to ask for minimum likes of 50.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Go this is a little quirky.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Go lower than you think.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Don't put in like 1000 put in 2550.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

See what happens.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But basically I'm saying you know what, I don't want every random opinion.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I just kind of want to see what took off.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We're going to run the search.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

First result we see November 26.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Baby Yoda is our God now.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

That indicates to me with 48,000 likes that Baby Yoda probably did all right.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And what's interesting about this is I didn't use the words baby or Yoda or the term exact


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

match Baby Yoda.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I started with Mandalorian.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So within two weeks after the show launched, we could see a trend.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But we can do better than that.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We can narrow that date range.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And then November 12, the launch date of the show, there were already tweets with thousands


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

of favorites talking about Baby Yoda.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

The second tweet I pulled up, I haven't known Baby Yoda for long, but if anything happens,


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I will throw hands.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This person will fight you over Baby Yoda the day they learned Baby Yoda existed.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

That's a trend, my friends.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

That's a thing that's going to take off.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And you could have known that on November 12.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And that's fascinating to me.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So this is not just a look back in time.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

If we're monitoring this, if we're careful, if we're filtering through the noise, we can


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

see trends as they happen, and we can adjust.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It turns out this is, if you look at the actual search bar, what comes up when I type all


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

this in, it's kind of like advanced search operators in Google.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So I've got exact match, Baby Yoda, min phase 50, English, and my start and end date.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They use since and until, but it's really just your start and end date in year, month,


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

day format.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Real quick, I'll show you, you can type in regular keywords.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You can do exact match in quotes, just like Google.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You can use the or operator.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I think it's all caps.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'd suggest parentheses, just keeps it cleaner.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You can negative match with minus.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You can do hashtag searches, min phase, min retweets, since and until, your start and


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

end date.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And there's a bunch of things around the accounts that you can do too.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So it's really elaborate.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You can start to do it with advanced operators, or you can just use that UI.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

That's great too.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So usually when I wrap up a deck, I don't do it real well.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm not great at conclusions.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so I give you these bullet points.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm like, oh, I'll try and tell you what you did.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But when I throw a lot of tools at you, it's tough because I think people go, oh, that's


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

cool.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And then they go home and have no idea what to do with it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so I want to try and tell you a case study.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And I also want to say, look, things like Baby Yoda and Lego, they're fun.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But I think sometimes they're great as a speaker, but they don't resonate with you and your


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

business.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So I want to walk you through something.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Let's say you're a wine store and COVID hit and you had to shut down.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

A few days later, a couple of weeks, maybe you see this article, or maybe you just are


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

doing some research on your own.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Call delivery, could be a sal for ailing Chicago restaurants.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And right away you see wine for delivery.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And you think, okay, is there an appetite for that?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Even at the end of March, you can see that there was.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Even probably in early to mid-March, you could see that trend taking off.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And let's say you just looked at wine itself.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You can also see that wine kind of spiked around the holidays.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It went up a little.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But this is a wine trend.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

There wasn't some wine thing we didn't know about.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

People want delivery wine.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They're stuck at home.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They're kind of depressed.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They want to drink.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And we go down to liquid related queries and we see official quarantine wine.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It turns out Ashton Kuchner, Kuchner, Kuchner, I don't know, released his own wine.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

However you feel about that is fine, but it was for charity.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So it's all good.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

But national wine day.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

That's interesting.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm going to come back to that.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I go to Pinterest.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I type in wine.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm just going to see what auto completes, right?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Some of this, not that useful, wine bottle crossed with lights, wine cork wreath.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It's fine.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It's from the holidays.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You can see that.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Wine basket.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Okay.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We don't just want wine delivery, but we could do gift baskets and we could send gift baskets


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

to ourselves.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You know, this isn't Christmas anymore.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I'm not going to send this to my friend.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I want a wine basket too.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

There's still, there's something here.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

There's something taking off.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We click on that.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We can see that this wine basket trend far exceeds the holidays.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

There's something very real to tap into.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I go to Google and I say national wine day.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

What's up with that?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

May 25th.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

If I got ahead of it, great.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

If I didn't, don't worry.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

End of May, let's say I missed national wine day, but I go to Twitter and I say, you know


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

what?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

National wine day.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I want to see at least 25 favorites.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Start me in mid-May, take me to the end of May.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I edited the results a bit, but all of these were in the first 10 to 15.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Obviously you're going to have to dig.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It's not going to magically pop up.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Here's what I found in just the first 10 or 15 results.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Research conducted by the University of Alberta has found that a glass of red wine is equivalent


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

to an hour at the gym.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

As a data scientist, I'm skeptical.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

As a marketer, damn, people are home.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

The gym is closed.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Every day can be national wine day.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is why.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

This is a thing we can market and tap into.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

In fact, this person says, happy national wine day, or as I like to call it, Monday.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Now you have a catchphrase and a target market and you know you have a trend, all in a couple


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

of tweets.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I would never read a Buzzfeed 19 things post, but here's 19 things you could put in that


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

wine basket.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And so there's a wealth of information.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And even if you missed it, every day is national wine day.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It doesn't matter.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

You found your message and you found it in, this took me about five minutes.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

The screen took me five minutes to edit, but the results were all there.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And I want to give you a couple of quick examples.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Here's a company that tapped into this.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I don't know anything about them, but the quarantine and chill custom bottle.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Take your wine, you can engrave it, you can add cigars, you can add a basket.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

They did this pretty quickly.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It's kind of cool.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And one quick happy story before I wrap up, when a fairy and unicorn show up at your door,


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

you really get to know your neighbors.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Turns out in my own trend research, I found that there's a group of people called the


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

wine fairies that are delivering wine to their neighbors in surprise dressed as fairies and


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

unicorns.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And that's nice.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And it's something I'm not, it's not exploitation.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

It's something you can tap into and say, you know what, why don't we sell a product for


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

them?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Why don't we package baskets or bags?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

In packs of six, why don't we give them a discount?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Why don't we tap into this cool thing that's going on that's nice and send a message about


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

our brand and tap into a trend?


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And here's the thing.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

We can't tell the future.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Maybe COVID won't last that long.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I hope not.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Maybe it's going to last months, but we'll never be able to tell the future.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

So we need to react and we need to get ahead of it.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

And I hope I've given you the tools to do that.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Thank you.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference and I will see you online at least.


Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis


Managing the Tensions & Tradeoffs Between UX & SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy Moz fans and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


This week we're chatting about managing tension between user experience and SEO.


This is a topic we've touched on a little bit in the past, but we've seen it come up


quite a bit.


I think as many more folks are thinking about user experience and working with user experience


designers and product and project managers and SEO, they're trying to reconcile some


of these differences.


It is the case that a lot of the things that positively impact user experience also positively


impact SEO.


In fact, we have a whole Whiteboard Friday about those kinds of things.


UX touches on lots of things that impact rankings in the search engines.


Certainly spam, to a certain indirect degree, Google can be looking at pages and sites and


may say, ah, this fits in our template of what spam looks like.


It affects links, especially because user experience helps to predict whether someone


might link to you.


If you have a thousand people coming to your site, by improving the user experience you


may go from one link per thousand people coming to your site to two or three, which could


dramatically increase the links that come to you, affecting your search engine rankings.


Obviously, content is being impacted here.


User experience affects how search engines judge content, just as it affects how users


judge that same content.


User and usage data, naturally, of course, technical issues, certainly in some respects,


especially with things like page load speed, mobile friendliness.


These are big UX elements that impact.


Probably less so with things like query interpretation and user context.


Those are generally less impacted signals that search engines might use.


But regardless of this, nearly everything you do that's on a site or a page that's going


to positively impact user experience or negatively impact user experience will have a corresponding


impact on SEO, with a small handful of exceptions.


The small handful of exceptions is where we see a lot of these tension and challenges


coming into play, and that's what we're going to discuss today, specifically four kinds


of tension that can exist.


What I'm going to do is ask you to imagine two worlds.


One world in which there is no SEO.


It's before search engines.


We're just worried about the user experience.


People only come to your site through the site itself, and they only navigate through


the website.


They don't navigate from engines directly to your pages.


They're not performing searches.


We're UX-only world.


In UX-only world, one of the big exceptions here is page consolidation versus segmentation.


So page consolidation would be, I'm going to put a bunch of different user intents all


together on a single page because we can serve users best from that single page, single experience.


That is true in UX-only world.


But what has happened is that you've forgotten about UX and SEO world.


I'll give an example here.


Let's say I'm trying to make a website all about transportation in the Seattle area.


I want to provide people with how to get to and from places and the best times to go.


Are you thinking about traffic?


Are you thinking about comparing public versus private transport options and driving versus


Lyft versus Uber versus renting a car?


All these different kinds of things.


I'm covering the whole world of Seattle transit.


So I have in my UX-only world a single experience that describes getting to and from any neighborhood


or any particular location to any other one.


That page is sort of a singular experience, provides everything all those users might


need.


But in SEO world, we have to remember that somewhere between a third and half, sometimes


even more of our traffic is actually going to be searching on Google for what we provide.


They're not going to be going directly to our website and then experiencing the site


only through that.


They're also going to be searching on Google.


And that means they're going to be searching with all different kinds of queries.


And those different kinds of queries have different intents behind them, and we need


to serve those with separate pages, which is why page segmentation is so important.


So I might have a general landing page in SEO and UX world.


I might have an individual neighborhood landing page.


I might have a location location landing page.


And if I'm only thinking about UX and not SEO, I am not serving these folks well.


In fact, I'm hurting the user experience of anyone who searches for me or who might come


to me through a search engine.


Because landing on this page, if I've already expressed to Google that I'm looking to go


from Ballard to the Space Needle and I want my options, that's a lousy experience.


I have to go enter that information again.


I already told Google what I wanted.


You website should be delivering that.


And so this is one of those areas where we have to make the sacrifice and live in UX


and SEO world, recognize this exists, create landing pages that specifically serve the


needs of searchers and provide that great experience for them.


Those pages have to be linked to.


They have to be indexable.


They have to be keyword targeted.


They need the right kinds of content on them.


It's different than pure UX world.


Exception number two, this also happens in internal linking and site navigation.


So in UX only world, I can have a much more limited set of onsite navigation because I


don't have to point to nearly as many pages and because in general I can rely on the intuition


of my users to be able to figure out that, oh, this particular page probably lives in


this particular section.


If I want to go from neighborhood to neighborhood, I can look at the neighborhood's landing area.


Or if I'm particularly interested in comparing costs of different kinds of vehicle rentals


versus getting around the city with Lyft and Uber versus that kind of thing, I can go to


the transportation options section.


But in UX and SEO world, again, because we have different types of landing pages, we


generally speaking have to link to much more.


And so that might mean instead of a single section, we actually need dropdowns.


We need to have more navigation.


Maybe we need to even put in a footer or have some more sidebar navigation.


We may need to make a little bit of a sacrifice for the purity of user experience for someone


who's not coming from search in order to link to more things and in order to provide better


internal anchor text.


These links are going to need good internal descriptive anchor text.


That is not actually just helpful for search engines.


This is actually quite helpful for folks who may not have the same intuition that you're


assuming many of your visitors might have and for folks who are looking to quickly navigate


directly, potentially on a mobile device or on a screen reader, right, for those folks


who have more trouble with accessibility issues.


This is positive from all those perspectives.


And that internal anchor text, as we've discussed previously on Wipeout Friday, does have, can


have quite a positive impact on your search rankings.


Exception number three, keyword use on pages in titles and in anchor text.


So in UX only world, I might have a page that's Ballard to Space Needle.


Great.


That's all I need to say.


But in UX and SEO world, I need to show the search engines and indeed searchers themselves


that I'm very relevant to their query, that I'm answering exactly what they are looking


for before they get to this page.


Because remember, all they're going to see in the search results is just the title and


the description, maybe whatever is in that little snippet.


They're not going to know, oh, you know what?


They probably provide a great experience, but it's very visual and interactive, and


so I just can't see it.


I'll click them anyway.


That is not how people search, right?


They look at that snippet.


They decide whether they're going to click and engage.


And so we need to present a better, more optimized version of the page for search engines specifically.


And in this case, right, what is also true is that there's probably a bunch of words


and phrases, what we've called here at Moz, related topics, right?


Related keywords, related topics that I should have on this page.


If I'm talking about going from Ballard to the Space Needle, I probably want to include


words like bus, streetcar, farmer's market, right, the farmer's market in Ballard, or


Seattle Center, which is at the base of the Space Needle surrounding it.


Monorail, which there is a monorail.


It won't get you from Ballard, but it'll get you from downtown to Space Needle.


Uber and Lyft, right?


These are all words and phrases that Google would expect someone who's interested in transportation


between these neighborhoods to want to find on this page, and therefore we need to do


a good job of serving those searcher intents and those related topics that Google cares


about.


Fourth, and finally, is we need crawler, readable text content on pages.


And in user experience only world, that's not always the case.


In fact, if you think about user experience only world, an app might be the very best


type of experience.


That could be a web app, or it could be a mobile app, or interchangeably both, right?


But it could provide a great experience by letting me just click around the city and


know where I'm going and select things from inside the app, and the URL would actually


never change.


But you know what?


This sort of visual interactive experience is not going to work in SEO and UX world,


right?


We need descriptive content.


We need to be able to navigate between pages.


We need separate URLs for each of these.


Those URLs need to have good anchor text that's pointing between them back and forth.


We need to have keyword targeting in all of the facets of that navigation, right?


And we need to figure out what all those keyword targets are, which requires keyword research.


So there's just a lot of different changes that need to happen.


My advice is this.


If you're an SEO and you are working with user experience folks, please remind them


that the user experience doesn't just apply to the people who are already on the site


or navigating internally in the site.


Search engines send a huge amount of traffic, and we need to think about the user experience


of coming from the search engine to the website.


It's not just about rankings and traffic.


It's about the user experience that those people have as well.


If you're a user experience professional and you're working with SEOs, with the exception


of these few things, generally speaking, everything that you do to improve user experience, the


UI itself and the visuals, the design, the branding, the load speed, the efficiency that


people get between pages on a site, all of those experiential elements also improve SEO.


So as a user experience professional, your pitch to SEOs should be, generally speaking,


very easy because you can help them rank better so long as you keep these things in mind.


All right, everyone.


Look forward to your comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of


Whiteboard Friday.


#WhiteboardFriday: Content Expansion: From Prompt to Paragraph to Published Page

Music


Hey folks, great to be back here with you on Whiteboard Friday.


Today we're going to be talking about content expansion.


It's a term you probably haven't heard before because I just made it up,


so hopefully it will be useful in the future for you.


But I think you'll get the gist of exactly what we're trying to accomplish here.


You see, search engine optimizers have this really bizarre responsibility,


which is we are often asked by our clients to produce content about things we have no business writing about.


As a search engine optimizer, we know exactly the kinds of things that make content good for Google,


but that doesn't mean we have any domain knowledge about whatever it is our customer does.


Maybe your customer is an artist of some sort, so your customer runs a restaurant.


You might not know anything about it, but you still might have a deadline to hit in order to get good content


that talks in depth about some sort of topic which really isn't in your wheelhouse.


So today I'm going to talk about a couple of tricks that you can use in order to go from a prompt


to a couple of paragraphs and then ultimately to a published page to a good piece of content.


Now I want to step back for a second and just make one thing clear.


This is not the preferred way to produce content.


If you can have an expert produce the content, by all means have the expert produce the content,


and then you go to work optimizing that content to make it the best it possibly can be.


That's the way it ought to be done whenever possible.


But we know that's not the case.


The truth is that most small business owners don't have the time to write lengthy articles


about their services and their offerings and what makes them special


and the kinds of things that their customers might need.


They have a business to run.


And so there's nothing unethical about taking the time to actually try and write a good piece of content


for that customer.


But if you're going to do it, you really should try and create something that's of value.


And so hopefully this is going to help you do exactly that.


I call this content expansion because the whole purpose is to start from one small prompt


and then to expand it a little and expand it a little and expand it even more


until eventually you're at something that's very thorough and useful and valuable


for the customers who are reading that content.


Each one of the individual steps is just sort of like taking a breath


and blowing it into a balloon to make it a little bigger.


So each step is manageable as we expand that content.


So first we have to start with some sort of topic or prompt.


In this example I've decided just bike safety off the top of my head.


I'm here in Seattle and there are bikes everywhere.


It's completely different from North Carolina where I'm from.


You've got to get in a car to go anywhere.


But with the prompt bike safety, we now have to come up with


what are we going to talk about with regard to bike safety?


I mean, we pretty much know off the top of our heads that helmets matter


and signaling and things of that sort.


But what are people actually asking?


What's the information they want to know?


Well, there are a couple of ways we can get at that,


and that's by looking exactly for those questions that they're searching.


One would be to just type in bike safety into Google and look for PAA's or people also asked.


That's the SERP feature that you'll see about halfway down the page,


which often has a couple of questions, and you can click on it


and there will be a little featured snippet or paragraph of text that will help you answer it.


Another would be to use a tool like Mazda's Keyword Explorer


where you could put in bike safety and then just select from one of the drop-downs our questions,


and it would then just show you all the questions people are asking about bike safety.


So once you do that, you'll get back a handful of questions that people are asking about bike safety.


So in this case, the three came up from the PAA for just bike safety,


where is riding a bike safe, how can I improve safety, and why is bike safety important?


All right, so what this does is start to get us into a position


where now we're building out some sort of outline of the content that we're going to be building.


We've just expanded from a title that said bike safety,


so now an outline that has a couple of questions that we want to answer.


Well, here's the catch.


I mean, bike safety, sure, we've got some ideas off the top of our heads about what's important for bike safety,


but the real thing that we're trying to get out here is authoritative or valuable content.


Well, Google's telling you what that is.


When you press the button to show you what the answer is to the question,


that's Google telling you this is the best answer we could find on the Internet for that question.


So what I would recommend you do is you take the time to just copy the answer to that PAA, to that question.


So why is bike safety important?


You click the button, it would show you the answer, and then you would write down the citation as well.


But if you think about it, this is exactly the way you would write papers in college.


If you were writing a paper in college about bike safety, you would go into the library,


identify books on safety studies, et cetera, and then you would go through,


and then you'd probably have note cards pulled out, and you'd find a particular page that has an important paragraph.


You'd write a paraphrase down, and you'd write the citation down.


This is the exact same thing.


So I'm not telling you to copy content, and that's not what we're going to be doing in the end,


but at the same time it is the way that we take that next step of expanding the content.


So what we've done here is we've now gone from a topic to a couple of questions,


and now for each of those questions we've kind of got an idea of what the target answer is.


But of course the featured snippet isn't the whole answer.


The featured snippet is just the most specific answer to the question, but not the thorough one.


It doesn't cover all the bases.


So what are some of the things we can do to expand this even further?


This is where I really like to take advantage of NLP technologies, natural language programming technologies,


that are going to allow us to be able to expand that content in a way that adds value to the user,


and in particular explains to the user concepts that both you as the writer in this particular case


and they as the reader might not know.


My favorite is a site called dandelion.eu.


It's completely free for a certain amount of uses, but if you're going to be producing a lot of content


I would highly recommend you sign up for their API services.


But what you're going to do is extract and explain entities.


So imagine you've got this featured snippet here and it's talking about bike safety.


And it answers the question and says, you know, why is bike safety important?


Well, the answer is that bicyclists who wear their helmets are 50% less likely to suffer traumatic brain injuries


in a wreck or something of that sort, and that's the answer in the featured snippet that's been given to you.


Well, perhaps you don't know what a traumatic brain injury is, and perhaps your readers don't know what that is


and why it's important to know that one thing protects you so much from the other.


Well, that's where entity extraction can be really important, because what dandelion.eu is going to do


is it's going to identify that noun phrase.


It's going to identify the phrase traumatic brain injury, and then it's going to give you a description of exactly what that is.


So now you can expand that paragraph that you originally pulled from the featured snippet


and add into it a citation about exactly what traumatic brain injury is.


And this will happen for all the questions.


You'll find different terminology that your reader might not know and then be able to expand upon that terminology.


Now, the one thing that I want to do here in this process is not just take advantage of content other people have written about,


but try and do some novel research.


And as you know, Google Trends is probably my favorite place to do novel research,


because if there is any topic in the world, somebody's searching about it,


and we can learn things about the way people search.


So, for example, in this Google Trends that I did, I can't remember the exact products that I was looking up,


but they were specific bike safety products, like, for example, bike lights, bike mirrors, bike video cameras, or bike cameras, et cetera.


In fact, I'm almost positive that the red one had to do with bicycle cameras,


because they were becoming cheaper and more easily accessible to bicyclists,


so they've become more popular over time.


Well, that's novel research.


So when you're writing this article here about bike safety,


you can include in it far more than just what other people have said,


but you can say, you know, of the variety of ways of improving your bike safety,


the use of a bike camera has increased dramatically over time.


All right, so now that you've got some of this novel research, including even graphs that you can put into the content,


we've got to pull this all together.


So we started with the prompt, and then we moved into some topics or questions to answer.


Then we've answered those questions, and then we've expanded them by giving clarity and definitions to terms that people might not understand,


and we've also added some novel research.


So what's next?


The next step is that we need to rewrite for relevancy.


This is a really important part of the process.


You see, chances are when you write about a topic that you are not familiar with,


you will not use the correct language to describe what's going on.


I think a good example might be if you're writing about golf, for example,


and you don't know what it means to accidentally hit a golf ball that goes to the right or to the left.


Which one is a hook and a slice?


Now, those of you who play golf, I'm sure know right off the top of your head,


but you wouldn't know to use that kind of terminology if you weren't actually a golfer.


Well, if you use a tool like Ntopic, it's at ntopic.org,


and you write your content and place it in there and then give bike safety as the keyword you want to optimize for,


it will tell you all of the relevant words and phrases you ought to be using in the content.


And in doing so, you'll be able to expand your content even further,


not just with further language and definitions that you know,


but with the actual language that experts are using right now whenever they're talking about bike safety,


or whatever topic it is.


The next thing that I would say is that you really should pull things back


and take a chance to look at the quality of the writing that you're producing.


You know, this whole time we've been talking mostly about making sure the content is in depth and thorough


and covers a lot of issues and areas and uses the right language,


but we haven't spent any time at all talking about, is this actually written well?


There's a fantastic free app out there called Hemingway App.


If you haven't heard of it, this is going to make your day.


Like, every writer in the world should be using a tool like this.


You just drop your content in there, and it's going to give you all sorts of recommendations,


from correcting grammar to using different words, shortening sentences,


passive and active voice, making sure that you have the right verb tenses, et cetera.


It's just incredibly useful for writing quality content.


Now, there are two things at the end that matter, and one is really, really important, in my opinion,


and that is to cite.


You see, when you've done all of this work, you need to let the world know that this work, one,


isn't only created by you, but two, is backed up by research and information provided by other professionals.


There is no shame whatsoever in citing even competitors who have produced good content


that has helped you produce the content that you are now putting up.


So cite. Put citations directly in.


Look, Wikipedia ranks for everything, and every second sentence is cited and links off to another website.


I mean, it's insane, but Google doesn't really care about the citation in the sense that somebody else has written about this.


What you're really interested in is showing the user that you did your homework.


And then finally, once you're all done, you can publish this great piece of content


that is thorough and exceptional and uniquely valuable, written well in the languages and the words that it should use,


cited properly, and be proud of the content that you produced at the end of the day,


even though you weren't an expert in the first place.


Hopefully, some of these techniques will help you out in the long run,


and I look forward to seeing you in the comments, and maybe we'll have some questions,


and I can give you some other ideas.


The CMO Role Has Been Disrupted – Are You Ready for Your New Boss?

Okay, everybody. This is it. This is the big closing keynote I put on my white jacket to


commemorate the event. This is Will Reynolds. You know Will Reynolds. You may know him from


Real Company Shit. You may know him from his work at Power BI, the SERE agency, one of


the best companies on the East Coast and the West Coast too, making differences not only


in the SEO and PPC world, but in their community. Just an awesome all-around great company and


a great guy. He's also one of the most honest people in the industry and that's why we always


enjoy him. Let's welcome Will Reynolds. Howdy folks. Will Reynolds here from SERE


Interactive and as you know, I like to study disruption within marketing. And this time,


I'm starting with the CMO and realizing some of the pressures that they're under,


what their goals and objectives are, and ultimately, how can we use the data that