SEO of Today, Tomorrow and Beyond

Core Web Vitals

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

Real-World Experience Metrics

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

Impact

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

Google Lighthouse

• Diagnose issues
• Recommend fixes

EAT & YMYL (Your Money, Your Life)

YMYL

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

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

E.A.T

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

Expertise

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

Authority

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

Trust

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

Google Evaluations

• Human quality raters for EAT review
• Manually review your site to determine your EAT score

Featured Snippets and Rich Snippets

Featured Snippets

• Position “0”
• Snippets for voice search questions

Pros

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

Cons

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

Impacts of CTR

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

Click and traffic

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

Though Leadership and Branding

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

Rich Snippets/Results

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

Schema

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

BERT (2019)

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

Specifics

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

Optimizing for BERT

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

Impacts

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

Evolution of Keyword Optimization

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

Strengthening Your Keyword Strategy

Topic Association

“Used by search engines to determine relevancy and trustworthiness”

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

How Does Branding Influence Website Rank?

Branding

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

How to identify a Brand?

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

How to do SEO for a Brand Recognition?

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