Thursday 31 October 2019

How Google’s Bert Update Will Affect Content Marketing

Google announced that it has been rolling out a new update called Bert.

I know what you are thinking… does this update really matter? Should I even spend time learning about it?

Well, Bert will affect 1 in 10 search queries.

To give you an idea of how big of an update this is, it’s the biggest update since Google released RankBrain.

In other words, there is a really good chance that this impacts your site. And if it doesn’t, as your traffic grows, it will eventually affect your site.

But before we go into how this update affects SEOs and what you need to adjust (I will go into that later in this post), let’s first get into what this update is all about.

So, what is Bert?

Bert stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.

You are probably wondering, what the heck does that mean, right?

Google, in essence, has adjusted its algorithm to better understand natural language processing.

Just think of it this way: you could put a flight number into Google and they typically show you the flight status. Or a calculator may come up when you type in a math equation. Or if you put a stock symbol in, you’ll get a stock chart.

Or even a simpler example is: you can start typing into Google and its autocomplete feature can figure out what you are searching for before you even finishing typing it in.

But Google has already had all of that figured out before Bert. So let’s look at some examples of Bert in action.

Is Bert even useful?

Here are 4 examples of Bert.

Let’s say you search for “2019 brazil traveler to usa need visa”.

Before Bert, the top result would be how US citizens can travel to Brazil without a visa. But look at the search query carefully… it’s slight, but it is a big difference.

The search wasn’t about US people going to Brazil, it was about people from Brazil traveling to the US.

The result after the Bert update is much more relevant.

Google is now taking into account prepositions like “for” or “to” that can have a lot of meanings to the search query.

Here’s another example… “do estheticians stand a lot at work”…

Google used to previously match terms. For example, their system used to think “stand” is the same as “stand-alone”.

Now they understand that the word “stand” has the context of physical demand. In other words, is the job exhausting… do you have to be on your feet a lot?

And one more, “can you get medicine for someone pharmacy” …

As you can see from the before and after picture, it’s clear that the new result is more relevant.

Same with this one on “math practice books for adults” …

Is that the only change?

It isn’t. Google also made changes to featured snippets.

For example, if you searched for “parking on a hill with no curb”, Google used to place too much emphasis on the word “curb” and not enough emphasis on the word “no”.

That’s a big difference… and you can see that in the results.

The new changes this algorithm update brings makes it much more relevant for searchers and it creates a better experience for you and me and everyone else who uses Google.

But how does it affect SEOs?

You need to change your SEO strategy

There are three types of queries people usually make when performing a search:

  1. Informational
  2. Navigational
  3. Transactional

An informational query is like someone looking to lose weight. They aren’t sure how so they may search for “how to lose weight”.

And once they perform the search, they may find a solution such as different diets. From there they may search for a solution, using a navigational query such as “Atkins diet”.

Once someone figures out the exact solution, they then may perform a transactional search query, such as “the Atkins diet cookbook”.

From what we are seeing on our end is that Bert is mainly impacting top-of-the-funnel keywords, which are informational related keywords.

Now if you want to not only maintain your rankings but gobble up some of the rankings of your competition, a simple solution is to get very specific with your content.

Typically, when you create content, which is the easiest way to rank for informational related keywords, SEOs tell you to create super long content.

Yes, you may see that a lot of longer-form content ranks well on Google, but their algorithm doesn’t focus on word count, it focuses on quality.

The context of the tweet from Danny Sullivan, who is Google’s search liaison, is that he wants SEOs to focus on creating content that is fundamentally great, unique, useful, and compelling.

So when you use tools like Ubersuggest to find new topics to go after, you need to make sure your content is super-specific.

For example, if you have a business about fitness and you blog about “how to lose weight without taking pills”, your content shouldn’t focus on diet shakes or supplements or anything too similar to diet pills. Instead, it should discuss all of the alternative methods.

I know what you are thinking, shakes and supplements may not be diet pills and they aren’t the same keyword but expect Bert to get more sophisticated in the next year in which it will better understand what people are really looking for.

Additionally, you should stop focusing on keyword density.

Yes, a lot of SEOs have moved away from this, but I still get a handful of emails each day asking me about keyword density.

Keyword density will even be less important in the future as Google better understands the context of the content you are writing.

So, where’s the opportunity?

As I mentioned, it’s related to creating highly specific content around a topic.

It’s not necessarily about creating a really long page that talks about 50 different things that’s 10,000 words long. It’s more about answering a searcher’s question as quick as possible and providing as much value compared to the competition.

Just like when you search for “what is it like to be in the Olympics”, you’ll see a list of results that look something like this:

Although the first result has the title of “What it’s like to go to the Olympics”, the article doesn’t break down what it is like to go as an attendee, it breaks down what it is like to go as an athlete. Just like a searcher would expect based on the query.

Bert was clearly able to figure this out even though the title could have gone either way. And the article itself isn’t that long. The article itself only has 311 words.

If you want to do well when it comes to ranking for informational keywords, go very specific and answer the question better than your competitors. From videos and images to audio, do whatever needs to be done to create a better experience.

Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean that long-form content doesn’t work. It’s just that every SEO already focuses on long-form content. They are going after generic head terms that can be interpreted in 100 different ways and that’s why the content may be long and thorough.

In other words, focus more on long-tail terms.

You may think that is obvious but let’s look at the data.

It all starts with Ubersuggest. If you haven’t used it yet, you can type in a keyword like “marketing” and it will show you the search volume as well as give you thousands (if not millions) of keyword variations.

In the last 30 days, 4,721,534 keyword queries were performed on Ubersuggest by 694,284 marketers. Those 4,721,534 searches returned 1,674,841,398 keyword recommendations.

And sure, SEOs could be typing in head terms to find more long-tail phrases, but when we look at what keywords people are selecting within Ubersuggest and exporting, 84% of marketers are focusing on 1 or 2-word search terms.

Only 1.7% of marketers are focusing on search terms that are 5 or words longer.

Following the strategy of creating content around very specific long-tail phrases is so effective that sites like Quora are generating 60,428,999 visitors a month just from Google alone in the United States.

And a lot of their content isn’t super detailed with 10,000-word responses. They just focus on answering very specific questions that people have.

Conclusion

Even if your search traffic drops a bit from the latest update, it’s a good thing.

I know that sounds crazy, but think of it this way… if someone searched for “how to lose weight without diet pills” and they landed on your article about how diet pills are amazing, they are just going to hit the back button and go back to Google.

In other words, it is unlikely that the traffic converted into a conversion.

Sure, you may lose some traffic from this update, but the traffic was ruining your user metrics and increasing your bounce rate.

Plus, this is your opportunity to create content that is super-specific. If you lose traffic, look at the pages that dropped, the search queries that you aren’t ranking for anymore, and go and adjust your content or create new content that answers the questions people are looking for.

If you don’t know how to do this, just log into Search Console, click on “search results”, and click on the date button.

Then click on compare and select the dates where your traffic dropped and compare it to the previous periods. Then select “Queries” and sort by the biggest difference.

You’ll have to dig for the longer-term search queries as those are the easiest to fix. And if you are unsure about what to fix, just search for the terms on Google that dropped and look at the top-ranking competitors. Compare their page with yours as it will provide some insights.

So, what do you think about the latest update?

The post How Google’s Bert Update Will Affect Content Marketing appeared first on Neil Patel.



* This article was originally published here

Wednesday 30 October 2019

Get the Bingeable & Shareable MozCon 2019 Video Bundle!

Posted by FeliciaCrawford


MozCon 2019 was an absolute blast. There were endless snacks. There were Roger hugs. There were networking opportunities and Birds of a Feather tables and search epiphanies galore. And there were a ton of folks in our community who watched it all unfold from the perspective of a Twitter hashtag — fun to follow along with, but not quite the same impact as seeing the talks unfold in real-time.

If you're still wishing you could've joined us in Seattle this past July, you’ll be happy to know that you can recreate the MozCon experience from the comfort of your home or office (or your home office, but hopefully not your office-home — seriously, Karen, the quarterly reports will still be there in the morning!).

Yep, you got it: the MozCon 2019 Video Bundle is available for your purchasing and viewing pleasure!

Get the MozCon 2019 video bundle


Tell me about the video bundle!

For those of you who attended in-person, good news: you've already got access! The video bundle is always included in the price of your MozCon ticket, so you can relive your three jam-packed days of learning as many times as you want — and if you aren't too bummed that they already made you share your MozCon swag with them, be sure to share the vids with your team!

For the rest of us, the video bundle lets us enjoy the presentations at our own pace. It's condensed MozCon-caliber information in a neat, on-demand package that you can — have we mentioned this? — share with your team. Seriously, we think they'll like it. We were humbled to host some of the very brightest minds in SEO and digital marketing on our stage. With topics ranging from content marketing to technical SEO, PPC to local SEO, and just about everything in between, there are presentations to inspire just about any role in marketing (and your web dev just might be interested in a few talks, too).

What's covered in the videos:

  1. The Golden Age of Search, Sarah Bird
  2. Web Search 2019: The Essential Data Marketers Need, Rand Fishkin
  3. Human > Machine > Human: Understanding Human-Readable Quality Signals and Their Machine-Readable Equivalents, Ruth Burr Reedy
  4. Improved Reporting & Analytics Within Google Tools, Dana DiTomaso
  5. Local Market Analytics: The Challenges and Opportunities, Rob Bucci
  6. Keywords Aren't Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing, Ross Simmonds
  7. How to Supercharge Link Building with a Digital PR Newsroom, Shannon McGuirk
  8. From Zero to Local Ranking Hero, Darren Shaw
  9. Esse Quam Videri: When Faking it is Harder than Making It, Russ Jones
  10. Building a Discoverability Powerhouse: Lessons From Merging an Organic, Paid, & Content Practice, Heather Physioc
  11. Brand Is King: How to Rule in the New Era of Local Search, Mary Bowling
  12. Making Memories: Creating Content People Remember, Casie Gillette
  13. 20 Years in Search & I Don't Trust My Gut or Google, Wil Reynolds
  14. Super-Practical Tips for Improving Your Site's E-A-T, Marie Haynes
  15. Fixing the Indexability Challenge: A Data-Based Framework, Areej AbuAli
  16. What Voice Means for Search Marketers: Top Findings from the 2019 Report, Christi Olson
  17. Redefining Technical SEO, Paul Shapiro
  18. How Many Words Is a Question Worth?, Dr. Peter J. Meyers
  19. Fraggles, Mobile-First Indexing, & the SERP of the Future, Cindy Krum
  20. Killer E-commerce CRO and UX Wins Using A SEO Crawler, Luke Carthy
  21. Content, Rankings, and Lead Generation: A Breakdown of the 1% Content Strategy, Andy Crestodina
  22. Running Your Own SEO Tests: Why It Matters & How to Do It Right, Rob Ousbey
  23. Dark Helmet's Guide to Local Domination with Google Posts and Q&A, Greg Gifford
  24. How to Audit for Inclusive Content, Emily Triplett Lentz
  25. Image & Visual Search Optimization Opportunities, Joelle Irvine
  26. Factors that Affect the Local Algorithm that Don't Impact Organic, Joy Hawkins
  27. Featured Snippets: Essentials to Know & How to Target, Britney Muller

What you’ll get:

For just $299, you'll get all of the MozCon education and inspiration with none of the air travel or traffic. The bundle includes:

  • 27 full-length presentation videos chock full of leading SEO innovations, thought leadership, and tips & tricks
  • Instant downloads and streaming to your computer, tablet, or mobile device
  • Downloadable slide decks for all presentations

If we could include a download of a Top Pot doughnut and some piping hot Starbucks, we would in a heartbeat. Alas, they don't have the technology for that... yet.

Free preview - Running Your Own SEO Tests: Why It Matters & How to Do It Right by Rob Ousbey

Speaking of doughnuts, we wouldn't expect you to buy a dozen sweet treats without taking a little taste first to see if you like 'em. It's important to know that your doughnuts are both delicious, shareable, and relevant to your everyday work as an SEO — almost exactly like the MozCon video bundle. And just like the feeling of warmth and goodwill you receive when you come back to the office with a fragrant baker's dozen, your teammates will thank you when you've got twenty-seven highly actionable talks to share with them — presentations that'll hone your skills and level up your understanding of modern SEO and digital marketing.

That's why we've released a talk we're super proud of as your free preview of all the juicy goodness you can look forward to in the video bundle: Running Your Own SEO Tests: Why It Matters & How to Do It Right, presented by our very own Rob Ousbey. 

Google's algorithms have undergone significant changes in recent years. Traditional ranking signals don't hold the same sway they used to, and they're being usurped by factors like UX and brand that are becoming more important than ever before. What's an SEO to do? The answer lies in testing. Sharing original data and results from clients, Rob highlights the necessity of testing, learning, and iterating your work, from traditional UX testing to weighing the impact of technical SEO changes, tweaking on-page elements, and changing up content on key pages. Actionable processes and real-world results abound in this thoughtful presentation on why you should be testing SEO changes, how and where to run them, and what kinds of tests you ought to consider for your circumstances.

Gather the team, grab some snacks, and get ready to binge these presentations Netflix-Original-Series-style. 

Get the MozCon 2019 video bundle


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!



* This article was originally published here

Tuesday 29 October 2019

The Unique World of Franchise Marketing [Guide Sneak Peek]

Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: Dion Gillard

Can franchises make good digital marketing agency clients? There are almost 750,000 of them in the US alone, employing some 9 million Americans. Chances are good you’ll have the opportunity to market a business with this specialized model at some point. In this structure:

The Franchisor grants permission to others to operate under its trademark, selling approved goods and services supported by an operating system and marketing.
The Franchisee is the person or group paying the franchisor for the right to use the trademark and the benefits of the operating system and marketing.

Seems simple enough. But it’s this structure that gives franchise marketing its unique complexities. For your agency, the challenge is that you can’t enter these marketing relationships equipped solely with your knowledge of corporate or local search marketing.

You need to deeply understand the setup to avoid bewilderment over why implementation bogs down with franchise clients and why players lose track of their roles, or even overwrite one another’s efforts.

In this post, we’ll give you some quick and useful coaching on the franchise model, but if your agency just got a phone call from Orangetheory or Smoothie King, you can get the bigger playbook right away.

Download The Practical Guide to Franchise Marketing

Roles and goals make franchises unique clients

Image credit: woodleywonderworks

Imagine a post-game locker room scene. On the field, all players seemed united by the goal of winning. But now, at different press conferences, the owner is saying the coach failed to meet standards, the coach is saying the owner should keep his opinions to himself, and several of the star players are saying they didn’t get the ball enough.

Franchises can be just like that when there’s confusion over roles and goals. Read on to get a peek into the playbook we've prepared to help the team as a whole work better together:



This post is excerpted from our new primer: The Practical Guide to Franchise Marketing.

Franchise marketing is a unique kind of activity. It does share a lot of qualities with corporate marketing (on the awareness side) and with SMB marketing (on the local side) but as we noted earlier, it’s sort of a joint custody arrangement that — like all custody arrangements — can get contentious at times.

Everyone wants the best for the brand, but everyone’s “best” is very much a matter of their own perspective and goals. Typically in this arrangement, there are at least two stakeholders, though sometimes there are more. The stakeholders and their goals tend to play out as follows:

Corporate Franchisor goals

  • Creating a strong brand to license more franchisors.
  • Controlling that brand so it isn’t negatively impacted.
  • Supporting franchisees with strong branding and resources so they succeed.

Master Franchisor goals

  • Working with corporate to protect the brand.
  • Licensing more local franchisors.
  • Supporting franchisees with resources so they succeed.

Regional or Area Franchisee goals

  • Driving customer traffic and revenue at individual locations.
  • Growing their portfolio of locations.
  • Supporting location managers with resources so they succeed.

Owner/Operator Franchisee goals

  • Increasing location(s) foot traffic.
  • Increasing location(s) revenue.
  • Building customer loyalty at the location(s).

In what ways is franchise marketing different from corporate or standard SMB marketing? There are some unique challenges that franchisors and franchisees face which are worth unpacking. Some of them are:

    • Conflicting goals between franchisor/franchisee
    • Faster turnover of locations and addresses
    • Different opening hours, menus and promotions from location to location
    • Unique local sales and marketing opportunities and challenges
    • Competitors on both the brand side but also among local SMBs
    • Lack of clearly defined marketing roles causing work to be overwritten, duplicated, or even neglected


    Getting your agency’s head in the game

    Image credit: yourgoodpaljoe

    Your agency can be a better coach to franchises by having a playbook that respects how they differ from corporate or SMB clients at the very outset. But differences don’t have to equal weaknesses. Are you ready to draft a game plan that draws from the strengths of both franchisors and franchisees? 

    The Practical Guide to Franchise Marketing


    Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!



    * This article was originally published here

    Saturday 26 October 2019

    The Featured Snippets Cheat Sheet and Interactive Q&A

    Posted by BritneyMuller

    Earlier this week, I hosted a webinar all about featured snippets covering essential background info, brand-new research we've done, the results of all the tests I've performed, and key takeaways. Things didn't quite go as planned, though. We had technical difficulties that interfered with our ability to broadcast live, and lots of folks were left with questions after the recording that we weren't able to answer in a follow-up Q&A.

    The next best thing to a live webinar Q&A? A digital one that you can bookmark and come back to over and over again! We asked our incredibly patient, phenomenally smart attendees to submit their questions via email and promised to answer them in an upcoming blog post. We've pulled out the top recurring questions and themes from those submissions and addressed them below. If you had a question and missed the submission window, don't worry! Ask it down in the comments and we'll keep the conversation going.

    If you didn't get a chance to sign up for the original webinar, you can register for it on-demand here:

    Watch the webinar

    And if you're here to grab the free featured snippets cheat sheet we put together, look no further — download the PDF directly here. Print it off, tape it to your office wall, and keep featured snippets top-of-mind as you create and optimize your site content. 

    Now, let's get to those juicy questions!


    1. Can I win a featured snippet with a brand-new website?

    If you rank on page one for a keyword that triggers a featured snippet (in positions 1–10), you're a contender for stealing that featured snippet. It might be tougher with a new website, but you're in a position to be competitive if you're on page one — regardless of how established your site is.

    We've got some great Whiteboard Fridays that cover how to set a new site up for success:

    2. Does Google provide a tag that identifies traffic sources from featured snippets? Is there a GTM tag for this?

    Unfortunately, Google does not provide a tag to help identify traffic from featured snippets. I'm not aware of a GTM tag that helps with this, either, but would love to hear any community suggestions or ideas in the comments!

    It's worth noting that it's currently impossible to determine what percentage of your traffic comes from the featured snippet versus the duplicate organic URL below the featured snippet.

    3. Do you think it's worth targeting longer-tail question-based queries that have very low monthly searches to gain a featured snippet?

    Great question! My advice is this: don’t sleep on low-search-volume keywords. They often convert really well and in aggregate they can do wonders for a website. I suggest prioritizing long tail keywords that you foresee providing a high potential ROI.

    For example, there are millions of searches a month for the keyword “shoes.” Very competitive, but that query is pretty vague. In contrast, the keyword “size 6 red womens nike running shoes” is very specific. This searcher knows what they want and they're dialing in their search to find it. This is a great example of a long tail keyword phrase that could provide direct conversions.

    4. What's the best keyword strategy for determining which queries are worth creating featured snippet-optimized content for?

    Dr. Pete wrote a great blog post outlining how to perform keyword research for featured snippets back in 2016. Once you've narrowed down your list of likely queries, you need to look at keywords that you rank on page one for, that trigger a snippet, and that you don't yet own. Next, narrow your list down further by what you envision will have the highest ROI for your goals. Are you trying to drive conversions? Attract top-of-funnel site visitors? Make sure the queries you target align with your business goals, and go from there. Both Moz Pro and STAT can be a big help with this process.

    A tactical pro tip: Use the featured snippet carousel queries as a starting point. For instance, if there's a snippet for the query "car insurance" with a carousel of "in Florida," "in Michigan," and so on, you might consider writing about state-specific topics to win those carousel snippets. For this technique, the bonus is that you don't really need to be on page one for the root term (or ranking at all) — often, carousel snippets are taken from off-SERP links.

    5. Do featured snippets fluctuate according to language, i.e. if I have several versions of my site in different languages, will the snippet display for each version?

    This is a great question! Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to do international/multi-language featured snippet research just yet, but hope to in the future. I would suspect the featured snippet could change depending on language and search variation. The best way to explore this is to do a search in an incognito (and un-logged-in) browser window of Google Chrome.

    If you've performed research along these lines, let us know what you found out down in the comments!

    6. Why do featured snippet opportunities fluctuate in number from day to day?

    Change really is the only constant in search. In the webinar, I discussed the various tests I did that caused Moz to lose a formerly won featured snippet (and what helped it reappear once again). Changes as simple as an extra period at the end of a sentence were enough to lose us the snippet. With content across the web constantly being created and edited and deprecated and in its own state of change, it's no wonder that it's tough to win and keep a featured snippet — sometimes even from one day to the next.

    The SERPs are incredibly volatile things, with Google making updates multiple times every day. But when it comes down to the facts, there are a few things that reliably cause volatility (is that an oxymoron?):

    • If a snippet is pulling from a lower-ranking URL (not positions 1–3); this could mean Google is testing the best answer for the query
    • Google regularly changing which scraped content is used in each snippet
    • Featured snippet carousel topics changing

    The best way to change-proof yourself is to become an authority in your particular niche (E-A-T, remember?) and strive to rank higher to increase your chances of capturing and keeping a featured snippet.

    7. How can I use Keyword Lists to find missed SERP feature opportunities? What's the best way to use them to identify keyword gaps?

    Keyword Lists are a wonderful area to uncover feature snippet (and other SERP feature) opportunity gaps. My favorite way to do this is to filter the Keyword List by your desired SERP feature. We’ll use featured snippets as an example. Next, sort by your website’s current rank (1–10) to determine your primary featured snippet gaps and opportunities.

    The filters are another great way to tease out additional gaps:

    • Which keywords have high search volume and low competition? 
    • Which keywords have high organic CTR that you currently rank just off page one for?

    8. What are best practices around reviewing the structure of content that's won a snippet, and how do I know whether it's worth replicating?

    Content that has won a featured snippet is definitely worth reviewing (even if it doesn’t hold the featured snippet over time). Consider why Google might have provided this as a featured snippet:

    • Does it succinctly answer the query? 
    • Might it sound good as a voice answer? 
    • Is it comprehensive for someone looking for additional information? 
    • Does the page provide additional answers or information around the topic? 
    • Are there visual elements? 

    It’s best to put on your detective hat and try to uncover why a piece of content might be ranking for a particular featured snippet:

    • What part of the page is Google pulling that featured snippet content from? 
    • Is it marked up in a certain way? 
    • What other elements are on the page? 
    • Is there a common theme? 
    • What additional value can you glean from the ranking featured snippet?

    9. Does Google identify and prioritize informational websites for featured snippets, or are they determined by a correlation between pages with useful information and frequency of snippets? 

    In other words, would being an e-commerce site harm your chances of winning featured snippets, all other factors being the same?

    I’m not sure whether Google explicitly categorizes informational websites. They likely establish a trust metric of sorts for domains and then seek out information or content that most succinctly answers queries within their trust parameters, but this is just a hypothesis.

    While informational sites tend to do overwhelmingly better than other types of websites, it’s absolutely possible for an e-commerce website to find creative ways of snagging featured snippets.

    It’s fascinating how various e-commerce websites have found their way into current featured snippets in extremely savvy ways. Here's a super relevant example: after our webinar experienced issues and wasn't able to launch on time, I did a voice search for “how much do stamps cost” to determine how expensive it would be to send apology notes to all of our hopeful attendees. 

    This was the voice answer:

    “According to stamps.com the cost of a one ounce first class mail stamp is $0.55 at the Post Office, or $.047 if you buy and print stamps online using stamps.com.”

    Pretty clever, right? I believe there are plenty of savvy ways like this to get your brand and offers into featured snippets.

    10. When did the "People Also Ask" feature first appear? What changes to PAAs do you anticipate in the future?

    

    People Also Ask boxes first appeared in July 2015 as a small-scale test. Their presence in the SERPs grew over 1700% between July 2015 and March 2017, so they certainly exploded in popularity just a few years ago. Funny enough, I was one of the first SEOs to come across Google’s PAA testing — you can read about that stat and more in my original article on the subject: Infinite "People Also Ask" Boxes: Research and SEO Opportunities

    We recently published some great PAA research by Samuel Mangialavori on the Moz Blog, as well: 5 Things You Should Know About "People Also Ask" & How to Take Advantage

    And there are a couple of great articles cataloging the evolution of PAAs over the years here:

    When it comes to predicting the future of PAAs, well, we don't have a crystal ball yet, but featured snippets continue to look more and more like PAA boxes with their new-ish accordion format. Is it possible Google will merge them into a single feature someday? It's hard to say, but as SEOs, our best bet is to maintain flexibility and prepare to roll with the punches the search engines send our way.

    11. Can you explain what you meant by "15% of image URLs are not in organic"?

    Sure thing! The majority of images that show up in featured snippet boxes (or to be more accurate, the webpage those images live on) do not rank organically within the first ten pages of organic search results for the featured snippet query.

    12. How should content creators consider featured snippets when crafting written content? Are there any tools that can help?

    First and foremost, you'll want to consider the searcher

    • What is their intent? 
    • What desired information or content are they after? 
    • Are you providing the desired information in the medium in which they desire it most (video, images, copy, etc)? 

    Look to the current SERPs to determine how you should be providing content to your users. Read all of the results on page one:

    • What common themes do they have? 
    • What topics do they cover? 
    • How can you cover those better?

    Dr. Pete has a fantastic Whiteboard Friday that covers how to write content to win featured snippets. Check it out: How to Write Content for Answers Using the Inverted Pyramid

    


    You might also get some good advice from this classic Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fishkin: How to Appear in Google's Answer Boxes

    13. "Write quality content for people, not search engines" seems like great advice. But should I also be using any APIs or tools to audit my content? 

    The only really helpful tool that comes to mind is the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, but even that can be a bit disruptive to the creative process. The very best tool you might have for reviewing your content might be a real person. I would ensure that your content can be easily understood when read out loud to your targeted audience. It may help to consider whether your content, as a featured snippet, would make for an effective, helpful voice search result.

    14. What's the best way to stay on top of trends when it comes to Google's featured snippets?

    Find publications and tools that resonate, and keep an eye on them. Some of my favorites include:

    1. MozCast to keep a pulse on the Google algorithm
    2. Monitoring tools like STAT (email alerts when you win/lose a snippet? Awesome.)
    3. Cultivating a healthy list of digital marketing heroes to follow on Twitter
    4. Industry news publications like Search Engine Journal and, of course, the Moz Blog ;-)
    5. Subscribing to SEO newsletters like the Moz Top 10

    One of the very best things you can do, though, is performing your own investigative featured snippet research within your space. Publishing the trends you observe helps our entire community grow and learn. 


    Thank you so much to every attendee who submitted their questions. Digging into these follow-up thoughts and ideas is one of the best parts of putting on a presentation. If you've got any lingering questions after the webinar, I would love to hear them — leave me a note in the comments and I'll be on point to answer you. And if you missed the webinar sign-up, you can still access it on-demand whenever you want.

    We also promised you some bonus content, yeah? Here it is — I compiled all of my best tips and tricks for winning featured snippets into a downloadable cheat sheet that I hope is a helpful reference for you:

    Free download: The Featured Snippets Cheat Sheet

    There's no reason you shouldn't be able to win your own snippets when you're armed with data, drive, and a good, solid plan! Hopefully this is a great resource for you to have on hand, either to share around with colleagues or to print out and keep at your desk:

    Grab the cheat sheet

    Again, thank you so much for submitting your questions, and we'll see you in the comments for more.


    Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!



    * This article was originally published here

    Friday 25 October 2019

    Machine Learning 101 - Whiteboard Friday

    Posted by BritneyMuller

    Machine learning is only growing in importance for anyone working in the digital world, but it can often feel like an inaccessible subject. It doesn't have to be — and you don't have to miss out on the competitive edge it can give you when it comes to SEO task automation. Put on your technical SEO cap and get ready to take notes, because Britney Muller is walking us through Machine Learning 101 in this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday.


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

    Video Transcription

    Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today I'm talking about all things machine learning, something, as many of you know, I'm super passionate about and love to talk about. So hopefully, this sparks a seed in some of you to explore it a bit further, because it is truly one of the most powerful things to happen in our space in a very long time. 

    What is machine learning?

    So a brief overview, in a nutshell, machine learning is actually a subset of AI, and some would argue we still haven't really reached artificial intelligence. But it's just one facet of the overall AI. 

    Traditional programming

    The best way to think about it is in comparison to traditional programming. So traditional programming, you input data and a program into a computer and out comes the output, whether that be a web page or calculator you built online, whatever that might be.

    Machine learning


    With machine learning, what you do is you put in the data and the desired output and put this into a computer, and you get a program, otherwise known as a machine learning model. So it's a bit flipped, and it works extremely well. There are two primary types of machine learning:

    1. You have supervised, which is where you're basically feeding a model labeled training data, 
    2. And then unsupervised, which is where you're feeding a program data and letting it create clusters or associations between data points. 

    The supervised is a bit more common. You'll see things like classification, linear regression, and image recognition. Things like that are all very common. If you think about machine learning in terms of, okay, there's all of this data that you're putting into the model, data is the biggest part of machine learning. A lot of people would argue that if machine learning was a vehicle, data would be the fuel.

    It's a really important part to understand, because unless you have the right types of data to feed a model, you're not going to get the desired outcome that you would like. 

    A machine learning model example

    So let's look at an example. If you wanted to build a machine learning model that predicts housing prices, you might have all of this information.

    You might have the current price, square foot of these homes, land, the number of bathrooms, the number of bedrooms, you name it. It goes on and on. These are also known as features. So what a model is going to try to do, when you put in all of this data, it's going to try to understand associations between this information and come up with a model that best predicts home prices in the future.

    The most basic of these machine learning models is linear regression. So if you think about inputting the data where maybe you just put in the price and the square foot, and you can kind of see the data like this. 


    You see that as the square foot goes up, so does the price. A model over time, in looking at this data, is going to start to find the smoothest line through the data to have the most accurate predictions in the future.

    What you don't want it to do is to fit every single data point and have a line that looks like that — that's also known as overfitting — because it doesn't play nice for new data points. You don't want a model to get so calculated to your dataset that it doesn't predict accurately in the future.

    A way to look at that is by the loss function. That's maybe getting a bit deeper in this, but that's how you would measure how the line is being fit. Let's see. 

    What are the machine learning possibilities in SEO?

    So what are some of the possibilities in SEO? How can we leverage machine learning in the SEO space?

    Automate meta descriptions

    So there are couple ways that people are already doing this. You can automate meta descriptions by looking at the page content and using a machine model to summarize the text. So this literally summarizes the content for you and pares it down to a meta description length. Pretty incredible. 

    Automate titles

    You could similarly do this for titles, although I don't suggest you do this for primary pages. This isn't going to be perfect. But if you have a huge, huge website, with hundreds of thousands of pages, it gets you halfway there. It's really interesting to start playing around in that space with these large websites.

    Automate image alt text

    You can also automate alt text for images. We see these models getting really good at understanding what's in an image. 

    Automate 301 redirects

    301 redirects, Paul Shapiro has an incredible write-up and basically process for that already. 

    Automate content creation

    Content creation, and if that scares some of you or if you doubt that these models can currently create content that is decent, I challenge you to go check out Talk to Transformer.

    It is a pared-back version of OpenAI, which was founded by Elon Musk. It's pretty incredible and a little scary as to how good the content is just from that pared back model. So that is for sure possible in the future and even today. 

    Automate product/page suggestions

    In addition to product and page suggestions.

    So this is just going to get better. Imagine us providing content and UX specifically for the unique users that come to our site, highly personalized content, highly personalized experiences. Really exciting stuff moving forward. 

    Resources

    I've got some resources I highly suggest you check out.

    Google Codelabs is one of my favorites, just because it walks you through the steps. So if you go to Google Codelabs, filter by TensorFlow or machine learning, you can see the possible examples there. Colab notebooks or Jupyter notebooks are where you'll likely be doing any of the machine learning that you want to do on your own.

    Kaggle.com is the number one resource for data science competitions. So you get to really see what are the examples, how are people using machine learning today. You'll see things like TSA has put up over $1 million for a data science team to come up with a model that predicts potential threats from security footage.

    This stuff gets really interesting really fast. It's also so important to have diversity and inclusion in this space to avoid really dangerous models in the future. So it's something to definitely think about. 

    TensorFlow is a great resource. It's what Google put out, and it's what a lot of their machine learning models is built off of. They've got a really great JavaScript platform that you can play around with. 

    Andrew Ng has an incredible machine learning course. I highly suggest you check that out. 

    Then Algorithmia is sort of a one-stop shop for models. So if you don't care to dip your toes into machine learning and you just want say a summarizer model or a particular type of model, you could potentially find one there and do a plug-and-play of sorts.

    

    So that's pretty interesting and fun to explore. The last thing is a machine learning model is only as good as the data. I can't express that enough. So a lot of machine learning and data scientists, it's all data cleaning and parsing, and that's the bulk of the work in this field.

    It's important to be aware of that. So that's it for Machine Learning 101. Thank you so much for joining me, and I hope to see you all again soon. Thanks.

    Video transcription by Speechpad.com


    If you enjoyed this episode of Whiteboard Friday, you'll be delighted by all the cutting-edge SEO knowledge you'll get from our newly released MozCon 2019 video bundle. Catch more useful technical tips in Britney's talk, plus 26 additional future-focused topics from our top-notch speakers:

    Grab the sessions now!

    We suggest scheduling a good old-fashioned knowledge share with your colleagues to educate the whole team — after all, who didn't love movie day in school? ;-)


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    * This article was originally published here