gregalbuto

M Posted 5 years 1 month ago

t 9 min read

In October 2019, Google released its newest and largest algorithm update since RankBrain – BERT. So, what exactly is BERT and does it matter to your SEO?

BERT – Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers – is a neural network-based technique for natural language processing and has the ability to better understand the full context of your query by looking at all of the words in your search. Google built new software and hardware to make this update happen to better serve your search results and delve deeper into the relevant information you’re seeking.

Google said, “With the latest advancements from our research team in the science of language understanding–made possible by machine learning–we’re making a significant improvement to how we understand queries, representing the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.”

The search giant understood that through the billions of searches they received every day, people were searching for queries they wouldn’t normally ask for; say – in a day-to-day conversation. Rather, people were gearing their questions to what they thought Google would understand best. With BERT, you now have the ability to search in a way that feels natural to you instead of searching in a way you think Google, or a robot, will understand best.

For conversational queries and long-tail keywords, where prepositions like “for” and “to” are influential words, Google – or rather, BERT – will be able to understand the context of the words in your search. BERT models have the ability to perceive that a word as simple as “to” matters a great deal.

Google systems were previously matching search terms with keywords found on a page but BERT models understand words in different use cases. For example, Google tested and tested before releasing BERT and discovered searching “do estheticians stand a lot at work” matched to a page with “stand-alone” in the copy, simply because the word “stand” was present. The SERP wasn’t relevant to the query. BERT now recognizes “stand” was being used in a different context.

So, does the Google BERT update impact your SEO? You shouldn’t have seen too much of a shift in SEO changes while BERT rolled out like you would have in previous Google algorithm updates. Danny Sullivan of Google has said not to optimize for BERT. Continue creating content and optimizing for people and their natural queries.

BERT models are applied to rank and will impact featured snippets Google says, “BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over times.”

The aftermath of BERT

After BERT was released, B2C companies, including AT&T, noticed that high volume head terms helped their rankings. Though, they weren’t ranking for solutions pages anymore but rather, for informational pages. Because of this, BERT altered content strategy for digital marketers. Instead of creating content around selling a consumer, digital marketers must first and foremost define the searched topic.

BERT is designed to determine what exactly the user is asking for so that Google can serve a searcher with the most relevant results pages. Below you can see different search use cases for the keyword “rose.” “What is a rose” turned up results pages for what a rose flower is. Here, Google used natural language processing and assumed that this search was requesting general information on what a rose is.

Then, you can see “what is rose” resulted in information on the pink wine Rosé. Here, Google assumed a search for the wine and offered insights through the entirety of page one about the pink colored wine, how it’s made, where it originated from, why it recently became so popular and more.

Below you can see “define rose” resulted in several different results pages. Rose is not only a flower, a type of wine and a name, but it’s also a verb. The “define rose” search wasn’t as certain as the ones above and offers multiple definitions for “rose" to answer a range of possibilities for the search.

Tracking BERT changes

It’s difficult to track whether or not BERT impacted your site ranks, but it’s possible to see how it continues to change your ranking content over time.

Data Cube offers monthly documentation to report on shifts in keyword rankings. You can track keywords in Keyword Reporting week-over-week to determine which keywords rank for your pages. There, you can see the content performing and what type of content your site is ranking for. Is it what is, who is, how is content? If you’re ranking for glossary and FAQ pages, strategize a content plan around even more informational content for your site.

gregalbuto

M Posted 5 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

A brand marketing strategy encompasses everything from your color scheme and logo to the interactions and experiences consumers have with your brand, your products and your services. Your brand strategy should plan for every step in the customer journey that your customers will take while interacting with your website, your social media, an in-person experience, an experience with a customer service representative, etc. 

While building the elements of your brand marketing strategy, ask yourself the following questions.

• Who is our audience?
• What are our brand values?
• What promises do we intend to make and keep to consumers?
• What personality or tone does our brand have?
• Where should our brand be sold or promoted?

Brand strategy must-haves

1. A why? What is your brand’s purpose? Are you hoping to make life easier for consumers? Are you going to be part of some of the biggest moments in a consumer’s life? Develop what your ‘why’ is and maintain it through all channels and content.
2. A voice. What type of personality do you want your brand to have? Are you educational and formal, empowering, fun or something else? Use this voice through all company facets including email, social media, in-person or tele engagement, internal communication, etc.
3. Consistency. When a consumer comes across your brand via social media, their experience should be the same as when they encounter a customer service rep. Maintain consistent experiences through all communication channels.
4. Emotion. Most brands have the ability to connect with consumers on an emotional level. By identifying a connection, you can leverage a consumer’s emotions to build a stronger connection and trust.
5. Be relatable. Being a relatable brand will help you build trusting relationships with consumers. Use likeable visuals that speak to more than just your brand, respond to consumer reviews, highlight your company ‘why’ and share real stories on how your brand came to be.
6. A logo. Your logo will be one of the most important visualizations for your brand. Coca Cola, Starbucks, Nike, Apple and McDonald’s are some of the most well-known, recognized brand logos in the world. Make your logo as unforgettable as these
7. Design and marketing assets. You’re going to need an arsenal of assets. Print, media, fonts, color schemes, email banners, internal documents and more. 

Include a social media marketing strategy in your plan

Social media is constantly evolving. Initially, it was a way for people to interact with their friends and family. Today, it’s a common way to receive news, information and networking interactions. For brands, it’s becoming the primary place to interact with consumers, showcase products or features and much more. Because of this, it’s a great idea to have a social media brand strategy as part of your overall brand strategy. 

Take the following steps to ensure a solid social media marketing strategy.

1. Set goals. Do you want to grow your following? Are you hoping to generate a percentage of sales or leads through social media? Whatever your goals may be, start planning by mapping out exactly what they are. Knowing that they can evolve throughout the year as well. If you’re not meeting goals, regroup and rethink your strategy.
2. Know your audience. This is important to your overall brand strategy, but really narrow it down for social media. Use relevant hashtags and follow accounts that relate back to your brand. Consider collaboration efforts with other likeminded brands to attract their followers as well. This is essentially the “backlink” of social media.
3. Create a social media content calendar. There are going to be reasons to create posts on the fly like a new product release or an unforeseen pandemic like COVID-19 but for the most part, you should be posting planned posts regularly. 
4. Create an influencer strategy. Aimlessly choosing influencers to drive brand awareness isn’t going to cut it. In order to maintain both a successful partnership and successful brand promotion, you’ll need to choose influencers in your industry. You can easily find them through social media platforms by searching relevant hashtags.
5. Research seasonality. BrightEdge Instant offers keyword research capabilities for you to find keywords and their search trends. Below you can see the volatility of certain keywords throughout the year. Plan the most relevant social posts for your brand at the most opportune times to make a sale.

A brand marketing strategy is important to the overall health of your brand. That includes awareness, consumer relationships, recognition, how you handle hardships or company hiccups, etc. Developing a brand strategy your audience can get behind is key. Keep your strategy and brand in mind throughout all campaigns, posts and consumer interactions.

brolapp

M Posted 5 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

What is the Google Page Experience Update?

This will be a major update to the Google algorithm that will bring a wide variety of metrics known as Core Web Vitals together to form a page experience ranking factor. It’s slated to occur in May of 2021, so you have some time to address any changes that need to be made to your site.

DOWNLOAD THE FREE CORE WEB VITALS WEBINAR

How is this different?

Google rarely announces algorithm updates before they’re released, so this will have a significant impact on how Google ranks websites. The impact on individual websites may be minimal, especially for industries that have already prioritized page load times and quality UX, but may be significant to niche ecommerce websites, news blogs and more with outdated user experiences.

Google is continuing their charge of improving mobile web performance here. Starting with the shift to https (helping to remove the stigma surrounding purchasing on unsecure networks) and then the change to mobile-first indexing, Google has made it clear that mobile search is the future. Now, through rewarding fast loading sites, Google is laying out the roadmap for successful online businesses and websites.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals, are three metrics that score a user's experience loading a webpage. These metrics score how quickly page content loads, how quickly a browser loading a webpage can respond to a user's input, and how unstable the content is as it loads in the browser. These three metrics are going to be bundled alongside Mobile Friendliness, Safe Browsing, HTTPS and Intrusive Interstitials into a signal Google is calling the "Page Experience Signal".

LCP – Largest Contentful Paint

This is simply put as the point in which a page’s main content has loaded. You may have heard your Dev Team or an SEO mention things like the DOM or DOMContentLoad in the past. That’s similar, but Google is claiming that this is a simpler measurement that looks at the render time of the largest visible image or text block.

So, in other words, if you have a large image on your site, or a video background that takes a long time to load, you’re in trouble.

Likewise if you have a large amount of render-blocking JS or CSS (another favorite SEO & Dev topic), or your site is setup with client-side rendering, you’ll likely have to spend some time in the next few months improving your LCP to better meet Google’s new guidelines.

CLS - Cumulative Layout Shift

Have you ever been on a website when the entire content shifted up or down? Sometimes more than one element shifted or shifted multiple times. Almost as if the layout shifted each time something loaded on the page and it all added up to a bunch of shifting in a, more or less, cumulative manner…

Yeah, you guessed it, this is finally being flagged as a terrible user experience.

The Google web.dev group shared this fantastic video that highlights this experience:

Captured so perfectly…

So, how do we understand and address this issue? Basically, resources and content are being loaded to the page after and above existing content. Maybe you have an image that’s too large and you’ve chosen to defer it to after critical content is loaded. Maybe there’s an ad that pushes down content after you’ve loaded everything else on your page. Maybe there’s a sidebar widget that pushes the main article to the right.

All of these are examples of layout instability that count towards a Cumulative Layout Shift, which is a measured by a score based on the sum of all the unexpected layout shifts.

FID - First Input Delay

When we load webpages in a browser, as users we usually have an expectation that the second we see a visual element, like a button, an image, or a scroll bar, load on the screen that the page is immediately ready to receive my input. This expectation is that we can click the button or scroll down the page, even if the page still appears to be loading.

We find it frustrating when our experience does not meet that expectation and a page does not begin to respond to our actions.

The reality is that often the browser can’t respond because it is busy parsing a large JavaScript that controls an on-page function. While the browser is loading this file, it does not have the necessary resources to run event listeners that would respond the user’s input.

First input delay (FID) helps quantify this user frustration into a user-centric metric. It is important to note that FID does not measure the event processing time or the time it takes to render changes to page layout or content, only the delay in processing the event initiated by the user.

In the above example, which can be found at  https://web.dev/fid/, we can see a solid example of FID measurement. In this scenario, a user has begun loading the page. As the page content load and begins to render the browser’s main thread is busy running tasks like loading a JavaScript file.

The page has already begun to load visual elements, and the user sees something of interest and tries to interact with the page. Since the main thread is already actively engaged in other tasks, it has to delay acting on the user’s input until the current task is completed. The time between when the user tried to engage with the page and when the browser can actually respond to that user’s input is FID.

Evaluating your Core Web Vitals

Now that we know all about the Core Web Vitals, how do we find out where our pages stand? Thankfully, there are a few ways to analyze your site.

Using Google Search Console is the easiest way to address multiple pages on a large site. GSC has a section under Enhancements in the main navigation where you can see the number of pages on your site affected by each Core Web Vital.

After clicking through to this section, you’ll see a report for each Core Web Vital issue where your site may be struggling.

As you can see in the example below, the brightedge.com site has a minor issue with CLS. 5 of our pages have a CLS issue. I’ve highlighted how to best read this report:

1. The issue and guideline, in this case CLS greater than .25
2. The number of pages on your site that are affected by this particular Core Web Vital
3. An example page where this issue is occurring. This is a key differentiator between this report and other GSC reports. The Core Web Vitals reports won’t show you every page you need to fix. Frankly, that would be a slow and painful way to address all the Web Vital issues as you’re likely going to need fix things on a templated level to fix more than one page at a time.
4. A list of up to 20 similar pages where this issue is happening. Each example URL will show you some similar pages. Google is using this method to highlight where the same issues found on your example page are found on other pages throughout your site. For example, if you have an issue on your /blog/ and the same issue is happening on pages in your /press-releases/ section, you’ll only see the one of those in the example urls, but the other will show up in example details. This should suggest to you that more pages in /press-releases/ will need the same fix.

Fixing your Core Web Vitals

Now that you better understand what each Core Web Vitals metric is measuring and how they represent pain points for your audiences trying to access your content and engage with your brands, it is time to take action to improve these metrics – but more importantly, improve your engagement with your audience.

Each site is going to be somewhat unique. It would be rare for two separate sites to suffer from exactly the same issues – so it’s important to really dig into and analyze your domains individually to prioritize updates that will be the most beneficial.

Of course, there are more common issues websites face, and subsequently we can point to common fixes for issues that you may face.

Common activities to address LCP

• Apply instant loading with the PRPL pattern
• Optimizing your Critical Rendering Path
• Optimize CSS files
• Optimize image file sizes and compression
• Optimize or remove web fonts
• Optimize or reduce your JavaScript (for client-rendered sites)

Common activities to address FID

• Reduce the impact of third-party code
• Reduce JavaScript execution time
• Minimize main thread work
• Keep request counts low and transfer sizes small

Common activities to address CLS

• Include the size attributes on your images and video elements or reserve the space with CSS aspect ratio boxes
• Never insert content above existing content, except in response to a user interaction
• Use transform animations instead of animations of properties that force layout changes