Posted by Alex-T

SEO and SMM are like pizza and cheese: you can get one without the other, but, believe me, it isn’t worth it.

Nowadays SEO cannot be effective without well-executed content curation. And that’s where social media kicks in — it helps you unlock untapped potential. Compared to other marketing channels, social media benefits SEO in unexpected ways. It’s not surprising that SEO and SMM have slowly become closely intertwined activities that all businesses want to take advantage of. But how exactly can SEO and SMM work together? Do social media signals affect your site’s visibility in Google? I’ve been investigating this topic for quite a long time and here’s what I’ve learned so far:

1. Social media signals don’t influence site rankings
2. SEO isn’t effective without harnessing social media channels

In this post, I want to highlight the following idea: When you share content on SMM channels you’re not only getting engagement, but also bringing visitors to your site. This in turn helps you boost your site’s visibility: SMM corresponds to SEO and indirectly influences website performance in Google. My analysis shows that SMM impacts SEO much more than you might think. The truth is that, paradoxically, organic channels bring more traffic to SMM-focused blogs than to SEO-focused ones.

Data and methods

To conduct my research, I included in my sample 10 well-known blogs.

Five blogs that specialize in search marketing:

• searchengineland.com
• marketingland.com
• searchenginejournal.com
• searchenginewatch.com
• seroundtable.com

And five blogs that focus on SMM:

• socialmediaexaminer.com
• blog.bufferapp.com
• razorsocial.com
• simplymeasured.com
• socialmediatoday.com

During all stages of my research, I also used the following tools:

1. Ahrefs – for examining sites’ backlinks profiles
2. Rival IQ – for analyzing the communities of these well-known resources
3. SimilarWeb – for figuring out from which channels the resources get their traffic.

Without further ado, let’s begin our analysis!

How effectively do SMM blogs trigger user engagement?

First, I went to SimilarWeb to learn which sources drove traffic to these sites in order to determine “winners” and “losers.” I expected that social media-focused blogs would perform much better when it comes to SMM traffic compared to SEO blogs. It sounds reasonable that SMM blogs know better than others how to attract and build relevant communities on social media and then convert them into loyal readers.

Below you can find a graph that represents the distribution of SMM traffic across all the resources studied:

The absolute winner is socialmediatoday.com with 2.6 times more visitors from social media channels compared to seroundtable.com, which follows it. It’s also worth mentioning that the other two leaders are blogs that are not from the SMM niche: seroundtable.com (11.63 percent of traffic coming from SMM channels) and searchenginejournal.com (10.75 percent).

The top three sites that are leading in organic traffic are all SMM-focused blogs that get more visitors from organic results than social media sites. This data supports my assertion about the role of SMM in the SEO process that I mentioned in the first part of this article:

Blog.bufferapp.com, razorsocial.com, and socialmediaexaminer.com received 5 times more organic traffic compared to social media traffic. And the main reason is because users interact with content shared on social media channels.

From examining my own clients’ Twitter and Facebook analytics insights, it’s clear that users are more likely to like or share content rather than click on it. To earn a sufficient number of visitors from social media sources, you need to keep a close eye on what kind of posts not only engage users, but also get clicks. And if your goal is to drive traffic, then you need to focus on writing engaging tweets that will make your followers want to click on them. At the very least, you have to make sure that you actually include a link in your post. Because — let’s face it — we’ve all forgotten to share a link in our tweet at least once.

Speaking of search marketing blogs in organic results, they’re also performing nearly the same as SMM blogs:

• searchenginewatch.com – 55.27 percent;
• searchenginejournal.com – 55.2 percent.

After learning how much traffic those blogs received from social media channels, I was quite keen on finding out exactly how they attract visitors. In particular, I was interested in whether the virality of content, as well as the engagement of particular SMM sites, influence the number of visitors these sites get from those traffic channels. Ideally, if users are actively sharing your content on Twitter, Facebook, etc., then it should bring users to your site. Due to the difficulty of collecting data, I was forced to narrow down the list of SMM sites and focus on analyzing how well content performs on Facebook and Twitter.

In order to measure the virality of the content on those blogs and the engagement these blogs receive on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, I took the following steps:

1. I took from SimilarWeb the number of visitors (i.e., traffic from Facebook and Twitter)
2. I analyzed engagement with the help of Rival IQ

Site Name	Traffic from Twitter	Engagement on Twitter	Engagement on Facebook	Traffic from Facebook
searchengineland.com	400	15100	8170	912
marketingland.com	585	8640	3370	139
searchenginejournal.com	180	4760	8170	585
seroundtable.com	5	509	2160	216
searchenginewatch.com	100	7550	417	20
socialmediaexaminer.com	3180	23700	19900	3780
blog.bufferapp.com	329	38900	8530	107
simplymeasured.com	324	8250	159	54
razorsocial.com	492	1910	558	495
socialmediatoday.com	8213	71500	34000	3440

As we can see from the table above, SMM websites are leading not only in levels of engagement, but also in traffic. Therefore, websites that successfully build and share content also receive the highest volume of traffic.

However, it is important to have relevant, active users following your social accounts. And you can always evaluate them with the help of Rival IQ, which helps you measure your audience’s engagement. Yet engagement on its own is a very vague measurement, should you need to understand how much traffic you can receive from your social media accounts. For the next step of my research, I was interested in discovering how many interactions you need, on average, to get your followers to click a link.

Based on the numbers from the table above, I found out that, on average, for every 40 interactions, you will only get one click (in case of an SEO community). Despite the fact that SMM communities usually have more subscribers than SEO communities, it’s even harder for SMM communities to get clicks: one click occurs for every 80 interactions on social media. Hence, the problem lies not in the small number of subscribers, but in the small number of active, relevant followers. Relevant users are those who are interested in your content and will click on your links and share them. My tip here is not to grow your audience via “follow-back” strategies; to drive traffic, you need to connect with people who are interested in your message, so that they can spread it further.

If content works so well for SMM blogs, then it should generate a good number of links. This brings us to my next questions: How many links do those sites generate, and who leads the competition?

How well do SEO blogs perform in organic results?

As you remember, at the very beginning of my research, I made the assumption that SEO blogs were more likely to receive referral traffic than SMM blogs. Also, I assumed that SEO blogs should also have a good backlink profile with a large number of authoritative links. It seems only logical to suppose that SEO blogs are outperforming SMM blogs in terms of SEO. To find out whether this is true, I used Ahrefs to check the backlink profiles of the sites from my sample. Ahrefs has an awesome feature called ‘Batch Analysis’ that allows you to pull backlink metrics for several individual URLs and easily compare them.

The screenshot below gives us a clear picture of the domains’ rankings and their number of backlinks:

Interestingly enough, searchengineland.com has gained the highest number of referring domains, and it has shown the highest rate of Facebook and Twitter engagement.

In terms of referral traffic, simplymeasured.com has the highest rate (17%) and is followed by two blogs from the search marketing niche: seroundtable.com (15%) and searchengineland.com (13%). However, all the analyzed sites receive relatively the same number of visitors from referring domains, because all of them are actively sharing content on SMM channels. With the help of this strategy they’re getting links and traffic.

After analyzing all this data, I concluded that social media helps you to get you content seen, which in turn can substantially increase your number of brand mentions on the Web. The better you promote your content across SMM channels, the more referring domains you will receive. The case of socialmediaexaminer.com supports my statement about the importance of social media channels in link building. As you remember, this blog is focused on SMM, but it has relatively the same number of backlinks as searchenginejournal.com and marketingland.com.

To check the relevance of my results, I decided to ask an expert’s opinion on the importance of harnessing social media as part of an overall SEO strategy. Kelsey Jones, executive editor of Search Engine Journal and Founder/CEO of StoryShout, was very kind to share her insights on how social media is powering searchenginejournal.com:

“At Search Engine Journal, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in social media referrals over the last year. Our largest referrer is Facebook, with Twitter right behind it. Because of that, we’ve been doing more with Facebook Live and looking at how we share and promote our content on Facebook and Twitter. The more attention and nurturing we’ve placed on our campaigns, the better.”

Conclusion

In this post, I wanted to shed some light on how leading digital marketing blogs focused on SMM and SEO niches attract visitors, and what traffic sources work best for them. It’s quite logical to assume that blogs focused on search marketing should be getting significantly more organic traffic compared to blogs that write about SMM. Accordingly, SMM blogs should be receiving the majority of their visitors from social media channels, since social media marketing is their area of expertise. Yet, I found out that the situation is much more nuanced than that. Drawing on examples using these ten well-known SEO and SMM blogs, we can see that SMM-focused blogs perform better in organic search than SEO-focused blogs. The high levels of engagement SMM blogs receive from social media allow them to get more backlinks and referral traffic, which, in turn, helps them rank higher organically.

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Posted by alexis-sanders

SEO specialists spend massive amounts of effort trying to get Google on our side — to see the brilliance of our content, the ingenuity of our meta elements, and the genius of our organic strategies. We spend so much time treating Google as a metaphorical friend that we sometimes we lose sight of the overarching picture: that Google’s (sometimes magical) results are built upon an algorithm seeking conversation.

Algorithms can (and do) solve many problems, but having one match the conversational level of human beings presents an enormous challenge. Engineers at top Mountain View companies have pushed and pried to move computer science into the realm of artificial intelligence. Their wins in the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning have been impressive, resulting in a new champion in Go, appearing in local stores as pseudo-employees, and has been predicted to drive even more fruitful conversations with our now personal assistant phones. Search engines have always been at the forefront of driving the AI initiative.

Since its beginnings, Google has been pushing search results into the realm of natural conversation, and a huge component of its strategy has been categorized under the umbrella of semantic search and, subsequently, machine learning algorithms (think: RankBrain).

So, when it comes to showing up in Google, what does it take to rank #1 now? Many of the following elements will come back to the idea of a simple conversation.

It comes as no surprise when Hollywood fantasizes search engine founders as the creators of AI in Ex Machina.

What is semantic search?

The word “semantic” refers to the meaning or essence of something. Applied to search, “semantics” essentially relates to the study of words and their logic. Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding a searcher’s intent through contextual meaning. Through concept matching, synonyms, and natural language algorithms, semantic search provides more interactive search results through transforming structured and unstructured data into an intuitive and responsive database. Semantic search brings about an enhanced understanding of searcher intent, the ability to extract answers, and delivers more personalized results. Google’s Knowledge Graph is a paradigm of proficiency in semantic search.

Why do engines pursue semantic search?

From an engine’s perspective, it’s not hard to imagine why Google would want to pursue a more connected world: more data, less spam, a deeper understanding of user intent, and more natural language (i.e. conversational) search. Understanding all of this data maximizes the possibility of their users getting the best search experience possible.

With the world’s data doubling every two years, big data has become the norm for players in the online realm. All this data creates an overarching concern of “What does this mean to me?” The process of organizing, structuring, and semantically connecting data is a coveted role for search engines.

One of the ways that semantic search helps Google is by identifying and disqualifying lower-quality content. Methods like article spinning and keyword stuffing are more easily flagged due to advanced systems such as latent semantic indexing (LSI), latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) weighing schemes, which use term frequency and their predetermined weighted relationships to determine quality. This means that search engines have a good idea of what words statistically occur together and make semantic correlations, which can be used in the war against spam.

Using semantics and entity-based search, engines can gain a better understanding of what users may want. For example, the image below shows a simplified illustration of what the data in an entity-based search algorithm would contain. It includes entities (people, places, things, concepts, or ideas) which are represented as nodes, and connected by their relationships as the arrows. The diagram shows how entity-based search seeks to connect various entities, in this case the individual Simpsons characters, which creates more depth to search responses.

Illustration of a semantic taxonomy of entities (as nodes) and attributes (relationships).

Knowledge Graph answer driven by the entity-based search associations.

Semantics help to understand more completely what our searches mean today. For example, a search for [Jennifer Lawrence] is most likely related to the American actress, star of the Hunger Games, and fashionista. Google provides news, photos, facts, social media accounts, and movies all related to Jennifer Lawrence. Through understanding entities, and coupled with the perplexing amount of data behind the habits of the 7.4 MM searches for Jennifer Lawrence, search engines can gain a better understanding of what the next user will want. Google’s invention of the Knowledge Graph is a golden example, aiming to understand things, not strings.

Search for “Jennifer Lawrence” appears with only topics related to the actress.

Google, and other engines, have become very adept at recognizing different entities and formulating answers to questions. And it’s through this connecting of data that search becomes stronger. Answers to questions are algorithmically understood and displayed when, for example, one searches “who is the dancer in the chandelier video?”. Google “knows” that it is Maddie Ziegler. The idea that a search engine can connect the keywords to an entity and reply with the accurate answer makes Google’s search much more constructive for its users.

Knowledge graph answer with entity name not mentioned in the query.

SEO implications

For SEOs, understanding semantic search has some major benefits. A large part is the ability to remain ahead of the curve. Search engines are moving forward and as SEO experts we need to make sure to stay at the top of our game. Semantic search is going to become especially important as voice search gains more traction.

The method of integrating semantic search signals has huge implications about how we approach our SEO strategies. If we could know all of the topics and keywords associated with a particular entity, we could create perfect content and achieve the optimal rankings for our clients. Although we live in an entity-not-provided world, there are a few tried and true strategies that can enhance your semantic search strategy.

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SEO semantic search strategies:

1. Provide value.

Google is looking towards AI and envisioning conversation as the next evolution of search technology. Google CEO Sundar Pichai even mentioned during the Google Assistant reveal, “We think of it [Google Assistant] as a conversational assistant; we want users to have an ongoing two-way dialog.”

Google needs a source of information for all of its conversations, a reference point, an expert friend, its trusty companion in the Wild West of the WWW. Become authoritative in your discipline, become the expert source that Google will reference in its conversations. Become that valuable source that drives connection, exchanges information, and provides visitors with some value.

• Recommendation: Determine what you want to be known for. Answer the following questions, then create a killer organic search strategy based on your findings.
  • What are the types of keywords that you want to rank for?
  • Who is currently in that space?
  • What are they doing that makes them the expert?
  • How can you be 10X better?
  • Who is interacting with your content?
    • Are they existing customer or prospects?
  • How are users interacting with your content?
    • Are users converting?
    • Is this content targeting users early in the funnel (awareness and consideration) or later (conversion)?
    • Are they getting what one would anticipate out of the content (i.e. are they finding the answers they sought out by clicking on your content)?
  • How can you improve your users’ experience with your content, including their customer journey throughout the site?
  • How can you reach your target better at every organic search touch point your customer encounters?

2. Develop targeted content that answers your customer’s questions.

Create targeted non-brand content, which doesn’t interfere with your acquisition-focused online assets (Think: Don’t cannibalize traffic from your product pages). The idea is to create content related to the entity of your product line, which interests users and fills gaps in organic visibility. Become a valuable source of information for your customers, build your semantic authority in the “eyes” of search engines, and become search engines’ go-to guru on the topic via building robust, informational content using mixed media (images, graphics, and videos).

• Recommendation:
  • Prioritize non-brand content with strong question/answer focus.
    • Tip: Google appears to prefer numbered lists or bulleted step-by-step instructions that succinctly answer questions.
  • Perform keyword research to determine opportunity for queries that are being searched with “how to,” “why,” and “what is” questions.
    • Tip: Try using http://keywordtool.io/ to spark some new ideas. You’ll have to carefully comb through the ideas, but it will give you a strong variation to use in Google Keyword Planner.

3. Structure sentences clearly and answer-based.

SEO writing is natural language writing. Content should use natural language. This simply means that content should make sense. With Hummingbird’s improvement on precision and semantic search, along with RankBrain’s machine learning ranking factor incorporated in 2015, also throwing in the growing popularity of voice search — natural language is necessary.

When creating content it is important to write in terms of entities which means more noun-focused sentences. Simple, subject focused sentences provide engines with more information. Try to structure sentences as Subject Predicate Object (SPO). This will make the content easier for users to understand, as well as for search engines to parse the information. The key here is to sound natural and construct your sentences with purpose, writing content that directly answers a question.

• Recommendations:
  • Write in natural language.
    • Tip: Read your content out loud (Tip brought to you by Gary Illyes and SEMPost)
• Structure your sentences so users and bots can easily understand what you’re trying to say.

The image above is a screenshot from the KDD 2014 Constructing And Mining Webscale Knowledge Graphs by presentation (presented by a Facebook and Google engineer). It shows how strong sentence structure can support bots’ grasp of content. The first two structures are able to be parsed and data organized. However, the last sentence offers no data.

4. Structure your data to help bots parse content.

Structured data markup annotates information, which is already on web pages, to add clarity and increase confidence for search engines. Using structured markup not only enables search engines to better grasp content, but also can be used to signal a desire for rich search results. These snippets provide users with additional information about the contents of the page and can improve click-through rates (CTR) from organic search.

Make sure that all marked-up content is visible on the page per Google’s structured data policies. Google lists all active and in-use structured data markups with examples (check them out regularly, because they update all the time!).

• Recommendation:
  • Implement structured data that is relevant to your site.
  • Examples:
    • Ecommerce:
      • Markup your content with Product Schema
        1. Nest Ratings or Reviews within your Product Schema.
    • Brick and Mortar Store:
      • Markup your business addresses with LocalBusiness Schema
    • Blog:
      • Markup your content with Article Schema
      • If your content follows the question/answer flow, consider marking up your questions with Question Schema
      • If your content is list heavy, consider using ItemList Schema
    • All Sites:
      • Markup your breadcrumb links with BreadcrumbList Schema
      • Tell search engines your website’s name with WebSite Schema
      • Markup your social profiles with SameAs Schema

5. Leverage internal linking.

Internal linking has long been a method of indicating topicality, supporting the user experience as they navigate throughout your site. Remember to use internal linking sparingly and only when it is in the best interest of the user.

• Recommendation:
  • Identify thematically relevant internal linking opportunities to target landing pages.
  • Important pages should be referenced in your main navigation or global footer
  • Important pages should be referenced in your site’s XML and HTML sitemap
  • Add contextual links within pages to important pages on the site
  • Fix any links that lead to pages returning 3XX or 4XX status codes
  • Always link to end-state canonical URL and not a URL with a parameter

Takeaways:

• Search engines are incorporating semantic signals in their results. This change requires webmasters to integrate synonyms and related content for each target topic.
• Semantic search provides additional meaning for engines: data, spam, answering user questions, establishing more personalized results, and providing a more conversational user experience.
• Semantic search high-level strategies: Provide value to your visitor, answer your customers’ questions, create content with structured sentences, and implement structured data.

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Posted by randfish

Longer, more thorough documents tend to do better in the search results. We know that’s true, but why? And is there a way we can use that knowledge to our advantage? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how Google may be weighting content comprehensiveness and outlines his three-step methodology for gaining an edge over your competitors when it comes to meeting searchers’ needs.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about, well, something I’ve noticed, something we’ve noticed here at Moz, which is that there seems to be this extra weight that Google is putting right now on what I’m going to call content comprehensiveness, the degree to which a piece of content answers all of a searcher’s potential questions. I think this is one of the reasons that we keep seeing statistics like word length and document length is well-correlated with higher rankings and why it tends to be the case that longer documents tend to do better in search results. I’m going to break this down.

Broad ranking inputs

On the broad ranking inputs, when Googlebot is over here and sort of considering like: Which URL should I rank? Someone searched for best time to apply for jobs, and what am I going to put in here? They tend to look at a bunch of stuff. Domain authority and page-level link authority and keyword targeting, for sure. Topic authority, the domain, and load speed and freshness and da, da, da.

But these four, all of which are sort of related:

1. Searcher engagement and satisfaction, so the degree to which when people land on that page they have a good experience, they don’t bounce back to the search results and click another result.
2. The diversity and uniqueness of that content compared to everything else in the results.
3. The raw content quality, which I think Google has probably lots of things they use to measure content quality, including engagement and satisfaction, so these might overlap.
4. And then comprehensiveness.

It’s sort of this right mix of these three things, like the depth, the trustworthiness, and the value that the content provides seems to really speak to this. It’s something we’ve been seeing like Google kind of overweighting right now, especially over the last 12 to 18 months. There seems to be this confluence of queries, where this very comprehensive content comes up in ranking positions that we wouldn’t ordinarily expect. It throws off things around link metrics and keyword targeting metrics, and sometimes SEOs go, “What is going on there?”

So, in particular, we see this happening with informational- and research-focused queries, with product and brand comparison type queries, like “best stereo” or “best noise cancelling headphones,” so those types of things. Broad questions, implicit or explicit questions that have complex or multifaceted answers to them. So probably, yes, you would see this type of very comprehensive content ranking better, and, in fact, I did some of these queries. So for things like “job application best practices,” “gender bias in hiring,” “résumé examples,” these are broad questions, informational/research focus, product comparison stuff.

Then, not so much, you would not see these in things like “job application for Walmart,” which literally just takes you to Walmart’s job application page, which is not a particularly comprehensive format. The comprehensive stuff ranks vastly below that. “Gender bias definition,” which takes you to a short page with the definition, and “résumé template Google Docs,” which takes you to Google Docs’ résumé template. These are almost more navigational or more short-format answer in what they’re doing. I didn’t actually mean to replace that.

How to be more comprehensive than the competition

So if you want to nail this, if you identify that your queries are not in this bucket, but they are in this bucket, you probably want to try and aim for some of this content comprehensiveness. To do that, I’ve got kind of a three-step methodology. It is not easy, it is hard, and it is going to take a lot of work. I don’t mean to oversimplify. But if you do this, you tend to be able to beat out even much more powerful websites for the queries you’re going after.

1. Identify ALL the questions inherent in the search query term/phrase:

First off, you need to identify all the questions that are inherent in the searcher’s query. Those could be explicit or implicit, meaning they’re implied or they’re obvious. They could be dependent on the person’s background, the searcher’s background, which means you need to identify: Who are all the types of people searching for this, and what differences do they have? We may need different types of content to serve different folks, and there needs to be some bifurcation or segmentation on the page to help them get there.

Same thing on their purpose. So some people who are searching for “job application best practices” may be employers. Some people may be job applicants. Some may be employees. Some may be people who are starting companies. Some may be HR directors. You need to provide that background for all of them.

One of the ways to do this, to get all the questions, truly all the questions is to survey. You can do that to your users or your community, or you can do it through some sort of third-party system. For example, Oli Gardner from Unbounce was very kind and did this for Moz recently, where he was asking about customer confusion and objections and issues. He used UsabilityHub’s tests. UsabilityHub, you can use this there as well. You can also use Q and A sites, things like Quora. You can use social media sites, like Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, if you’re trying to gather some of this data informally.

2. Gather information your competition cannot/would not get:

Once you have all these questions, you need to assemble the information that answers all of these types of questions, hopefully in a way that your competition cannot or would not get. So that means things like:

• Proprietary data
• Competitive landscape information, which many folks are only willing to talk about themselves and not how they relate to others.
• It means industry and community opinions, which most folks are not willing to go out and get, especially if they’re bigger.
• Aggregated or uniquely processed metrics, obviously one of the most salient recent examples from the election that’s just passed is sites like FiveThirtyEight or the Upshot or Huffington Post, who build these models based on other people’s data that they’ve aggregated and included.
• It also could mean that you are putting together information in visual or audio or interactive mediums.

3. Assemble in formats others don’t/can’t/won’t use:

Now that you have this competitive advantage, in terms of the content, and you have all of the questions, you can assemble this stuff in formats that other people don’t or won’t create or use.

• That could be things like guides that require extraordinary amounts of work. “The Beginners Guide to SEO” is a good example from Moz, but there are many, many others in all sorts of fields.
• Highly customized formats that have these interactive or visual components that other people are generally unwilling to invest the effort in to create.
• Free to download or access to reports and data that other people would charge for or they put behind pay walls.
• Non-transactional or non-call-to-action-focused formats. For example, a lot of the times when you do stuff in this job search arena, you see folks who are trying to promote their service or their product, and therefore they want to have you input something before they give you anything back. If you do that for free, you can often overwhelm the comprehensiveness of what anyone else in the space is doing.

This process, like I said, not easy, but can be a true competitive advantage, especially if you’re willing to take on these individual key phrases and terms in a way that your competition just can’t or won’t.

I’d love to hear if you’ve got any examples of these, if you’ve tried it before. If you do use this process, please feel free to post the results in the comments. We’d love to check it out. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by Dr-Pete

Google Home, Google’s latest digital assistant, is part of a broader market experiment in voice-only search. While the hardware is new, Google has been building toward this future for a while, and one of the clearest examples is the introduction of featured snippets to answer questions in search. For example, if I ask Google: “What is a moonshot in business?” I get this answer…

In desktop search, Google also returns a set of traditional organic results, and, in some cases, ads, news results, Knowledge Panels, and other features. Featured snippets weren’t designed for desktop, though — they were designed for devices that only have room to display a small number of results (such as mobile phones) or even a single result.

Google Home is a single-result search device, and featured snippets were designed for exactly this purpose. The good news is that, if we can optimize for featured snippets, we can optimize for voice. Below are six examples that explore how featured snippets become answers on Google Home.

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“How many people have walked on the moon?”

Here’s a question that should have a factual answer, but, for whatever reason, that answer is not available in Google’s Knowledge Graph. So, the answer is extracted from Wikipedia and presented as a featured snippet. It’s interesting to note that the answer (twelve) is pulled out of the paragraph and presented on its own…

How does this two-part answer “appear” on Google Home? Let’s find out…

Google Home starts with the short answer: “Twelve”. Then, it moves on to attribution: “According to Wikipedia…”. Finally, the device reads the snippet, but only the first sentence in this case. As we’ll see, Google may choose to cut off the featured snippet, but the logic of when and where isn’t perfectly clear.

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“Who has walked on the moon?”

Let’s move on to the natural follow-up question — who are these people? This question returns a more typical, paragraph-based featured snippet…

Here’s how it sounds on Google Home.

In this case, we get attribution first (“According to Universe Today…”), followed by the full snippet. Even though this snippet is fairly long, Google Home chooses to read the full contents.

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“How do I get to the moon?”

Hey, I’d like to be one of those people — how do I get in on this whole moon thing? I’m feeling starved for glory. Here, Google returns a list-based format. I’ve purposely chosen a messy example (notice how Google presents an ordered list but then repeats the numbering, e.g. “1. Step 1.”) to see how Google Home will handle it…

How will Home deal with an ordered list that includes a bit of mess? Let’s find out…

First, notice the attribution is different: “According to some information I found on Live Science…”. This may just be for variety’s sake, but I’m not entirely sure. Google Home then proceeds through the steps, but some are truncated. Step 1, for example, becomes simply: “Assemble the Pieces.” We’re left a bit unclear what we’re assembling the pieces of (the moon?). Google also reads the odd syntax (“1. Step 1.”) verbatim, but this is more of a problem with the featured snippet algorithm than Google Home itself.

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“List all the moons.”

Let’s try a longer list, and a slightly different format. This isn’t a question so much as a command, but featured snippets handle it well enough…

What happens to the longer list on Google Home? Here’s what we get…

Google Home skips a couple of words in the list and pauses oddly in one spot, before finally ending the list with “…and more.” Clearly, there’s a length limit to the spoken answer, but that limit isn’t entirely consistent and seems to depend on the format of the answer.

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“What kind of cheese is the moon made of?”

This one’s just for fun. We all know what kind of cheese the moon is made of…

Here’s the snippet on Google Home, which is structured just like our first example…

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“List of ISS missions.”

Occasionally, Google formats a featured snippet as a table, generally extracting it from tabular data in the source page. Here’s an example…

Interestingly, this same search returns no results on Google Home. I tried a handful of tabular featured snippets, and either they returned no results or Google substituted a paragraph-based snippet. Obviously, translating a table into a voice answer is tricky business, and it appears that Google hasn’t worked out how best to solve that problem.

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“What is Page Authority?”

How does this help you and your brand? Obviously, we’re not all in the moon business. While featured snippets are naturally focused on informational queries, questions are relevant to many aspects of our business and even our branded properties. For example, if I search Google for “What is Page Authority?”, one of Moz’s own proprietary metrics, I’m rewarded with a featured snippet…

Obviously, this isn’t a household term or particularly high-volume search, and yet there’s still opportunity to be had. Is the same question answered by Google Home? Yes, it is…

Google Home needs a little work on its pronunciation, but we do get back the full snippet and are even rewarded with “According to Moz…” and a bit of a brand boost.

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“Where do we go from here?”

This is one question Google Home definitely can’t answer. The direct translation of featured snippets into voice answers means that Google Home does present clear search marketing opportunities. At the moment, though, it’s very difficult to measure the extent or the impact of those opportunities. How does a voice answer help us without a corresponding click? How will we measure voice answers? How will Google monetize voice? I don’t think even Google knows the answers to these questions yet.

For now, it’s worth exploring ranking for voice if only because winning featured snippets also positions you well in desktop and mobile search. As voice evolves, we can expect to see more interplay between devices, where a voice search saves a link in an app (Amazon Echo’s app already does this with Bing searches) or opens a page directly on a linked device. Our investments now will create opportunities over the next few years as the market for voice search grows.

Remember, Moz Pro can help you find and track featured snippets, as well as flag opportunities where you might be in a position to win a snippet. If you can rank in position #0, you can rank for voice and on Google Home.

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Posted by ronell-smith

(Original image source)

The young man at the back of the ballroom in the Santa Monica, Calif., Loews hotel has a question he’s been burning to ask, having held it for more than an hour as I delivered a presentation on why content marketing is invaluable for search.

When the time comes for Q&A, he nearly leaps out of his chair before announcing that he’s asking a question for pretty much the entire room.

“How do I know what content I should create?” he asks. “I work at a small company. We have a team of content people, but we’re typically told what to write without having any idea if it’s what people want to read from us.”

When asked what the results of their two blog posts per week was, his answer told a tale I hear I often: “No one reads it. We don’t know if that’s because of the message or because [it’s the] wrong audience for the content we’re sharing.”

In fishing and hunting circles circles, there’s a saying that rings true today, tomorrow, and everyday: “If you want to land trophy animals, you have to hunt in places where trophy animals reside.”

Content marketing is not much different.

If you want to ensure that the right audience consumes the content you design, create and share, you have to “hunt” where they are. But to do so successfully, you must first know what they desire in the way of bait (content).

For those of us who’ve been involved in content marketing for a while now, this all sounds like fairly simplistic, 101-level stuff. But consider this: While we as marketers and technologists have access to sundry tools and platforms that help us discern all sorts of information, most small and mid-size business owners — and the folks who work at small and mid-size businesses — often lack the resources for most of the tools that could help flatten the learning curve for “What content should I create?”

If you spend any time fishing around online, you know very well that the problem isn’t going away soon.

Image courtesy of Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs

For small and mid-size business looking to tackle this challenge, I detail a few tips below that I frequently share during presentations and that seem to work well for clients and prospects alike.

#1—Find your audience

First, let’s get something straight: When it comes to creating content worth sharing and hopefully linking to, the goal is, now and forevermore, to deliver something the audience will love. Even if the topic is boring, your job is to deliver best-in-class content that’s uniquely valuable.

Instead of guessing what content you should create for your audience (or would-be audience), take the time to find out where they hang out, both online and offline. Maybe it’s Facebook groups, Twitter, forums, discussion groups, or Google Plus (Yes! Google Plus!).

Whether your brand provides HVAC services, computer repair, or custom email templates, there’s a community of folks sharing information about it. And these folks, especially the ones in vibrant communities, can help you create amazing content.

As an example, the owner of a small automobile repair business might spend some time reading the most popular blogs in the category, while paying close attention to the information being shared, the top names sharing it, and common complaints, issues, or needs that commonly arise. The key here is to see who the major commenters, sharers, and influencers are, which can easily be gleaned after careful review of the blog comments over time.

From there, she could “follow” those influencers to popular forums and discussion boards, in addition to Facebook groups, Google Communities, and wherever else they congregate and converse.

The keys with regard to this audience research is to find out the following:

• Where they are
• What they share
  
• What unmet needs they might have

#2—Talk to them

Once you know where and who they are, start interacting with your audience. Maybe it’s simply sharing their content on social media while including their “@” alias or answering a question in a group or forum. But over time, they’ll come to know and recognize you and are likely to return the favor.

A word of warning is in order: Take off your sales-y hat. This is the time for sincere interaction and engagement, not hawking your wares.

Once you have a rapport with some of the members and/or influencers, don’t be shy about asking if you can email them a quick question or two. If they open that door, keep it open with a short, simple note.

• Be brief
• Be bold
• Be gone

Respect their time — and the fact that you don’t have enough currency for much of an ask — by keeping the message short and to the point, while leaving the door open to future communication.

#3—Discern the job to be done

We’ve all heard the saying: “People don’t know what they want until they’ve seen it.”

Whether or not you like the bromide, it certainly rings true in the business world.

Too often a product or service that’s supposedly the perfect remedy for some such ailment falls flat, even after focus groups, usability testing, surveys, and customer interviews.

The key is to focus less on what they say and more on what they’re attempting to accomplish.

This is where the Jobs To Be Done theory comes in very handy.

Based primarily on the research of Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a framework for helping businesses view customers motivations. In a nutshell, it helps us understand what job (why) a customers hires (reads, buys, uses, etc.) our product or service.

Christensen writes…

“Customers rarely make buying decisions around what the ‘average’ customer in their category may do — but they often buy things because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve. With an understanding of the ‘job’ for which customers find themselves ‘hiring’ a product or service, companies can more accurately develop and market products well-tailored to what customers are already trying to do.”

Christensen’s latest book provides a thorough picture of the “Jobs To Be Done” theory

One of the best illustrations of the JTBD theory at work is the old saw we hear often in marketing circles: Customers don’t buy a quarter-inch drill bit; they buy a quarter-inch hole.

This is important because we must clearly understand what customers are hoping to accomplish before we create content.

For the auto repair company preparing to create a guide for an expensive repair, it would be helpful to learn what workarounds currently exist, who are the people experiencing the problem (i.e., DIYers, Average Joes, technicians, etc.), how much the repair typically costs, and, most important, what the fix allows them to do.

For example, by talking to some of the folks in discussion groups, the business owner might learn that the problem is most common for off-roaders who don’t feel comfortable making the expensive repair themselves. Therefore, many of them simply curtail the frequent use of their vehicles off-road.

Armed with this information, she would see that the JTBD is not merely the repair itself, but the ability to get away from work and into the woods on the weekend with their vehicles.

An ideal piece of content would then include the following elements:

• Prevention tips for averting the damage that would cause the repair
• A how-to video tutorial of the repair
• Locations specializing in the repair (hopefully her business is on the list with the most and best reviews)

A piece of content covering the elements above, that contains amazing graphics of folks kicking up dirt off-road with their vehicles, along with interviews of some of those folks as well, should be a winner.

#4—Promote, promote, promote

Now that you’ve created a winning piece of content, it’s time to reach back out the influencer(s) for their help in promoting the content.

First, though, ask if what you’ve created hits the threshold of incredibly useful and worth sharing. If you get a yes for both, you’re in.

The next step is to find out who the additional influencers are who can help you promote and amplify the content.

One simple but effective way to accomplish this is to use BuzzSumo to discern prominent shares of your amplifiers’ content. (You’ll need to sign up for a free subscription, at least, but the tool is one of the best on the market.)

After you click “View Sharers,” you’ll be taken to a page that list the folks who’ve re-shared the amplifier’s content. You’re specifically looking for folks who’ve not only shared their content but who (a) commonly share similar content, (b) have a sizable audience that would likely be interested in your content, and (c) might be amenable to sharing your content.

As you continue to cast your net far and wide, a few things to consider include:

• Don’t abuse email. Maintain the relationships by offering to help them in return as/more often than you ask for help yourself.
• Share content multiple times via social media. Change the title each time content is shared, and look to determine which platforms work best for a given message, content type, etc.
• Use engagement, interaction, and relationship to inform you of future content pieces. Don’t be afraid to ask, “What are some additional ideas you’d be excited to share and link to?”

#5—Review, revise, repeat

The toughest part of content marketing is often understanding that neither success nor failure are final. Even the best content and content promotion efforts can be improved in some way.

What’s more, even if your content enjoys otherworldly success, it says nothing about the success or failure of future efforts.

Before you make the commitment to create content, there are two very important elements to adhere to:

1.) Only create content that’s in line with your brand’s goals. There’s lots of good ideas for creating solid content, but many of those ideas won’t help your brand. Stick to creating content that in your brand’s wheelhouse.

2.) This line of questioning should help you stay on track: “What content can I create that’s (a) in line with my core business goals; (b) I’m uniquely qualified to offer; and (c) prospects and customers are hungry for?”

My philosophy of the three Rs:

• Review: Answer the questions “What went right?”, “What can we do better?”, and “What did we miss that should be covered in the future?”
• Review: You’ll need to determine the metrics that matter for your brand before creating content, but whatever they are ensure they’re easy to track, attainable, and, most important of all, have real meaning and value.
• Repeat: Successful content marketing efforts occur primarily through repetition. You do something once, learn from it, then improve with the next effort. Remember, the No. 1 reason we have less and less competition each year is many aren’t willing to pay the price of doing the little things over and over.

This post is, by no means, an exhaustive plan of what it takes to create effortful content. However, for the vast majority of brands struggling with where to start, it’s exactly what the doctor ordered.

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