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Alright folks, another memorable BrightonSEO went down in the SEO history books last week, and once again it was savage. As part of our ongoing training and team-building initiative here at Wolfgang Digital, the majority of the SEO crew headed over to Brighton to spend some quality time together and attend the world’s greatest SEO conference!
We had the chance to attend lots of interesting talks and get bags of actionable SEO insights from some of the world's industry leaders.
Every year this quaint seaside town becomes a hotbed for our industry's movers and shakers and it’s in the bars and cafes that hot topics and trends are discussed. During our trip we met old friends and made a bunch of new ones to share our nerdy SEO jokes with. As always there was an amazing lineup of speakers, and today we're going to share with you our key takeaways that we brought back to the Emerald Isle.
An Entity is ‘a thing with distinct and independent existence’ according to online Dictionary Lexico. But in the SEO world an entity is far more than that. Entities can exist out of language. An entity can be from a person, an object or a brand, to a colour, a date or even an idea. For Google, an entity is ‘a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well defined and distinguishable’.
That said, we completely agree with Greg that entities are one of the most important concepts in modern SEO and we should be focusing our actions based on that, rather than trying to optimise individual page elements. Already, for a few years at Wolfgang, we’ve been embracing a ‘let’s own this featured snippet’ mindset and never publish anything without being confident to read it out loud or send it to a friend!
Local SEO is also becoming a key component to success as Google My Business is a direct interface to Google’s entity base about any online business.
Tim Soulo from Ahrefs talked about an old-time SEO essential topic, Keyword Research, and gave some solid pieces of actionable insights that we can all use and improve upon. Keyword Research is one of the most important skills any SEO can develop, it’s always evolving and there are many ways that it can be done.
Tim introduced BrightonSEO to his own three-step approach:
Pages will never rank for only one or even a handful of keywords. In fact, Tim and his team at Ahrefs conducted a study and found that a page ranking number 1 for a specific keyword, also ranks for approximately 1,000 additional keywords.
Every keyword or topic has its own search demand curve, which includes all the keyword variations for that specific search term.
So the total search traffic potential for each topic or keyword highly depends on the various ways people are searching for it, as everyone has their own method to search and find something on the internet.
You should make sure to analyse all the top-ranking pages of the keywords you want to rank for, get the total search traffic potential and focus more on long-tail keywords.
This is a great one. You might be ranking number one for a keyword with loads of search volume. You might get a considerable amount of traffic from that keyword as well. However, is that enough? As Tim pointed out, you should be making sure that the traffic you get, is also converting.
To do this, you can apply a business potential score for each page of the website. This will help you focus on pages that drive people to the website but also result in some juicy conversions. We even share Tim’s business potential score below:
3 - your product is an almost irreplaceable solution to the problem
2 - your product is helpful for the problem but can be solved without it
1 - your product is barely relevant to the problem
Most SEOs aim to rank number one on Google for as many pages and as many queries as possible. However, Tim explained that ranking number 1 is overrated nowadays and it doesn’t guarantee the most visitors and traffic to your website. In fact, a study from Ahrefs based on 100K search queries found that the top-ranking page gets the most total search traffic only 49% of the time.
So how do we outperform #1? Focusing on search intent is a key element of success.
Jan Willem talked about how JavaScript and Single Page Applications are dominating the internet and how this evolved over the last couple of years. Jan used the 10 most popular JavaScript frameworks and the results were mindblowing!
Many are unaware that Googlebot is not a real user and always starts with a blank browser and history. It can’t use cookies, session data or local storage after the first visit, all elements that could improve your website's loading times.
Jan advises and we at Wolfgang agree that developers should always avoid full client-side rendering as it can impact upon performance for both your valuable visitors and search engines. Server-side rendering is always what we’d recommend (delighted to see that we are on the same page as Mr Willem!)
Unfortunately, server-side rendering can cause skews in analytics data and even double log page views.
Thankfully, there is a selection of tools out there allowing us to test JavaScript on websites. For example, you can use the URL Inspection Tool through Google Search Console, or the View Rendered Source plug-in via Chrome 77.
Jamie showed the audience how Googlebot sees websites and their content and how web crawlers build their view/understanding of a webpage. She explained the two waves of indexing (as discussed above) and what we should be focusing on to overcome and prevent any indexation issues.
With Google driving over 95% of all traffic to the majority of our client's websites, we know we must ensure all of our content is accessible and visible through Google’s eyes to ensure these pages are indexed the way we expect them to be. Rendering can be tricky due to Google’s two-wave process of indexing. We should be aware that there is a delay between indexing HTML pages and Javascript pages and that can cause indexing issues.
Google’s WRS doesn't retain any cookies or any data at all and doesn’t have any UI or visual elements. Googlebot wants to be polite and acts as ‘a good citizen of the web’ as it will pull back on crawling when a server is responding with errors ensuring that overloading is avoided.
Rory helped us to go deeper into the SERPs’ language and how we can analyse it using the coding language Python to get an idea of what Google thinks searchers are actually searching.
Little known fact: Google rewrites the SERPs meta description 84% of the time, based on this study by Conductor. As SEO’s we can turn this into our advantage by scraping those results and uncover what Google is algorithmically changing. We can do that by utilising Python scripts within Jupyter, an open-source web app that lets you run programming-language scripts, a task that would normally require special software and developer skills to carry out successfully. This process makes it easier to analyse the linguistic trends and themes of the content from a Search Engine Result Page.
‘N-gram co-occurrences’ is a script that allows us to count the most frequently occurring words and combinations in the SERPs, then analysing them and optimising our content using a more scientific approach to our target keywords.
Rory also explained how we can uncover content gaps within our landing pages and find new keywords that Google might see as semantically or contextually relevant to the keywords we’re already tracking and optimising for.
Additionally, a script called ‘Part of Speech’ allows us to dig more into those words and phrases based on their specific type (verbs, adjectives, nouns) making the analysis more accurate and detailed. For example, looking at the analysis that Rory did for the query ‘yoga’ we can see that ‘poses’ is the noun that appears more frequently in the SERPs’ content.
‘Topic Modeling’ is another script which allows us to determine topical trends within the SERPs and give us a glance at what Google identifies as topics of interest for the users. We can then use the analysis to build a content strategy across the website.
Charlie Norledge began the structured data session with his talk on what’s new in structured data.
In his talk, Charlie focused primarily on the latest Schema.org properties that produce rich results on Google. He spoke about winning SERP real-estate by using FAQ page schema and How-To schema markup. He also took a look at the niche-specific “Movie” schema which had just been announced days before BrightonSEO.
The reason that this Schema was interesting“Movie” schema was that some of the leading websites had already implemented this schema ahead of Google’s announcement of the rich results. Showing that it pays to implement all appropriately structured data markup to your site asap.
Charlie went on to give very practical advice on how we can find, create and implement the right schema for our own webpages. For example, by utilising Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool we can do a competitor analysis and take a look at what properties are being utilised by others as “inspiration”.
Overall, Charlie shared information that we currently provide to our SEO clients on structured data.
Luci walked us through an upcoming vertical of search, ‘Google Discovery’ and gave some actionable insights and advice.
Google is using AI in order to serve users with content that might interest them and is more relevant to them based on interests and web interactions. Discovery is available for mobile devices and despite the fact that it’s a fairly new form, already boasts approx. 800 million monthly users, which is quite impressive.
Google Search Console allows us to monitor the performance of our pages in Discovery with a dedicated report within GSC. The performance report gives you visibility on clicks, impressions and click-through rates. Other metrics include:
It’s worth mentioning that this report will only show pages with meaningful visibility.
Eleni talked about Press Releases and walked us through the optimal steps to turn a boring piece of informative content into an asset that ranks in Search Engines and drives qualified traffic.
People want to hear from (and trust) other people and businesses. In fact, 642,000 press releases are being published each year. This means 1,759 press releases are being pushed out to the public every single day!
When considering a Press Release we should be making sure that we are creating relevant, high quality and unique content as this is the only way to turn the press releases into a valuable asset of our SEO campaigns.
We should be focusing on content that speaks to our audience and always think out of the box. Press releases don’t have to be just text style. The text could be converted to images, videos, etc.
Eleni advises us not to neglect category landing pages and put the brand/site news into a subfolder as this shows Google it's correctly structured. This will make the website more crawlable and more rapidly indexed.
That’s all for now! Our clients will be getting a full BrightonSEO makeover on their websites over the coming months. Till next BrightonSEO, aloha!
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