A Different Way of Thinking About Core Updates

These days, Google algorithm updates seem to come in two main flavors. There’s very specific updates — like the Page Experience Update or Mobile-Friendly Update — which tend to be announced well in advance, provide very specific information on how the ranking factor will work, and finally arrive as a slight anti-climax. I’ve spoken before about the dynamic with these updates. They are obviously intended to manipulate the industry, and I think there is also a degree to which they are a bluff.

This post is not about those updates, though, it is about the other flavor. The other flavor of updates is the opposite: they are announced when they are already happening or have happened, they come with incredibly vague and repetitive guidance, and can often have cataclysmic impact for affected sites.

Coreschach tests

Since March 2018, Google has taken to calling these sudden, vague cataclysms “Core Updates”, and the type really gained notoriety with the advent of “Medic” (an industry nickname, not an official Google label), in August 2018. The advice from Google and the industry alike has evolved gradually over time in response to changing Quality Rater guidelines, varying from the exceptionally banal (“make good content”) to the specific but clutching at straws (“have a great about-us page”). To be clear, none of this is bad advice, but compared to the likes of the Page Experience update, or even the likes of Panda and Penguin, it demonstrates an extremely woolly industry picture of what these updates actually promote or penalize. To a degree, I suspect Core Updates and the accompanying era of “EAT” (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) have become a bit of a Rorschach test. How does Google measure these things, after all? Links? Knowledge graphs? Subjective page quality? All the above? Whatever you want to see?

If I am being somewhat facetious there, it is born out of frustration. As I say, (almost) none of the speculation, or the advice it results in, is actually bad. Yes, you should have good content written by genuinely expert authors. Yes, SEOs should care about links. Yes, you should aim to leave searchers satisfied. But if these trite vagaries are what it takes to win in Core Updates, why do sites that do all these things better than anyone, lose as often as they win? Why does almost no site win every time? Why does one update often seem to undo another?

Roller coaster rides

This is not just how I feel about it as a disgruntled SEO — this is what the data shows. Looking at sites affected by Core Updates since and including Medic in MozCast, the vast majority have mixed results.

Meanwhile, some of the most authoritative original content publishing sites in the world actually have a pretty rocky ride through Core Updates.

I should caveat: this is in the MozCast corpus only, not the general performance of Reuters. But still, these are real rankings, and each bar represents a Core Update where they have gone up or down. (Mostly, down.) They are not the only ones enjoying a bumpy ride, either.

The reality is that pictures like this are very common, and it’s not just spammy medical products like you might expect. So why is it that almost all sites, whether they be authoritative or not, sometimes win, and sometimes lose?

The return of the refresh

SEOs don’t talk about data refreshes anymore. This term was last part of the regular SEO vocabulary in perhaps 2012.

Weather report: Penguin data refresh coming today. 0.3% of English queries noticeably affected. Details: http://t.co/Esbi2ilX

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 5, 2012

This was the idea that major ranking fluctuation was sometimes caused by algorithm updates, but sometimes simply by data being refreshed within the existing algorithm — particularly if this data was too costly or complex to update in real time. I would guess most SEOs today assume that all ranking data is updated in real time.

But, have a look at this quote from Google’s own guidance on Core Updates:

“Content that was impacted by one might not recover—assuming improvements have been made—until the next broad core update is released.”

Sounds a bit like a data refresh, doesn’t it? And this has some interesting implications for the ranking fluctuations we see around a Core Update.

If your search competitor makes a bunch of improvements to their site, then when a Core Update comes round, under this model, you will suddenly drop. This is no indictment of your own site, it’s just that SEO is often a zero sum game, and suddenly a bunch of improvements to other sites are being recognized at once. And if they go up, someone must come down.

This kind of explanation sits easily with the observed reality of tremendously authoritative sites suffering random fluctuation.

Test & learn

The other missing piece of this puzzle is that Google acknowledges its updates as tests:

This sounds, at face value, like it is incompatible with the refresh model implied by the quote in the previous section. But, not necessarily — the tests and updates referred to could in fact be happening between Core Updates. Then the update itself simply refreshes the data and takes in these algorithmic changes at the same time. Or, both kinds of update could happen at once. Either way, it adds to a picture where you shouldn’t expect your rankings to improve during a Core Update just because your website is authoritative, or more authoritative than it was before. It’s not you, it’s them.

What does this mean for you?

The biggest implication of thinking about Core Updates as refreshes is that you should, essentially, not care about immediate before/after analysis. There is a strong chance that you will revert to mean between updates. Indeed, many sites that lose in updates nonetheless grow overall.

The below chart is the one from earlier in this post, showing the impact of each Core Update on the visibility of www.reuters.com (again — only among MozCast corpus keywords, not representative of their total traffic). Except, this chart also has a line showing how the total visibility nonetheless grew despite these negative shocks. In other words, they more than recovered from each shock, between shocks.

Under a refresh model, this is somewhat to be expected. Whatever short term learning the algorithm does is rewarding this site, but the refreshes push it back to an underlying algorithm, which is less generous. (Some would say that that short term learning could be driven by user behavior data, but that’s another argument!)

The other notable implication is that you cannot necessarily judge the impact of an SEO change or tweak in the short term. Indeed, causal analysis in this world is incredibly difficult. If your traffic goes up before a Core Update, will you keep that gain after the update? If it goes up, or even just holds steady, through the update, which change caused that? Presumably you made many, and equally relevantly, so did your competitors.

Experience

Does this understanding of Core Updates resonate with your experience? It is, after all, only a theory. Hit us up on Twitter, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

Advanced On-Page SEO Optimizations — Whiteboard Friday

Typically, when SEOs think about on-page optimizations, they’re thinking about core places to include their target keywords within their content. But how can you take your on-page optimizations to the next level and get beyond some of those basic tactics? In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Chris Long shows you how.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. I'm Chris Long with Go Fish Digital, and today we're going to talk about advanced on-page optimizations. Commonly in SEO, when we think about on-page optimizations, we're typically thinking about core places to include the keywords, such as the title, the H1, the URL within the content. But some people might be wondering, how can you take your on-page optimizations to the next level and get beyond some of those basic tactics? So that's what I want to cover today.

Entities

So one of the best ways I found to shift away from the keyword mindset is actually to shift to more of an entity mindset. So, for an example, if you're going to optimize a page for the term "retire early," instead of using the term "retire early" a bunch of times on the page, you could use tools like IBM Watson or Google Natural Language. Both of those have public-facing tools that you can run any text document you want through. And if you ran it from a result like Investopedia, you might see that "retire early" comes up with a strategy or entity such as Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, two of the top authors about "retire early."

As well, when you take a look at competitor pages and have more of an entity mindset in mind, instead of just thinking about how many times they're using a keyword on the page, you're thinking more strategically about common topics and themes you want to integrate within your own website content.

E-A-T

Another great way to take your on-page optimization to the next level is this concept of E-A-T — expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. One of the best ways to improve the expertise of your site content is just to simply look at your author biographies. A lot of sites still get this wrong. And when you look at author biographies, you should always be thinking about, hey, where can I highlight my years of experience, my education, my previous experience, my thought leadership directly within your author biographies to better highlight your expertise to both Google and users.

As well, another thing I love to think about with on-page optimizations is this concept of information gain scores. It's one of my favorite patents, analyzed by Bill Slawski, where he talks about the fact that Google looks to reward content that adds to the search results and doesn't just repeat what's already out there. So think about where you can leverage your own unique expertise, data, and insights to benefit from this concept of information gain scores.

Another great way to improve the E-A-T of your site's content is to actually cite sources. The Wirecutter is phenomenal at doing this. Any time they cite an individual fact, they actually cite where they got that fact and link to external, trusted, accredited sources to verify where they're finding that information from. Another great way to improve the trustworthiness of your content and take your on-page optimizations to the next level.

Freshness

Another strategy that I think is highly, highly underrated is this concept of freshness. We've actually run tests on our own site, and we pretty consistently see that when we do things like update timestamps or just refresh content, we see noticeable upticks in both rankings and visibility and traffic. And I think this makes sense from kind of multiple perspectives when you really start to think about it. From a trustworthiness standpoint, if Google thinks the content is outdated, well, it's hard for it to trust that the information is actually accurate within the article. As well, from a competitive standpoint, it's very hard for Google to compete in terms of real-time results. That's why users might go to platforms like Twitter instead of Google. However, in recent years, Google is making a push toward to include live blog-posting-type URLs in top stories. I think they're trying to incentivize publishers to update their content in real time to set the expectation that users can get real-time information on Google instead of just Twitter.

Historical competitor changes

Another great way of thinking about your on-page optimizations is this concept of historical competitor changes. Oftentimes, when we think about our on-page optimizations, we're only thinking about what competitors are doing in the given moment, but we're not telling the story of how they've changed their on-page optimizations in order to get to that point. So you can do this type of analysis for really competitive queries. What I like to do is find a strong competitor that's actually improved in the rankings in recent years and then take that page and actually run it back through the Wayback Machine, and see which on-page changes have been made over time, what content they're adding. What are they removing, and what are they keeping the same? And that can help you better isolate what the most prominent on-page changes competitors have made have been.

Another great strategy to use is to use a text diff compare tool. You can actually take an old version of text and then compare that against the current version of text, run that through a tool, and the tool will actually highlight all of the changes competitors are making. That makes it very easy for you to find what on-page strategies your competitors are utilizing.

Keyword segmentation

The final aspect of advanced on-page optimizations I want to talk about is this concept of keyword segmentation. We segment our traffic data in Google Analytics all the time, but we don't segment our keyword data in the same way. So using tools like STAT, we can actually create keyword segments any time we do some type of on-page optimization. If we update entities, if we update freshness, if we update EAT, we can create keyword segments in all of those different instances. And then, over time, we can compare the segments against each other and measure what the most important ones have been. That will actually give you better data about what type of on-page optimizations work best for your specific sites.

So, hopefully, that's been helpful. Hopefully, you'll walk out of here with some more strategies and concrete takeaways. Now you can improve your on-page optimizations and take them to the next level. Thanks a lot Moz fans.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Announcing: The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior | SEO Industry Report

A warm welcome to Moz’s first large-scale survey on the habits of local business review readers, review writers and successful owner responses. Our survey uncovered interesting insights and actions local businesses can take to better serve their customers, earn more reviews, and build relationships. Read our free report today to peruse the findings, our thoughtful analysis, and expert commentary from local SEO industry professionals.

Read the report!

We surveyed 1,000+ US residents to assess trending behaviors surrounding reviews and responses and gained a powerful picture of the role this type of online sentiment is playing in consumer journeys, conversions, and most importantly, reputation. Local business owners and their marketers can access the full report today for strategic takeaways like these:

Only 11% of consumers trust brand messaging over public sentiment

In the complete report, you’ll learn that 96% of consumers now read online local business reviews. That’s basically almost everyone accessing this type of content, and the context comes into high relief when you know that just 11% of the public trusts what brands say about themselves over what customers say. Review management deserves serious investment from local businesses because it is the customers who are now writing the most trusted brand narratives.

52% of respondents say their negative reviews stem from false or incorrect online information on assets like local business listings

Local business listing management also needs to sit at the core of your marketing strategy because, without it, negative customer experiences in the real world result in negative online reviews. When neglect of listings leads to incorrect contact information existing around the web, customers are significantly inconvenienced by driving to wrong locations, calling outdated phone numbers, or arriving on the premises outside of accurate business hours.

With over half of customers having written negative reviews following poor experiences like these, it’s clear that location data management is essential to customer service and is key to protecting your reputation.

91% of consumers’ next steps after reading reviews occur in areas completely controlled by the business

Local search can be a powerful connector between brands and consumers, but it can also sometimes lead to feelings of a loss of control. While business owners and marketers can be part of the conversation in big spaces like review platforms and social media, they can’t directly control it.

This is why it should come as such welcome news that the incredibly broad road of review readers lands the majority of customers right back into areas directly controlled by the business. As the next step after reading reviews, 51% of consumers visit your website, 27% go directly to your place of business, and 13% contact you. It turns out that you have significant control over customer experiences along the post-review-reading customer journey.

The top reason customers don’t review your business is because they forget to

As you dig deep into Moz’s complete survey findings, you will come to identify a leading consumer desire for a substantial number of recent reviews. It’s this trend that obliges local business owners to implement review acquisition campaigns so that fresh sentiment is always incoming.

It’s a welcome insight to know that 38% of customers don’t leave you a review because they simply forget to when they have free time. This is the top reason, amongst many, explaining why you likely aren’t receiving as many reviews as you need to. Fortunately, a remedy is within easy reach with follow-through reminders to review your business being helpfully shared with customers via email, text, and print assets. You can get more reviews if you just keep communicating.

62% of negative reviewers would give a local brand a second chance after an owner response solves their problem

As you move through the complete report, you’ll come to see the medium of reviews as a platform for two-way conversations, with the majority of customers who leave a negative review expecting to hear back quickly from the business owner. It's harder to imagine better tidings than that 62% of your customers are willing to give your company a second chance if your owner response successfully resolves their complaints.

This figure transforms scary narratives surrounding negative reviews into moments within a relationship where forgiveness is likely to follow when real help is given. A complete local search marketing campaign must include ongoing hands-on responsiveness to online customer sentiment.

Come get the keys to running a customer-centric local business

As we’ve learned, reviews are a wide road almost all of your potential and current customers are traveling on. To fully charge your vehicle for best performance on that highway, local business review stats and trends can help you better serve customers by understanding their needs; implement structural fixes within your business based on problems cited by consumers; earn more reviews to improve your local pack rankings and conversions; and build loyal community relationships via two-way conversations.

Reading The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior will help you prioritize reputation management tasks on the basis of consumer demand and habits. It will give you access to expert commentary from industry leaders including Aaron Weiche, Amy Toman, Crystal Carter, Joy Hawkins, and Mike Blumenthal. And, it will be a resource you can share with multiple stakeholders, be they clients, staff, team members, or company leadership to get buy-in for the considerable work involved in professionally managing reviews. There’s nothing quite like good data to make a great point, so please come take this ride with us!

Read: The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior | SEO Industry Report

How to Optimize for Google's Featured Snippets [Updated for 2022]

Google’s featured snippets started as an experiment almost a decade ago.

They have since become an integral part of Google’s SERPs, showing up for lots of queries.

In fact, featured snippets are now considered organic position #1, so it is part of any SEO strategy.

What are featured snippets?

Featured snippets are selected search results that are featured on top of Google's organic results below the ads in a box.

Featured snippets aim at answering the user's question right away (hence their other well-known name, "answer boxes").

The recent studies reveal that featured snippets have an average 35% click-through rate.

Being featured means being on top of everything (except for ads), in the most prominent spot:

Types of featured snippets

There are three major types of featured snippets:

• Paragraph (an answer is given in text).

• List (an answer is given in a form of a list)

• Table (an answer is given in a table)

Each type can also include an image, and that image may come from a third-party page that is not featured. There may be 2 images included inside the featured box:

An older study from STAT: the most popular featured snippet is "paragraph" type.

Featured snippets or answer boxes?

The terminology may still be pretty loose here. Many people (including myself) are inclined to refer to featured snippets as "answer boxes," obviously because there's an answer presented in a box.

While there's nothing wrong with this terminology, it creates a certain confusion because Google often gives a "quick answer" (a definition, an estimate, etc.) on top without linking to the source:

To avoid confusion, let's stick to the "featured snippet" term whenever there's a URL featured in the box, because these present an extra exposure to the linked site (hence they're important for content publishers):

Do I have a chance to get featured?

Yes.

According to another older research by Ahrefs, about 100% of featured pages already rank in top 10 of Google. So if you are already ranking in top 10 for related search queries, you have very good chances to get featured.

Featured snippets appear and disappear for the same queries but you have higher chances to get featured if there’s already a featured snippet showing up for your target query (i.e. Google has already identified search intent for your query as informational).

Obviously, based on the purpose of the search section (i.e. to give a quick answer), you have a higher chance of getting featured if you answer a lot of questions in your content.

Identify all kinds of opportunities to be featured

Start with good old keyword research

Multiple studies confirm that the majority of featured snippets are triggered by long-tail keywords. In fact, the more words that are typed into a search box, the higher the probability there will be a featured snippet.

It's always a good idea to start with researching your keywords. Moz’s Keyword Explorer is a good place to start.

When performing keyword research with featured snippets in mind, note that:

• Start with question-type search queries (those containing question words, like “what,” “why,” “how,” etc.) because these are the easiest to identify, but don’t stop there...

• Target informational intent, not just questions. While featured snippets aim at answering the user’s question immediately, question-type queries are not the only types that trigger those featured results. According to the aforementioned Ahrefs study, the vast majority of keywords that trigger featured snippets were long-tail queries with no question words in them.

It helps if you use a keyword research tool that shows immediately whether a query triggers featured results. SE Ranking offers a nice filter allowing you to see keywords that are currently triggering featured snippets:

You can also run your competitor in Serpstat and then filter their best-performing queries by the presence of featured snippets.

This is a great overview of your future competition, enabling you to see your competitors' strengths and weaknesses.

Browse Google for more questions

To further explore the topic, be sure to research popular niche questions.

Tools like Buzzsumo and Text Optimizer can give you a good insight into questions people tend to ask around your topic:

Identify search queries where you already rank high

Your lowest-hanging fruit is to identify which phrases you already rank highly for. These will be the easiest to get featured for after you optimize for answer boxes (more on this below).

Google Search Console shows which search queries send you clicks. To find that report,

• Click "Performance" .

• Check the box to show the position your pages hold for each one and you'll have the ability to see which queries are your top-performing ones:

Note that Search Console labels featured snippet positions as #1 (SEO used to call them position 0). So when you see #1 in Google Search Console, there’s nothing to do here. Focus on #2 and lower.

You can then use the filters to find some question-type queries among those:

Go beyond traditional keyword research tools: Ask people

All the above methods (albeit great) tackle already discovered opportunities: those for which you or your competitors are already ranking high. But how about venturing beyond that? Ask your readers, customers, and followers how they search and which questions they ask.

MyBlogU: Ask people outside your immediate reach

Move away from your target audience and ask random people what questions they have on a specific topic and what would be their concerns. Looking out of the box can always give a fresh perspective.

MyBlogU (disclaimer: I am the founder) is a great way to do that. Just post a new project in the " Brainstorm" section and ask members to contribute their thoughts.

Seed Keywords: Ask your friends and followers

Seed Keywords is a simple tool that allows you to discover related keywords with help from your friends and followers. Simply create a search scenario, share it on social media, and ask your followers to type in the keywords they would use to solve it.

Try not to be too leading with your search scenario. Avoid guiding people to the search phrase you think they should be using.

Here's an example of a scenario:

And here are the suggestions from real people:

Obviously, you can also create similar surveys with tools like WP Forms or Google Forms.

Organize questions and keywords

I use spreadsheets to organize questions and keyword phrases I discover (see more on this below). Some of these questions may become a whole piece of content, while others will be subsections of broader articles:

• I don’t try to analyze search volume to decide whether any of those questions deserve to be covered in a separate article or a subsection. (Based on the Ahrefs research and my own observations, there is no direct correlation between the popularity of the term and whether it will trigger a featured snippet).

• Instead, I use my best judgment (based on my niche knowledge and research) as to how much I will be able to tell to answer each particular question. If it’s a lot, I’ll probably turn it into a separate article and use keyword research to identify subsections of the future piece.

Optimizing for featured snippets

Start with on-page SEO

There is no magic button or special markup which will make sure your site gets featured. Of course, it's a good idea to start with non-specific SEO best practices, simply because being featured is only possible when you rank high for the query.

Randy Milanovic did a good overview of tactics of making your content findable. Eric Brantner over at Coschedule has put together a very useful SEO checklist, and of course never forget to go through Moz’s SEO guide.

That being said, the best way to get featured is to provide a better answer. Here are a few actionable tips:

1. Aim at answering each question concisely

My own observation of answer boxes has led me to think that Google prefers to feature an answer which was given within one paragraph.

An older study by AJ Ghergich cites that the average length of a paragraph snippet is 45 words (the maximum is 97 words), so let it be your guideline as to how long each answer should be in order to get featured.

This doesn't mean your articles need to be one paragraph long. On the contrary, these days Google seems to give preference to long-form content (also known as " cornerstone content," which is obviously a better way to describe it because it's not just about length) that's broken into logical subsections and features attention-grabbing images. 

Even if you don’t believe that cornerstone content receives any special treatment in SERPs, focusing on long articles will help you to cover more related questions within one piece (more on that below).

All you need to do is to adjust your blogging style just a bit:

• Ask the question in your article (that may be a subheading)

• Immediately follow the question with a one-paragraph answer

• Elaborate further in the article

This tactic may also result in higher user retention because it makes any article better structured and thus a much easier read. To quote AJ Ghergich,

When you use data to fuel topic ideation, content creation becomes more about resources and less about brainstorming.

2. Be factual and organize well

Google loves numbers, steps and lists. We've seen this again and again: More often than not, answer boxes will list the actual ingredients, number of steps, time to cook, year and city of birth, etc.

Use Google’s guide on writing meta descriptions to get a good idea what kind of summaries and answers they are looking to generate snippets (including featured snippets).

Google loves well-structured, factual, and number-driven content.

There's no specific markup to structure your content. Google seems to pick up <table>, <ol>, and <ul> well and doesn't need any other pointers. Using H2 and H3 subheadings will make your content easier to understand for both Google and your readers.

3. Make sure one article answers many related questions

Google is very good at determining synonymic and closely related questions, so should be you. There's no point in creating a separate page answering each specific question.

Creating one solid article addressing many related questions is a much smarter strategy if you aim at getting featured in answer boxes. This leads us to the next tactic:

4. Organize your questions properly

To combine many closely related questions in one article, you need to organize your queries properly. This will also help you structure your content well.

I have a multi-level keyword organization strategy that can be applied here as well:

• A generic keyword makes a section or a category of the blog

• A more specific search query becomes the title of the article

• Even more specific queries determine the subheadings of the article and thus define its structure

  • There will be multiple queries that are so closely related that they will all go under a single subheading

For example:

Serpstat helps me a lot when it comes to both discovering an article idea and then breaking it into subtopics. Check out its " Questions" section. It will provide hundreds of questions containing your core term and then generate a tag cloud of other popular terms that come up in those questions:

Clicking any word in the tag cloud will filter results down to those questions that only have that word in them. These are subsections for your article.

Here’s another good guide on identifying your keyword modifiers (groups) and using those to structure your content.

Here's a good example of how related questions can help you structure the article:

5. Make sure to use eye-grabbing images

Paragraph featured snippets with images are ridiculously eye-catching, even more so than regular featured snippets. Honestly, I wasn't able to identify how to add an image so that it's featured. I tried naming it differently and I tried marking it as "featured" in the Wordpress editor. Google seems to pick up a random image from the page without me being able to point it to a better version.

That being said, the only way to influence that is to make sure ALL your in-article images are eye-catching, branded, and annotated well, so that no matter which one Google ends up featuring, it will look nice. 

• Here’s a great selection of Wordpress plugins that will allow you to easily visualize your content (put together graphs, tables, charts, etc.) while working on a piece.

• There are lots of image editing apps and tools to create original images

• Finally, there are ways to watermark your images (to brand them better) or even to create a free logo in case you don’t have one yet.

Optimizing and branding your images well is crucial for featured snippet optimization because images are often included in featured boxes, and in many cases those images come from different domains.

Clicking images within featured images enlarges that image inviting the user to go to the linked site. In other words, this can be a traffic-building opportunity for non-featured sites.

Google is pulling these images from Google Images search results, so image optimization is important for driving traffic from featured snippets.

Also don’t forget to update and re-upload the images (on Wordpress). Wordpress adds dates to image URLs, so even if you update an article with newer information the images can be considered kind of old.

Monitor your progress

You are already monitoring your organic positions, and featured snippets are tracked as #1 position these days.

For your most important keywords, you may want to set up closer monitoring to be alerted when Google changes anything:

How about structured markup?

Many people would suggest using Schema.org (simply because it's been a "thing" to recommend adding schema for anything and everything) but the aforementioned Ahrefs study shows that there's no correlation between featured results and structured markup.

Conclusion

It takes a lot of research and planning and you cannot be sure when you'll see the results (especially if you don't have too many top 10 rankings just yet) but think about this way: Being featured in Google search results is your incentive to work harder on your content. You'll achieve other important goals on your way there:

• You'll discover hundreds of new content ideas (and thus will rank for a wider variety of various long-tail keywords)

• You'll learn to research each topic more thoroughly (and thus will build more incoming links because people tend to link to in-depth articles)

• You'll learn to structure your articles better (and thus achieve a lower bounce rate because it will be easier to read your articles)

Update: We have released a featured snippet optimization tool. With it, you can see exactly what your featured snippet opportunities are and what it may take to grab each of them (based on where the featured page ranks organically, where your page ranks and what type of featured snippet to optimize for.)

The Authoritative Content Funnel — Whiteboard Friday

In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, digital marketing expert Amanda Milligan walks you through the three parts that make up a content funnel for building authority, as well as the types of content that fit into each one.

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Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. My name is Amanda Milligan. I am the Head of Marketing at Stacker Studio, and I am here to talk about something that I made up that I hope is very useful to you all. It is the authoritative content funnel.

So the reason that I put this together is because of conversations I was having with folks about I'm always talking about authoritative content and I realized that there was a mismatch of what other people thought I was talking about and what I was talking about. What I realized is that there are so many different types and we need to be thinking about them in a certain context, and I thought the easiest thing to start this brainstorm was to think about it overlaid the typical content funnel that we're all used to. So what I'm going to do today is walk through those different categories, explain how I think about it, and then I would love to hear your feedback after watching this if there's something that I missed or anything else that we should explore.

Decision

So let's start down here at the bottom with our favorite, the decision stage. I have written here, "Illustrate that your brand is the best solution." So in terms of building authority at the decision stage of the funnel, you're trying to reinforce that the person who's on your website or really anywhere is making the right decision. They're almost there, right? Like they have pretty much decided they want to go with you. Don't give them a reason to doubt themselves or to back out.

Demos

The way you see a lot of people do this, demos are good example of this. Even demos could almost be a little bit higher in the funnel. But it's a way of reassuring people, okay, this tool does what I thought it did. I'm getting the validation that everything that I need it to do is there. I'm seeing it for myself. I don't have to just base it off what they're telling me. I get to see it firsthand. That's helping to build authority.

Testimonials

Testimonials, especially in the B2B world, you'll see oftentimes a contact form will have testimonials listed next to them, and that's a way of saying, "You're right. You do want to fill out this contact form or this lead form. Look at these authoritative brands who have trusted us in the past." So they're leveraging the authority of their previous or current clients to show that they work with great businesses like yours and to validate that you're making the right decision.

Reviews

Same thing with reviews. Whether it's your product reviews or it's just the star ratings, the average star ratings on a third-party platform, you'll see that come up a lot, third-party validation, and you'll also hear this referenced as like authority signals. It could be client logos or places you've been published, all that sort of thing. All of these are lingering around conversion pages because they're trying to validate to you, "Yes, work with us. It's a good decision." 

So that is the decision part of the funnel. 

Consideration

Consideration gets a little more nebulous. So you're trying to show that you understand the nuance of your audience's problems and that you could be a good solution for them. It doesn't always have to include your product or service, but it can. However, what it does need to do is reflect that you have a very good understanding of your buyer personas and your potential customers. 

Case studies

So a lot of the examples are case studies. That's a little more branded, but you're showing I know what your problem is and I can show you how we did this, again, for other companies similar to yours and how we were successful. 

How-tos and guides

But then you also have more higher in the funnel examples of how-tos or guides. So if you know, if you've done your keyword research or your question research and you understand what your target audience or even a little bit more of a general audience is looking for in your space and you're able to create content that answers those questions, people are going to start to trust you because you're helping them.

Again, we're talking about not just content. If we zoomed out, there are other goals for content. We're already talking about some of them — conversion. But if we're talking about just authority, the way that you're building authority is by showing you know the answers to their questions, period. So the thought process here is: What are the best questions for us to answer no matter where they fall as long as we're showing that we care about them and we're the best people to answer their questions?

Awareness

Then we have awareness. This is what my career has primarily been based on, so I'm a little biased toward awareness because I think it's the biggest area of opportunity for marketers. It makes sense to focus here, especially in the beginning. You know that you need to convert. When you get the traffic, you know you want to convert those people. Completely understand. But I think the biggest area of opportunity and where a lot of people can start surpassing their competitors is up here, building awareness and authoritative awareness in particular.

The way to do that is to create content that is not specifically about what you're trying to sell but about bigger topics in your industry and doing it in a particular way. 

So that's the other thing. Whether you have somebody in-house who is already an expert, definitely you can leverage that, but a lot of us don't have that. A lot of us are at companies where there's already somebody who's kind of famous in the field and everybody already inherently trusts. So you need to try to think about how you can create content that's going to build authority at the top of the funnel.

Newsworthy content

At Stacker, we're a newswire that creates stories usually based on data. We create newsworthy content on behalf of our brand partners. So we operate in the top of the funnel. Newsworthy content is essentially anything that a news site would deem worthy of picking up. So that's kind of a whole other strategy and a whole other Whiteboard Friday. 

But any kind of original data applies as well. A lot of companies will run surveys or they'll use internal data and share that, and that's really interesting to audiences. Again, you could do some digital PR and get that picked up. Or also really common are annual reports, and that often does take internal data and supplies information and trends to a broader industry for their benefit. 

But the difference here is you're trying to show readers that you're willing to invest time and money into creating content that's not just about selling for you. It's about helping the broader audience. But it's also about showing Google this. The way that that happens is when you're creating newsworthy content or any kind of like digital PR type content and earning great news mentions and links, that signals to Google that you're an authority too, and that's why there's a lot of missed opportunity if you don't do this part of the funnel.

So that's how I think about it. I would love to hear how you think about it. If this is a topic that's interesting to you, I run a newsletter where I talk about stuff like this all the time. It's called "Newsworthy," and you can go to this URL here and subscribe and say hi. If you reply to it, it's my email, so please feel free. But also, as you can see, I talk nonstop and I can talk about marketing forever, so please feel free to tweet me. I love to meet new people and to talk all things content, authority, newsworthiness, all that good stuff.

So in the meantime, thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it, and I hope to talk to you soon.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Study: Which Link Metric Correlates Closest to Organic Visibility?

Throughout my career, most of my teams’ digital PR strategies for clients have consisted of closing link gaps, creating new ones, and earning as many high-tier links as possible. The goal was always the same: get our clients' websites to the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs) and outranking their competitors.

To that end, we’ve earned press coverage for clients on every top-tier publisher you can think of, including "dream publishers'' like CNN, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Business Insider. We’ve even had dozens of campaigns go viral, earning thousands of links and hundreds of thousands of social shares, all resulting from sending a single outreach email to a journalist.

"What's wrong with that?" you might be asking. "It sounds like a successful strategy."

While "going viral" might not carry the same weight it once did, I'll be the first to admit it – there is hardly a more exciting feeling when working in digital PR. And we all know that link volume combined with high authority links will help you rise in the ranks of the SERPs. So, actually, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that strategy.

But when all you care about is lots of links and going viral, sometimes you miss the mark on something that matters just as much, if not more: relevance.

Since 2019, Google has acknowledged that it uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) when assessing the relevancy and intent of users' search queries. So why is no one measuring relevance when it comes to link profiles?

The team at Journey Further sought to do just that — and in our latest study, we demonstrate why link relevance is more important than ever, and how a relevance-led approach can outperform larger and more authoritative websites time and time again.

What does it mean to be relevant in digital PR?

Like most things that catch fire in our industry, "relevance" has become a bit of a buzzword in digital PR. But what does it mean, really?

When you think about relevance, it's simple. Ask yourself:

• Does this campaign relate to the client's product or service?

• Does it have target keywords in it?

• Does it talk about the main topics we want to target?

• Does it answer the search intent?

• Does it make sense for the client to be considered an authority and/or a trusted source on this topic?

If you answered no to most of these, you might want to go back to the drawing board.

For some clients, it can be difficult to come up with an idea that's both relevant and newsworthy. The most relevant idea in the world will not earn links if it's boring, and that's the challenge we all face every day when creating digital PR campaigns for our clients.

Though it's difficult, it's in your clients' best interest for you to think outside the box in ideation and come up with both relevant and link-worthy digital PR ideas — you'll understand why after seeing the data from our latest study.

How do you measure content relevance?

Beyond manually determining relevance with those questions above, what if there was a data-driven way?

Steve Walker, the technology director at Journey Further, found this kind of analysis to be resource-intensive and prone to error. Humans aren't as good at these tasks as machines are, so he created Salient, a free-to-use tool that measures the relevance of your content.

Steve thought, "If Google uses machine learning to measure the relevance of content, why aren't we?"

Using this proprietary technology powered by Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology is how we can measure the relevance of content, analyzing an entire website's link profile rather than individual articles. Incorporating the IBM Watson Machine Learning API allows us to extract sentiment, recurring keywords and entities, and a relevancy and frequency score for each topic.

Off the back of this insight, we can understand what gaps exist in the relevancy of the link profile. This information then guides our PR and content strategies to drive organic visibility.

Study: Which link metric correlates closest to organic visibility?

So, how important is relevance compared with much-heralded metrics like Domain Authority (DA) and link volume?

In a data-driven attempt to learn which metric is statistically the best driver of organic visibility, our team at Journey Further analyzed the organic rankings of 6,000 commercially valuable keywords, calculating share of voice for a range of competing websites. From there, we measured the correlation of these scores against three link metrics:

1. Number of unique linking domains

2. Domain Authority

3. Topical link profile relevance

In this study, we focused on the home retail sector, with the following focus areas:

Across all 15 sectors, topical link relevance was the only metric that had a positive correlation to organic visibility

The findings of our study show that topical link relevance has the strongest correlation in 10 out of 15 sectors.

Domain Authority had a stronger correlation in five sectors: outdoor/patio, office furniture, bedding, desks, and pillows.

Unique linking domains never had the strongest correlation to organic visibility and, in fact, showed a negative correlation in 6 out of 15 sectors.

However, across all 15 sectors, topical link relevance was the only metric that positively correlated to organic visibility every time.

That's the TL;DR of it, but read on for a deeper look at some individual topic areas and how we came to these figures. View the full study here.

Definitions and Limitations

To better understand the data, let's detail some definitions first:

Correlation coefficient: A linear measure of the correlation between two variables. A value of 0 indicates no association between the two variables. A value greater than 0 indicates a positive association, and a value less than 0 indicates a negative association.

Organic share of voice (SOV): Organic SOV is a metric that represents how much organic traffic a site receives vs. the other sites in that sector for a set of high-traffic keywords. It considers keyword volumes, click-through rates, ranking position, and SERP features. The final SOV is expressed as a percentage of that keyword set's total available search volume. So if your SOV is 25%, you're winning 25% of the clicks for that set.

Topical link relevance: A score that shows the relevance of a keyword or topic to the entire document text or range of pages analyzed - in this case, the text on each page that links back to the sites we analyzed. The higher the number, the more relevant a topic. A score of 0 means that the topic was not relevant at all.

Unique linking domains: The total number of unique domains that link back to each site.

Domain Authority (DA): A ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website will rank on SERPs. A DA score ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater visibility.

Limitations

This study relies on correlation and thus has limitations. Please note that correlation ≠ causation, and because Google historically does not comment on studies, or reveal precisely how the ranking algorithm works, we’ll likely never find causation. However, based on patents mentioning the use of topical relevance in combination with the findings of the correlation studies, we can be confident in the validity of the data.

Relevance vs. Link Volume

As an example, let's look at the bathroom sector. When looking at hundreds of keywords related to bathrooms like bathroom mirrors and bathroom ideas, we found that this sector has over 1.8 million searches per month, with leading home brands competing for share of voice.

After analyzing the backlink profile and relevance score, we then calculate a correlation with that brand's share of voice to determine if there is any connection between this metric and organic visibility.

• Anything below zero has a negative correlation, so there is no connection.

• Anything over zero has a positive correlation.

• The higher the correlation, the stronger the relationship between the metrics and organic visibility.

With a correlation coefficient of .74, it's clear that the metric that is most closely related to organic visibility for the bathroom sector is topical link relevance.

Unique linking domains, in this case, has a negative correlation. For example, IKEA has a backlink profile of more than 406K ULDs, but doesn’t have the biggest market share, which shows that there is no correlation to the link volume and market share.

Relevance vs. Domain Authority

When looking at hundreds of keywords related to dressers, we found that this sector has over 1.6 million searches per month.

Again, we did the same thing here and compared each brand's backlink profile and relevance score to that brand's share of voice.

With a correlation coefficient of .61, we see that topical link relevance is the metric most closely related to organic visibility for the dressers sector.

However, this example demonstrates that all three metrics (relevance, Domain Authority, and link volume) are critical to organic visibility. All three have a very high correlation, which suggests that not only are these metrics correlated, but perhaps they are integral for boosting organic visibility in this sector.

View the full study here. (And feel free to reach out to me directly if you want us to run a free relevance report for you).

In SEO, it's not enough to be popular, you also need to be relevant

Historically, the SEO industry has relied on metrics like Domain Authority and link volume. These two metrics are important, but only provide a portion of the puzzle. Alone, they don't answer Google's primary question: which website is the most relevant for a query?

We've all seen campaigns out in the wild that make us scratch our heads, thinking, "what does this topic have to do with that client?" Think: why is a CBD company pushing out a study on anything but CBD? Why is a company that sells bathroom fixtures creating content about dogs?

When you fail to see the connection between the story and the client, you know they're only thinking of one thing: links.

But, as my colleague Beth Nunnington likes to say, "in SEO, it's not enough to be popular, you also need to be relevant."

Don’t forget, most clients don't want links for links' sake. They want what links bring: increased traffic, better rankings for priority keywords, increased revenue, brand awareness, etc.

And links will only serve those goals when they're relevant.

Don't get me wrong – I still LOVE a CNN placement (and so do clients), but now, I'd also like it to be relevant.

How to E-A-T Ethically with Digital PR

It’s an old marketing cliche that people buy from people, not brands, and if you spend any amount of time on LinkedIn, you’ll be inundated with personal branding gurus explaining to you exactly why that is.

Ultimately, it all comes down to trust — the T in Google’s E-A-T.

People are more likely to trust a brand or organization with a real human face. In a crowded e-commerce space, that trust (or lack thereof) can make or break a website’s fortune in the SERPs.

This, combined with a move away from historic link-building activities, such as link exchanges or broken link building, has seen brands of all sizes from household names to e-commerce start-ups jump on the thought-leadership bandwagon.

Free and easy-to-access tools such as HARO and the Twitter #journorequest hashtag offer a low barrier to entry and give the misleading impression that this is an easy route to links in top-tier publications — without the need to invest in a long-term strategy.

When done right, this type of digital PR can deliver a range of benefits for both SEO and brand awareness, but building trust both with search engines and consumers takes time and consistency.

Below I’ve included some examples of best practice, as well as explained how to avoid common pitfalls.

About who?

A strong “About Us” page is one of the most important on-page trust signals for a content SEO strategy when it comes to E-A-T. Whether you’re using the page to introduce one subject matter expert or a whole team, make sure to include a decent headshot and a bio clearly outlining their credentials, role, and expertise.

The Huel “About Us” page is a great example featuring a photo and quick bio of their founder Julian Hearn:

Don’t invent a subject matter expert just to put a face to the website and suggest that content is written with authority. And don’t be tempted to use a stock photo on an “About Us” page or author profile — we all know how easy it is to reverse image search a profile picture. If a journalist is impressed with an expert's credentials, and reaches out for a phone or Zoom interview with someone who doesn’t exist, it’s going to be very awkward.

Don’t fake it until you make it

Google has made it clear that it values everyday expertise, so there really is no need to fake a doctorate. Instead, find an authentic way to present real, lived expertise.

Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines state:

“Some topics require less formal expertise. Many people write extremely detailed, helpful reviews of products or restaurants. Many people share tips and life experiences on forums, blogs, etc.”

Huel is a nutrition brand but its founder is honest about his area of expertise, which is business and start-ups. The Huel website doesn’t attempt to present him as a qualified nutritionist in hopes of landing links or impressing Google.

This level of transparency is best practice whatever the industry, but is especially important for financial or medical experts, which leads us on to...

Health and wealth

Google has been very open about setting a higher bar for what it deems “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) pages. This is any page that, according to the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, could impact thefuture happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users.

This doesn't just apply to the websites of banks or healthcare providers. Health and wealth could cover a multitude of e-commerce industries, from websites selling CBD products, vapes, or supplements, to online casinos and loan services.

Google wants to see that this content is written by those with authority on these topics. Digital PR can play a crucial role by positioning on-site authors as subject experts and having them cited elsewhere — whether that be in newspapers, academic studies, or on government websites.

When outreaching content, it’s always best to assume that both Google’s algorithm and a journalist’s instincts are going to be well trained in identifying a real expert from a phony.

Content conflict

Digital PR is still PR — yes we’re here to build links, but those who adopt a “links at all costs” approach will often find it comes at the detriment of a brand.

There’s nothing wrong with using a strong soundbite to get coverage in the press, and there is nothing wrong with being controversial when appropriate. Some start-ups deliberately build a reputation on being outspoken and disruptive, but you must always consider how a quote will reflect on the brand, and crucially, whether it will contradict company ethos.

Reactive PR, especially newsjacking, is fast-paced, and this can make abiding by tone of voice guidelines feel like wasted time. But remember: you’re not just building links, you’re building a reputation. This means you run the risk of doing serious reputational damage if you ignore a brand's vision and values in the quest for links.

In a world of screenshots and digital “receipts”, being caught saying one thing in the press and one thing on site can make a brand or expert look at best a bit silly and at worst untrustworthy.

Huel are open on their About Us page about Julian's expertise, and they take the same approach in the press. Julian is cited as talking about business and start-ups in business publications, not talking about nutrients in science journals.

It’s also worth bearing in mind whether a brand or expert can add real value to a story, especially when the news centers around real human suffering such as a school shooting or the invasion of Ukraine. Sometimes it's better to just sit a story out — there are bigger things than SEO.

Don’t sleep on socials

When it comes to trust signals, social profiles can often be overlooked. After all, it’s not usually something that falls under digital PR’s remit. However, when you’ve got a real subject matter expert on page, you're going to want to ensure that both journalists and Google know this.

If you contact a journalist with commentary or analysis from an on-page subject expert, the likelihood is they will Google them, and a public-facing social profile (LinkedIn, Twitter, or even TikTok) that demonstrates industry or subject knowledge will make the journalist feel more comfortable including them in an article.

Make sure that the About Us page links out to these social profiles, and don’t forget to include a link back to the site in the bio of the social profiles.

The perfect E-A-T circle

When Google sets its Search Quality Raters on a website, they will cross the web looking for signals confirming expertise and authority – including everything from news articles to Wikipedia pages – meaning even non-linked citations have value here.

This is where a holistic thought-leadership for digital PR strategy that incorporates newsjacking, About Us pages, and social profiles can start helping both Google and journalists connect the dots on a thought-leader's expertise.

A subject-relevant news article that cites an expert's name, or better yet, links to an About Us page, means that the next time a journalist Googles them, they’ll see even more evidence that they are an expert.

This should result in more coverage, more evidence of authority on the topic, and ultimately more trust signals for Google. The perfect circle of expertise, authority, and trust.