Back to basics with Brisbane 13 Jun 2024 Amanda King FLOQ floq.co

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What’s what ● The bare bones of an SEO strategy ● Burn down how we do content ● The future

At the most basic level, most SEO strategies can be summaried in one line

Have unique content and get relevant backlinks. Win.

Today, we’ll be focussing on content.

Burn down how we do content

Queries very quickly become entities “[...]identifying queries in query data; determining, in each of the queries, (i) an entity-descriptive portion that refers to an entity and (ii) a suffix; determining a count of a number of times the one or more queries were submitted“ - patent granted in 2015, submitted in 2012 Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9047278B1/en ; https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150161127A1/

Google acknowledges query-only based matching is pretty terrible. “Direct “Boolean” matching of query terms has well known limitations, and in particular does not identify documents that do not have the query terms, but have related words [...]The problem here is that conventional systems index documents based on individual terms, rather than on concepts. Concepts are often expressed in phrases [...] Accordingly, there is a need for an information retrieval system and methodology that can comprehensively identify phrases in a large scale corpus, index documents according to phrases, search and rank documents in accordance with their phrases, and provide additional clustering and descriptive information about the documents. [...]” - Information retrieval system for archiving multiple document versions, granted 2017 (link)

“Rather than simply searching for content that matches individual words, BERT comprehends how a combination of words expresses a complex idea.” Source: https://blog.google/products/search/how-ai-powers-great-search-results/

Helpful Content Update & Information Gain Score (granted Jun 2022) ● The information gain score might be personal to you and the results you’ve already seen ● Featured snippets may be different from one search to another based on the information gain score of your second search ● Pre-training a ML model on a first set of data shown to users in aggregate, getting an information gain score, and using that to generate new results in SERPs. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200349181A1/en

What is “information gain”? “Information gain, as the ratio of actual co-occurrence rate to expected co-occurrence rate, is one such prediction measure. Two phrases are related where the prediction measure exceeds a predetermined threshold. In that case, the second phrase has significant information gain with respect to the first phrase.“ - Phrase-based searching in an information retrieval system, granted 2009 (link)

So, basically, it’s quantifying to what degree you talk about all the topics Google sees as related to your main subject.

So why are we still creating “blog” content the same way we did seven years ago?

why are people still doling out this advice?? Shameless plug - go to https://floq.co/seo-strategy/tactics-strategy/ to read what I see SEO strategy to be all about https://backlinko.com/seo-content

why are people still doling out this advice?? Shameless plug - go to https://floq.co/seo-strategy/tactics-strategy/ to read what I see SEO strategy to be all about https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seo-strategy

creating an article for each keyword variant makes no sense when if you’re an expert writing editorially on a topic you’ll use all of that language in one article

blog articles don’t work because they’re intrinsically siloed, time bound and a footnote to the brand

No content

So what do we do about all this?

First — content consolidation, or pruning.* *this is not about link juice. Fuck that shit.

Find your duplicates, your near-duplicates, your “keyword targeted” pages that are actually keyword stuffed… and properly sunset them all.

No content

When is the last time you’ve done a full content inventory?

What I mean when I say content inventory https://www.portent.com/onetrick

Redo keyword research and overlay entities ● Pull content for at least the top 10 search results ranking for your target keyword ● Dump them into Diffbot (https://demo.nl.diffbot.com/) or the Natural Language AI demo (https://cloud.google.com/natural-language) ● Note the entities and salience ● Run your target page ● Understand the differences ● Update your content accordingly

Start with keyword research, find co-occuring terms ● Pull content for at least the top 10 search results ranking for your target keyword ● Look at TF-IDF calculators to reverse engineer the topic correlation (Ryte has a paid one) ● Note the terms included ● Run your target page ● Understand the differences ● Update your content accordingly

Break old content habits ● FAQ on product pages ● Consolidate super-granularly targeted blog articles ● Think outside of the blog folder — the semantic relationship can carry through to the directory order of the website as well ● Internal linking can be a secret weapon ● Fit content to purpose: not everything needs a 3,000 word in-depth article

The future

Your (client’s) website isn’t the product. The content is.

Google is much more than a search engine. Google Home Google Groups Google Discover Google Lens Google Arts & Culture Google News Google Assistant Google Play Google Images Google Videos Google Maps Google Shopping Google For Jobs Podcasts Google Travel Buy on Google Google Finance Google Books Google Classroom Google Search Bard AI

Think of the information Google can curate but not create themselves: rich media experiences.

Generative Search Optimisation (GSO) is a lot like Online Reputation Management At a glance, it’s a lot like owning the SERP. It’s amplification on ADHD meds. Because in order to get those 30 encounters, you will likely need to think beyond the bounds of your (client’s) website, with things like: ● Podcasts ● YouTube ● An app ● Interviews & press

GSO is a lot like local search Name, Address, Phone (NAP) for GSO and entity optimisation is doing everything possible to facilitate those 30 encounters and making sure the information is consistent… …and then linking it all back through one of Google’s native languages, Schema markup.

GSO is a lot like voice search and rich snippet optimisation ● You have one result, rather than ten ● The result presented may be incomplete, changed, or taken out of context ● HTML formatting can matter if or in what way the information is presented

It’s about reality, not theory. ● Do the actual search and see what the SERP genuinely looks like. Have multiple folks do that and come back with what they’re seeing ● Talk to the customer service teams and sales reps ● Use journey tracking tools like Fullstory or Microsoft Clarity or HotJar ● Do analysis in their Analytics solution and see what trends you’re finding in other channels and their visibility

5 takeaways To move forward with the new search experience in step with the business 1. Manage your historical “blog” content 2. Re-focus your content around customer needs 3. Focus on the new foundations (entities & expertise) rather than chasing the shiny new thing 4. Choose surfaces by prioritising what customers are already asking for or engaging with 5. Acknowledge you no longer control distribution and you are your content, not your website

Amanda King is a human ● Over a decade in the SEO industry ● Traveled to 40+ countries ● Business- and product-focussed ● Knows CRO, Data, UX ● Always open to learning something new ● Slightly obsessed with tea

Thank you Amanda King t. @amandaecking i. @floq.co / @amandaecking li. Amanda King / FLOQ w. floq.co