mkirchhoff

M Posted 7 years 11 months ago

t 9 min read

Content silos are the second part of a three-part strategy. Explore Part 1 and Part 3 of Michael's in-depth series. When people hear that they need to improve their SEO and content marketing efforts, they often jump feet first into blogging. Unfortunately, without a strong website architecture, the potential impact of blogging is greatly diminished. Countless businesses create a flat website structure, which means that they have their website or blog, but they are not organized based on a clear content hierarchy. Often the blog covers a range of different topics, but there is little organization to the posts. They all have completely unique URLs and they have random internal links that take readers all around the blog, haphazardly crossing topic lines. These links are more for the sake of linking, rather than as a part of a useful SEO strategy to provide structure to the blog and improve comprehension. Google states clearly in its Webmaster Guidelines, “Design your page to have a clear conceptual hierarchy.” The establishment of this type of structure makes it obvious to the search engine your level of expertise in the subject and the depth of the experience you are able to provide for a user seeking answers in this particular area. The best way to fulfill this technical SEO criteria is by developing content silos.

What is a content silo?

Content silo structuring describes a form of technical SEO that helps you organize your material based on relevant content. In a content silo, you will have several layers of material for a particular topic. At the top you will have a more general page that answers a broad question, for example, “What is SEO?” Each layer below that general topic dives more deeply into related subjects. Your “What is SEO?” silo might be divided into “On-Page SEO” and “Off-Page SEO.” On the third level, your “On-Page SEO” might be divided into pages that deal with topics related to keyword research or alt tags, while “Off-Page SEO” will look at topics related to influencer marketing, building backlinks, and social media. A content silo allows you to organize content based upon user needs and search behavior so you can maximize the traffic you capture and your brand reach. You will research the topics that matter the most to your audience and be able to create an organized grouping of content that will explore their topic of interest thoroughly, allowing them to click on different links and learn about related ideas. This will firmly establish your brand as an authority in the field.

The connection between the content silo and the semantic web

The goal of technical SEO is to build a stronger, more efficient site. With content silos, you are able to organize your pages so that users can easily find their way around the domain and learn more about the topics that interest them. Google understands how your site is organized by following internal links, so the silos also help Google see the expertise you have in a particular area. Since the silos help you organize your thoughts and ideas and build categories around topics, you are also able to clearly demonstrate competence in a particular area, which will then help establish your domain authority. It is also important to note that the major Google updates in the past few years, including RankBrain and Hummingbird, have also forced a major shift in emphasis in content development. Prior to these algorithm updates, keywords were the cornerstone of helping Google understand your relevance to a particular topic. RankBrain and Hummingbird, however, are more oriented towards semantic search--the understanding of user intent and context. That means they do not just match keywords in queries to those in text. Instead, the algorithm uses semantics to "understand" text by looking at the language used throughout the material to grasp the meaning and relevance. When you create silos, you will naturally develop text and visuals around the common questions within a particular topic area. Since the content will be connected, Google will be able to "see" that you are an authority on the subject and that your material is highly relevant for the semantic web. A content silo, therefore helps you make your content more appealing to the intent-centered practices of the modern Google algorithm.

How do I use silos in my SEO strategy?

Silo structuring for your content requires breaking down your material into various categories and beginning to rank the pages as the top page for that topic, a secondary page, or a tertiary page. Since these silos are being constructed as part of a technical SEO strategy, however, it is important that you make these categories wisely. Base each category upon search volume, user behavior, and your buyer’s journey--or conversion path. Remember, silos are intended for your visitors first, and are a central part of the UX design. Search engines, and helping them understand the website’s topical and contextual meaning, are the secondary target. Ultimately, the ideal strategy is to closely align your content coverage to high-performing and extremely relevant keyword groupings at each level of the silo. Each topical name should represent a high-performing head-term. The topic will then have a keyword universe that is tightly correlated with the head term and the content coverage found at each level, therefore providing semantically relevant words for the silo. Tools like BrightEdge Data Cube, Google Keyword Planner and BrightEdge Recommendations can make it easy to pinpoint important keywords that can be broken down into the different levels of the silo. You can use the tools to explore the different subtopics that are commonly associated with your main keyword, better understanding the material that users and Google will want to see at each level of the silo. You can use Data Cube, pictured above, to find related keywords that can help you build your silos. Keep in mind that each level of the silo also serves a very specific purpose in the buyer’s journey. Therefore, many of the top-level and secondary pages may serve as aggregators for that topic’s content. Links within the content will encourage people to move further through the buyer’s journey, further engaging with the brand and guiding them closer to conversion. Think of an ecommerce website that sells clothing. One silo may be Women’s Clothing > Jackets > Winter Jackets. Another example may be a blog covering renewable energy, where the silos represent the various types of renewables. For example: Wind Power > Wind Power Projects. As people progress through the silos, they learn more specifically about the organization’s depth of knowledge and what they have to offer about the different subjects. They build their relationship with the brand and eventually get closer to a website conversion. As you begin to organize the content into these categories, you may also find it beneficial to use your URLs to further emphasize your silos. For example, a URL that says yourexample.com/blog/seo/offpage/influencer-marketing will clearly indicate that this is a tertiary level of the silo and that it is a page under the Off-Page heading, which falls under the SEO category of the blog. Structuring your URL this way not only boosts your UX strategy and helps Google to understand your site, but it also makes it easy for people to see where they are in your site and how they can get to other sections they might be interested in reading. Content pages can be located within a specific URL silo, but often content belongs to multiple silos. For example Women’s Red Puffer Jacket could display in silos covering:

• Women’s jackets
• Puffer Jackets
• Red Jackets

Depending on how your site is architected, you could easily end up with duplicate content. Canonicals can help resolve that sort of problem, but it’s better to address it with clean silo architecture. This issue is discussed further in the taxonomy and semantics parts of this series, but here is an overview. There are numerous approaches to solve this problem. One approach is to have the content reside alongside the top level of the taxonomy. In this example, content would display something like this:

https://www.domain.com/content/name-of-my-new-blog-post.html

This solves the problem of potential duplicate content, while also placing the content higher in the website architecture, which provides greater authority. Furthermore, many SEOs agree that having a page closer to the root domain or home page may provide an authority boost. Including the targeted keyword or latent semantic indexing keywords in the URL can increase that boost. Technical SEO should never be neglected. Building a content silo is an effective means of keeping material organized, helping both your readers engage with your site and Google to understand your authority and expertise. Silos make it easy to organize your site with deep structures and a clear content hierarchy. Brands who want to see genuine results from their content production efforts need to work on developing strong silos to maximize the effectiveness of their efforts.  

mkirchhoff

M Posted 7 years 11 months ago

t 9 min read

Michael Kirchhoff, one of BrightEdge's top SEO minds, wrote this series of articles on the semantic web and what it means for SEO. It is one of the best set of advanced SEO content we have, so we updated it and are publishing them again for the community. Be sure to read all three:

1. Semantics and the Future for SEO
2. Content Silo-Value for SEO
3. Taxonomies and Technical SEO and UX Strategy

BrightEdge Marketing Since its birth in 1998, Google has been continually evolving and improving its ability to match users with the websites that answer their needs. The Internet has grown from just over an estimated 17,000 websites in 2000 to well over a billion now. This tremendous growth has put an enormous amount of pressure on Google and the other major search engines to be able to interpret what people are looking for and better understand the value and depth of the websites available. This pressure pushed Google to introduce semantic search into its algorithm.

Beginning with the Knowledge Graph in 2012 and the Hummingbird Update in 2013, Google stopped looking at strings of letters in a sequence and trying to match them to the strings of content on a website. Instead, the algorithm began to understand the ‘meaning’ within the query and on the website.

The search engine was working to understand context and intent and then match the idea that the user was looking for with the best website, rather than just matching the words. While Google has been working on improving its algorithm, there has also been simultaneous growth in the content marketing industry and the number of people who use the Internet when researching products and services.

An estimated 94% of B2B buyers and 81% of customers currently use online research while determining what product they want to purchase. Within the marketing sphere, an estimated 88% of B2B marketers and 76% of B2C marketers use content marketing.

This exponential growth in competition and demand - an estimated 90% of the data available has been produced in the past two years alone - along with the improvement of digital technology has also led to increased expectations on behalf of the search engine users.

People now require sophisticated and user-friendly sites that quickly meet their needs. If you fail in this task, they will just click off and go to the next one on the SERP.

For sites to meet the needs of these users and the modern Google algorithm, we believe that logical organization (taxonomy) and content silos are the key.

This structural system allows you to organize and classify your available content in a way that helps both search engines and users navigate your content and understand the depth of your knowledge on the topic at hand.

Silo Structuring and LSI

Silo structuring ties closely with Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), which has been around for several years. A few notable resources that can introduce you to LSI and the role it plays in site building can be found on SEOBook’s excellent post on LSI or Bruce Clay’s post. In short, and to paraphrase SEOBook, the benefits of LSI and its ties to semantics and silo structuring are the following:

• The LSI system will first record the keywords contained within a document
• It will then record the keywords used throughout the silo
• It will then compare the keywords used in the document with those used throughout the silo
• The documents that contain large amounts of common keywords are considered semantically similar, those that do not are considered semantically different.

There is some debate as to whether or not the major search engines directly use LSI in their algorithms; however based on studies and my personal experience, I believe they do. Regardless, silo structuring and LSI work from the audience perspective. Therefore, the question of, “does Google use LSI?” becomes less significant. When you add the value of silos and content organization to your website and products for improved UX, you have created a meaningful and purpose-driven website that aligns content to the audience. This is what Google has been telling us is the key to success from the beginning. Constructing an efficient silo therefore requires a careful look at your user experience, your content coverage, the linking structure between content and pages in the silo, the keywords used in the silo, and your taxonomy. This is just part 1 of a 3-part series that will break down for you the principles of content silos and how you can use this strategy to boost your click-through rate, conversions, and ranking.

How Google is pushing semantics forward

LSI, the Knowledge Graph and Hummingbird laid the foundation, but Google continues to push the issue of semantics forward, calling on webmasters to conform to improve or maintain their rankings. In 2015 they introduced RankBrain, their first leap into the world of artificial intelligence. The engineers for the search engine aimed to create a system that not only would be able to understand how different concepts were related because of manual inputs, but would actually be able to learn how different concepts relate.

RankBrain was specifically designed to help Google return useful results for the roughly 450 million completely unique queries it receives each day. Shortly after RankBrain, Google stopped participating in the announcement and naming of algorithm updates and encouraged the community to focus on quality and relevance with the implication that RankBrain would be able to recognize and reward that focus.

Learn about the impact of SEO topic clusters.

This push towards semantics has changed the way SEO is done. Now, rather than trying to match the keywords and vocabulary that your targeted audience is using, you want to match to the topics that they are asking about. Suddenly, related vocabulary terms are not only relevant but often important as a way to demonstrate your depth.

Establishing silos on your site takes a little effort, but it will prepare you for the changes Google continues to make to the algorithm. Each section of this series will help you understand the topic on a deeper level and will make it easier to understand how to build your silos yourself.

Here is what we will cover in each section the this blog series. Look for future posts.

Part 2 - Technical SEO and Content Strategy

In this part, we will explore how semantic search helps Google understand your site organization and how site silos influence Google’s idea of your domain authority and competence. As you create your content silos, you will also work on aligning each step to the buyer’s journey and a keyword group. Here we will explore the value of using technical SEO as a part of your overall authority and why it can help influence your rank. Read Part 2

Part 3 - Creating a UX and SEO-Based Taxonomy

In part 3 we will dive deeply into the taxonomy - your classification categories - of your project. We will see how you can use your terms to align your content and then manage your created system. You will look at how to do a taxonomy markup and how create a system that works specifically for your needs. Learn more about SEO technology in the BrightEdge platform.

Read Part 3 Login to the BrightEdge platform to get started today, or request a demo to learn more. 

maspillera

M Posted 7 years 11 months ago

t 9 min read

Among all digital marketing goals the most important one is simple: to help grow business. Accomplishing that is where it gets complicated. Here's an introduction on how to get the internal buy-in and resources that you will need.

Content is the fuel that powers meaningful growth, capturing every relevant moment in search with an engaging and convincing story. If content is fuel, then your website is the engine that needs to be maintained and optimized continually. There’s no sense in pouring in more fuel, expecting phenomenal results, if the engine is leaking oil. We know that every organization is different, and every website is different. It follows that every web team is different too. That said, there are a couple of common traits we see in the community:

• A backlog of projects that could keep you busy for weeks, if not longer
• Limited resources to take actions on the items on your backlog
• Having to collaborate with other specialists, like designers and web developers to accomplish many of your longer-term goals

Therefore, more often than not, many website enhancements can’t be done by a website owner working alone. Significant enhancement projects, like new interactive site features, new page templates, or overhauling information infrastructure, typically require help from web developers. This is an issue near and dear to our hearts. Therefore, BrightEdge put together some of our best practices on how to get the buy-in and resources you need to accomplish your website enhancement projects.

Types of website projects

Not all website projects are created equally. Most of the time you can categorize web projects into two broad categories:

1. Bugs
2. Enhancements

Bugs

Bugs are generally any kind of broken or inoperable feature, element, or experience on your site. A drop-down menu that doesn’t render properly in Chrome on mobile devices is an example. Hyperlinks that 404 and buttons that don’t work are also good examples. The turnaround time on bugs is typically (and ideally) short, and the priority for getting them resolved is very high for both the business as well as engineering sides of the aisle. Just about anyone can report a bug, including end users of your site and not just people within your organization.

Enhancements

In contrast to bugs, site enhancements are projects that drive growth for the website and provide new experiences and functions for visitors. These can be things, like new page templates, full site redesigns, and more. Generally though, the level of complexity is much higher than it would be for a simple bug fix and requires a greater amount of resource investment. Because the complexity level varies so much, the delivery time can differ considerably from project to project. Since the necessity of site enhancement projects isn’t always as self-evident as it is for bug fixes, it’s often the web owner’s responsibility to communicate business value to stakeholders and any other involved parties.

Discovering web project opportunities

It’s hard to get buy-in on your projects if you don’t have a prioritized backlog of proposed projects you can point to and articulate the business value of each. Modules like ContentIQ can help you to evaluate your website as it exists today and identify areas of improvement or potential growth. It gets overwhelming very quickly when grooming the website to identify site errors. A sensible way to prioritize these site errors is as follows.

1. First, fix site-wide performance issues
2. Then identify key pages, measured by revenue, conversion or website traffic contribution, to fix or enhance first
3. Fix severe errors on key pages

Secure commitment

Once you’ve built your backlog of web projects, the next step is to secure resources commitment from your web development team. While many web owners have some degree of technical proficiency in HTML, JavaScript, etc., the reality is that few have the skill level or free time necessary to simply build out, say, a new web page template on their own, much less lay out the wireframes and mocks on their own. We need to collaborate to achieve our digital marketing goals. Sometimes this is easier said than done. Web developers don’t just exist to execute on the enhancement projects that are brought forward by a marketing manager. They have their own set of responsibilities that have to be balanced against, most of which focus around minimizing turnaround time on bugs and working together with a DevOps team to maintain site integrity and uptime. Here is a quick illustration of the “mismatched worlds” of the web developer and you, the web marketing lead.

User stories

A big asset in securing commitment is the user story. The term “user story” is used in Agile development models, but is just a term for the master sheet that catalogs all the information a web developer needs to estimate the scope of a project and proceed with development. Ideally, a user story should also be a reliable reference guide for a QA team when testing proper functionality and for any prospective audience within the organization to read and have an understanding of the ask and its business rationale. Web owners should develop their skill in creating this kind of documentation for their web enhancement projects. The format and layout of these documents can vary based on the organization and team structure, but typically include the following elements:

• Detailed breakdown of features and intended functions of each
• Business rationale for the project
• Criteria for what elements need to be in place for the project to be considered in a “completed” state
• Digital marketing goals: The metrics you’ll be measuring
• All related content and design materials

Implement

A web owner’s job doesn’t end once a project gets greenlit. Complications can and will arise, and an effective web owner will take the initiative to clear blockers and make sure that their team is equipped with everything it needs to succeed. A common source of blockers is not having all of the necessary materials on hand before development begins. Depending on the project requirements, it’s a good practice to make sure that everything is in order and aggregated in the user story before making the handoff to the web developer(s) to begin their work. Below is an example flowchart depicting the kinds of materials everyone involved in an enhancement project would be responsible for. While the web owner’s responsibility is to make sure that all of those materials flow down to them to incorporate into the user story before developer handoff, this chart highlights the importance to “teaching to fish” - inform your content owners about the full workflows and the importance for them to drive their own project assets to completion before throwing the project over the fence to you. One of the common misunderstanding is unfinished copy deck for the new web page. The reality is: if the copy deck is not completed, the design of the new web page might not look right after it is coded.  

Measure

Any web owner knows that an enhancement project doesn’t end with a “Mission Accomplished!” when the work is deployed on the website. Marketers measure success through impact, and a major part of the documentation any web enhancement project is detailing the KPIs you will evaluate. Having this in place from the get-go makes it much easier to track progress towards your digital marketing goals. Monitor impact closely and run analyses comparing post-deployment KPIs to pre-deployment numbers (normalizing the time measures being compared). Additionally, deploy tracking features like page visitor heatmaps, clickpath mapping, and conversion goals to evaluate whether your new features are driving the kinds of user behavior you want.

Provide feedback, share wins

This is one of the easiest steps to overlook, but also one of the most important to ensure ongoing successes in your job. Obviously, it’s important to communicate when accomplishment of digital marketing goals vertically to stakeholders, superiors, and subordinates, but it’s just as beneficial to share successes -- such as any of the metrics in the infographic above -- to keep developers in the loop on the business impact of their work and build morale. All of this helps to encourage enthusiasm and future collaboration down the line. You should also take the initiative to share your feedback and get feedback from other team members. Conducting retrospective meetings to compare notes on what went well and what could be improved next time around is an essential part of the Scrum development framework and can be beneficial in virtually any kind of team structure. For an in-depth walkthrough of this 5-step process, be sure to view Launching Site Enhancements That Yield High ROI, part of our Elevating SEO webinar series.

maspillera

M Posted 7 years 12 months ago

t 9 min read

Google announced this week that it launched a new way of displaying additional search results on the mobile SERP, the More Results button, effectively removing pagination. How does this impact your site?

According to a tweet from Google's SearchLiason Twitter account, secondary organic search results will now be displayed differently on mobile. Upon reaching the bottom of the SERP and clicking "More Results" the SERP will now extend down to present more results that the user can scroll down to. The stated goal of this change is to speed up the way users view more search results by eliminating the step of navigating to a new page of search results. The tweet from Danny Sullivan, along with an animated example of the new More Results button:

We've launched a new “More results” button that makes it easier & faster to get more search results on mobile. Now additional listings load below the ones already being viewed, rather than the old "Next" button that would load an entirely new page.... pic.twitter.com/A4ZMXFlwd0

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 11, 2018

By removing pagination from mobile SERPs, users now more or less see organic search results as a single, ever-expanding results page, a format that seems more compatible with touchscreen scrolling behavior.

Does "More Results" affect SEO strategy?

It's a given that mobile SEO is highly important. We know that 57% of all online traffic now comes from mobile and saw previously that 79% of keywords rank differently on mobile vs. desktop. On top of that, Google has made it clear that the mobile-first index is happening this year. That said, it doesn't seem likely that this will have an outsized on effect on mobile SEO strategy. The switchover to the More Results button affects search results that would have appeared on Page 2 and lower. You can argue that since click-through rate for Organic listings tends to be far higher for Positions 1-5 with a steep drop-off for everything below that range, the potential impact of a SERP change that only affects Page 2+ is small. As such the overall effect of being in Rank 20 doesn't change regardless of whether that rank is on Page 2 or the first batch of listings after a More Results click. Also, as of 2016 a full 20% of Google search queries on mobile were conducted via Voice. Many of these searches, depending on the query, bypass the SERP experience entirely, and it's a fair assumption that the percentage of mobile voice queries will increase as the technology continues to become more common. You could argue that abandoning paginated results on mobile has a chance of increasing user engagement with longtail search results as moving to a behavior that's more intuitive for touchscreen interactions may make users more likely to move further down the SERP on their devices. This is something that BrightEdge will be keeping an eye on for the community. Google suggested one other potential impact in the second half of its statement: "As for ads, the button will load more organic results first, then ads when relevant underneath those." This seems to open up the possibility of appearing in paid listings much further down the SERP, though there currently isn't any indication of whether these additional ads can be targeted specifically or how that would be rendered in the AdWords interface.

Don't overreact

Google has been testing the More Results button since last month. The general rollout of the feature would suggest that the test ended in favor of the experiment or change. Despite that, Google is constantly measuring and evaluating the performance of all of its features. It's not outside the realm of possibility that the More Results button could somehow change or be replaced with another feature down the line. Google's main objective is providing the optimal user experience, and search results pages can and will change on a rolling basis in pursuit that goal. On the SERP, nothing is set in stone. It should also be noted that as of the publishing of this post, the More Results button is live on all mobile browsers except for Chrome on iOS. Request a demo to learn more about BrightEdge.