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Using the information from your content analysis, create an SEO outline, and have your company’s SMEs fill it out. This provides the trustworthy content you need, while still giving you control over how the content is written

t is perfectly acceptable to include trustworthy research from other sites. Outbound links can help users find out more about a topic and allow them to check your sources.

Can I measure traffic from Popular Products?

Google included the example that user reviews are helpful for an online store, but not as much for a medical information website.

user reviews may be more important for sites that deal with customers than with medical (or other YMYL) websites, whose E-A-T may be calculated differently.

the existing Google My Business web experience will transition to primarily support larger businesses with multiple locations, and will be renamed “Business Profile Manager.”

new features include: Claim and verify your Google Business Profile directly in Google Search and Google MapsCall History is officially launching in US and Canada (more details here)Messaging can be done directly from Google Search (more details here)Message read receipts can be controlled in Google Search and Maps

How do you manage your business. You can either just search for your business name in Google Search or Google Maps for businesses or search for “my business” in Google Search to see the business you have already claimed and verified.

For now, the web interface is not changing much, outside of branding, but over the coming months, you can expect more and more of the features in the old Google My Business web interface will work directly in Google Search, Google Maps and the respective apps.

Among the tools that do city-specific checking are AccuRanker and Ahrefs.SEMrush and Whitespark include only a limited set of cities/countries. So they will only work for you if your target location is on the list.

My personal favorite in this category is BrightLocal – for their nicely formatted reports and easy-to-use interface.

How to Check the SERPs for a Specific Street Address

Set up Custom Latitude & Longitude in Chrome

Use the Valentin App

There are only two tools I know of that let you automate street address rank checking. However, they do the job in quite a different manner.

2. Use Local FalconLocal Falcon is my absolute favorite among all the new SEO tools to emerge in 2018. The app has a brilliant idea behind it – to visualize how your business ranks on Google Maps in the area surrounding it.

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

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.

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.

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 answerElaborate further in the article

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 blogA more specific search query becomes the title of the articleEven more specific queries determine the subheadings of the article and thus define its structureThere 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:

5. Make sure to use eye-grabbing images

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.

This should make it easier for you to understand errors in Search Console reports and thus which items to prioritize over others

Technical Guidelines for Article Links There are two technical requirements that are recommended by Google in order to be featured in Discover feeds, listed below. These recommendations apply only to the ‘Article Link’ content types. These technical guidelines do not apply to YouTube videos or shorts, web stories or Ads.

Images are a major part of the Google Discover experience

RSS Feeds

Follow Feature

quality of its content

Provide content that's timely for current interests, tells a story well, or provides unique insights

The “shelf life” of an article within a Google Discover feed may only be 1 or 2 days.

According to a Search Engine Journal study, 46% of a sample size of Google Discover URLs were news sites and 44% were Ecommerce.

It's important to note that impressions are only counted when a link from your site is scrolled into view.

By reading this, you’ll learn:  What an entity is and why it’s important. The history of semantic search. How to identify and use entities in the SERP. How to use entities to rank web content.

Examples of entities

Perhaps the best example of entities in the SERP is intent clusters. The more a topic is understood, the more these search features emerge

What is an entity? An entity is a uniquely identifiable object or thing characterized by its name(s), type(s), attributes, and relationships to other entities. An entity is only considered to exist when it exists in an entity catalog.  Entity catalogs assign a unique ID to each entity. My agency has programmatic solutions that use the unique ID associated with each entity (services, products, and brands are all included). If a word or phrase is not inside an existing catalog, it does not mean that the word or phrase is not an entity, but you can typically know whether something is an entity by its existence in the catalog.

concepts and ideas are entities

Schema is one of my favorite ways of disambiguating content. You are linking entities in your blog to knowledge repositories. Balog says:  “[L]inking entities in unstructured text to a structured knowledge repository can greatly empower users in their information consumption activities.” 

That brings us to the current search system. Google went from 570 million entities and 18 billion facts to 800 billion facts and 8 billion entities in less than 10 years. As this number grows, entity search improves.

How to optimize for entities What follows are key considerations when optimizing entities for search: The inclusion of semantically related words on a page. Word and phrase frequency on a page. The organization of concepts on a page. Including unstructured data, semi-structured data, and structured data on a page. Subject-Predicate-Object Pairs (SPO). Web documents on a site that function as pages of a book. Organization of web documents on a website. Include concepts on a web document that are known features of entities.

We know this, so how can we optimize for it?  Your documents should contain as many search intent variations as possible. Your website should contain every search intent variation for your cluster. Clustering relies on three types of similarity:  Lexical similarity.  Semantic similarity. Click similarity.

More could be said about schema, but suffice it to say schema is an incredible tool for SEOs looking to make page content clear to search engines.

(Remember, Google wants to understand the hierarchy of the content, which is why H1–H6 is important.)

Balog writes:  “We wish to help editors stay on top of changes by automatically identifying content (news articles, blog posts, etc.) that may imply modifications to the KB entries of a certain set of entities of interest (i.e., entities that a given editor is responsible for).” Anyone that improves knowledge bases, entity recognition, and crawlability of information will get Google’s love.  Changes made in the knowledge repository can be traced back to the document as the original source.  If you provide content that covers the topic and you add a level of depth that is rare or new, Google can identify if your document added that unique information. Eventually, this new information sustained over a period of time could lead to your website becoming an authority. This isn’t an authoritativeness based on domain rating but topical coverage, which I believe is far more valuable. With the entity approach to SEO, you aren’t limited to targeting keywords with search volume. All you need to do is to validate the head term (“fly fishing rods,” for example), and then you can focus on targeting search intent variations based on good ole fashion human thinking.

We begin with Wikipedia. For the example of fly fishing, we can see that, at a minimum, the following concepts should be covered on a fishing website: Fish species, history, origins, development, technological improvements, expansion, methods of fly fishing, casting, spey casting, fly fishing for trout, techniques for fly fishing, fishing in cold water, dry fly trout fishing, nymphing for trout, still water trout fishing, playing trout, releasing trout, saltwater fly fishing, tackle, artificial flies, and knots. The topics above came from the fly fishing Wikipedia page. While this page provides a great overview of topics, I like to add additional topic ideas that come from semantically related topics.  For the topic “fish,” we can add several additional topics, including etymology, evolution, anatomy and physiology, fish communication, fish diseases, conservation, and importance to humans.  Has anyone linked the anatomy of trout to the effectiveness of certain fishing techniques? Has a single fishing website covered all fish varieties while linking the types of fishing techniques, rods, and bait to each fish?  By now, you should be able to see how the topic expansion can grow. Keep this in mind when planning a content campaign. Don’t just rehash. Add value. Be unique. Use the algorithms mentioned in this article as your guide. Conclusion This article is part of a series of articles focused on entities. In the next article, I’ll dive deeper into the optimization efforts around entities and some entity-focused tools on the market.