SEO Bytes with Nitin - Win SEO in 2021

so we are live hello and welcome everybody to this first edition of seo bites with nathan in 2021 a special year so i'm so looking forward to the whole year 2021 2021 2020 was not that great for all of us but let's make 2021 a very special year and for that we have two amazing experts well they are my two favorites i'm absolutely like super honest and transparent about it they are my two favorite seos and i'm so happy that i uh you know got to convince them to join me here super super happy and they will be sharing some great tips to help us win seo in 2021 so i cannot wait for it i know you can't wait for it either and first of all i mean if we well we generally start with introductions but i don't think these two people really need any introduction but still there are some people who are new in the industry and they're starting you know with their first webinar probably so let's start with a quick introduction and i don't want to you know talk about them i want them to introduce themselves because if i speak about them i would need an hour and we only have hour for covering a lot of topics so let's start with jason right you're such a charming knitting that's delightful thank you very much i'm charmed and i'm blushing uh i'm jason bernard i'm the brand serp guy brand serps are what your audience sees when they google your brand name i think it's deeply underestimated within the industry and by brands in general it's incredibly important not just for people searching your brand name but also to get give you a better understanding of how google perceives your brand or yourself as a person so this is what i always talk about obsessively and overexcitedly uh so if you want to talk about that with me connect with me on linkedin or twitter or visit caddycube.pro to learn more about me and oh and the other thing is nit and i remember you you said i was the knowledge graph guy i love the knowledge graph google's knowledge graph is one of my favorite things alongside brand serps that's me uh professionally speaking lovely well jason i think you should not say that you know people can find you on twitter or linkedin other mediums they can just google and you are like the strongest brand person right i mean you are there completely so why not search my name you will probably find me yeah along with some nice cartoons right yeah well i i've been working on my own brand sir what what i think was when you searched for jason barnard for seven years and it's it's it's been a very very very interesting journey and if you look at it i mean it it's all controlled by me there are 250 jason barnard's in the world none of them get a look in unfortunately for them and i do apologize but google is so confident in in me and what it knows about me that it shows things like search engine journal sem rush myself my own site my company site knowledge panel on the right with i used to be a blue dog in a cartoon i used to be in a folk punk group both of those are on there my daughter's on there and unfortunately uh she says related entities are there other people that google associates me with and it's got bill sulowski jose de valk ram fishkin cindy crum and i'm missing the later solace but that's my next target amazing amazing well so good and you'll be talking about that today right yeah partially i'm talking about rich elements because one of the interesting things about brand serps is that they're full of rich elements and it's an incredibly insightful way to understand how google actually triggers them i'm going to explain how the rich elements the serp features get triggered by the google algorithm and also helps you to see how your content strategy is evolving how well you're doing because google shows on your brand search that's what appears when somebody searches your exact match brand name it shows what's most relevant and valuable for your audience and remember your audience is a subset of google's users and it will show what's relevant and valuable and if it's showing video boxes it thinks that those videos the videos you have made or about you are valuable and relevant to your audience that means you're doing a good job if you're working on videos and they don't appear it means you're doing a bad job either the videos are not as relevant as you thought they were for your audience or google simply hasn't understand understood which means you're not communicating the fact that they are valuable and relevant to your audience which is you know just something you need to do you need to make sure that google understands that these videos are important so yeah it's an incredibly interesting insight into how these rich elements work and how google perceives these rich elements within the context of the brand but then from that moving out to the entire ecosystem around your brand including the more general seo results that aleda's going to talk about cool and i'm talking for the olympics and yeah absolutely yeah all right then thank you so much so looking forward to that and thanks jason for joining us cheers and then now moving to the next expert that's elena solis well i should say the later solace because she is the one and she is the master well i'm a big fan of you later i mean all the content that you're doing through you know your articles amazing i mean everything is still bookmarked even though i've you know read them like few times i'm a big fan and then you know your videos crawling mondays and then you recently started with clubhouse uh weekly as well that's pretty good as well thank you so much elena for everything that you're doing for the community i have well of course i mean maybe you can introduce yourself first and then i have a question for you no problem let's let's go to the to the mid because i have lots of content to share today i really don't want to spend more time on chatting i'd rather go to the to the actual stuff perfect let's do that so stage is all yours then go for it perfect yes and sorry about that but i have so many i realized just before right that i had all this content and all this presentation and i just have 50 minutes so i need to manage to do this well enough time for you to not go crazy when i go through all of the slides right yeah let's agree on 20 no stress yes yes let's start with not stress for sure let's let's try so seo success in 2020 first right how to win seo and i know that there are so many trends out there new things etc and on one hand we know that seo is continuously evolving and is becoming only more complex to achieve results pretty much because well there's a shift and sophistication in user search behavior on one hand and then of course on the other hand we have a search algorithm you have google the search engine especially right like let's be realistic this is what we mostly use in the western world we have google search algorithm and continuously improving trying to better fulfill those user needs and also making improvements all the time in their presentation layer besides the algorithmic type of improvements for a better search experience then on the other hand we have a continuous evolution of website text stack right especially with javascript frameworks that don't necessarily facilitate the the fundamentals of how search engines work right crawlability and indexability and there's also a growing competition and barriers to entry especially in competitive markets right so there's a higher seo maturity across most profitable industries so yes it is only getting tougher right so i want to share with you a few areas that i do think are core are fundamental to get right to maximize in order to facilitate uh the achievements of our goals this year on one hand the seo plus product alignment for any strategic approach uh understanding and fulfill an audience intent leveraging and maximizing search features uh also trying to maximize our experience or establish our our presence in these additional verticals and platforms that you have for example discover then growing also brand authority is critical and i love that jason is here to talk more about your own brand and and at the end of the day is your own entity and your presence and it it doesn't only influence in the way that you are seen or perceived when they are searching about you but in so many different ways it can impact the the how google sees your website uh your property and and the assessment that it will give to you versus any other players out there uh for very competitive queries and i'm going to show you how then also opportunities are things that we'll still need to avoid or minimize at least some challenges out there that still exist today and are all only growing in some cases so giving a bad user experience especially this year with the pitch experience update and the mobile first index everything switching to mobile too still today we are going to see that uh many websites are not given the best experience on on mobile and there's uh still an existing app then technical barriers to were crawling and indexing this is particularly important for bigger websites out there and seo implementation blockers at the end of the day a year and a half ago when i asked uh which were the main causes of why seo processes fail uh people pretty much say oh it's because they don't they don't implement my recommendations right so there's here a very important issue uh regarding uh that it's not necessarily sometimes about knowledge we have knowledge we have identified the problems but the the main challenge is to get the resources and the flexibility to to execute them and fix them at the end of the day so let's maximize on one hand uh the alignment of our seo efforts with our product right a product triangle that i call for for a strategic approach and the reason of this is because even today i see that many seo processes are driven by a checklist of unconnected seo tactics that don't necessarily take the business contacts and goals into consideration and because of that won't achieve meaningful results and this is the type of thing that i'm talking about like establishing a well-aligned seo strategy integrating seo within the website product triangle taking into consideration the the website growth and marketing efforts as a whole to online whatever activities that we set for with with our seo purposes but also with the overall efforts of the brand then on the other hand how the website makes money the business model and the goals to also take those into consideration so they don't see seo as an additional issue or task to be done but something as a channel something meaningful that they actually need to also take into consideration to achieve their own results right and then of course the the the functionalities the features how we can leverage what already exists on the website uh in order to maximize whatever actions that we want to achieve or we want to implement to achieve our results right so avoid implementing disconnected seo tactics that won't help you to achieve goals is critical or every time like i see like these hundreds of items checklists that you need to implement like yes but which one you should implement first um which makes more sense for you to really uh start implementing right now because it will have the higher impact in your particular context right so we need to be more effective when setting an seo strategy that is really aligned with the company's business and functionalities and growth goals and align ourselves our own efforts to gain support across different areas and departments to avoid that feeling of oh they don't want to implement my my seo related tasks and sometimes it's because of our lack of integration and communication of them so how seo affects and is affected by the companies of the growth marketing efforts the features of functionalities business and sales and we need to this huge checklist that we have out there we need to prioritize it and take the business and industry and take context into consideration to what's the ultimate growth goal to achieve with the overall seo efforts how seo success is realistically measured how each of the seo activities in place help to achieve the disciple and we will very likely see that half of those tasks that we have there to do pretty much won't have a direct effect at least at the start or or the biggest effect and up like pretty much 20 of them that really need to be implemented right now uh and how to prioritize these seo activities to achieve the circle faster and cost effectively right so it will allow us to uh to set our seo activities to be prioritized on impact and difficulty to achieve results right so which are the required resources the non-restrictions the scoop and then on the other hand which are the affected areas if these align with the affected areas of those categories or products are much more important for us the business important and the current optimization of course so it is a lower hanging fruit so because i i'm going to be jumping from topic to topic if you want to deep dye and if you think that you really want more information about this particular one you could take a look at this resource as i cover this particular seo strategy or seo as a integrating seo within the product efforts in in for example in this blog post here to the left then i also did a crawling mondays about seo strategy and kevin indic has um developed this great uh guide step by step to help you to establish one right then it's about also understanding and connected with your audience search intent to become the best comprehensive answer for the queries that actually do matter for you and this is the thing right every time there is this google core update we see this type of effects right website dropping in rankings and in many cases it's because yeah the information is inaccurate is uh your money of your life very sensitive type of of information and they are realistically not a high authority on giving financial or health advice but on other cases we see that realistically is because you have been trying to really target two broad queries with content that doesn't connect that is not necessarily aligned with the intent of the user on one hand with the content format that is not the right one to be consumed at that stage of the customer journey so it's important that we better understand our user's intent to be able to craft the content and to format the content in a way that will actually connect with and fulfill their needs right so we will be able to achieve uh that we will have a much better understanding of the audience search through the customer journey and the different type of information that they want to get from us then to better develop and structure and organize the form this format in our content funeral to connect with them and establish yes and offering expertise and trustworthiness to fulfill the audience audience this is great this is this is fundamental right and we have more and more tools and features that allow us to see which are the the intent if it is informational if it is transactional there's if it is a navigational of the query to prioritize accordingly and to also identify which are these are features through which we want to maximize our visibility more about this uh in a bit uh and then what is important is to identify okay which the third journey what is the journey of our of our audience and how i can match that's their journey for the queries that actually matter with my content funeral right like if this are informational for awareness which are the guides and topics and how i can structure them to really fulfill that need and and to make it really uh useful and comprehensive for them or which are those consideration type of content the category pages the the comparison pages that you can create to connect with those type of queries and which are those purchase related um queries that are much more connected with our product pages that we actually need to create in order to already sell so we can see that the intent and the type of action of the user is very very different and sometimes we end up out there there's this big joke of how um try we try sometimes to feature a lot of content in category pages just for the sake of improved relevance but at the end of the day the type of content that we end up we end up adding there is a bunch of history of the city or the the history of the product right and and actually this is content that doesn't help the user at that stage of the customer journey and won't fulfill any need of the user so it's important that we do this type of analysis in order to understand what is the type of content that makes much more sense for our users to structure at that level at that step of the customer journey so for example in your category pages it will be information that will be pretty much the same information that a sales person will be giving you when you're trying to choose between different products from the same category in the in in the shop right and the physical shop so actually developing a quick q a to go through the main characteristic of those type of products the person counts uh the criteria to take into consideration to highlight their particular characteristics that will be much more important for the user at that stage of the journey this is the type of content that is much more meaningful and then on the other hand is about the establishing the authority the expertise and trustworthiness of our content to make it really comprehensive on on one hand but also to make sure that google and the user sees that you are you are the source for this sort of information that they can trust you with their money with their data and and and they can buy for you and you should be the answer to give for that query right and for that google has actually shared with us a list of questions uh that they take things into consideration also when evaluating our content for quantum quality and i what i have done is to gather all of these questions and put them together in this google sheet so you can download it and then start answering if your content actually complies and and the answer is positive for all of these questions and then you compare yourself with the one of your competitors out there and see how how you how you are evaluated versus them because at the end of the day nothing is absolute everything is relative versus your competitors and then finally you might end up realizing that a good share of your content realistically is needs to be pruned it's out there but it's not fulfilling any any goal it's only wasting your crawl budget it's content that is not driving any traffic any backlinks any value and if so then it's important that you don't only show a 410 http status there but you actually follow certain guidelines to make sure that it doesn't backlash right that you don't end up uh hurting your website even much more right so here you have a flowchart that i created um a couple of years ago regarding how what are the best steps to take into consideration to to remove the content tech content that you really see that well there's no need to to keep it on your website right and the criteria for that and then on the other hand take a look at these resources even more if you think that there's a weak area that you really need much more information step by step these are amazing step by step to better understand search intent to develop topic clusters to to improve your eat by the wonderful lily so you can literally like go through them and start optimizing your content using them right now then on the other hand we have the the opportunities uh that serve features and visibility in search results can provide us and not only search results but also in other additional platforms that uh google is also leveraging like discover for example and why because of this when i search for how to start a podcast take a look yes the first uh result is an organic one but then the second one we can see how this is how to what structure data and like literally what takes half of the screen here are videos right uh so if you have the capacity to create videos this is a win-win you can publish in youtube because pretty much all this uh videos from the carousels google pull them from youtube and create an audience there and start start your own channel and community that there and then on the other hand uh get the visibility for deserve so it's a win-win so this is the type of approach right is to analyze which are the opportunities or the areas that can provide you uh additional visibility right across all of these queries that we have seen before and we have seen that many of these uh content types are of videos product fees now that before were paid through the merchant center and now google is also uh showing them in carousels like this for organic search results uh also web stories that google is showing more and more so we see how multi-format content becomes even more important how google is not only to create content for this um features or features and that's it but this is content that you can reuse and repurpose for many other type of platforms and additional visibility like youtube discover or shopping tabs for example and indeed it's not only maximizing your cliche rate but it's also expanding reach through additional platforms and better inform google about the content meaning also with structured data and of course here we have also jason who um has an additional very important expertise in this area if we want to talk about this later on and i will have here a point saying like even if you there is opportunity for you to implement structure data that won't generate right ahead as your future is important that you take into consideration because you're literally telling google what your content is about and has many other uh type of of outcomes and and and consequences that won't be potentially visible right away in the next feature type of impact but will have all the type of impact within google itself on providing the best answers to relevant queries for your products right so what's your feature including mobile and desktop for your search results for your targeted query so semrushing is an amazing tool to assess this for your own domains for your own properties it tells you which for which you are included for which not also you can do this with your your competitors to see which are then leveraging or not and then when you do a keyword research again you we have this surface columns that allow us to identify opportunities so we can create when we create condom to target these queries we also know pretty much how we should structure our content and which are the opportunities out there to maximize the visibility of this content besides trying to rank it better and then of course it's critical that we also identify opportunities and see for example what we will discover which are the guidelines what the with the merchant center what what is this fee that i need to create how should i uh export it to to google right so it's important that we understand the best practices the guidelines the editorial on the go and and and the technical ones too sometimes we overlook the editorial ones and we end up implementing thinking that is purely a technical thing and now it's important to understand if these align in the first place with our goals and meaning and and and editorial guidelines and if we can comply with them and then although the han is also leveraging and trying to identify opportunities even outside go go on properties at the end of the additional platforms but yes for example with videos that you can attract and grow your brand and and presence and authority in many other different ways right and this is content that you can repurpose too to maximize your search visibility within google so take a look at this resources you will see here all the overview for search appearing topics that google has this really great hop of information there and then those best practices for your products free listings on google now and these are a magnificent guide from andrea vulpini from warlift about the ultimate checklist of optimized content for google discover which i believe that can only grow even more and more and become more important this year and finally the one other thing that you should totally do this year um to maximize right is to grow and leverage your brand authority to develop your search popularity we talk a lot and i know that this is a sometimes as a non-sexy topic and there has been a lot of chat in the last few days regarding if the building is equal to online pr and literally for me also not only as an seo but as a business owner what promoters here doesn't matter i want to grow my authority i want to get mentions i want that when i spend my whole weekend or even more um gathering data and pulling together this remote world trends and stats for 20 21st this is cover out there if the link is not follow i don't care if it is a business insider or if it is an authoritative type of of publication out there but i i want to be endorsed i wanted to get coverage and this is something that is very own brand because my website is about remote work so it's not creating content that is completely disconnected with my actual purpose i want to establish my website authority so they see that this is a brand that actually knows what they are talking about regarding remote works and they they they they share their trends their share their insights uh they they are to follow we need to follow them and we need to endorse them because they are the best in the fields right and these are so building links or getting links because of this is it's a by-product right it's not your main goal it's a byproduct and pretty much for a lot of brands this is realistically the most scalable way to do it and an easier way also especially when it's a web a company that has their own pr efforts con like content marketing efforts um community management efforts and they get also all the time interacting with influencers and at the end of the day this is what you get right you publish a piece you make sure that you follow a good seo best practices you don't you so you're not updating the url every year and you leverage the the the established backlink popularity that you have building across the years and at some point you end up also ranking in the first results with a nicer uh feature snippet out there for that top query right so it's another way to establish your authority your brand to so it's about not only attracting but it's due by prodigal faces growing your learning popularity branded searches to maximize your visibility for your own search much more easily if you ask me please give me all the branded uh searches because this means that i'm doing a great work establishing my authority and direct traffic and conversions i i wish to not necessarily rely on third parties to get traffic even as an seo right uh the best traffic is the direct traffic because it means that i am the authority in that field and everybody who thinks about this type of products and services are already thinking about me so key questions to ask here what is your unique selling proposition what do you want to be known as a brand what does your audience like to share and to link to where do they do it who do they follow what do they read and how where and with whom should you promote these assets and resources especially at the beginning to be covered because you won't have all of these connections right and i love how neo-mam a few days ago they shared this amazing list of resources of amazing pieces that have been published out there and it's amazing for inspiration and to see what all of this many websites have done in that not only to fulfill and to connect with their user needs but also to establish also as a consequence their brand much more within their fields and take a look at these resources again i i interviewed a few months ago to the wonderful giselle from your mom and and um and also the rice at seven uh director and ceo so you can see how how they think about this is it's amazing and they are at this definitely another level on at this uh an in and online pr and then ira they are also fantastic and they're also an authority in the building uh field and they have done this wonderful instead of the building report in which we can go through all of the different type of activities that most of the agencies do right and then last but not least let's minimize this other activities and in this case i won't explain that much because i think that we all know why we want to avoid this right but let's let's go through the ones that we cannot accept that happen anymore this year because the backlash can be real giving a bad user web experience why well we in the first the first place we want uh users to trust us right and we need to facilitate that by giving a good user experience in the first place and providing a good journey in our website also which experience is becoming a ranking factor it's not that this elements or signals are not taking into consideration right now they are but as independent in disconnected signals they are going to become one mobile friendliness safe browsing https no intrusive uh interstitial along core web battles will become the search signals for page experience and they are going to start being taken into consideration in may um and then we also have the mobile only index uh happening in march 21st and realistically it should be easier for us now to be able to make sure that we give a bet a better user experience especially with the buyers metrics much much more are much more straightforward to understand and to share and they are sort of a standard right however still today right we have issues many sites still don't pass then so uh i had the opportunity to contribute to the seo chapter of the web almanac last year and we like there were terabytes of websites that were analyzed more than seven terabytes if i uh remember well and like 33 percent uh of those websites um in uh in desktop devices uh pass the validation and only 19 percent of mobile pass what is going on there's there are still important issues right so the good thing is like it should be straightforward i have shared in the past these google docs these google sheets here with tons of free tools that we can use to validate our website for revitals https safe browsing no intrusiveness to make sure that we comply and even i share and you have here the link of this twitter thread when i share step by step of how to do an assessment of your core web battles and speed uh by using these free tools and you can see very straightforward which are the issues if it's js or css or images are too big are not compressed so everything you can see there so it should be straightforward for you much more than before to fix and hopefully it is you are able to to do it before may and then another thing to minimize is generating the necessary technical barriers for content to be indexed and ranked and we know that a lot of websites are over relying on javascript even to create links that could be easy href tags and for some reason some javascript that is not crawlable is used instead and not only that uh we know that content and i'm going to show you a few examples completely rely on it and why it's completely unnecessary sometimes and realistically it's true that google is able now to render javascript but we know that they need additional effort to do it so so especially if you have a big website you don't want to rely on that you want to make that your content is reachable and accessible and indexable much more straightforward right and as you can see here there is no trivial difference between the content showing raw versus render html across the web again from the web almanac data we can see the difference in in raw versus rendering desktop 360 versus 402 um and words and then 312 and 248 why let's let's avoid that and that is not even the words this is a real case from an audit that i was doing the other day i love how cyborg uh showcasing and is able to show you the gap between between the response versus render uh html from most of the core areas of a page the title the description internal links external links canonical tags meta robots and believe me it's not only that you add stuff or we add stuff and and stuff is created right using javascript only but stuff is modified canonical tags the urls are modified in this particular case i remember that the url was was sometimes completely shown uh within the canonical tags some meta robots that were indexable in the raw html were turned to non-indexable in the rendered one so how do we know what google takes into consideration how do we confirm we want to avoid this additional hassle for sure so let's make sure that we facilitate this our lives the crew ability and indexability from a technical seo perspective take a look at this resources are wonderful resources out there from content king on javascript seo best practices then also from uh only they are really like amazing on identifying issues here and they have the ultimate guide to javascript seo and then google also published not so long ago their guide to facilitate the credibility and crop budget on big websites and we are going to see why and how it is so important to make sure that we really make the most out of the core budget that we have and and avoid wasting our budget on pages and and resources that are not necessarily that meaningful and could be completely avoided right and finally seo implementation blockers and horror stories should literally let's hope this year be completely avoided and we we don't see any more anymore any any seo horror stories and we can have a good healthy seo process in in most cases because last year for example and i do this every year i ask oh which are your seo horror stories and in the last few months and i get dozens of of uh answers i get uh dozens of retweets uh and a lot of people share again and again and again all these pitfalls during web migrations during uh dev environments becoming indexable uh after changing in the internal web structure without getting getting the heads up how do the signs uh went to hell literally just because they were not involved right from the start things like that right we need to avoid that and so it's it's funny because there's this paradox on one hand sometimes it's so hard to make seo recommendations to be implemented on the other hand there's so much stuff going on sometimes especially from a web development perspective that we don't know about and ends up getting launched and it costs us some horror story and we end up realizing very too late all the time right so to avoid that it's we need to set an healthy seo framework that you can see that i shared this presentation here about seo horror stories so how we can not only educate validate and be proactive in the monitoring of across all of the different type of areas and and configurations uh within our seo process and and then on the other hand it's not only this and i share here like the questions and the stack and the tools to use but also leveraging automation within an agile approach to show results faster sometimes we get stuck and we see all the errors coming up and nothing getting done well also because we are not able to have this agile approach on implementing things fast and i love how a few months ago i again i i talked about hseo with um dan taylor and hamlet batista they are they they have their own tools and that they provide as a service to to anybody who wants to use them to use cloud for workers to implement stuff that can be sometimes tricky like canonical tax redirects um meta robots in general and how you can end up showing results much faster like this to gain support development support and get get things right and implemented in the right way in the long term so as you can see is to be a little bit smart to identify opportunities to leverage new technology but also aligning what we know that is important the core of seo and at a level of sophistication and quality that is very well needed to achieve results in 2021s so thank you very much and hopefully that with all of this now it's time to achieve um our desired seo goals in 2021 absolutely well thank you so much aleda that was amazing content and a lot of it so thank you so much for compiling this for us and yeah and sharing these tips with everyone all right jason do you have anything to add here on what i just shared what could you possibly add to such a complete everything in seo in 25 minutes uh absolutely nothing to add i'm sure we've got lots of questions so let's keep moving on as a later said uh uh faster we get through our stuff first we get to the questions yeah yeah absolutely well so if you have a question i would like to say that was absolutely brilliant i don't know if i said it clearly enough you did i i guess yeah it was it was amazing indeed yeah all right so jumping to the question so the question we have like one question right now so the question is on a small website does crawl budget come into consideration for taking pruning actions on legacy pages that are getting almost zero traffic or should we just leave them as they are so what's your take on that so in this case it wouldn't be necessarily because of crop budget if it is a small website let's say 100 pages i don't know 500. well small can be relative again right or less than 10k pages call budget is is a real issue when you have a big e-commerce website or a marketplace or a big very big website with a lot of construct unstructured content that sometimes you don't control yourself because you have user generated content too you have forums etc and can go easily out of hands right um on a small website called budgets shouldn't be the concern but i have to say what should be a concern in this case is that uh well you might be sometimes giving a bad user experience on search experience and hurting your website overall quality assessment because of this few pages that is true they don't bring any value right now you don't care about you overlook you try to not link but sometimes some some people might end up landing there sometimes google will will crawl these pages anyway and see that yeah called not index or uh not not enough content to index or value to index uh so be careful with that because you really don't want not only because of the sake of cold budget but you really don't want to gain your credibility your your let's say your quality the quality of the of the content that you give to to google and the user at some point so if it is something straightforward for you to do and if you're like if you're sure that these pages are not bringing any value at this point like validate if they have any visits if the if they have any backlinks any rankings in the last year or so so you can and prune accordingly right you might redirect you you want consult you might want to consolidate etc not necessarily just to no index or for 10 right but after you do this validation if you're certain that they don't bring any value like why to have them there like they only will can be growing from time to time i will take your focus and and will add noise in general right so i will i will i will properly have my my web structure clean especially if it is small let's let's try to do things well especially when it is easy and under control right exactly yeah i i totally agree i think it's about practice so maybe you're talking about one thousand or ten thousand pages website right now and ten percent of that is legacy what you're calling here but maybe i mean if you're talking about a website which grows maybe tomorrow you have 1 million pages and then 10 is a really high number and when you go to 10 million the number is even bigger right so it's about practicing it's about you know keeping these standard practices in place so that you have optimization basic optimization and user experience part of your dna and once you do that then i think you are always serving user good excuse experience right and as a later mention about uh core updates right people are like core update oh my god that's a big thing right it should not be a big thing big thing because here we're talking about user experience we're talking about core web principles so there i think if you're following that you should definitely do that sorry jason you were saying something oh yeah i was actually just going to say that the idea of a small site i think kind of a lot of these tools when you use a tool to analyze a site a lot of seos will say oh we've got errors or or whatever and on a small site things like this aren't actually that important as later rightly said and we can exaggerate a problem prioritize it wrongly and go for this is the big priority when in fact there are lots of other i mean on a small site one of the first things you should be looking at is your really important pages full of content and looking at that content and looking at what a leader was saying do you address the question do you answer the question do you solve the problem and are you expressing yourself with the vocabulary that your audience uses and that's what you're looking for so that would be a better priority in inverted commas for a smaller website exactly and i remember i was having chat with don anderson and jono the other day on site speed and we were talking about you know like people with smaller websites or any any size website they're chasing side speed like you know like like maths so they are already if you talk about performance score they're already at 90 and they're saying hey we need to achieve 100 and we need like three months of effort completely like does that even make sense i mean think about it logically as alittle also you know touched upon this prioritization part i'm also writing a content piece around that you should think about opportunity you should think about reach you should think about confidence impact and also efforts if you're not thinking about efforts you are missing a big chunk so just you know be more uh pragmatic about how exactly you're uh tackling these things well let's talk about the pragmatism of of uh opportunity cost what are you not doing when you're doing this thing a marginal gains am i actually making a decent marginal gain on it so i mean i'm an economist by training marginal gains opportunity cost you really have to think about that not just follow the reports that these automatic tools throw at you 100 a lot of people lose so much time and effort on checklists oh my god but this still to do but does it really make sense in that particular context so how much impact will it have and how much versus much how much effort right maybe if it is something not trivial for you and you will pretty much stay in the same way so you're already good you already have a good battle for example so it's it's important that we understand how that is why i mentioned how to you connect your efforts within the product and and have this view about it uh from a strategic perspective rather than just following a checklist this is critical yeah absolutely perfect go chat on this and now jason so you wanted to share some good stuff as well so let's talk about that now yeah um wonderful i mean i i i have a presentation that that is focusing ready on the serp features uh later covered all of the great stuff that traditionally i think we're looking at as seo she pushed it a long way in to discover and cert features uh and talked about brand which i was particularly intrigued by um john mueller was saying we want to be looking for pool searches and what he means by pull searchers is brand searchers so google are now saying openly as brands you should be looking to dominate your market as a brand so they're saying let's do some traditional marketing which is really good news i think for brands because it means that it brings it back more into our control makes it more human uh and what i deal with brands certs becomes important so i'm terribly terribly pleased with john moodle for saying that um so we're looking at making the most of cert features in 20 20 and 21 in fact i i had a quick look at the um excuse me never ever leave your phone on how ranking works in darwinism i wish that i'd run when a leader was talking um i had an explanation from gary edius last year of a year and a half ago um describing how the ranking algorithm actually functions and frederick dubu from bing confirmed it i called it darwinism in search you can read the article on search engine journal i'll give you a really quick brief overview basically the blue links are the basic foundation of the results page the blue links sit there they they bid and this is what gary is calls them and frederick to boot from bing they bid they send in a bid which is the bid of value to the user it's not a monetary bid it's a value to the user bid and that's how the blue link algorithm then ranks its results then you have the other verticals such as twitter boxes news uh what am i talking about images videos all of those come along they have an algorithm which is parallel that also puts in a bid and if they can put in a higher bid a higher value to the user if they can prove to the algorithm the major algorithm that they have a better value bigger value to the user in the context that user finds themselves in they get a place on the serp and that is how these rich elements these serp features get a place on the serp or don't obviously that was an incredibly quick explanation probably doesn't make that much sense read the article makes lots of sense uh but that brings us on to the rich elements and the serp features now frederick boo pointed out to me i thought the serp features are going to be taking over and blue links are going to disappear he said no not at all they're going to remain more or less stable and that is true they remain stable the number of blue links on a page remains stable at an average of about eight and a little bit uh on the left rail we have almost one and a half rich elements on average and that hasn't changed much since last may so what seems to be happening is that they're swapping them in and out what i see with brand serps in particular is image boxes will disappear and be replaced by video boxes when there are video boxes that actually provide value to the user that is more than the image boxes themselves but what i found very interesting is on the right route we're seeing an explosion the right rail is that right hand side with the knowledge panel with google my business the related entities boxes absolutely explosion of content in that right rail and that's a really good place to start thinking about branding because it's all about branding the entity boxes the knowledge panel the google my business is all about your brand so this is really really important for 2021 along with of course the left rail with those rich sightings people also has video boxes image box is there an opportunity for visibility and i would split them into three practical types both the left and the right rail these rich items what i call rich elements serp features the near me ones the entity ones and the content ones and if you split it down that way it becomes really easy to deal with and and focus on what it is you're trying to do we'll start with the near me one that's basically google's humans curated business listings it's google my business and the iterations of google my business across the maps on the left-hand side or the google my business on the right-hand side that people also search for which is related businesses and the discover more places which appears on the left-hand side so obviously in 2021 first thing to do google my business make it accurate and up to date go in there and correct everything you possibly can about your business now i've put local national and international with different size fonts because i want to point out that for a local business this is fundamentally important it's the number one top thing you should be doing but for national businesses it's also important people will also be seeing the google my business but also the google my business it's information that you're feeding to google directly and if that information is not accurate and up to date you're feeding google the wrong information google won't be able to understand who you are and what you can offer its audience and even on an international level it's still feeding information to google about who you are what you do and who your audience is which are my three favorite things in the entire world google needs to understand who you are what you do and who your audience is if it's even to start thinking about offering you as a solution for its users or an answer to their questions next entity elements uh it's google's machine curated encyclopedia it's it's a it's a nice way of saying it's basically google is trying to understand the world in a similar manner to human beings and it has an encyclopedia which is called the knowledge graph and though the knowledge graph is driving an awful lot of these rich elements these cert features knowledge panels which we see all the time on the right hand side the see results about which are just underneath which is related entities related things related topics that you might be interested in in my example if you search for my name jason bernard as i said earlier you've got ron fishkin yes develop don't yet have a leader but i will and that would that would mean that google associates me with them and as a brand that's important to see who google associates my band with who it's potentially sending its users towards then see results about knowledge cards related searches refined by an event these are driven by the knowledge panel and the knowledge sorry knowledge graph and the knowledge graph is the fundamental basis i mean you later mentioned andrea volpini from word lift earlier on he's a big expert on this stuff the knowledge graph google's understanding of the world is the single most important thing in the next 10 years for any digital marketing strategy because it's not just google it's facebook it's apple it's microsoft it's amazon all and all the social media platforms all using knowledge grass to understand who we are what we do and how we can offer something to their audience and i think if you bear in mind that every time you talk about one of these machines including google it's their audience we're talking about it's their users our audience is a subset of their users and if we remember that we remember that we're looking to serve somebody else's user set to do in 2021 schema.org markup it needs to be simple accurate and corroborated i think that's really important don't get over excited with schema markup i got over excited with schema mic i've added much too much of it and of course it just created more confusion than it actually resolved um so to keep it simple there are some tools there that i've put on the right hand side word lift andrea volpini absolutely brilliant schema app canadian company who do a schema markup um sas platform yoast integrated in wordpress brilliant uh done by john alderson who you mentioned earlier on and at cali cube we do a very simple version which is aimed just at companies and people but you want to mark up in this order of priority your company then your product then the people and then carry on with the rest the later was mentioning the the rich elements you can get in the serp i think they're great and i think they're really important and they can give you an excuse to do the schema markup to your boss but the fundamental basis of schema markup is to speak google's native language schema markup is your content recreated in google's native language that it can digest like that so you're confirming what google has probably already understood is in your page using schema markup and it makes it much more confident that it has understood what is in your page and i put corroborated in bold because i think it's really important a lot of people think i just put skim and markup on my page and that's all i need to do google needs to understand but it needs to be convinced that it has correctly understood and that's corroboration you need to get that information out onto third-party sites it was talking about mentions and getting that ea the expertise authority and trust the the support of authoritative resources about you and your brand but also the information the facts about your brand next branded content strategy elements this is kind of more traditional seo and it's a really good motivation to create a decent content strategy just writing blog posts no longer hacks it you want to be aiming for the image boxes the video boxes the video answers the twitter the news the podcast boxes explore panels features people also asking jobs incredibly important and once you start looking at this and you start aiming for these rich elements features you're going to naturally build a great content strategy and google as i mentioned will only show the content to its users if it's valuable and relevant so you need to create valuable and relevant content and if you are you will get put in front of google's users and if you aren't you won't so just creating content for content sake won't hack yet and i've put the people also asking green there because one place i would start if i had to prioritize would be to start here the faq section questions about and around your brand and your topic incredibly powerful and that's a great way to start your what people would call keyword research but it's actually research into what my users what my audience is asking what they're looking for start answering them about my brand so you can start with your brand up there you look at if they appear there answer those questions first and then spread out bit by bit too about my brand about my products about my topic um and you will see at the bottom there you can see a lovely lovely click graph as it goes up and up and up and up and up and all we did was build an faq section and we started answering questions with the brand moved on to questions about the topic and about our industry more generally and it's been a phenomenal success google is thirsty for questions and answers on simple topics um that it can actually present to its users and then i would go with videos obviously a lot of it's on youtube as later said 85 percent of videobox content comes from youtube but 15 doesn't and one of my clients actually installed on their site their youtube videos and all of a sudden they were getting a thousand visits uh a month from those videos that were already on youtube because their site outranks youtube because it's more authoritative about them which is logical so the idea i mean obviously youtube dominates but it doesn't have to dominate if you can get that content put it on your site you are still the authority about yourself so you should be able to over out optimize youtube and get that traffic to your site if it's about you or your core topics then social and podcasts for me podcast is the next big thing it's the next big thing that google's going to push into its knowledge graph and are going to explode onto the scene so if you're thinking about a podcast if you're thinking as a brand doing a podcast get started good place to start because in 2022 so i've just gone beyond 2021 2022 this is going to explode like videos are going to explode in 2021 i already did in 2020 and importantly i've put on and off site don't just think about the content on your own site think about the content on the social platforms on the twitter platforms on on youtube you want to push it your content out to where your users already are and potentially then take that content repurpose it and package it for google and i love the idea of creating a content strategies on third-party platforms that pays for itself on third-party platforms that you repackage on your site for google as a bonus and that has to be the el dorado of content strategy so you can track your brand serp on caddy cube this is my last slide i'm obsessed by the idea that if you start with your brand serp and you analyze your brand set and you understand what google is presenting to your audience through your brand serp it's a brilliant place to start not only to impress people with your google business card when they do search your brand name when they're making those pool queries as john mueller said but also analyze what's right and wrong about your content strategy what what's positive and negative about what google thinks the world thinks about you because if google's showing a negative result it thinks that the world thinks something negative about you your brand cert represents what google thinks the world thinks about you and you can track it you can measure it and you can improve it and i'm building a platform to make it a really simple process please do sign up to the beta um that's cadicube dot pro with a little bit of help from word lift and authoritas that's it from me i hope that made sense because it was incredibly fast but that was brilliant thank you so much for sharing all that and i think together you and elena uh you covered a lot of different things a lot i think this can keep like anyone busy for the whole 2021 so thanks uh for sharing such amazing content all right elita do you want to add anything on what uh what jason just shared no i think it's amazing and 100 i couldn't agree more with all of his information uh i think that there's well a huge value on leveraging structured data far beyond only the the sub features on one hand then on the on the other hand i i think it is um still like we need to enhance much more uh the opportunities that sometimes we have when we create content thinking indeed on youtube only but then this content that we can totally repurpose and also publish on our own website and connect it much more with us and and then for example in my own for with my own uh for example videos what i tend to do is i have calling mondays in in its youtube channel and great it is including the carousel etc but i have doubling inclusion sometimes by embedding the same video with uh with wistia and bets that are also add the video object structure data to the video and where i have also the opportunity to add a transcript and and gains also organic search results not only uh then an inclusion within the carousel but also as a organic page so i think that there are so many win-wins and how we think about this and online the different content that we tend to already produce and distribute but how we can leverage to even improve our own uh website experience search experience and maximize the opportunity within serps yeah absolutely and i think it's it's like later you mentioned like you know interview somebody and you have a video and then you can just repurpose it and then have a landing page with text on it and then you can also think about you know just take the video off and publish it as a podcast so one content can be published in many different ways and uh jason mentioned about podcast which is actually trending like a lot of people are doing podcasts these days including jason and uh yeah and then uh even video so even uh you mentioned in your youtube seo presentation that you know how videos are going up and it is working great for you as well so definitely like some great tips there thanks for sharing that i think that whole kind of repurposing thing from from that perspective i mean as a later said doing transcripts of a video is pretty easy making a video from uh it's significantly more complicated uh so if you start with the video you can then make the sound and then the audio file then you can make the transcript and it's important to remember that google still digests text written text much more easily easily than it will digest anything else so doing that transcript is well worth the effort i i actually do the the two things i i do the transcript to create the blog post for example of the video and then i also use anchor uh to generate the the sound file of the video and then publish it as a podcast too of course like if it is a how-to video it will be much more difficult but if it is an interview uh it can work pretty well as also as a podcast so i i love this one effort multiple formats and i make the most out of the opportunity to distribute it and get disability with it brilliant sorry go ahead jason well there's another aspect which is i mean i'm obsessed by the idea that google understands when i talk there's an article on search engine journal if you look at it from google's point of view google needs three things and it only needs three things it needs to understand who you are and what you do and who your audience is it needs to believe that you're credible a credible solution for its audience and it needs to believe that you can deliver i call that understanding credibility and deliverability and that idea of deliverability is is that you have the content that they need or you can provide the products that they need and everything you do within your seo strategy towards google needs to serve one or more of those pillars understanding credibility and deliverability i'm personally obsessed with the understanding and podcasts and videos and events a great way ways that google can get to grips with who you are what your topic is because more videos i mean olada is a brilliant example all of these videos and all these transcripts and all of these podcasts around a topic make her an expert in an authority and trustworthy within that niche yeah absolutely cool now we are running uh our time so i'll just take like one last question we have a few nice questions but i'll try to answer them in youtube live and one question which i'm really uh you know i really want to ask you two is about uh page speed so did i mention about web uh core web vitals and then we have a question like in the um uh upcoming may algorithm update will slow load times be a death sentence site what's your take on that well do you want to answer it later repeat the the question i didn't understand the question well i think what they're asking is uh within co-web vitals is site speed incredibly important in fact core web vitals isn't about the speed of the web page as such it's about the perceived user experience it's the perceived user experience that they've actually measured for years i remember 10 years ago i started playing with one of the google tools which was you they would show you two screens and show you two sites loading you had to click on which one you thought looked fastest and they used that human data to decide what they would then measure for the core web vehicles that's what i suspect they did and it's all about that first contentful content contentful paint which is the first thing that i see as a human being that makes me feel that the page is loaded it isn't the page is loaded it's that i perceive it to have loaded and then you've got the content shift which is if something moves around the page it really annoys me as a user and the third one is the delay between the moment when i click on a button or i try and interact with a page and there's a half a second delay that's incredibly frustrating those are the three things and none of them are about pure speed yeah this is important right because many people go to the pagespeed insight tool and they and and they only take into consideration sometimes oh but i i get this metric but i see that the one that the google search console is showing me is a little bit different right because we need to take into consideration that the the sources of this data is different one thing is that you measure yourself in your own environment that you may have a great speed and this type of devices and then uh what the crooks data does is to take the data into consideration of real users uh and this is the data that is actually assets then on the other hand how these different metrics play together we know that largest content for pain it needs to be lower than 2.5 seconds to be perceived as good the the ffid the first input input delay needs to be less than 100 milliseconds cls to be uh to be considered good was should be less than 0.1 so how like which is more important and what you should prioritize at the end of the day i think that well it should be first about the users but then if what you really want is to change the trend of of the metrics uh for the most important pages i i will start with those templates that are used for the most critical pages of the website through the user journey the web the ones more attracting more more traffic too um you can take a look at how google access those in the google search console they give you the in the search console help and when they where they explain how the core web vitals report work they tell you look these are the status definitions for each one of them and this is the combination right for example they say a url mobile with poor fid but neet improv improvement with lcp is labeled as poor on mobile or a url mobile web needs improvement in lcp but good fid is labeled as need improvement right so they give you like the different combination but pretty much you can see the weight of each um based on on on the perceived importance right but i think that they are in general well balanced yeah and i think sorry just just to because this this guy's off what i was saying earlier on i think what's really important is to understand what the motivation of google is to give us all this information and it's being empathetic to google google is trying to make the experience of its users better through our sites and that's the kind of the empathy for google understanding credibility and deliverability this is the deliverability aspect it doesn't want to send people through to sites it's users through to sites that don't perform or aren't perceived by the human being to be performing in an adequate manner and their motivation is they want to improve your web performance for their users who happen to be your audience yeah absolutely well great discussion and with that we have seven minutes over time and i'm sorry but i'll have to cut it here but yeah i think it was completely you know worth having uh seven more minutes but because it was a lot of information a lot of good tips from both of you thank you so much once again for sharing that and thank you so much once again for joining us and yeah we're good with that so then i wish everyone a very happy new year and a strong year ahead with all these tips that they've shared and yeah if you have any questions which are not answered here feel free to catch any one of us on twitter i think we are all really active on twitter right yeah unless you want to share any other perfect communication channel no twitter's fine for me and thank you nitin for having me thank you later for that amazing presentation and the audience thank you for listening i mean brilliant stuff for the opportunity i i had such a great time and it was so fun to be able to to share it with you i will be uploading the the deck too so you can take a look at it and an article that i had uh written about this topic too so thank you for the opportunity brilliant thank you so much aleda for that and thanks for joining us

Channel: Semrush Live

Views: 2,071

Keywords: search engine optimization, search, search marketing, google, serp features, webinar, semrush webinar, semrush live, marketing, marketing strategy, digital, digital marketing, digital strategy, online, online marketing, online business, web, web marketing, internet, internet marketing

Id: W63m3sIkJ-U

Length: 68min 12sec (4092 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021