tool dot IO, you could use Uber Suggest, you could use, you know, some of the keyword research


Long Tail SEO: When & How to Target Low-Volume Keywords - Whiteboard Friday

tools from the other providers out there like a search metrics or what have you.


But all of these kinds of terms, what you want to find is those zero searches or zero


to ten searches keywords because those are going to be the ones that have very, very


little volume but potentially are super high value for your specific website or business.


Be aware that the keyword difficulty scores may not actually be that useful in these cases.


Keyword difficulty scores, this is true for Moz's Keyword Difficulty Score and for all


the other tools that do keyword difficulty, what they tend to do is they look at a search


result and then they say how many links or how high is the, you know, domain authority


and page authority or all the link metrics that point to these ten pages or nine pages


if there's nine pages ranking.


The problem is in a set where there's very few people doing very specific keyword targeting,


you could have powerful pages that are not actually optimized at all for these keywords


that aren't really relevant and therefore it might be much easier than it looks like


from a keyword difficulty score to rank for those pages.


So my advice is to look at the keyword targeting to spot that opportunity, right?


If you see that none of the ten pages actually includes all the keywords or only one of them


seems to actually serve the searcher intent for these long tail keywords, you've probably


found yourself a great long tail SEO opportunity.


Next one, the large scale, untargeted long tail SEO.


This is very, very different in approach.


It's going to be for a different kind of website, different application.


We are not targeting specific terms and phrases that we've identified.


We're instead saying, you know what, we want to have a big content strategy to own all


types of long tail searches in a particular niche.


And that could be educational content, it could be discussion content, it could be product


content where you're supporting user generated content, those kinds of things.


Essentially, I want to bias to the uniqueness of the content itself and real searcher value,


which means I do need content that is useful to searchers, useful to real people, it can't


be completely auto-generated.


I'm worrying less about the particular keyword targeting.


I know that I don't know which terms and phrases I'm going to be going after.


And so instead I'm biasing to other things like usefulness, amount of uniqueness of content,


the quality of it, the value that it provides, the engagement metrics that I can look at


in my analytics, all that kind of stuff.


You want to be careful here.


Any time you're doing broad scale content creation or enabling content creation on a


platform, you've got to keep low value, low unique content pages out of Google's index.


That could be done two ways.


One, you limit the system to only allow in certain amounts of content before a page can


even be published, or you look at the quantity of content that's being created or the engagement


metrics from your analytics and you essentially block via robots.txt or via meta-robots tag


any of the pages that look like their low value, low unique content.


This approach requires a lot of scalability, right?


And so you need something like a discussion forum or Q&A style content or user posted


product or service or business listings, right?


Think something like an Etsy or a GitHub or Moz Q&A, right?


Discussion forums like Reddit, right?


These all support user generated content.


You can also go with non-UGC if it's editorially created, something like a frequently updated


blog or news content, particularly if you have enough of a staff that can create that


content on a regular basis so that you're pumping out good stuff on a regular basis.


That can also work.


It's generally not as scalable, but you have to worry less about the uniqueness of quality


content.


You don't want to fully automate this system, right?


The worst thing you can possibly do is to take a site that has been doing well, pump


out a ton of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of pages, throw them up on the site,


their low quality content, low uniqueness of content, and Google can hit you with something


like the panda penalty, which has happened to a lot of sites that we've seen over the


years, and they continue to iterate and refine that, so be very cautious.


You need some human curation in order to make sure the uniqueness of content and value remain


above the level you need.


And the last thing, if you're going to be doing this large scale content creation, I


highly advise you to make the content management system or the UGC submission system work in


your favor.


Make it do some of that hard SEO legwork for you, things like nudging users to give more


descriptive, more useful content when they're creating it for you.


Require some minimum level of content in order to even be able to post it.


Use spam software to be able to catch and evaluate stuff before it goes into your system.


If it has lots of links, if it contains poison keywords, spam keywords, kick it out.


And finally, encourage and reward the high quality contributions.


If you see users or content that is consistently doing well through your engagement metrics,


go find out who those users were, go reward them, go promote that content, push that to


higher visibility.


You want to make this a system that rewards the best stuff and keeps the bad stuff out.


And a great UGC content management system can do this for you if you build it right.


All right, everyone.


Look forward to your thoughts on long tail SEO, and we'll see you again next week for


another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Giving Searchers a Reason to Prefer Your Brand - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to this special Christmas edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Now whether you celebrate Christmas or not, my family's Jewish, at least ethnically, and


so... but we still love Christmas, we used to get a tree and presents and all that kind


of stuff.


Merry Christmas to all those of you who celebrate religiously or non-religiously, and to all


the rest of you, hopefully you're having a lovely and wonderful December holiday break


time, middle of winter time, sun's gonna start getting a little higher in the sky, days get


a little longer, I'm really looking forward to that, especially being here in Seattle.


And I want to talk today about giving searchers something, a reason to prefer your brand.


This is why it is so critical, and I think going forward, look, into the next year and


into 2016, we have seen that the last few years have been years where Google, where


social media sites, where consumers and customers, web users of all kinds, and platforms of all


kinds have given brands, especially brands that have recognition, that have people have


an affinity for them, they give them a lot of preference.


I'll show you what I mean.


So even small brand preferences can yield these sort of remarkable and amazing results


because of the amplification that they receive all the way down the line in your marketing


efforts.


So let's say, for example, that you are able to get a slight lift in brand recognition,


in brand affinity, in recall, and in association, positive associations.


It's gonna do a few things for you.


First off, it'll raise your average click-through rate in search results.


So as a searcher is performing whatever queries they are, the thousands, hopefully many thousands


of queries that lead to your site, if you appear in position four, five, or six, you


might see a slightly higher click-through rate than what you would normally see for


an average website ranking in that position because of the brand preference.


What this does, actually, is over time, it results in higher rankings because Google


is set up to reward a long-term click-through rate bump and all the other signals that come


with that into higher rankings.


So even if you are someone who says, ah, I'm not really sure whether Google's using click-through


rate models in my stuff, they are in a lot of stuff now, but even if you don't believe


that, what's happening is you're getting a slightly higher share of visits, which means


a slightly higher share of people who can amplify your brand, link to your brand, all


those kinds of things, all of those signals over time slowly, positively increase your


potential ranking.


Next up, if you have that slight brand preference, you're going to increase the rate at which


visitors return to your site, come back to you through bookmark, through type-in, through


branded search, all of those kinds of things.


Those forms of returning visits, whether it is branded search or direct visit or a bookmark,


that will lead to browser and search biasing, and you can see this in all of your browsers,


right?


So if I'm on my iPhone or my Android device, if I'm in Google Chrome on a laptop or desktop


and I start typing something, all of those browsers and all of those systems will look


for previous patterns that start to match what I'm typing in or voice searching, and


they will be more likely to bias to show me those kinds of things.


If I've been to Moz in the past and I type just M into my Chrome browser, I'm likely


to see Moz in that drop-down list of things that it suggests to me, particularly if I


visit with some real frequency.


So you get that preferential treatment.


But this also goes back to helping your rankings up here because brand-based search queries,


as Google has shown, can have an impact on non-branded, unbranded query rankings.


So if lots of people are searching for, let's say, Virgin America flights to San Francisco,


when Google sees the query flights to San Francisco, they might say, hey, you know what,


Virgin America should rank a little bit higher because we've seen lots of branded search


volume for that.


Obviously brand lift can help conversion likelihood, which leads to more sales.


That's one of the most direct and obvious ones.


That's one of the reasons that big brand marketers invest so much in it.


But it's also the case they will increase the likelihood, right?


So let's say that you are reaching out through social media or amplifying messages through


social media, through press, obviously through word of mouth, which may be somewhat under


your control and a lot not in your control.


All of that amplification will be slightly enhanced each time with additional brand preference.


And that means that in the future you have a larger audience for future marketing, future


targeting, hugely helpful there.


Also you can see that perception of value and quality actually improves as brand affinity


and recall and recognition goes up.


And you've seen this in lots of consumer tests where folks are shown – well, one of my


favorite examples is the Bing study where Bing looked at replacing Google's results


with Bing's results, but they had the Google logo and the Google layout, and then they


showed Google's results in Bing, and no matter whose results they showed, if they showed


the Google logo next to it, people said those were the better results.


So essentially the brand is part of how we judge the quality of something.


It is part of that.


This goes to some consumer-based tests around wine, the flavor that you get from wine or


the enjoyment you get from wine.


And if you set something down and it is a recognized bottle, known to be very high in


price, known to be hard to get, you will actually see areas of the brain light up and perceive


that wine to be better tasting and to provide more enjoyment even if the flavor – even


if it's actually filled with cheap $5 wine.


So this psychological preference is actually improving our perception of quality from the


brand perspective, and because of that we get higher retention, more recidivism.


So brand can help you in a huge number of ways, both technical through algorithmic and


social means and also psychological means.


Worth investing in absolutely for the years to come, and certainly as the last few years


have pushed more and more stuff in web marketing, it becomes essential for all of us.


Okay, but how do we do this?


I'm not going to be able to get into all the tactical details today.


I mean, we could spend a whole Whiteboard Friday on any one tactic in these groups,


but I wanted to provide some framework around these groups for you to think about and add


potentially to your strategy going into the new year.


So things like brand values.


Brand values matching customer values or overlapping with them or working against them can impact


how a brand is perceived.


Most obviously many consumers are very frustrated with brands like a Volkswagen or an Enron


before that, who kind of, we feel like they pulled the wool over our eyes and they've


been dishonest.


Cigarette marketing in the tobacco industry turned off many, many consumers in the Western


world to a lot of those brands.


And then brands that have values that we recognize and respond to, we can see those getting brand


lift.


Voice, tone, and visuals.


So this is essentially the style of how you present yourself and whether that matches


and has resonance with your audience's preferences, with their own styles, and with existing cultural


cues.


So you can see that speaking, it's like speaking the language of your customer, but


we're not talking about a verbal language like English versus Hindi versus Spanish versus


German.


It's more about the resonance on the cultural language level.


Are we in the same cultural zeitgeist?


Do we have the same cues and recognition?


Do we have the same things around nostalgia and associations between concepts?


All those kinds of things.


Content.


This is one that we talk about a lot.


Matching your content to your audience's, well, potentially their needs, their desires,


things they enjoy, their influencers and what their influencers are going to amplify.


This is really where content strategy comes into play because if you take content down


to the tactical level only, you are not thinking about the overlap.


Well, many times when you're doing tactical content creation and content amplification,


you're not thinking about the strategic overlap with what's my audience's needs, what do they


desire, what do they have associations with, what do they enjoy, what do their influencers


enjoy, all of that kind of stuff.


When you do this, you get closer and closer to making that Venn diagram match and your


content is much more likely to have a strategic positive impact on brand association.


Brand representatives.


The human beings that we associate with a brand are critically important.


In fact, I would say, and many, many marketers have been talking about this for the last


couple of years, but more important to a brand's presence than ever before.


We are getting to build brand associations through human associations.


Oftentimes that's founders and CEOs, but many times it is also brand representatives, which


can include a large number of people.


It can include people who are amplifiers of that brand, not necessarily people who work


at the brand, but amplifiers.


It can include the testimonials that are present in the marketing messages.


It can include brand contributors, whether those are guest contributors or full time,


and of course team members.


The big one is often founders and CEOs and the leaders of an organization, but many of


these others have influence as well.


If those match well to who your customers' influencers are or the zeitgeist of your customers'


world, that can create additional brand resonance as well.


Pricing and positioning.


This is the classic old school four P's of marketing, but the value perceived and the


value that is quantifiable against the pricing and the costs associated with the service.


Costs I don't just mean financial costs, but also setup costs and work-wise and process


costs, and customers' own self-perception, meaning that if a customer believes that they


are a medium-sized business but you're selling them a package that's called enterprise, they


may perceive that they're paying too much.


They don't think of themselves as an enterprise.


Even though the enterprise package is right for them and it's providing the right kind


of value, you're now sort of disconnecting the language of the positioning from what


the customer actually thinks of themselves as.


That can potentially harm brand affinity.


And then of course lots and lots of psychological nudges that tell people, that build associations


around a brand.


Those are things like familiarity, liking, processing fluency, which we've had a whole


whiteboard Friday on processing fluency I think last year in 2014.


Those kinds of things, when I say processing fluency, what I'm talking about is the ease


with which I recognize something and can make an association.


For example, one of my favorite studies around this was the correlation between stocks from


stock prices of companies that have pronounceable names, easily pronounceable names, versus


hard to pronounce names.


And you can see that the easier processing fluency of an easier to pronounce name over


time tends to correlate with higher stock value.


Weird, seems like markets would be more sophisticated than that but human beings are subject to


this stuff.


User experience flow, that also fits into the psychological nudges.


So as we're thinking about influencing all this stuff, a lot of it, a lot of times when


people talk about brand and building brand, they talk exclusively about brand advertising.


But as you can see from all of these categories, there's a lot of organic work that we can


do in SEO, in social, in content, in email, in community, in all the channels that we


talk about here at Moz that can have a big influence on your brand.


And that can have a big influence over time on all of these things positively as well.


All right, everyone.


Merry Christmas.


If you are celebrating another holiday, may you have a great holiday.


And we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


How to Use STAT to Discover Extra Value in Your Keyword Data

Hi and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Zoe, I work in the learning team


here at Moz and my focus is on developing educational materials and resources to promote


understanding of our stack tool. Today we're going to take a look at how you can use stack


to surface additional insights in your keyword data. Looking for value in your keyword data


is important if you're a brand trying to stay visible and on top of the forever changing


steps. Looking for those additional insights is paramount to making informed SEO decisions.


So what is stat? If you haven't come across stat before it's a large-scale rank tracker


but it's also fantastic for many other things. SERP analysis and intent, a competitive landscape


tool, its value is really how you can dig into the data it provides. So where are the


quick wins here? Well we know that usually improved ranking position means increased


or at least some uplift in traffic for that term. Knowing where you sit on the SERPs and


what features you're winning can make or break your content strategy. This is where stats


dynamic tags can be hugely useful. Dynamic tagging allows you to group keywords together


based on criteria you've set. That group is then automatically populated daily with keywords


based on changeable filter criteria. This means you have the ability to create a group


of keywords with any criteria that's important to your business. A great grouping criteria


to set here is keywords based on ranking position. For example, flagging keywords which are sitting


just outside the top three, top five or top ten positions and adding a traffic benchmark


means you can easily discover which keywords with traffic potential need just a little


bit of extra work to shift them into that better position. So maybe your strategy includes


hunting down a featured snippet. If so, you can use that to set up a dynamic tag that


monitors keywords that result in featured snippets. If you see keywords that aren't


ranking well in that grouping, they're not winning those snippets. So if you're tracking


keywords for a client, this is a great way of seeing where your client owns a snippet


and where they don't. You can try to take the spot from their competitors by finding


new opportunities to create optimized content. Using this feature is powerful for getting


quick feedback on the intent and type of content that perform best in a keyword set, which


ultimately is what you can use to guide your content strategy. So we know that organizing


your data is key. How do you organize your data so it's meaningful to you while allowing


you to see potential opportunities to quickly report back to a client? In Stat, you can


hold all your keyword groups, your tags in a single data view. So keeping selected tags


in a data view means you get a single dashboard of metrics for those chosen keyword groups.


For example, you could easily put together a data view of tags that reflect the tactical


aspirations of your client. If you're a search marketer, you may choose to set up a data


view containing keyword segments that cover stages of the conversion funnel. You really


want to split keywords into segments that reflect what your clients want to target.


So that could be industry sectors, services or locations. If product categories are important


to your client, you can set up a data view containing keywords tagged as shoes, sportswear,


swimwear or whatever specific attributes you need to track across a product line.


Okay, so maybe you're looking for a quick health check on how that specific set of keyword


groupings are doing. Well, there's a smart little feature in Stat that allows you to


compare all of your tags and how well each of those are performing in terms of visibility


online and it's called the tags tab. So this feature is pretty cool because it allows you


to see the performance of all those tags in one place. You'll get the overall picture


of how your SEO strategy is progressing and where to focus your attention based on your


most important metrics. You can set a specific date range, you can see average rank, top


10 change. Another key piece of information is finding out who up against for those keyword


sets you've just put together. You can use Stat to view share of voice across that specific


set of keyword tags or for that entire market. The share of voice metric used in Stat measures


the visibility of a given keyword set on Google. This means you can get invaluable insights


such as where competitors are increasing or decreasing in their visibility. Now, you may


have clients that need formalized insights into the progression of a campaign. What's


the best way of displaying those reports? Well, in Stat, we have built connectors that


allow you to pull live data from Stat into Google Data Studio reports. These visualizations


make it easier to share insights with clients and for them to see those top level metrics


really quickly. So hopefully these tips and tools mean you can really investigate how


much extra value and insights you can squeeze out of your keyword data. Have a great day


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

Music


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

Hi Moz friends, I'm Oluking. I'm a user researcher here at Moz and I'm excited to join today for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

Today I'll be talking to you about the next search intent. In a previous Whiteboard Friday, I mentioned the three bosses of SEO


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

and one of the factors that I mentioned affecting SEO are the search intents behind each and every search.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

So everyone performing a search on a search engine is looking for something and the search intent is the purpose behind that search.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

And as an SEO, satisfying that search intent is critical to the success of your content.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

Brittany Miller has a very in-depth Whiteboard Friday on this topic already, so I'm not going to be covering that.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

Logan Brandt also has another topic called the Eden Search Intents, so that's something you should check out as well.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

But today I'm going to be talking about what happens after you've satisfied the initial search intent, so the next search intent.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

So what's the next search intent? Well, if you're looking at a search as a journey, the next search intent is the next step on a searcher's journey.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

That is what someone will most likely be looking for next after they've completed the objective of a particular page.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

So if the search intent helps a searcher stay on your page, the next search intent helps a searcher stay on your site.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

So why is this important? Well, SEO is not just about ranking.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

In order to really maximize your efforts for SEO, you have to start thinking about how are your pages converting?


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

How do the pages move people into next stages in your funnel? So funnel optimization.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

What's the user experience for your searchers? What's the customer journey like?


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

And how are they engaged with the relevant content that you want them to be engaging with? And how is this helping you retain your ideal customers or searchers?


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

And how is each and every content into linking with other piece of content that you have on your site?


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

And also the traffic distribution as well. So how is how are you moving traffic from the top performing pages into pages that might not be getting as much traffic?


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

So how do you perform, you know, how do you implement next search intent?


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

Well, the goal of next search intent is really to identify what people are most likely to search for next and then nudge the searchers into those next actions.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

So you can do this with simple call to actions, embeds on pages and links from one page to another.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

Or you can get more advanced by tweaking your navbar, making things a bit customized, adding a read next section to each one of your pages, having launches that pop up.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

So many different ideas. Pretty much your goal is just to think of a particular page and think as a user, as a searcher, what would I most likely need next after I've consumed this information?


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

So some ways to get ideas is to understand your searchers persona. Look at similar keywords that might be related to what your page is ranking for.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

Look at other ranking keywords that you are ranking for as well. Look at what your competitors are ranking for that you might not be ranking for.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

This might give you ideas of your blind spots for content that might not be relevant for a particular page, but other related pages.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

Understand the curiosity journey. So this is like customer journey, but instead of looking at your funnel, you're trying to look at in terms of information, let's call it map.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

What would someone want to know about next? Focus on the user experience as well. Providing the most relevant information always helps with a good user experience.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

Check your Google Analytics and see what pages are people visiting when they land on a particular page. That will give you clues into what next page or next intent that they want.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

And you can also look on Google, just search for a keyword and you can see for some keywords that people search next as well. And that's the most obvious way to find the next search intent.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

So how do you do this? Well, if you've watched Brittany's video or other information around the search intent, you would understand that there are four main types of search intent.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

So informational, commercial, navigational and transactional. So for informational, your goal is really to provide a good user experience and to optimize your funnel so that you can move people or searches from one page to another.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

So you can do this by surfacing related content and then linking to your relevant pages on your site. For the commercial one, your goal is for conversion because commercial is just about I purchase intent.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

So you can do this by adding comparison of your competitors products or similar products that you have on your site, adding coupon, discount and answering any objections that someone might have. So be proactive on the information that they would need before they need it and then surface it onto your page.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

And navigational, the goal is also good user experience, retaining people onto your website and making sure you optimize your journey so that traffic can flow from one page to the most relevant next page.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

And you can do this with launchers that pop up as users perform certain actions on the page. You can have customized nav bars. You can set up your site links correctly so that from the search engines that becomes apparent what page people can visit as well.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

So for transactional, this is someone already knows what they want and they're just trying to buy things. And your goal in this case is just to convert and upsell. So you want to have your related products surfacing, have your product variations and then have the compatible purchases like Amazon's people also buy type of thing.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

And you can put a little demo as well to help the user, searchers who might be looking for how your product works in real life by be proactive and have that on your page.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

But yeah, so that really is the next search intent. If you have any ideas that I might have missed, please don't hesitate to reach out and I would love to learn from you as well.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday

The main key points to learn about this is when it comes to SEO, you want to think about things in an holistic way. You don't want to just look at one page on your site. You want to look at how each page connects and understanding the next search intent allows you to bring value from one page that is performing well to other pages on your website so that your entire site can be blooming.


Next Search Intent – Whiteboard Friday


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Hi there.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

My name is Lily Wray, and today we're going to be talking about EAT, expertise,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And we're particularly going to be focusing on the E component, expertise.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So just to take a step back, EAT stands for expertise, authoritativeness,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

and trustworthiness.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

It comes directly from Google's Quality Rater Guidelines, which is a document that


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

they use to train human search quality evaluators that they use to conduct tests


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

thousands of times every year to basically benchmark and see how well Google's doing


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

in terms of meeting the expectations of its users.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Throughout this document, Google uses EAT pretty much synonymously with good content


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

quality.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

But they're looking for the raters to describe how well the content creators and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

the sites are meeting the expectations of users in terms of demonstrating good


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

expertise, authority, and trust.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Google also has a document that's related to learning SEO.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So if you go on Google Search Central, they have documentation related to how you can


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

learn SEO, and they explicitly say that you should be providing content that has a lot


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

of great expertise.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

In Google's documentation about core updates, they have an article that's called


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

What Webmasters Should Know About Core Updates.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

They share this article every time a new core update is rolled out,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

several times per year.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And they explicitly say that you should get to know the Search Quality Rater


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Guidelines, and particularly, you should get to know EAT.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Google also owns YouTube, and YouTube has its own documentation about particularly


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

how it elevates high quality information in the video results.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And there's one section that's dedicated to how it combats misinformation on


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

YouTube.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And in that section, they talk a lot about the importance of authoritativeness in


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

YouTube rankings.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Google also, in its documents about Google News and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Google Discover, they talk about the importance of EAT.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So if you're a brand that wants to rank in Google News or Google Discover,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Google extensively describes the importance of demonstrating good EAT


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

throughout your content.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

The product reviews updates are a new series of updates that Google started to


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

roll out in the past year.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And in these updates, sites that do product reviews or


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

companies that do reviews of different products, Google's saying that in order to


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

rank really well for this type of content, they're expecting to see expert level


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

content, and basically experts and enthusiasts who know the products really


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

well are the ones that are going to rank a little bit better than people that are


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

just maybe reviewing products that they haven't actually tried or spent time with.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So a lot of people in the SEO industry are curious how do we measure EAT,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

because Google tends to be pretty ambiguous about what EAT actually is,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

how it's measured.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So it's not a direct ranking factor.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

It's really important to understand that unlike something like PageSpeed or


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Core Web Vitals, which is very measurable, there's no EAT score.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

There's no way to know on a scale of 1 to 100 how good is my EAT.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

The only factors that Google has explicitly confirmed as ranking factors


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

that contribute to EAT are page rank and links.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

That being said, there's a lot of ways that EAT plays into the algorithms


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

indirectly, and a lot of things that Google has said that we can piece together


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

to understand the role that EAT plays in the algorithms.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So for example, there's a variety of different patents that I've been


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

researching with the patent expert Bill Slowski, rest in peace,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

late patent expert Bill Slowski.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And basically, there's a variety of different patents that describe the role


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

that authoritativeness might play in the search results.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So for example, starting way back in 2007, Google registered for


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

a patent that allows it to understand who the author is of a given piece of content,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

and to rank that content according to the authoritativeness of that author.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

More recently, there's a patent called Website Representation Vectors,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

which Google applied for in 2018.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And this patent allows Google to understand how authoritative a piece of


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

content is, or how authoritative a brand is, and to rank that content accordingly.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

They also have a couple of different patents to identify who authors and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

experts are, either by their writing style, or by their tone of voice, or


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

their accent.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So Google's doing a lot of work to really kind of get an understanding of who


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

everybody is, and to understand the areas where they're credible, or


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

where they demonstrate expertise.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And the results of this is what Google's been doing across a lot of different


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

products, and throughout the course of many years in the SEO space,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

which is really trying to get an understanding of who the authors are,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

why they can be trusted, why they're credible.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And there's a lot of different examples, for example, dating back to author rank,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

and agent rank, which was something around 2007.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

It's been a very big project for Google.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Later, they had rel author.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

They've had a lot of different manifestations of how they're basically


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

identifying different authors in the search results, and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

ranking content according to their authoritativeness.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

But what this boils down to is the role of experts in SEO.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

I believe that this is where Google's really going.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

They're trying to get an understanding of who the authors are,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

why they can be trusted, what are the areas where they specialize, and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

what is the subject matter where they demonstrate true expertise.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

I believe that with the product reviews updates,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

which are relatively new updates by Google, this is an update where they're


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

algorithmically trying to understand who's a true subject matter expert.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Who has actually done the work of putting together the research,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

because they've actually spent a lot of time reviewing the products.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And I believe that they're taking this type of approach to a lot of the different


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

algorithms that they're using, where they're trying to understand


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

who's an expert that's actually done the research.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

They've spent time in the field.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

They've done a lot of this work.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

They're not just SEO people or content marketers who are


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

doing keyword research and reverse engineering what's already ranking and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

kind of saying the same thing as everybody else.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

In fact, there's another patent that Google has, which basically enables them


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

to identify when they have a bunch of pieces of content that talk about the same thing.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

If there's one piece of content that has something new, they're able to basically


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

elevate the rankings of that piece of content because it's introducing something


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

new to the conversation.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So with all these patents and the ability to identify individual experts,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

we have to remember what Google's doing on a larger scale with entities.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So particularly with something like Google's Knowledge Graph,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

which allows them to understand 500 billion facts about 5 billion entities online.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

This is a way that Google can basically say, this is a person, place, or thing.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

We know all this different information about them, and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

we know how they're connected to other entities.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So this is a visualization of what that might look like.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

There's a variety of different tools that are available online to visualize


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

how these entities are understood,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

all the different attributes that might relate to these entities.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So in this example, we have Joe Smith, and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

perhaps we know that Joe Smith has a certain hometown, he has a certain age.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

This is his career, this is the name of his wife, these are the awards that he's won.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

This is the skills that he has, and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Google's able to start building out that profile for that entity.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And that could play into potentially the way that Joe Smith ranks for


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

different content that he's found in, or


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

perhaps how he's displayed in Google Knowledge Graph or Google Scholar.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And I personally believe that Google's connecting the dots between all these


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

different Google products and evaluating EAT across all these different products.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And when they're looking for somebody to rank on YouTube or


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

somebody to rank on Google, depending on the query itself,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

depending on how much EAT is required for that query.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So if it's something where what we call your money, your life,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

it's very much related to health, it's related to finances, security.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

EAT is gonna be much more important for those queries.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And they're gonna do this evaluation to say,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

we know that we have all these different authors that we can choose from, and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

different brands that we can choose from.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And we have this understanding of EAT on the entity level, and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

that's gonna play a role in who they choose to rank for certain queries.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So how can we factor this into our SEO strategy?


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Well, I think it's very important to focus on incorporating experts


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

into your content strategy.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So what my team and I do, for example,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

is we might work with a bona fide expert in a different area,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

bring that person into the conversation in terms of creating content.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

There's also many examples where the expert themselves actually creates


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

the content or starts a blog.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And I've seen in my research many, many examples of experts who are providing


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

first hand information about their area of expertise.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

In many cases they're not necessarily linking out to other sites when they're


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

citing their sources in terms of how they're putting together information.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

They're actually breaking the news.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

They're providing the information.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

They're talking about what it's like to work in their respective fields.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So they offer first hand experience, and I strongly believe that Google is


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

algorithmically trying to identify where that first hand experience exists.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

They're providing original research,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

which is something that Google's been elevating algorithmically.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Google's actually said in the past couple of years that they're going to


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

elevate the rankings of content that provides original research above the other


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

people that are maybe linking back to that original research or citing it.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

There's nothing wrong with citing that research.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

It's just that Google's going to now kind of reward the source that's breaking


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

the news.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

There's also, in the case of top stories for news sites,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Google can apply a label that says highly cited if it's the piece of news that all


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

the other news sites are linking to.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

In the case of experts, other people are often linking to them.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So while it's definitely a best practice in SEO to link out to other sites and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

to cite your sources and to link to all the places that are helping you


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

provide information, in the case of using expert-driven content,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

many people are linking to the expert.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So you don't necessarily need to link out that much if you're the expert writing


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

the content because you're just sharing what you know about the area where you


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

actually demonstrate expertise.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

In the case of the experts that are doing very well with SEO,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

you can look at the link profile and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

you can notice they're the ones breaking the information.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And other sites are referencing them with links.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

They're also very focused on their niche.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So one thing that Google is doing a lot of is that they are basically evaluating


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

EAT on the website level, on the domain level.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

This is something that my team and I notice in our research.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

You can basically take something like a website's categories,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

a website's tags, a website's breadcrumbs.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

You can collect all that information,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

cross-reference it with the performance of how the site is doing for


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

SEO with using Google Search Console or Google Analytics or another analytics tool.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And you can start to visualize the different categories and subcategories and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

topics where a site tends to demonstrate a lot of expertise,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

where it tends to drive a lot of traffic.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And you might notice that there's other areas or other topics or


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

breadcrumbs or subcategories where your site is unable to rank.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

This is especially true for your money or your life sites.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

There's often cases where you're able to maybe perform well on topics related to


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

fitness and nutrition, but maybe not as much when you talk about medical conditions or


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

health conditions.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Also with expert sites, it's really important to include author bios.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So you wanna talk about who that expert is,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

you should include their name in the content.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

If you have somebody else writing the content,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

try to incorporate the expert into that content strategy.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So you can say, this article was written by Sarah, but


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

the expert reviewer was Joe Smith and he came in to basically review the content.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So that's a nice way to incorporate experts into your content strategy.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And you can basically, with any of the clients that you work with or


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

your company that you work with, work with the people who are actually


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

the bona fide experts at your company and see if you can incorporate them into your


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

content strategy, even if it's just to say, can you please review this content and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

make sure it makes sense, make sure it's factually accurate, and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

can we include your name on it?


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

In some cases, they might be skeptical to say,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

why do you wanna include my name in your content?


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Why is the marketing team involving me in this process?


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

One thing that I found very effective is to talk to them and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

say, this is actually a personal branding strategy for you.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

If we put your name behind this, if we build this really nice profile for


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

you on the website, you're probably gonna have a really nice listing on Google that


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

ranks for your name.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

That often gets their attention and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

that's something that they wanna participate in.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So that's kinda in line with what we call a brand SERP.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

You can have the expert Google their own name and you can say,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

are you satisfied with the way that it looks on Google?


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

We can influence that.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And if you really go deep into this strategy,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

you can ultimately help them get included in Google's knowledge graph,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

which is definitely something people love to show off.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

When you Google your name,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

you get all this great information directly on Google about the expert.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And I believe that tying it all together,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

when you have experts who Google understands who they are,


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

Google understands all these attributes about them and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

how much they can be trusted in a certain area.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

I believe that that process is something that Google is more and


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

more incorporating into its evaluation and who gets to rank for certain keywords.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So tying it all together, I think expertise is becoming increasingly important.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

EAT is extremely important, especially for your money or your life websites.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

It's not going anywhere.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

It's something that Google references throughout much of its documentation.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

And so think about not taking shortcuts when it comes to demonstrating EAT, but


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

really kind of doing an overhaul of your content strategy to make sure that


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

real experts are collaborating with you in the content process.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

So I hope you enjoyed the talk.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday

My name's Lily Rae and my Twitter handle is lilyraenyc.


Measuring E-A-T? — Whiteboard Friday


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Hey Moz fans, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Today we are talking all about introduction to Python,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

which is why I have a special co-host here.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

She is a ball Python herself, total expert.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Her name is Pumpkin and she's the best.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So, what is Python?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

This has been in the industry a lot lately.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

There's a lot of commotion that you should know how to use it


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

or know how to talk about it.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So Python, it's an open source object oriented programming language


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

that was created in 1991.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And some fun facts about Python is it's often compared to R,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

but it's arguably more simple to use.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

The syntax just often times feels more simple and common sense


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

like when you're new to programming.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And huge companies use it, right?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

NASA, Google, tons of companies out there use it


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

because it's widely supported, it is open source, so pretty cool.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And while we're going through this Whiteboard Friday,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

I would love it if we would do a little Python programming today.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So, I'm just going to ask that you also visit this in another tab,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

python.org slash downloads.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Download the version for your computer and we'll get back to that, okay?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So, why should you care, right?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Python is incredibly powerful because it helps you automate


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

time consuming tasks, right?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

It can do these things at scale so that you can free up your time


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

to work on higher level thinking, to work on more strategy.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

It's really, really exciting where these things are going.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Some examples of that are things like log file analysis, right?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Imagine if you could just set up an automated system with Python


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

to alert you anytime one of your primary pages


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

wasn't being crawled as frequently as it typically is, right?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

You knew all sorts of things or let's say Google crawls your robots.txt


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

and it throws out a server error, which many of you know causes huge problems.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

It can alert you.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

You can set up scripts like that to do really comprehensive tasks.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Some other examples, internal link analysis can do a really great job of that.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

It can help you discover keyword opportunities by looking at bulk keyword data


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

and identifying some really important indicators.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

It's really great for things like image optimization, right?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

It can auto tag and alt text images.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

It can do really powerful things there.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

It can also scrape the websites that you're working with


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

to do really high volume tasks.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

It can also pull Google search console data, right,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

and do analysis on those types of things.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And I do have a list of all of the individuals within SEO


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

who are currently doing really, really powerful things with Python.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And I highly suggest you check out some of Hamlet Batista's recent scripts


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

where he's using Python to do all sorts of really cool SEO tasks.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So how do you run Python?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

What does this even look like, right?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So you've hopefully downloaded Python as a programming language on your computer.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

But now you need to run it somewhere, right?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Where does that live?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So first you should be setting up a virtual environment.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

But for the purpose of these examples,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

I'm just going to ask that you pull up your terminal application.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

It looks like this.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

You could also be running Python within something like Jupyter Notebooks


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

or Google Colab.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

But just pull up your terminal,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

and let's check and make sure that you've downloaded Python properly.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So the first thing that you do is you open up the terminal


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

and just type in python space dash dash version.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And you should see a readout of the version that you downloaded for your computer.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

That's awesome.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So now we're just going to activate Python and do some really basic tasks.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So just type in Python and hit Enter,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

and you should hopefully see these three arrow things within your terminal.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And from here you can do something like print hello world.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So you enter it exactly like you see it here.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Hit Enter, and it will say hello world, which is pretty cool.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

You can also do fun things like just basic math.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

You can add two numbers together using something like this.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So these are individual lines, and after you complete the print sum,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

you'll see the readout of the sum of those two numbers.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

You can randomly generate numbers.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And I realize these aren't direct SEO applications,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

but these are the silly things that give you confidence


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

to run programs like what Hamlet talks about.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So I highly suggest you just have fun,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

create a little random number generator, which is really cool.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Mine is pulling random numbers from 0 to 100.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

You can do 0 to 10 or whatever you'd like.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And a fun fact, after you hit Enter and you see that random number,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

if you want to continue,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

hit using your up arrow will pull up the last command within your terminal.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And it even goes back to these other ones.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So that's a really quick way to rerun something like a random number generator.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

You can just crank out a bunch of them if you want for some reason.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And this is where you can start to get into really cool scripts as well


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

for pulling URLs using request HTML.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And then you can pull unique information from web pages.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

You can pull at bulk tens of thousands of title tags within a URL list.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

You can pull things like H1s, canonicals, all sorts of things.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And this makes it incredibly easy to do it at scale.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And one of my favorite ways to pull things from URLs


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

is using XPath within Python.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And this is a lot easier than it looks.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So this might be an XPath for some websites,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

but websites are marked up differently.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And so when you're trying to pull something from a particular site,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

you can right-click into Chrome Developer Tools.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And within Chrome Developer Tools,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

you can right-click what it is that you're trying to scrape with Python.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And you just select Copy XPath,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

and it will give you the exact XPath for that website,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

which is kind of a fun trick if you're getting into some of this stuff.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

What are libraries?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

How do we make this stuff more and more powerful?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Because Python's really strong on its own,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

but what makes it even stronger are these libraries or packages,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

which are add-ons that do incredible things, right?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

This is just a small percentage of libraries that can do things


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

like data collection, cleaning, visualization, processing, deployment.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

One of my favorite ways to get some of the more popular packages


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

is just to download Anaconda,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

because it comes with all of these commonly used most popular packages.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

And so it's kind of a nice way to get all of it in one spot,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

or at least most of them.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So you kind of, you know, dipped your toes.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

You kind of understand what Python is, what people are using it for.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Where can you learn more? How can you start?


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

Well, Code Academy has a really great Python course,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

as well as Google, Kaggle, and even the python.org website


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

has some really great resources that you can check out.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

This is a list of individuals I really admire in the SEO space


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

who are doing incredible work with Python


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

and have all inspired me in different ways.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So definitely keep an eye on what they're up to.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

But yeah, Pumpkin and I have really enjoyed this,


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

and we hope you did too.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

So thank you so much for joining us


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python

for this special edition of Whiteboard Friday.


#WhiteboardFriday: Intro to Python


Creating Demand for Things that Have Little to No Existing Search Volume - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy Moz fans and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going


to chat about a particularly challenging problem in the world of SEO and that is trying to


do SEO or trying to do any type of web marketing when your product, service, or idea has no


search volume around it. So nobody's already looking for what you offer. It's a new thing,


a new concept. And I'll use the example here of a website that I'm very fond of but which


there's virtually no search volume for called Nice. I'm not sure if that's exactly how you


pronounce it since there are two I's in Nice. It's nice.co, N-I-I-C-E.co. And it's great.


I search for things in here. It brings me back all these wonderful visuals from places


like Colossus and lots of design portals. And I love this site. I use it all the time


for inspiration, for visuals, for stuff that I might write about on blogs, for finding


new artists. It's just cool. I love it. I love the discovery aspect of it and I think


it can be really great for finding artists and designers and visuals. But when I looked


at the keyword research, and granted I didn't go deep into the keyword research, but let's


imagine that I did, I looked for things like visual search engine, almost no volume. Search


engine for designers, almost no volume. Graphical search engine, almost no volume. Find designer


visuals, nada. So when they look at their keyword research they go, man, we don't even


have keywords to target here really. SEO almost feels like it's not a channel of opportunity.


And I think that's where many, many companies and businesses make mistakes actually because


just because you don't see keyword research around exactly what you're offering doesn't


mean that SEO can't be a great channel. It just means we have to do an extra step of


work. And that's what I want to talk about today. So I think when you encounter this


type of challenge, and granted it might not be the challenge that there's no keyword volume.


It could be a challenge in your business, for your organization, for some ideas or products


that you have or are launching that there's just very little. And thus you're struggling


to come up with enough volume to create the quantity of leads or free trials or customers


that you need. And this process really can work. So I want you to go through questions


like these. Who's the target audience? Who's the target audience for this? So in Nice's


case, that's going to be a lot of designers. It might be people who are creating presentations.


It might be those who are searching out designers or artists. It could be people seeking inspiration


for all sorts of things. So they're going to figure out who that is. And from there,


they can look at the job title, interests, demographics of those people. And then you


can do some cool stuff where you can figure out things like, oh, you know what? We could


do some Facebook ad targeting to those right groups to help boost their interest in our


product and potentially, well, create branded search volume down the road, attract direct


visitors, build brand awareness for ourselves, and potentially get some traffic to the site


directly as well. And if we can convert some of that traffic, well, that's fantastic. In


their case, I think Nice is ad supported right now. So all they really need is the traffic


itself. But regardless, this is that same type of process you'd use. Second question,


what else do they search for? What is that target audience searching for, right? Knowledge,


products, tools, services, people, brands, tools, whatever it is. If you know who the


audience is, you can figure out what they're searching for, right? Because they have needs.


If they have a job title, if they have interests, if you have those profile features about the


audience, you can figure out what else they're going to be searching for. And in this case,


right, knowing what designers are searching for is going to be, well, that's probably


relatively simplistic. The other parts of their audience might be more complex, but


that one's pretty obvious. And from that, we can do content creation. We can do keyword


targeting to figure out, to be in front of those folks when they're doing search by creating


content that may not necessarily be exactly selling our tools, but that's the idea of


content marketing, right? We're creating content to target people higher up in the funnel before


they need our product. We can use that too for product and feature inspiration in the


product itself. So in this case, right, they might consider, Nice might consider creating


a design pattern library or several, pulling from different places, hiring someone to come


in and build one for them, and then featuring that somewhere on the site if you haven't


done a search yet, and then potentially trying to rank for that in the search engine, which


then brings qualified visitors, the types of people who, once they got exposed to Nice,


would be like, wow, this is great, and it's totally free. I love it.


UX tool lists, right, so lists of tools for user experience folks, people on the design


or UI side, maybe Photoshop tutorials, whatever it is that they feel like they're competent


and capable of creating and could potentially rank for, well, now you're attracting the


right audience to your site before they need your product. Where do they go, that audience,


right? Where are they going on the web? What do they do when they get there? To whom do


they listen? Who are their influencers? And how can we be visible in those locations?


So from that, I can get things like influencer targeting and outreach. I can get ad and sponsorship


opportunities. I can figure out places to do partnership or guest content or business


development. In Nice's case, right, that might be things like sponsor or speak at design


events, right? Maybe they could create an awards project for Dribbble, right? So they


go to Dribbble, they look at what's been featured there, or they go to Colossus or some of the


other sites that they feature. They find the best work of the week, and at the end of the


week they feature the top 10 projects, and then they call out the designers who put them


together. Wow, that's terrific. Right now you're getting in front of the audience whose


work you're featuring, which is going to in turn make them amplify Nice's project and


product to an audience who's likely to be in their target audience. This is, right,


it's sort of a win-win. That's also going to help them build links and engagement and


shares and all sorts of signals that potentially will help them with their authority, both


topically and domain-wide, which then means they can rank for all the content they create,


building up this wonderful engine. Fourth question I'd like to ask, what types of content


have achieved broad or viral distribution? I think what we can glean from this is not


just inspiration for content and keyword opportunities as we can for many other kinds of content,


but also sites to target. In particular, sites to target with advertising, sites to target


for guest posting or sponsorship or sites to target for business development or for


partnership, sites to target in an ad network, sites to target psychographically or demographically


for Facebook if we want to run ads like that, potentially bidding on ads in Google when


people search for that website or for that brand name in paid search. If you're nice,


you could think about contracting some featured artists to contribute visuals, maybe for a


topical news project. Something big is happening in the news or in the design community, you


contract a few of the artists whose work you have featured or are featuring or people from


the communities whose work you're featuring and say, hey, we might not be able to pay


you a lot, but we're going to get in front of a ton of people. We're going to build exposure


for you, which is something we already do, FYI, and now you've got some wonderful content


that has that potential to mimic that work.


You could think about, and I love this just generally as a content marketing and SEO tactic,


if you go find viral content, content that has had wide sharing success across the web


from the past, say two, three, four, five years ago, you have a great opportunity, especially


if the initial creator of that content or project hasn't continued on with it, to go


say, hey, you know what? We can do a version of that. We're going to modernize and update


that for current audiences, current tastes, what's currently going on in the market. We're


going to go build a that, and we have a strong feeling that it's going to be successful because


it's succeeded in the past. That, I think, is a great way to get content ideas from viral


content and then to potentially overtake them in the search rankings, too.


Because if something from three or five years ago that was particularly timely then still


ranks today, if you produce it, you're almost certainly going to come out on top due to


Google's bias for freshness, especially around things that have timely relevance.


Then last one, I like to ask about brand advertising in these cases because when there's not search


volume yet, a lot of times what you have to do is create awareness. I should change this


from advertising to a brand awareness because really there's organic ways to do it and advertising


ways to do it. You can think about, well, where are places that we can target where


we could build that awareness? Should we invest in press and public relations, not press releases?


Then how do we own the market? I think one of the keys here is starting with that name


or title or keyword phrase that encapsulates what the market will call your product, service


or idea. In the case of Nice, that could be visual search engines. You can imagine the


press saying, well, visual search engines like Nice have recently blah, blah, blah.


Or it could be designer search engines or it could be graphical search engines or it


could be designer visual engines, whatever it is. You need to find what that thing is


going to be and what's going to resonate. In the case of Nest, that was the smart home.


In the case of Oculus, it was virtual reality and virtual reality gaming. In the case of


Tesla, it was sort of already established as electric cars, but they kind of owned that


market. If you know what those keywords are, you can own the market before it gets hot.


It's really important because that means that all of the press and PR and awareness that


happens around the organic rankings for that particular keyword phrase will all be owned


and controlled by you. When you search for smart home, Nest is going to dominate those


top 10 results. When you search for virtual reality gaming, Oculus is going to dominate


those top 10. It's not necessarily dominate just on their own site. It's dominate all


the press and PR articles that are about that, all of the Wikipedia page about it, et cetera,


et cetera. You become synonymous. You become the brand that's synonymous with the keyword


or concept. From an SEO perspective, that's a beautiful world to live in.


So hopefully for those of you who are struggling around demand for your keywords, for your


volume, this process can be something that's really helpful. I look forward to hearing


from you in the comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard


Targeted Link Building in 2016 - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to chat about four questions that kind of all go together around targeted


link building.


Targeted link building is the practice of reaching out and trying to individually bring


links to specific URLs or specific domains, usually individual pages, though, and trying


to use those links to boost the rankings of those pages in search engine results.


Look, for a long time this was the core of SEO.


This was how SEO was done.


It was almost the start and the end.


Obviously, a lot of other practices have come into play in the industry, and I think there's


even been some skepticism from folks about whether targeted link building is still a


valid practice.


I think we can start with that question and then get on to some of these others.


In my opinion, targeted link building does make sense when you fulfill certain conditions.


We know from our experimentation, from correlation data, from Google's own statements, from lots


of industry data, that links still move the needle when it comes to rankings.


You have a page that's ranking number four.


You point a bunch of new links to it from important pages and sites around the web,


particularly if they contain the anchor text that you're trying to rank for, and you will


move up in the rankings.


It makes sense to do this if your page is already ranking somewhere in the, say, top


10 to 20, maybe even 30 results, and or if the page has measurable high impact on business


metrics.


That could be sales, could be leads, could be conversions, even if it's indirect.


If you can observe both those things happening, it's probably worthwhile.


It's also okay if you say, hey, we're not yet ranking in the top 20, but our paid search


page is ranking on page one.


We know that we have high conversions here.


We want to move from page three, page four, up to page one, and then hopefully up into


the top two, top three results.


Again, it is worth this targeted link building effort because when you build up that visibility,


when you grow those rankings, you can be assured that you are going to gain more visits, more


traffic that will convert and send you these key business metrics and push those things


up.


I do think targeted link building still makes sense when those conditions are fulfilled.


Is this form of link building worthwhile?


Is this something that can actually do the job it's supposed to do?


The answer is yeah.


Look, if rank boosting is your goal, links are one of the ways where if you already have


a page that's performing well from a conversion standpoint, from a user experience standpoint,


pages per visit, your browse rate, things like time on site, if you're not seeing a


high bounce rate, if you have got a page that's clearly accessible and well-targeted and well-optimized


on the page itself, then links are going to be the most powerful, if not one of the most


powerful elements to moving your rankings.


But you've got to have a scalable, repeatable process to build links.


You need the same thing that we look for broadly in our marketing practices, which is that


flywheel.


Yes, it's going to be hard to get things started, but once we do, we can find a process that


works for us again and again, and each successive link that we get and each successive page


whose rankings we're trying to move gets easier and easier because we've been there before,


we've done it, we know what works and what doesn't work, we know the ins and outs of


the practice.


That's what we're searching for.


When it comes to finding that flywheel, there are sort of tactics that fit into three categories


that still do work.


The tactics, I'm not going to get into the individual specific tactics themselves, but


they fall into these three buckets and what we've found is that for each individual niche,


for each industry, for each different website, and for each link builder, each SEO, each


one of you out there, there's a process or combination of processes that works best.


I'm not going to dictate to you which tactics will work best, but you'll generally find


them in these three buckets.


One, one to one outreach.


This is you going out and sending usually an email, but it could be a DM or a tweet,


an at reply tweet, it could be a phone call, it could be, I literally got one of these


today, a letter in the mail addressed to me, hand addressed to me from someone who'd created


a piece of content, wanted to know if I would be willing to cover it.


It wasn't exactly up my alley, so I'm not going to, but I thought that was an interesting


form of one to one outreach.


Could be broadcast.


Broadcast is things like social sharing where we're broadcasting out a message like, hey,


we've produced this, it's finally live, we've launched it, come check it out.


That could go through bulk email, could go through an email subscription, could go through


a newsletter, could go through press, could go through a blog.


And then there's paid amplification.


That's things like social ads, native ads, retargeting, display, all of these different


formats.


Typically, what you're going to find is that one to one outreach is most effective when


you can build up those relationships and when you have something that is highly targeted


at a single site, single individual, single brand, single person.


Broadcast works well if, in your niche, certain types of content or tools or data gets regular


coverage and you already reach that audience through one of your broadcast mediums.


Paid amplification tends to work best when you have an audience that you know is likely


to pick those things up and potentially link to them, but you don't already reach them


through organic channels or you need another shot at reaching them from organic and paid


both.


Let's end here with the process for link acquisition.


I think this is kind of the most important element here because it helps us get to that


flywheel.


When I've seen successful link builders do their work, they almost all have a process


that looks something like this.


It doesn't have to be exactly this, but it almost always falls into this format.


There's a good tool I can talk about for this too, but the idea being the first step is


opportunity discovery where we figure out where the link opportunities that we have


are.


Step two is building an acquisition spreadsheet of some kind so that we can prioritize which


links we're going to chase after and what tactics we're going to use.


Step three is the execution, learn, and iterate process that we always find with any sort


of flywheel or experimentation.


Step one, we might find that it turns out for the links that we're trying to get, relevant


communities are a great way to acquire those links.


We reach out via forums or Slack chat rooms or it could be something like a private chat


or it could be IRC.


It could be a whole bunch of different things.


Could be blog comments.


Maybe we found that competitive links is a good way for us to discover some opportunities.


Certainly for most everyone, competitive links should be on your radar where you go and you


look and you say, hey, who's linking to my competition?


Who's linking to the other people who are ranking for this keyword and ranking for related


keywords?


How are they getting those links?


Why are those people linking to them?


Who's linking to them?


What are they saying about them?


Where are they coming from?


It could be press and publications.


There's industry publications that cover certain types of data or launches or announcements


or progress or what have you.


Perhaps that's an opportunity.


Resource lists and linkers.


There's still a ton of places on the web where people link out to, here's a good set of resources


around customer onboarding for software as a service companies.


Oh, you know what?


We have a great post about that.


I'm going to reach out to the person who runs this list of resources and I'm going to see.


Maybe they'll cover it.


We put together a great meteorology map looking at the last 50 winters in the northeast of


the United States and showing a visual graphic overlay of that charted against global warming


trends and maybe I should share that with the Royal Meteorological Society of England.


I'm going to go pitch their person at whatever.ac.uk it is.


Blog and social influencers.


These are folks who tend to run obviously popular blogs or popular social accounts on


Twitter, on Facebook or on LinkedIn or what have you, Pinterest, right?


Could be Instagram.


Potentially worth reaching out to those kinds of folks.


Feature focus or intersection sources.


This one's a little more complex and convoluted but the idea is to find something where you


have an intersection of some element that you're providing through the content of your


page that you're seeking to get a link from and there is intersection with things that


other organizations or people have interest in.


For example, on my meteorology example, perhaps you might say, you know, lots of universities


that run meteorology courses would probably love an animation like this.


Let me reach out to the professors.


Or you know what?


I know there's a data graphing startup that often features interesting data graphing stuff


and it turns out we use one of their frameworks.


Let's go reach out to that startup and we'll check out the GitHub project, see who the


author is, ping that person and see if maybe they would want to cover it or link to it


or share it on social.


All those kinds of things.


You've found the intersections of overlapping interest.


And last one, biz devs and partnerships.


This is certainly not a comprehensive list.


There could be tons of other potential opportunity to discover mechanisms.


This covers a lot of them and a lot of the ones that tend to work for link builders but


you can and should think of many other ways that you could potentially find new opportunities


for links.


Step two, got to build that link acquisition spreadsheet.


Spreadsheet almost always looks something like this.


It's not that dissimilar to how we do keyword research except we're prioritizing things


based on, you know, how important is this and how much do I feel like I could get that


link and do I have a process for it, do I have someone to reach out to.


And so what you want is either the URL or the domain from which you're trying to get


the link, the opportunity type, maybe it's a partnership or a resource list or press,


the approach you're going to take, the contact information that you've got if you don't have


it yet.


That's probably the first thing on your list is to try and go get that.


And then the link metrics around this.


There's a good startup called BuzzStream that does sort of a system, a mechanism like this


where you can build those targeted link outreach lists can certainly be helpful.


I know a lot of folks like using things like OpenSight Explorer and Followerwonk, Ahrefs,


Majestic to try and find and fill in a bunch of these data points.


And then step three, once we've got our list and we're going through the process of actually


using these approaches and these opportunity types and this contact information to reach


out to people, get the links that we're hoping to get, now we want to execute, learn, and


iterate, right?


So we're going to do some forms of one-to-one outreach where we email folks and we get nothing.


It just doesn't work at all.


And what we want to do is try and figure out why was that?


Why didn't that resonate with those folks?


We'll do some paid amplification that just reaches tens of thousands of people, low cost


per click, no links, right?


Just nothing.


We didn't get anything.


Okay, why didn't we get a response?


Why didn't we get people clicking on that?


Why did the people who clicked on it seem to ignore it entirely?


Why did we get no amplification from that?


Then we can have those ideas and hypotheses and use that to improve our processes.


We want to learn from our mistakes.


But to do that, we have to, just like investments in content and investments in social and other


types of investments in SEO, got to give ourselves time.


We have to talk to our bosses, our managers, our teams, our clients, and say, hey gang,


this is an iterative learning process.


We're going to figure out what forms of link building we're good at.


And then we're going to be able to boost rankings once we do.


But if we give up because we don't give ourselves time to learn, we're never going to get these


results.


All right, look forward to your thoughts on tactical link building and targeted link building.


And we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


3 Important Google Updates to Understand — Whiteboard Friday

Hey, everyone, I'm Lily Rae, and today I'm going to be talking about a few different


types of Google updates.


So we're going to start with the helpful content update, which was announced and rolled out


in August of 2022.


And the helpful content update introduced a new concept in the SEO space, which is a


site-wide classifier that will be identifying unhelpful content.


And this is content that Google decided or determined is primarily written for search


engines and is not exactly helpful for users.


This new site-wide classifier that they're using with the helpful content update will


be applied to sites that Google believes is doing this type of thing at scale.


So if the majority of the content on the website is considered unhelpful, it's written primarily


for search engines and not for users.


The helpful content update classifier can be applied to those sites, which can have


the impact of affecting the rankings for the whole site.


So it's not just one or two pages.


It's potentially the entire site, including even if the website has some content that's


actually helpful.


So this was introduced in about mid-2022, and Google has explained that it's going to


be using machine learning with the helpful content update classifier, which means that


the classifier is learning and growing and evolving over time.


As it begins to understand different patterns and different signals about sites that do


provide unhelpful content, it can continue to impact those sites over time.


So while they told us the update rolled out in August and it lasted about two weeks and


it concluded, we also know that Google will likely be leveraging the helpful content update


classifier all the time or in future updates.


They told us if it's a big, significant change to how they use this update, they'll let us


know, but otherwise we should assume that it's kind of there operating in the background.


So this was a new development for 2022.


The product reviews update, there have been a variety of them.


They started in 2021, and this was also a new type of update from Google in which Google


is telling us that if you're a website that provides product review content, you need


to meet a certain criteria for content quality that they're looking for.


The backstory behind this and the reason that I believe Google rolled out these product


review updates is because there's many, many websites that have reviews of products, that


have affiliate links, that are making money through SEO, through having these affiliate


websites, but they don't add a lot of value.


They don't tell you a lot of insights about the product that's different than what Google


has already seen before.


And Google has received a lot of feedback from users that it's not particularly helpful


when they read a product review that's just saying the same thing the manufacturer said


about the products or that other sites have already said about the products.


So there's been a variety of different product review updates because I believe that they're


refining this set of algorithms to basically elevate the best product reviews on the internet.


Google has told us that they should be written by experts or enthusiasts that know the products


very well.


So people that are obsessed with tech devices, like smart watches or TVs or whatever, they


need to prove that they've spent a lot of time analyzing these products, that they have


an obsession with it.


Maybe they studied it.


Maybe they have pictures of themselves using it.


Anything that gives the user and search engines evidence that they've actually spent a lot


of time with the product.


This is another very important concept from these updates.


Google has specifically said if you're providing product reviews, we need evidence.


We need photos of you using the product.


We need videos of you using it.


We need anything that shows us that you're not just rehashing what everybody else has


already said online.


We need proof that you've actually spent the time doing it.


So a lot of sites are starting to adapt their product review strategy to meet Google's expectations


of what makes a good product review.


As a result of this, almost every product review update that rolls out, you'll see a


lot of volatility in the search results because some product review sites are winning from


these updates, some are losing, and then there's other sites that are being impacted by these


ranking changes, such as e-commerce websites, who might see gains or losses in rankings


because maybe the product review site that Google was previously ranking was affected


by the updates, so the e-commerce site wins out a little bit more.


This has been a big change for a lot of sites in this category.


We've seen a lot of ranking volatility with product review sites.


The third type of update that we're all probably very familiar with and has existed for a very


long time are Google's core updates.


These are nothing new, but the nature of them changes over time.


They pretty much happen quarterly.


That's not 100% true for every year, but it's pretty much every few months that Google will


roll out a big core update.


They started to basically just name them after the month, so you might have the September


22 core update, for example.


What makes these tricky is that Google doesn't give us a lot of specificity each time they're


rolled out about what changed.


They almost always reference back to the same article that says what site owners should


know about Google core updates.


That article gives 25 questions or so that the reader or the content creator should read


with regard to what makes a good page, a good website.


Does the website demonstrate EAT?


Does the website have good quality content?