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5 More WordPress SEO Enhancements You Wish You Had – Part 2

5 More WordPress SEO Enhancements You Wish You Had – Part 2 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Are there certain things you wish you could accomplish with your SEO in WordPress, but the functionality is just not there? Me, too.

Last time I wrote about WordPress SEO enhancements, I talked about the popularity of WordPress as a platform for some of the world’s best-known websites. I also discussed the challenges that WordPress presents for doing SEO effectively, further challenged by the gap in functionality of SEO plugins out there today, even with 52,000 WordPress plugins in the marketplace.

So I created a list of WordPress SEO enhancements we wish we had, including:

A plugin that allows you to focus on optimizing for more than one keyword
A plugin that clearly shows where the keywords are in the content
A plugin that shows the content creator how their content and their site are performing
A plugin that alerts you to problems with mobile usability and performance

At the end of the last post I asked for your vote. We wanted to know what functionality you would like to see in WordPress SEO, and here are the results:

Which of these WordPress enhancements do you want from an SEO plugin?

Today, I’ll outline five more WordPress SEO enhancements you wish you had and why.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 5: You Can’t View Customized Keyword Recommendations

Existing WordPress SEO plugins make recommendations for keywords based on fixed SEO best practices, rather than customized guidance per keyword. The problem with that is best practices are good to know, but experienced SEOs realize that each keyword creates its own playing field in the search engine results pages.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 5: You Can’t View Customized Keyword Recommendations

We know that content is one of the top ranking factors, and so search engines will analyze all the top pages about a topic as a population to determine what attributes they share in their content.

This includes things like the total word count, title tag length, meta description length, the number of times keyword is used, the reading level and other factors.

The search engines will evaluate a newly published web page against the top competitors for a query to see how many of those top attributes it shares before the page is ranked among them.

Wouldn’t it be nice if an SEO plugin could size-up the competitors and tell you, for example, how long your page needs to be before you publish? Or, how many times a given keyword should appear?

The gap: A plugin that evaluates the top-ranked pages for your keywords in real-time, and then gives actual recommendations for keyword usage in tags and content, even word count, based upon these competitors. Just reporting usage is easy, but recommendations is what is needed.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 6: You Can’t See Content History per Keyword

As your website ages, you add more and more content. And, more people author those pages and posts, leaving it hard to know how many times you’ve written about a topic in the past at-a-glance, and how those posts are performing.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 6: You Can’t See Content History per Keyword

Today’s WordPress SEO plugins don’t address those challenges. For example, when choosing what keyword to focus on when creating content, it would be helpful to see:

The keywords you’ve already used in previous posts
How many posts or pages you’ve written for each keyword
How well those pages or posts are doing, for example, average rank, page views, clicks, impressions and click-through rates

There are ways to stitch this information together outside of WordPress by looking at Google Search Console and Google Analytics, but this takes time and resources away from the goal: creating more targeted content.

The gap: A plugin that shows how much content has been written on your site per keyword, and how each of those pages or posts are actually performing using Google Analytics data.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 7: You Can’t Gamify Publishing

Are you able to quickly tell who the top-performing authors are on your website? Within WordPress today, you can see a list of all your pages or posts, but you can’t tell which pages are your top performers and who authored those, and that can change daily or weekly.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 7: You Can’t Gamify Publishing

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about the need to see top-performing posts and pages to influence your plan for new content:

When you don’t know which posts are resonating in organic search, it can hinder planning for future posts and social media campaigns. You’re basically flying blind.

Knowing which posts and topics are succeeding allows you to create more winning content. It also helps you avoid wasting time promoting content with high bounce rates or which generates little interest and little traffic to your site.

What you want is “unicorn” content — your very best, standout content. You want to be able to find your best content, amplify it, and then make more like it. You can only do this with analytics data informing you of the unicorns in the herd.

But what if you could also easily see how many posts an author has on the website, and how many of those posts are top performers? Things like page views and time on page could be useful metrics to gauge this by.

How could an organization use this data? Let’s say you’re a news publisher with hundreds of contributors, and you want to incentivize authors to properly optimize their posts so they gain more traffic.

With access to data that shows top-performing posts per author, you can stir up some healthy competition amongst contributors, and in turn, reward those top authors with recognition or goodies.

The gap: A plugin that shows the top performing posts or pages per author/contributor to the website as measured by actual visitors over a selectable period of time.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 8: You Don’t Know if You Have Duplicate Content

Google may not have an official penalty for duplicate content on your site, but when pages are too similar, the search engines filter out the “duplicates” from the search results. That equals less real estate for your website. If it happens a lot, your site might appear low quality. These outcomes make duplicate content an SEO concern.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 8: You Don’t Know if You Have Duplicate Content

Today, publishers can gather data about duplicate titles and meta descriptions in Google Search Console. If you’re on top of it, you’ll check regularly and fix those issues — but it’s easy to neglect.

That’s why website publishers using WordPress don’t have an easy way to know if they’re inadvertently creating duplicate content. This can happen, for example, when someone copies an existing title tag or meta description, or if someone mistakenly publishes the same page under two different URLs. Using canonical tags can prevent the auto-generated types of URLs from being indexed as duplicates — and your SEO plugin should add a canonical tag automatically, if your settings are right — but this is no cure for the inadvertent duplication of content in newly created pages.

The gap: A plugin that easily notifies website publishers when there is a possibility of duplicate content, like meta information or the content on a page.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 9: You Don’t Understand Your Content’s Reading Level Score

Reading level is just one of the many criteria that search engine algorithms may take into account when evaluating web pages against one another.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 9: You Don’t Understand Your Content’s Reading Level Score

Knowing a page’s or post’s reading level score, such as that generated by the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests can help you ensure your content is on par with the competition in the search results. The Yoast SEO plugin today does offer readability guidance that gives general recommendations on how to improve the overall ease of reading of your content, but there isn’t a plugin today that tailors reading level to the keyword.

As I mentioned earlier, each keyword query can have its own set of signals when it comes to the search engine algorithms, so readability scores can vary based on the type of query, for example, a medical query versus a shopping query.

The gap: A plugin that presents a readability goal based on your keywords and assesses the reading level on your pages and posts so the author can instantly know if the new content is on par with the competition at the top of the search results.

What WordPress Is Missing

Let’s face it, WordPress is in the business of WordPress, not the business of SEO.

WordPress is not exactly SEO enabled by default and finding the right plugins to help you accomplish everything you want in SEO can be a challenge. Consider my wish list and ask yourself if your job would be easier or goals closer to accomplishing with the right tool.

If you like this post or want to commiserate with a friend or colleague about the gap in the WordPress SEO plugin marketplace, please share.

If you have friends that could benefit from improved WordPress SEO guidance, then share this post series with them. And if you just like how we think, then tell everyone.

Save

5 More WordPress SEO Enhancements You Wish You Had

5 More WordPress SEO Enhancements You Wish You Had was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Are there certain things you wish you could accomplish with your SEO in WordPress, but the functionality is just not there? Me, too.

Last time I wrote about WordPress SEO enhancements, I talked about the popularity of WordPress as a platform for some of the world’s best-known websites. I also discussed the challenges that WordPress presents for doing SEO effectively, further challenged by the gap in functionality of SEO plugins out there today, even with 52,000 WordPress plugins in the marketplace.

So I created a list of WordPress SEO enhancements we wish we had, including:

A plugin that allows you to focus on optimizing for more than one keyword
A plugin that clearly shows where the keywords are in the content
A plugin that shows the content creator how their content and their site are performing
A plugin that alerts you to problems with mobile usability and performance

At the end of the last post I asked for your vote. We wanted to know what functionality you would like to see in WordPress SEO, and here are the results:

Which of these WordPress enhancements do you want from an SEO plugin?

Today, I’ll outline five more WordPress SEO enhancements you wish you had and why.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 1: You Can’t View Customized Keyword Recommendations

Existing WordPress SEO plugins make recommendations for keywords based on fixed SEO best practices, rather than customized guidance per keyword. The problem with that is best practices are good to know, but experienced SEOs realize that each keyword creates its own playing field in the search engine results pages.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 1: You Can’t View Customized Keyword Recommendations

We know that content is one of the top ranking factors, and so search engines will analyze all the top pages about a topic as a population to determine what attributes they share in their content.

This includes things like the total word count, title tag length, meta description length, the number of times keyword is used, the reading level and other factors.

The search engines will evaluate a newly published web page against the top competitors for a query to see how many of those top attributes it shares before the page is ranked among them.

Wouldn’t it be nice if an SEO plugin could size-up the competitors and tell you, for example, how long your page needs to be before you publish? Or, how many times a given keyword should appear?

The gap: A plugin that evaluates the top-ranked pages for your keywords in real-time, and then gives actual recommendations for keyword usage in tags and content, even word count, based upon these competitors. Just reporting usage is easy, but recommendations is what is needed.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 2: You Can’t See Content History per Keyword

As your website ages, you add more and more content. And, more people author those pages and posts, leaving it hard to know how many times you’ve written about a topic in the past at-a-glance, and how those posts are performing.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 2: You Can’t See Content History per Keyword

Today’s WordPress SEO plugins don’t address those challenges. For example, when choosing what keyword to focus on when creating content, it would be helpful to see:

The keywords you’ve already used in previous posts
How many posts or pages you’ve written for each keyword
How well those pages or posts are doing, for example, average rank, page views, clicks, impressions and click-through rates

There are ways to stitch this information together outside of WordPress by looking at Google Search Console and Google Analytics, but this takes time and resources away from the goal: creating more targeted content.

The gap: A plugin that shows how much content has been written on your site per keyword, and how each of those pages or posts are actually performing using Google Analytics data.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 3: You Can’t Gamify Publishing

Are you able to quickly tell who the top-performing authors are on your website? Within WordPress today, you can see a list of all your pages or posts, but you can’t tell which pages are your top performers and who authored those, and that can change daily or weekly.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 3: You Can’t Gamify Publishing

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about the need to see top-performing posts and pages to influence your plan for new content:

When you don’t know which posts are resonating in organic search, it can hinder planning for future posts and social media campaigns. You’re basically flying blind.

Knowing which posts and topics are succeeding allows you to create more winning content. It also helps you avoid wasting time promoting content with high bounce rates or which generates little interest and little traffic to your site.

What you want is “unicorn” content — your very best, standout content. You want to be able to find your best content, amplify it, and then make more like it. You can only do this with analytics data informing you of the unicorns in the herd.

But what if you could also easily see how many posts an author has on the website, and how many of those posts are top performers? Things like page views and time on page could be useful metrics to gauge this by.

How could an organization use this data? Let’s say you’re a news publisher with hundreds of contributors, and you want to incentivize authors to properly optimize their posts so they gain more traffic.

With access to data that shows top-performing posts per author, you can stir up some healthy competition amongst contributors, and in turn, reward those top authors with recognition or goodies.

The gap: A plugin that shows the top performing posts or pages per author/contributor to the website as measured by actual visitors over a selectable period of time.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 4: You Don’t Know if You Have Duplicate Content

Google may not have an official penalty for duplicate content on your site, but when pages are too similar, the search engines filter out the “duplicates” from the search results. That equals less real estate for your website. If it happens a lot, your site might appear low quality. These outcomes make duplicate content an SEO concern.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 4: You Don’t Know if You Have Duplicate Content

Today, publishers can gather data about duplicate titles and meta descriptions in Google Search Console. If you’re on top of it, you’ll check regularly and fix those issues — but it’s easy to neglect.

That’s why website publishers using WordPress don’t have an easy way to know if they’re inadvertently creating duplicate content. This can happen, for example, when someone copies an existing title tag or meta description, or if someone mistakenly publishes the same page under two different URLs. Using canonical tags can prevent the auto-generated types of URLs from being indexed as duplicates — and your SEO plugin should add a canonical tag automatically, if your settings are right — but this is no cure for the inadvertent duplication of content in newly created pages.

The gap: A plugin that easily notifies website publishers when there is a possibility of duplicate content, like meta information or the content on a page.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 5: You Don’t Understand Your Content’s Reading Level Score

Reading level is just one of the many criteria that search engine algorithms may take into account when evaluating web pages against one another.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 5: You Don’t Understand Your Content’s Reading Level Score

Knowing a page’s or post’s reading level score, such as that generated by the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests can help you ensure your content is on par with the competition in the search results. The Yoast SEO plugin today does offer readability guidance that gives general recommendations on how to improve the overall ease of reading of your content, but there isn’t a plugin today that tailors reading level to the keyword.

As I mentioned earlier, each keyword query can have its own set of signals when it comes to the search engine algorithms, so readability scores can vary based on the type of query, for example, a medical query versus a shopping query.

The gap: A plugin that presents a readability goal based on your keywords and assesses the reading level on your pages and posts so the author can instantly know if the new content is on par with the competition at the top of the search results.

What WordPress Is Missing

Let’s face it, WordPress is in the business of WordPress, not the business of SEO.

WordPress is not exactly SEO enabled by default and finding the right plugins to help you accomplish everything you want in SEO can be a challenge. Consider my wish list and ask yourself if your job would be easier or goals closer to accomplishing with the right tool.

If you like this post or want to commiserate with a friend or colleague about the gap in the WordPress SEO plugin marketplace, please share.

If you have friends that could benefit from improved WordPress SEO guidance, then share this post series with them. And if you just like how we think, then tell everyone.

Save

Ready for a Career Boost? Think SEO Training

Ready for a Career Boost? Think SEO Training was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Ninety-six percent of employers say continuing education improves job performance, according to a 2016 study by Evollution.

From “Lifelong Education and Labor Market Needs“

That’s what George Niver, CTO of OneBoat, Inc, believes, or came to find sometime between his first attendance at Bruce Clay SEO Training in 2004 and his eighth time taking the course in 2017.

How Annual SEO Training Helped George Niver Climb His Career Ladder

George Niver is an eight-time student of our SEO training course. So we interviewed him to hear more about why.

First, his story. In 2002, he was working in IT as website manager for a nonprofit. An SEO consultant agreed to give him the recommendations if he did the work.

He decided to enroll in some in-person SEO training himself, which led to doing more SEO for his company and eventually led to contract SEO work.

Businesses, as it turned out, were hungry for his ability to attract new customers through search engines. He was hired as an in-house developer at OneBoat, Inc (at the time Destination Commerce Corporation) to work on their site for the Outer Banks, NC, region.

“My boss told people that because of SEO we ranked No. 1 for hundreds of keywords in the Outer Banks even though the competition is getting stronger,” Niver said in a recent interview.

Niver says that he attends our classroom training course every year because it allows him to keep “in constant touch with what’s happening with the search engine changes.”

It’s also because, sitting in a room face-to-face with a trainer, he gets to ask tough questions and get an expert reply.

In 2009, OneBoat, Inc promoted Niver to CTO. Today he manages the digital marketing of 50 websites, develops new markets, and still focuses half of his time on SEO.

He credits continuing education with greater perspective:

“[Annual attendance] has a spiraling effect of getting more grounded each time in certain things that I may not have been aware of. The breadth of what I do at work has expanded because of taking the course regularly. My knowledge increases, and my interest increases in different directions.”

Industry-Wide Trends toward Continual Training

Niver’s story is exceptional but it isn’t unique. We’ve also leveled-up whole marketing and IT departments with on-site group training.

Some companies build SEO training into their annual education. We’ve seen our fair share of students who come back every year for a technology update as part of their continuing education.

With hundreds of search engine rankings signals, changing algorithm updates and even a mobile-first index looming with Google’s search engine, can you say with confidence that you understand and know how to respond to these events?

Periodic search engine optimization training is a best practice for professionals in the digital marketing industry. It’s investing in yourself and your people.

It prepares you to think and respond strategically to anything the search engines like Google can throw your way, and helps keep your company up-to-date with the changes that we see each year in SEO.

If you do not understand SEO to the core, then your website, its rankings and visibility will suffer. Uninformed and careless decisions will be made with your website that can cause it to be impacted in the search results.

You Need SEO Training If …

SEO training is important for more reasons than you may think. You’ll get value from SEO education if:

You want various stakeholders to have intelligent conversations about and make unified decisions regarding website changes and anything that will impact SEO.
You are not satisfied plateauing at No. 5 in the search results – you want to know how to be a top-ranking source of information for your customers, and increase your visibility across the different elements on search results pages.
You want to build SEO education into annual continuing education goals.
You want people who are managing teams to deeply understand SEO. They can then use this important skillset to make strategic decisions and better work with their team members.
You have new additions to your team or roles are changing hands, and the new people need to get up to speed about SEO best practices.
You are working with an SEO vendor and want to know how to evaluate and intelligently implement their recommendations.
You have a website that’s suffered a search engine penalty and you want to understand what it is and how to go about fixing it.

Who can benefit from SEO training?

Marketing manager: Understand how SEO techniques fit into the broader digital marketing mix, and empower search wins from the top down.
SEO professional: SEO best practices are constantly evolving; hear from SEO industry leaders what changes mean the most. An in-person classroom setup will best suit the SEO’s needs.
IT professional: Support your organization’s search engine discovery, crawlability and accessibility.
Web developer: Set yourself apart with SEO knowledge that can help improve the rank, reach and conversion of websites.

How to Choose SEO Training

When choosing training for yourself or your company, consider this:

Read the reviews. Students are likely to give the most unbiased feedback.

Research the trainers. Are they in demand in their space and/or did those with an extensive background in both theory and practice design the course?

SEO training comes in many different flavors. Each type is viable and the best fit depends on your resources, availability, budget and learning style.

Conferences: Conferences are good for more general training. However, with conferences, it takes some background knowledge and intuition to read between the lines and pick up on the nuances of what is being taught. Conferences are great for learning what has changed within the search marketing industry, but generally do not teach you the fundamentals of the SEO practice. SMX conferences are a great place to start. (And you can often find a one-day training workshop there on various digital marketing disciplines).
Online training: Video training classes like those offered by Market Motive are a good option for people who like to learn at their own pace without a high degree of interactivity. Online training is also good for groups of people and perhaps companies with limited budgets for continuing education. Typically, these classes are one-off trainings on specific topics, not a “soup to nuts” educational program. Be sure that you block interruptions like email so your focus is where it needs to be.
In-person training: In-person training is typically highly interactive, and is designed with a classroom-type curriculum, often taking a deep dive into a discipline over the course of one or several days. In-person training can sometimes happen at your place of business, and in many cases, requires travel and time away from work. However, the scope of knowledge transfer is usually very high. I may be biased because we run in-person SEO training here at Bruce Clay, but I believe it to be the most effective.

SEO training comes in many different flavors and the best fit for you depends on your resources, availability, budget and learning style.

I should mention that a portion of people get their SEO knowledge from the tools they subscribe to. But it isn’t enough to know how to run an SEO tool and cross off the list of tasks or recommendations it is giving.

The Canary Wharf Executive Development Centre gives the following tip to those sizing up training:

You need to ensure that it is producing knowledge & skills that your employees can use immediately to have a bottom line impact – and, therefore, create a tangible ROI as soon as the training ends.

It’s not enough to take a course or send folks to training. You have to ensure that you walk into the course ready to get the most from the experience:

Come with real-life examples of problems you’re facing, and get feedback from the instructors on them.
Establish a goal for yourself ahead of training, like learning more about a particular aspect of SEO or being able to teach your team when you get back.
Look for a channel — a community or support structure — that allows you to continue your development after the course is done through questions and peer/instructor feedback.

At the end of the day, with SEO training in particular, you want to ensure it’s conducted by a reputable brand that believes in ethical SEO practices. At the end of the course, the goal is that you can go back to work and be better at SEO.

What Happens When You Invest In Yourself

There’s an old saying in business that the CFO says to the CEO: “What happens if we spend money training our people and then they leave?” The CEO’s response: “What happens if we don’t and they stay?”

SEO training is a competitive survival tactic, and if you are a marketer or manage an in-house team, training is mandatory. It’s an investment in the future of your career and business.

George Niver attends training each year to stay on the pulse of SEO and also to spark new opportunities:

“I have eight sets of manuals. It’s obvious as Bruce is going through the course, how many things have changed in the manual since the last year. When I’m sitting there listening to the class, I’m continually making notes or writing suggestions about which clients could use certain things that have changed in the last year. It’s inspiring to hear what’s changed in the last year. It’s important to what I do every day.”

Introducing the Early Bird Discount

Today, in our 18th year presenting in-person SEO training, we’re announcing a brand new discount among our special offers: the early bird.

Apply an early bird discount when you sign up for SEO training a month or more before the training date.

The early bird can be combined with other deals, like the returning student 25% discount or the multi-student discount where every student after the first is $300 off.

See all our discount offers here.

via GIPHY

If you like this post or want to send this discount offer to a friend or colleague, please share.

4 WordPress SEO Enhancements You Wish You Had – Part 1

4 WordPress SEO Enhancements You Wish You Had – Part 1 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

WordPress is the most popular content management system out there and powers more than a quarter of the world’s websites. Huge brands are hosted on it, like TechCrunch and BBC America. You likely have a WordPress site, too.

The fact that it’s open source and easy to use makes it desirable for all types of brands, businesses and professionals. Enter WordPress plugins — one of the easiest ways to customize the functionality of a WordPress site. At the time of writing, there are almost 52,000 to choose from.

However, WordPress is not SEO enabled by default, and finding the right plugins to help you accomplish everything you want in SEO can be a challenge. That leaves many brands and professionals with the task of identifying which plugins will address different SEO issues before, during and after creating a post or page.

Whether you use Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, Ultimate SEO, or another plugin, you probably have many needs covered — like being able to craft custom titles, meta descriptions, and URL slugs for your posts.

All these are essential for SEO. But beyond these basics, does your plugin give you visibility of your posts’ performance? Allow you to distribute multiple keywords through your posts? Alert you of potential broken links or usability problems? Help you optimize for multiple keywords or variations?

In this post, we’ll look at where there are gaps in the SEO plugin space and what an SEO wish list looks like.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 1: You Can’t Optimize for More Than One Keyword per Post

Many website publishers target multiple keywords for any one piece of content, and need to track how the content is optimized for them.

Two of the more popular SEO plugins for WordPress offer good functionality but are still lacking in this area.

The Yoast SEO plugin only allows one focus keyword per page or post (except in the premium version). So though you can definitely include more than one keyword in a piece of content, the plugin can’t confirm that you’ve optimized the post for these additional terms or even for variations of your main keyword.

Another popular plugin for SEO is the All in One SEO Pack. It doesn’t offer a focus keyword feature at all. So you’re out of luck if you’re using that one and want to be able to track your keywords for SEO.

The gap: A plugin that allows you to focus on optimizing for more than one keyword.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 2: You Can’t See How Your Keywords Are Distributed Throughout the Content

Keyword distribution may impact the ranking of your web content. Keyword distribution refers to using the keywords (and their semantic variations) consistently throughout the text from top to bottom.

Distribution can influence rankings because if a keyword shows up only in the first hundred words on a page, a search engine bot may determine the content is not as relevant as a page that talks about the keyword throughout.

While some WordPress SEO plugins track which page elements contain a focus keyword, there aren’t any viable plugins on the market right now that allow you to see your keyword distribution. So for those who want to check how well they’re distributing keywords as they write, it has to be done manually, which can be time-consuming (or you have to use an external tool like our SEOToolSet).

The gap: A plugin that clearly shows where the keywords are in the content.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 3: You Can’t Easily See Which of Your Posts Are Succeeding in the Search Results

Today, if you wanted to see what pages on your WordPress site are succeeding in the search results — data like click throughs, impressions, average rankings, and which queries are bringing search traffic to each post — you’d have to go outside WordPress. You might have to check different accounts to piece it together, like your Google Search Console, Google Analytics and/or third-party analytics software.

Plugins exist that offer some data. But the top SEO plugins don’t show current analytics data in the WordPress dashboard or in the post editor (where it would be much easier to keep tabs on).

Unfortunately, not being able to access this information easily can either a) tax your resources or b) cause you not to gather any data.

When you don’t know which posts are resonating in organic search, it can hinder planning for future posts and social media campaigns. You’re basically flying blind.

Knowing which posts and topics are succeeding allows you to create more winning content. It also helps you avoid wasting time promoting content with high bounce rates or which generates little interest and little traffic to your site.

What you want is “unicorn” content — your very best, standout content. You want to be able to find your best content, amplify it, and then make more like it. You can only do this with analytics data informing you of the unicorns in the herd.

The gap: A plugin that shows the content creator how their content and their site are performing.

SEO Plugin Gap No. 4: You Can’t Confirm Your New Page Is Mobile-Friendly or Identify Mobile Errors

Google’s mobile-first index may hit in 2018. When it does, Google will base its index and subsequent rankings on the mobile version of your site. (You can read more about what that means here and here.)

If you don’t ensure you have mobile-friendly web pages and also don’t consistently monitor your mobile content for issues, then you could be creating a bad user experience and your rankings can suffer — this is especially true in a “mobile first” world.

While Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test lets publishers check their pages for problems, how often do you actually take that step? Having visibility within WordPress could make all the difference.

The gap: A plugin that alerts you to problems with mobile usability and performance.

What’s Your Vote?

In sum, WordPress can be an excellent platform for your website that accomplishes much of what you need in a CMS today. The challenge is making it SEO-friendly, and right now, there is still work to do.

Now I want your vote: Which of these issues matter to you?

Create your survey with SurveyMonkey

I’ll cover more enhancements needed to solve WordPress and SEO problems in Part 2 of this post.

Save

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What Are the Most Frequently Disavowed Domains, URLs, IPs and ccTLDs? DisavowFiles.com

What Are the Most Frequently Disavowed Domains, URLs, IPs and ccTLDs? DisavowFiles.com was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

In June 2015, Bruce Clay launched DisavowFiles.com. Our goal was to create a easy to use tool that allows you to see whether or not other webmasters are disavowing a site.

DisavowFiles is a free, crowdsourced project. Upload your disavow files to the database, see what domains have been disavowed by others, in turn. It’s a community project that everyone is invited to participate in to put the power of disavow transparency back into SEOs’ hands.

There’s been lots to learn along the way.

Since release we’ve captured a lot of data. To date we have:

1,840,287,252,622 disavowed URLs
13,997,396 disavowed domains

This is a lot of data from the SEO community so, we thought we’d say thank you by sharing some crucial information about the disavow files that have been uploaded.

Enjoy!*

Top 10 Domain Wide Disavows

The following are the top ten domain wide disavows across all disavow files that were submitted.

http://prlog.ru
http://topalternate.com
http://askives.com
http://m.biz
http://the-globe.com
http://theglobe.net
http://theglobe.org
http://stuffgate.com
http://webstatsdomain.org
http://dig.do
http://mrwhatis.net

Top 20 URL Level Disavows

The following are the top twenty URL-level disavows across all disavow files.

http://prlog.ru
http://topalternate.com
http://similarpages.com
http://askives.com
http://vnseo.com
http://stuffgate.com
http://webstatsdomain.org
http://findeen.co.uk
http://botw.org
http://boxwind.com
http://wopular.com
http://popular.jp0.ru
http://ppfinder.com
http://busi-wiki.com
http://siterow.com
http://5go.cc
http://webstats7.net
http://trafficip.com
http://keywordslanding.net
http://ygaskme.com

Top 15 Disavowed IPs

The following are the top fifteen disavowed IPs:

72.55.178.202
184.168.143.37
173.201.142.193
67.222.20.174
206.225.0.82
108.160.146.227
176.9.87.30
78.46.68.41
78.46.0.68
72.55.190.165
67.228.16.66
67.222.19.62
208.100.7.226
173.193.5.161
140.113.239.106

Most Disavowed ccTLDs (Domain Level)

The following are most disavowed ccTLDs on the domain-wide level:

.com
.net
.info
.ru
.uk
.pl
.de
.biz
.nl
.us

Most Disavowed ccTLDs (URL Level)

The following are most disavowed ccTLDs on the URL level:

.com
.net
.uk
.info
.pl
.de
.au
.cn
.ru
.nl

Good Sites People Disavowed

Sometimes good links can get listed on a disavow file, and that’s dangerous according to Google.

"Disavowing links from sites like CNN is batshit stupid" – Wise words from Gary Illyes

How to Onboard Your Selected Search Agency [Checklist]

How to Onboard Your Selected Search Agency [Checklist] was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Whether for the first time or the tenth, reducing the ramp up period when onboarding a new SEO agency is going to save you time and money. Plus, an effective onboard process lays the path to a productive partnership.

There are two parts to effectively onboarding a selected new agency:

1. Educating your agency about your business, and

2. Understanding their process, workflow and digital strategy for your business.

Here you’ll find a checklist and expanded description of the checklist items for both steps.

1. Educating Your New Agency

At my agency, we use a new-client questionnaire to build a brand brief for each of our clients. Whether you or your agency compiles the brief, the end product should provide clear answers on your audience, marketplace, competitors, marketing strategy and history, unique differentiators, and success metrics.

To work well together, you and the agency need to get to know one another. You’ll want to share how you work and learn everything you can about your new agency’s processes. Even before your first meeting, put together a brand brief about your business to give to your agency.

Here’s your checklist for educating your new agency about your business:

✓ Company overview

✓ Value proposition

✓ Competition and positioning

✓ Goals and KPIs for digital marketing

✓ Analytics setup and KPI tracking

✓ Website hosting and CMS

✓ History of marketing campaign service providers

✓ Audience

✓ Brand voice and messaging

✓ Writing style and tone

✓ Types of content

✓ Any other context

Company overview: Along the way from interviewing the prospective agency to inking the deal, you’ve given the 30-second elevator pitch of your business to people at your new agency, for example, their sales team. This brief introduction is a great way to assure communication of your company’s background to your new agency’s operations team.

Value proposition: What sets you apart from anyone else in your industry selling a similar product or service? What values do your customers hold when they align themselves with your business?

Competition and positioning: Who are your main competitors that court the same audience as you do? How do you position yourself as distinct within your industry?

Goals and KPIs for your digital marketing: What concrete and defined goals would you like accomplished through your SEO and digital marketing activities? What will you use to measure project success?

Analytics setup and KPI tracking: What analytics software is in place to track the accomplishment of your goals and KPIs? What formal conversions and microconversions are being tracked in your analytics setup?

Website hosting and CMS: How and where are your website hosted and content managed? Will your SEO agency have access to the system?

History of marketing campaign service providers: Who have you worked with before — agencies and vendors — for content, SEO, SEM, web development, design and other digital marketing work? Can you summarize the projects and what worked and didn’t work about them? Be sure to explain if you’ve ever suffered a traffic loss.

Audience: Describe everything you know about your customers — demographics, what they value, what they need and want. Of course there could be a few different types of customers to talk about.

Brand and messaging: What exercises have you performed to clearly state what your brand stands for, and what voice and messaging do you use to convey it in graphics and text?

Writing style and tone: Speak to humor, authority, stories, complexity of language — what guidelines can you convey to your SEO agency that communicate the tone of the brand? Inform them of any words that are taboo.

Types of content: What do you want your agency to know about the content you’ve created in the past? What do you want them to understand about competitors’ content you’d like to either emulate or avoid?

Any other context: If there’s anything else of note to convey to your agency, this is the place to include it.

2. Understanding Process, Workflow and Strategy

Step 2 of onboarding a new agency is finding out their process and workflow in order to create an expectation for receiving deliverables and responses for requests. You’ll need to get a concrete outline of the search strategy they will be using for your site.

Soon after selection of your agency, you want to become familiar with the inner workings and processes of the analysts and others assigned to your production team. Expand your knowledge of the selected agency beyond the salespeople you’ve been speaking to up till now.

Here’s your checklist for understanding the agency’s process, workflow and strategy that will be driving your search campaigns.

✓ What is the timeline of deliverables?

✓ How often is the project plan updated?

✓ How often will they be in communication?

✓ What processes do they have for editing your website?

✓ What schedules and forms do they have for reviewing new content and design changes?

✓ How do their capabilities for implementing recommendations align with your needs?

✓ What commitment to service do they make?

✓ Is your SEO a senior or a junior analyst?

What is the timeline of deliverables? When can you expect to see the project plan, have scheduled calls, and receive audits and reports? Do they run in sprints? You want to understand their tactical scheduling.

How often is the project plan updated? As a living and evolving document, at what interval will the project plan be updated? This is strategic in nature and will be key to accomplishing your project goals and KPIs.

How often will they be in communication? What is the communication cadence of your agency team members? How often can you expect to hear from them? How quickly can you expect to get responses from them when needed? Is there a dedicated point of contact for your project?

What processes do they have for editing your website? Do they work through your staff to avoid errors? By a similar turn, what do their processes look like for evaluating links, server performance and other SEO levers?

What schedules and forms do they have for reviewing new content and design changes? In what format can you expect to receive new content or site edits? How are recommended changes tracked as the document passes hands?

How do their capabilities for implementing recommendations align with your needs? Who and what is available to provide labor and resources regarding education, mentoring, development, content and so on?

What commitment to service do they make? What assurances do they give about your dedicated staff and about meeting your KPIs?

Is your SEO a senior or a junior analyst? How many years of experience do members of your team have? As a point of context, Malcolm Gladwell famously said it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert.

Keys to a Good Partnership

It’s been said before, but the key to a lasting relationship is communication. Ensure you’re communicating with your partner and they with you, and come prepared to do the work to see the gains you want.

Other resources:

5 Things Businesses Should Know About SEO Agencies
How to Hire an SEO, with Advice from Google

We can help your team as an invested partner in your SEO success. Our services are tailor-made to match your goals and audience. For results-driven digital marketing, let’s talk.

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The One Thing Your Business Can Immediately Take Away from Google I/O

The One Thing Your Business Can Immediately Take Away from Google I/O was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Google leads the world in technological advances that affect the way we live and do business. At the Google I/O developer conference this week, we glimpse a preview of how people will interact with computing in the near future.

Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, CA, scene of the 2017 Google I/O conference

Kicking off the conference, CEO Sundar Pichai opened a two-hour keynote to a packed audience of developers, tech reporters and others who were joined by viewers in 85 countries watching online to hear what was new from the tech giant, including one overarching announcement:

We have shifted from a mobile first to an AI first world.

This shift into an “artificial intelligence first” world will impact the way customers find your business AND the way you interact with those customers.

Many articles no doubt list the many Google feature announcements coming out of the I/O conference. But here, we zero in on something that all business owners should be aware of as we move forward into this AI-powered, machine learning-based new world…

Focus on solving user problems

One thing becomes clear as you watch the tech giant unveil feature after feature: Each new product is designed to solve a problem. You could say this is the key to Google’s success.

During yesterday’s keynote alone, Google announced many coming AI-enabled features that exemplify this problem-solution strategy. Here are just a few.

Google Assistant will be much more connected, even allowing people to type their interactions through a phone instead of speaking them — because there are times you don’t want people to overhear what you’re saying.
Google Photos is getting Photo Sharing, a new feature that can recognize people in your photo and proactively suggest sending them the file — because people have a problem following through and sharing their photos.
Google Visual Positioning Service will be able to guide your indoor movements through a store such as Lowes to help you find what you want — which solves a big problem for visually impaired people, not to mention the rest of us who need help navigating aisles.
Google Lens is a fascinating new AI feature that takes visual identification to new heights. In one application, Lens can remove obstructions in front of a subject, such as a chain link fence (see demo tweeted below), and fill in the missing elements — because people want to be able to take better pictures.

Yes, this is a real thing real people at Google are working on. #Googleio2017 pic.twitter.com/vZJqkHBtH3

— Golden Krishna (@goldenkrishna) May 17, 2017

Let’s apply Google strategy to your business. In a nutshell:

Your greatest opportunities as a business are probably hiding under the cloak of user problems.
Click To Tweet

To find the opportunities awaiting discovery for your own business, ask yourself two questions:

What do people complain about in my industry? Complaints expose problems just waiting for a new product, service or technology to solve. This kind of negative feedback also provides clues for how to best engage your prospective customers.
What is difficult or time-consuming for prospective customers to accomplish today? In addition to listening for pain points, also just observe. Look for processes that everyone just accepts, but which require a lot of time and effort to do.

If your business innovates a solution to a problem, you can make people’s lives or jobs easier, potentially jump ahead of your competition, and grow your business.

But even if you’re not going to invent the next great product, by understanding people’s needs better you can offer solutions more effectively. Your marketing campaigns will ring truer (and have better click-through rates!) if they come from a point of empathy.

Solving people’s problems underlies the majority of Google’s advancements. Make it your business’s mantra, too.

Note: You can watch Google I/O to see various presentations live May 17–19 (check out the schedule here).

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How to Know If You’re at Risk When Google Switches to a Mobile-First Index (Flowchart)

How to Know If You’re at Risk When Google Switches to a Mobile-First Index (Flowchart) was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

I’d like to put your minds at ease. Or alert you to an upcoming risk. I guess we’ll see which camp you’re in.

Over the course of the year, Google is going to turn up the dial on its mobile-first index. What’s that? Google is moving toward analyzing and ranking the mobile version of websites and not the desktop version, as they do now.

Exactly when the switch will be 100% is a mystery. Gary Illyes suggested it could be in 2018. Yet we know that Google rolls out algorithm and infrastructure changes gradually and with plenty of testing. We are likely witnessing mobile-first SERPs today to some degree.

With the switch to a mobile-first index, you’ll either be in good shape or you’re going to feel the pain of a major loss in organic search traffic.

As an SEO services company we are busy doing risk assessments for clients, identifying exactly how ready a website is for the mobile-first index.

To help you get a sense of how prepared you are for a Google index that’s focused on the mobile website experience, we created a decision tree to assess a website as low risk or high risk. For a refresher on how to satisfy a mobile searcher, take a look at our SEO Tutorial step on Mobile SEO and UX Optimization.

What does your path to mobile-first index readiness look like? Here’s what we look for when we do a mobile-first readiness analysis of a client’s site.

Click image to enlarge. Click this text to view as PDF.

Assessing Your Risk in Google’s Mobile-First Index

This agency signed on to the mission of helping businesses succeed online, but when more and more factors are rapidly changing, our ability to institute timely change diminishes. So we want everyone to know what’s at stake if every action isn’t taken to be mobile-friendly.

If a client’s site does not perform well on a mobile browser, this is a problem. The mobile experience is how we serve connected consumers. If there is any issue, then it’s our job as the SEO expert to discuss this risk with our clients.

If a client has a mobile-friendly site, it’s our job to evaluate if the mobile site contains the same content as served on the desktop. If the content is different, then the client is at risk.

If a client is unable to optimize for site speed or for conversions, or if they are not working on a solution to a mobile-friendly site, then this client should acknowledge the risk of losing rankings.

How do we check if a client site is going to suffer a drop in rankings and traffic when the mobile-first index goes live?

Right at this moment we can look in Google Search Console to compare mobile and desktop rankings. You can too.

How to Compare Your Mobile Rankings and Desktop Rankings in Google Search Console

Go to your site in Google Search Console.
Go to Search Traffic > Search Analytics.
Select “Position” and “Devices”.
Select the filter to compare mobile vs. desktop.
Is your average position for mobile higher or lower than for desktop?

If your average mobile rankings are worse than your average desktop rankings, you’re at risk when the mobile-first index switch occurs.

Click to enlarge.

Calculating the Impact on Your Business

If I could stress three things, consider this.

To be mobile-friendly goes beyond having a responsive website. It’s critical to match the content on the desktop site to the mobile user experience. A mobile-friendly website doesn’t merely mimic the desktop. In fact, a responsive site can have lower conversion rates if the mobile UX isn’t optimized. What value does your mobile experience provide to help the consumer want to do business with you?
If you don’t have a mobile-friendly site, get started on your update now. Some content management systems (CMSes) don’t produce mobile experiences. Do you have a solution in place? What is it? How fast can you implement? You may already be late to the party.
Please understand that “mobile first” relates to the Google index being based upon the mobile displayed content. It does not mean that desktop is dead. There are many reasons that in your business that “desktop first” may apply. For whether or not this applies to you, you may want to consult with an expert mobile SEO agency.

I’m not trying to create fear, but I am hoping to convey a risk.

What else can you do to make sure your business is well positioned when Google flips the switch and turns on its mobile-first index?

People generally understand how much traffic they’re getting from Google in the desktop-focused index environment. Meanwhile, we have no idea how much traffic will be affected after the switch to a mobile-focused index. We want you in the best possible position when the change to a mobile-first index rolls out.

We are convinced that mobile readiness is vital to the future of your business. To help you, we have created a service offering insights into your mobile readiness with our Mobile-First Readiness Report. Ensure your mobile-first SEO strategy is on track with a second pair of expert eyes on your site.

A typical report may include assessment of the following:

Mobile friendliness
Page speed
Content matching
Mobile navigation
Mobile interstitials
Security issues
Indexing and robots directives
Schema markup

Order a mobile-first focused audit of your site for just $995 and we’ll have it back to you in about a week.

Or give us a call at 866-517-1900 during business hours Pacific time and our team will be happy to answer any questions you have about the mobile-first index shift and developing your mobile SEO strategy.

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It struck me the other day, while I was reviewing a client project with one of our SEO analysts, that the old problem of thin content is still an insidious revenue killer for many websites.

Or put another way, until you have content worth ranking, do not be surprised if you don’t rank well.

By way of example, the client, a B2B lead gen site for industrial parts, is receiving 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. We’re seeing these stellar results after many months of work that focused heavily on fixing thin content — until content was improved, the traffic suffered!

By focusing on improving content quality, our client is seeing 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. (click to enlarge)

Then looking at some mobile and newer sites reminded me that low-quality or “thin” content remains a serious problem for many websites, whether they know it or not. A majority of sales inquiries are sites with this problem.

“What a powerful weapon we wield as SEOs when we help a site raise its content quality.” -Bruce Clay
Click To Tweet

SEO changes set the right course for a site, but content improvements give it long-term lift.

Why We’re Still Concerned with Thin Content Long After the 2011 Panda Update

Thin content is not a new search engine optimization issue.

It was February 2011 when Google introduced the first Panda update, which targeted low-quality sites and lowered their rankings. In addition to the algorithmic hits from Panda, countless sites have received manual actions penalizing them for having “Thin content with little or no added value.”

Google has only elevated the importance of quality content since then.

An unconfirmed update in early February and the Google Fred Update on March 7 both targeted low-quality content.

Sites that got hit by Fred included content-driven sites with heavy placement of ads, according to reporting by Barry Schwartz. These sites “saw 50% or higher drops in Google organic traffic overnight.”

Besides the algorithms, Google has an army of people reviewing sites manually for signs of quality. Periodically, Google releases its Quality Rater Guidelines, a document used to train these quality raters to spot low- vs. high-quality content. If you’ve gotten a manual action notice or warning in Google Search Console, you have a quality rater to thank. (Or not.) I unconditionally recommend that you read this entire document from Google!

The search engines clearly intend to keep ratcheting down their quality tolerance. The recent updates and penalties further stress the need for websites to fix thin content without delay.

“You cannot afford to ignore thin content on your site and expect to survive.” -Bruce Clay
Click To Tweet

Solutions for Thin Content

Identifying thin content on a site is crucial to SEO health, yet it’s only the first step.

Once thin content is diagnosed on your site (whether by a Google manual action notice or through an SEO audit), you need a strategic plan for fixing it. And if you’re uncertain, then your content is probably low quality, too terse, or likely both.

The trick is knowing WHICH strategy is right to fix your unique situation.

The solution has to address your site’s situation uniquely, taking into consideration the scope of the problem AND the resources available to you to do the work.

Remove or Improve?

Site owners often react to the news that their sites have many thin content pages with a surgical approach: Cut it all out!

Removing or no-indexing low-value pages can fix thin content problems some of the time, enabling a site to get back on its feet and start regaining lost rankings with minimal time and effort. For instance, Marie Haynes cites one Panda-penalized site that recovered by removing a forum it had hosted, accounting for several thousand low-quality posts that were separate enough from the main site content to be easily detached.

However, removing content can have a negative SEO effect instead. Cutting off whole sections of a site at once could amputate the legs the website needs to stand on, from an SEO perspective.

Another approach is to simply elevate the quality and depth of the content. It is hard to be a “subject matter expert” in only a few words. And if your content is written poorly, then you gain no love from others — the kiss of death for content.

We prefer this latter approach (as does Google, per Gary Illyes’s tweet below), but we use both at the same time quite often.

@Marie_Haynes Thin content: make it better, make it … thick, and ADD more highQ stuff. @jenstar @shendison

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) October 7, 2015

If the pages hurting your search engine rankings (for being low quality) are also the ones supporting your keyword relevance (for having keyword-containing bulk content), then you’re stuck. You have little choice but to keep the content, improve its quality, and perhaps add more content readers will appreciate.

Finding a Way to Improve Thin Content — Affordably

For this client’s site, we took the content-improvement approach.

The types of thin content we found on their website included:

Product pages with minimal text (just one or two sentences with a few bullets)
Pages whose content had been scraped and indexed on many third-party sites
Image alt attributes lacking text and/or keywords
Autogenerated title and meta description tags that often lacked targeted keywords

Your site may have similar issues, or may contain other types of thin content. Google’s support topic on thin content lists these common forms:

Automatically generated content
Thin affiliate pages
Content from other sources (example: scraped content or low-quality guest blog posts)
Doorway pages

Fixing these content problems may involve any or all of the following:

Removing pages or no-indexing them
Reducing the number of ads
Adding at least a few sentences of original text (on filter-category pages, for example)
Inserting relevant content from a database (in small doses)
Revising title and meta tags to be unique and contain appropriate page keywords
Adding original text in image alt attributes and captions
Rewriting the page entirely

Our client’s site contained a manageable number of pages (less than 500), so we started chipping away.

The SEO analyst first clarified the silo structure of the site, and then prioritized pages for revision starting with the top-level pages for each silo. In batches of 10 or so at a time, pages were rewritten and reviewed, passing back and forth between the client and the BCI analyst. Important products got brand-new full-page descriptions. Information pages were rewritten with thorough explanations. In all, we fattened up about half of the site’s pages.

The strategy worked. Among the SEO services we provided to this client, by far the higher quality content is yielding the biggest wins. The search engines and site visitors are eating it up, with vastly improved rankings, traffic and leads.

Why Your Thin Content Solution Must Be Your Own

If you have an enterprise site with millions of pages, or an ecommerce site with thousands of products, you might be thinking this approach would never work for you.

And you’d be right!

It’s often simply impossible to rewrite each individual page manually on a large website. Yet quality content is a non-negotiable for SEO. Even large sites have to find a way to fatten up or remove their thin content.

Maintaining quality content requires an ongoing investment to maintain rankings — but each site’s specific strategy has to be practical and affordable to implement.

A Prioritized Approach

First, we look for what’s causing the thin content. A template might be producing non-unique meta tags, for instance. The business may be duplicating pages on other domains. A CMS might be building empty or duplicate pages. Whatever the issues are, we try to identify them early and stop the bleeding.

Next, we prioritize which pages to tackle first. It’s worth the effort to hand-edit content on the most important pages of even the largest sites. This priority list should include the home page, the top-level landing page(s) per silo, as well as the most trafficked and highest-ROI product pages. Putting creative energy into making these pages unique and high quality will pay huge SEO dividends.

It’s also crucial to look at competitors’ sites. Even if your content is technically clean and unique, is it as high quality as theirs? Remember that “thin content” can be a relative term, since Google is going to choose the highest quality results to present to a searcher.

More and more often, we include some sort of content development along with our SEO services. As we found with the industrial parts site, fixing thin content can make a long-term difference.

A parting comment: If nobody would share your content, then it is not good enough.

If your site has thin content or other SEO issues, contact us online or give us a call at 1-866-517-1900.

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The REAL Impact of RankBrain on Web Traffic

The REAL Impact of RankBrain on Web Traffic was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

We’re entering a new era of optimizing for search engines.

And no, SEO is not dead.

While many things stay the same in search, we can’t deny the new path we’re on with the introduction of machine-learning systems like Google’s RankBrain.

The concept of RankBrain may seem technical and daunting, but it’s one that CMOs — not just technically savvy SEOs — must understand to be competitive in the months to come.

In this post I cover:

What RankBrain is.
How search results are changing.
How to evolve your digital marketing strategy for machine learning search algorithms.
And why you might need PPC advertising even more than ever.

An Intro to RankBrain

RankBrain is a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that came onto the scene in 2015.

Bloomberg was the first among mainstream media to break the news of RankBrain, Google’s newest addition to search rankings.

And while we officially met RankBrain in 2015, Google was talking about it as early as 2013.

RankBrain is designed to better understand the meaning behind a searcher’s words. This 2013 post at Google discusses this concept of understanding word relationships if you want to learn more.

From the Bloomberg article we learned that 15 percent of queries per day have never been seen by Google before. RankBrain helps interpret those novel queries.

At the heart of RankBrain is a goal to better interpret search queries and serve the most relevant search results. This has been a lifelong goal of Google Search.

We discuss this at greater length in our SEM Synergy podcast http://www.semsynergy.com/ (July 2016) here.

Mobile: A Primary Driver of RankBrain’s Existence

Mobile drove the need for RankBrain even further. Mobile search behavior has been a game-changer, especially when it comes to voice search, something a lot of mobile users take advantage of.

As you may know, queries tend to be much more conversational using voice search versus typing.

RankBrain deals well with the long-tail queries that are common to voice search today, though there are plenty of long-tail searches typed into a search bar, too.

I believe that RankBrain is preparing for a world where voice search will become more and more the norm.

Remember, voice search is already on the rise. In a presentation by Mary Meeker on the popular 2016 internet trends report, we see that voice search is up 7x since 2010.

And it’s not just voice search coming from mobile devices. Now, we have to consider things like voice assistants such as Google Home, where it remains to be seen how the device’s answers will pull from web results.

Here’s What RankBrain Does

RankBrain was designed to better analyze the language of websites in Google’s index, and then apply that analysis to a search query. By better understanding the search query, it can better match users with websites and pages.

The purpose is to better understand the meaning of content and the intent behind a search query.

Once RankBrain better understands the intent, it can then presumably apply the appropriate Google algorithm signals that deserve the most weight for that query.

Along with being able to understand concepts on a web page better, RankBrain also allows for a better understanding of the association between multiple queries, like:

“Where is the Eiffel Tower?”

Followed by:

“How tall is it?”

How Does RankBrain Learn? Examples of RankBrain in Action

Essentially, RankBrain can take sets of “training” data created by humans to help establish a baseline, and then can apply machine learning to determine the best search results based on a variety of factors over time.

Google confirmed in the Bloomberg article and in this article at Search Engine Land that they periodically update the system by giving it new data to better reason with new concepts.

At SMX West 2016, some presenters shared examples of RankBrain in action.

One study showed how RankBrain better interpreted the relationships between words.

This could include the use of stop words in a search query (“the,” “without,” etc.) — words that were historically ignored by Google but are sometimes of critical importance to understanding the intent behind a query.

For example, take the television series “The Office.” It’s an example of a search that would be taken out of context without the all-important “the.”

Here’s another example query from an interview with Googler Gary Illyes: “Can you get 100% score on Super Mario without walk-through?” Ignoring “without” would potentially return search results on getting a 100 percent score on Super Mario with a walk-through … so the opposite of the results a person was trying to get.

There are other theories on how RankBrain might use data to learn what the best results are for a search query. It’s possible that searchers’ engagement with the search results may be a factor in how RankBrain determines the relevancy of a result, as Rand Fishkin posits in a keynote from July 2016.

For example, if someone clicks a search result and doesn’t go back to the search results to start clicking other web pages, this could indicate the searcher found what they were looking for.

The machine could then learn over time that a low bounce rate signals a relevant result, so that web page could show up more often and higher in search results.

Here’s a visual of that concept from Fishkin’s presentation:

How RankBrain Works with Other Ranking Signals

As I mentioned earlier, RankBrain is essentially built into the query process to better understand language and make an improved match between the search query and the websites in the Google index.

Remember that Google still has hundreds of other signals it can apply to a search query to identify the best results.

In 2016, however, Google confirmed that RankBrain was among its top 3 ranking signals for search. Rounding out the top 3 are content and links.

This is an important concept to understand. Google clearly stated that the signals that we’ve come to know to be important and that we’ve been optimizing for still matter: content and links.

While the content on a website and its links are both essential to determining meaning and relevance, RankBrain works in partnership by assisting the Google search engine to better determine if a website is the most relevant based on signals and algorithms, given the searcher’s intent.

The Impact of RankBrain on Big Brands

With machine learning, RankBrain learns associations over time. That means, if a brand becomes associated with a certain product, the queries about that product may lead to more branded search results.

Because Google tends to favor big brands online for a variety of reasons, with RankBrain things like the site’s engagement rate, mentions of the brand across many social sites and so on could further enhance favoritism here.

This could happen despite the fact that some bigger brands may have a weaker link profile than other websites in their space.

What RankBrain Means for Your SEO and Digital Marketing Strategy

OK, now for some action items …

SEO and Your Content

First, let’s talk content. For many, it’s actually business as usual.

Examine your content to ensure it provides the best, most complete answers to a query, whether you’re an informational page or selling a product.

RankBrain is a machine learning system, but it still needs input from your website.

Yes, it’s working to better make connections about concepts. For example, we can give RankBrain credit for understanding a page is about baseball even if the word is never used and only “Chicago Cubs” and “New York Yankees” are present on a page.

Absolutely one of the goals of SEO is to better help search engines understand what your content is about. It is still vital that you make sure you’re including the keywords that are important to your business on your website page.

This includes keyword “stemming” (like “walked” and “walking” along with “walk” and “walks”) and using synonyms and natural word variations to help make connections between ideas.

One example we use in our SEO training classes is the word “mercury.” You can use “mercury” 10 times on a page, but if you forget to use the word “planet,” then the search engine may be confused about the subject of the page. Is it an element, car, insurance or other?

This is also a time to explore structured data markup, which helps search engines better make connections as to what is on the page.

Remember, the little things matter as they always have in SEO.

You’ll want to continue to pay attention to making your search results listings stand out in the crowd. That means ensuring each web page has custom meta data in addition to exploring other ways you can make it stand out using schema markup and useful, engaging copy.

Another question to ask: Once people land on your website, is it helping them move farther along in their journey by offering up related content that explores a topic/product/service more?

This can be accomplished by siloing your content to create subject themes around the key terms that are important to your business.

Subject organization chart aka siloing

RankBrain and Digital Marketing Strategies

I mentioned earlier that RankBrain will likely favor big brands. So what happens if you’re not a big brand?

Now is the time to start thinking about how to supplement your digital marketing strategy, if you haven’t already.

While it’s a great idea to have a thorough SEO strategy, it’s never a great idea to put all your eggs into one basket.

So in the era of RankBrain, even though the basics of SEO that we know and love are still important, you’ll want to think of creative ways to grab that SERP real estate.

That means if you’re not in the upper echelon of brands online in your space, consider supplementing your search marketing strategy with pay-per-click ads.

RankBrain Is Not the End of SEO

If you’ve been concerned about how RankBrain impacts SEO, there’s possibly more to worry about than you may think.

RankBrain is search results relevance on steroids. Simply put, you must improve your content relevancy to match the query intent. Yes, SEO best practices are critical to traffic, and rankings are more competitive than ever.

But you must also focus on your content from a macro and micro level, and how your website’s content as a whole helps to answer the questions your audience is looking for.

And don’t forget to supplement your digital marketing strategy with things like paid search, social and other channels to keep your brand top of mind.

Do you have insights on the impact of RankBrain on search rankings? I want to know. Leave a comment below.

We can help with your RankBrain optimized SEO strategy. Our services are tailor-made to match your goals and audience. For more revenue through digital marketing, let’s talk.