Group items tagged

General SEO Tips for Hx Headings Use short and concise H2 through H6 tags. Don’t use other formatting within H tags, e.g. avoid using bold or italics. More importantly, don’t use links inside heading tags.

Older listings are more likely to have place labels. 

If you have an editorial summary, there is a pretty good chance you’ll also get a place label

User engagement is likely a large factor for determining which businesses get a place label.

Listings that had popular times graphs on them (ie: businesses that get a lot of physical store visits) were a lot more likely to have a place label

In Toronto, only 5% of businesses that we looked at had an active Google post.

Professional services (lawyers, dentists etc) are the least likely to have them.

In Toronto, the businesses that had place labels in the 0-3 zoom levels had an average of 8,659 searches a month.  For the businesses that didn’t get a place label, the average was 565.

During this study, we looked at 12 different factors on 395 businesses in 3 different cities.  We purposely chose cities that had varying populations to see how this differed for businesses that had tons of competition.

SERP ownership trackers: are increasingly common. For instance Visably (I have no affiliation but do have a free account, which you could get too) and SERP Sketch (I’ve heard of it but not used it). Rather than just telling you if you’re ranking for a specific keyword, they’ll show you if any of the pages in the top ten results mention your brand. That’s the kind of information you can use to select outreach targets.

However… almost every content piece, video, audio, text, graphical, interactive, or multimedia on every platform that went truly “viral,” nailed this final element: The Sinker.

Here’s the real secret: there is no one Sinker. The Sinker is different for different content consumers. The one memorable line, incredible takeaway, photo you’ll never forget, the way the piece made you feel… For someone else, that wasn’t The Sinker, it was ______________

Your job as creator isn’t to deliver only one of these potential hits, but to strike those chords again and again throughout your content, then remind the reader/viewer/listener at the end.

Even better than attempting to retrofit a struggling piece is applying that energy to a more-worthy, more-success-likely content candidate.

One of the most significant issues is the potential loss of control over search rankings and referral traffic.

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

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.

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.

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.” 

(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.

It’s probably no coincidence that Google announced the addition of “experience” in its search quality raters guidelines shortly after ChatGPT’s launch. 

Besides, expertise will build confidence with the human reading your content, so I would still consider adding: The author’s name. A descriptive bio containing: Their relevant qualifications. Links to their social media profiles. A Person schema with relevant properties for certifications or professions.

Authority can be demonstrated in three core ways:  Establishing a strong content architecture covering all aspects of a particular topic. Earning backlinks from other authoritative sites. Building a digital profile or personal brand as an expert in a particular topic.

Once again, the idea of publishing content that is truly helpful supports Standford’s web credibility guidelines: Make it easy to contact you. Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose). Make your site easy to use – and useful. Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently). Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers). Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.

Although they carry less weight than they used to, backlinks are still an indicator of an authoritative site.

Consider page experience

Show your humans with an About us or Team page

Link to authoritative sources

Build topical clusters

Use internal links

Include different content types

Engage experts

Encourage reviews