SEO News

Posted by jon.white

SEO is changing. We can no longer rely on keyword targeting alone to optimize our content. Whether we should focus on topics or keywords is a debate in progress. But figuring out which topics can influence the SERP is, at best, a manual process; at worst, it’s a timesuck that can take hours out of your day.

TL;DR

Today we’ve launched Related Topics, a new feature in Moz Pro that can help you make sense of how search engines understand topics and phrases.

You can use data like this to build deeper content, improve your topical authority, find keyword ideas, and generally better understand the SERP. It uses machine learning and topic modeling to mine related topics from the SERPs.

We see this as another step on the journey to help marketers better understand the complex world of SEO in 2016. As of this moment, Moz Pro is one of the only places you can get this kind of data.

Want the quick run-down? Tori explains it all in this brief 1:39 minute video, complete with snazzy music.

Can’t wait to dive in? Already an avid Moz Pro user? Head to the Keyword Rankings section of any campaign and get started. And if you’re not a Moz Pro subscriber, you can satisfy your curiosity with a free trial, too:

Try it for 30 days!

Pandas, Hummingbirds, and the relationship between keywords and pages

We’ve all noticed that SEO has become a lot more complex in the last few years. When Google started to figure out the meaning of words and phrases, simple keyword usage alone no longer guaranteed us results. Then Hummingbird spread its wings, and now in some cases, pages in the SERP don’t contain the keyword at all. Utter chaos, right?

Panda made sure we put effort and research into our content. And while it’s still a good idea to ensure your target keywords appear in key parts of your page, the simple on-page optimization of the past can no longer move the rankings needle on its own.

Related Topics is a new feature in Moz Pro that helps you understand how phrases and topics influence the SERP, allowing you to broaden your content and build out pages instead of devoting yourself to time-consuming (and let’s be real, sort of boring) research.

That all sounds well and good. But how do we get insight into how Google understands the relationship between topics? Well, it turns out they give us a handy clue: the SERP itself.

Related Topics examines all of the pages that rank in the top 20 for a given keyword. Using machine learning and topic modeling, it figures out which unique sets of terms and phrases those pages include. It then removes the topics that your page already talks about and presents the resulting list, along with the ranking URLs. Armed with this mighty list, you can now understand which topics have influence in the SERP and decide whether to integrate these into your own pages and content. It lives within the Page Optimization feature in Moz Pro, which you can now get to by clicking the “Optimize” next to any keyword in the ranking table.

While it’s impossible to say for sure that including topics in your page will result in a higher ranking (that ol’ correlation versus causation thing), we do know that pages that rank well are already including these topics in their content. If you’re looking to diversify and broaden your page’s subject coverage to try and win more authority, Related Topics is the place to start. Bonus points: it’s also quite likely that including coverage of these topics will improve the user’s experience of your content.

How can I use this data to get ahead?

1. Experiment with including different topics and content to build authority

Adding topically similar content to your page can help Google understand what that page is about, establishing yourself as an authority on those topics.

I’m a fan of Tim Ferris and his productivity hack blog, fourhourworkweek.com. Let’s take this article on speed reading. Looks like the page is optimized pretty well for the target keyword and has a decent link profile and PA. Now, let’s look at some other topics that have influence on the SERP.

Here I can see a couple of variations I might want to play around with, but a couple in particular catch my eye. I notice the topic “reading comprehension” seems influential (it’s included in 3 of the top 5 ranking pages), and it’s not syntactically related — this is a topic I might not have discovered manually by looking at variations of the target keyword. I also see “subvocalization” being influential. This is a term I might not be familiar with, but using Related Topics, I can drill into the actual URLs mentioning that topic, learn about it, and get some inspiration for how I could build out my content to include it.

This is a particularly interesting case, as “speed reading” has a somewhat reasonable search volume of 9,900 (from Keyword Planner). In contrast, “reading comprehension” has a search volume of 18,100. If I can integrate it well, I have an opportunity to broaden my audience.

2) Avoid thin content and go deeper

You’ve got to pacify the Panda. If you’re looking for ways to expand on thin content, go deeper or broader on an existing page, or convert shorter content to long-form, using Related Topics suggestions can give you inspiration for subject-matter expansion. Multiple studies have shown that deeper and more topically relevant content correlates with better ranking performance.

In the example below, I have a page about Product Management Events, if I wanted to make it broader I might do a deep dive on the subject of Product Design, or even talk about some of the branded topics that were discovered.

3) Save time on topical, competitive, and SERP research

This can be especially helpful when you’re wearing many hats, and tackling a new domain you’re not as familiar with. Using Related Topics — and especially researching the ranking pages they appear on — can give you a head start for topic-appropriate language to use, or inspiration for areas to research.

At Moz, we all think we’re experts on the housing market since we watched “The Big Short.” But challenge us to write about the more technical terms and we might struggle! Here’s another example using a US real estate blog recommended by our own in-house real estate guru Tim Ellis.

Let’s say we want to understand a bit more about the SERP for the keyword “real estate forecast,” and perform some industry research on terminology. Here are some topics that have influence:

I notice there are a few technical terms in here that I’m not familiar with, and if I want to learn more I can jump right into the ranking URLs that contain the topic and research them instead of trying to manually pull them out of the SERP.

4) Keyword Ideas

The list of topical suggestions also double as suggestions for other keywords to target, or as seed keywords for keyword research (we have some new keyword research tools coming very soon).

How does it actually work? (Tech jargon alert!)

Wondering how Related Topics knows just which content is on the page? Well, we use Moz’s proprietary Context API, which also powers other tools around here (such as Moz Content). Here are a few words from Dr. Matt Peters (Moz’s Chief Data Scientist) on how it works:

Moz’s topic modeling algorithm extracts relevant keyword phrases from English language web pages. We use natural language processing algorithms to analyze the page content and create a list of candidate topics. Then, a machine learning model assigns each candidate phrase a relevance score and ranks them from most-to-least relevant. The relevance score is a combination of traditional information retrieval techniques like term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and language modeling, syntactic and semantic signals such as part of speech tags, and graph-based features. The resulting lists of highly relevant topics and relevance scores are used in both Moz Pro and Moz Content.

As mentioned above, Related Topics takes the top 20 ranking pages on the SERP, extracts topics from them using the Context API, and then applies a series of filters and rules to show topics that we think are relevant. We exclude topics we find on any URLs that you rank with for the keyword. During feature development, we were faced with a choice: show topics that occur more frequently, but show less of them; or show more topics with varying ranges of frequency. We decided that our customers prefer having more data, and often we find gems near the bottom of the list. For this reason we went with the “more data” option. You might find the odd strange suggestion in there, but we think that’s outweighed by having more data to choose from.

See it in action!

Want to take it for a spin? If you’re already a Moz Pro subscriber (hey, pal!), head to your Keyword Rankings section in any Moz Pro campaign and hit the “Optimize Keyword” button.

Curious but not ready to commit? Check it out with a 30-day free trial:

Try it for 30 days!

As always, we want your feedback / comments / experiences in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

It seems like it’s getting harder to find people willing to talk about the virtues of good, solid search engine optimisation; the core technical proficiencies that make the web work.

Instead, people want to talk about content, creative, social engagement and all manner of audience metrics.

While that is, and always was, undoubtedly part of any sound digital marketing strategy, there’s a sense that perhaps, just perhaps, some marketers have jumped on the content bandwagon a little incautiously. 

What we have seen, in a relatively short period of time, is a rise in the number of brands banging the content drum above all else.

Many agencies have largely followed that same beat, and it has changed the mind-set of the brands that they are talking to. 

There are lots of good reasons for this. Google algorithm changes are obviously a key driver behind the shift.

Content was important before, and it is certainly important now, but has the industry allowed itself to lurch to the other end of the spectrum; where big-bang creative and the pursuit of ‘engagement’ have overtaken consideration for just, you know, doing the basics and doing them really, really well?

And is content simply an easier sell than some of the more technical and less glamorous aspects of digital?

That idea that may cause some raised eyebrows for any content marketer that has had to wrestle with the idea of proving the ROI to the board, but at the very least, content is visible, it’s fashionable and, ultimately, it’s what puts people and brands in the spotlight. 

But content cannot be a strategy around which every other element of digital and search engine optimisation is built, it has to be a tactic that is part of a wider and much more balanced strategy. 

Digital is all about balance

People love to talk about content.

It’s creative, it’s exciting, it’s interesting and it allows both marketers and brands to express themselves in ways that few other tactics do on the same cost and resource level. 

But when speaking to various marketers recently, there was a notion that perhaps the love affair with content has arguably come at the expense of other core elements of search marketing.

That isn’t to say that marketers aren’t doing the other fundamental elements of digital, but the question is over the extent to which these elements are integrated together – if they are integrated at all. 

This isn’t a particularly new debate, but while the virtues of integrating content marketing with SEO have been discussed at length, the issues still persist.

Indeed, in the light of Google’s Penguin and Panda updates, it’s arguable that the disconnect has become even greater, and in an environment where search engines are decreasing the reliance on links and focusing on content, UX and engagement, it is only natural that minds will focus in a particular direction. 

But while content-related factors are undeniably an important part of a digital strategy, so too are some of the more traditional and technical elements of digital.

Stickyeyes’ own Roadmap tool highlights that although the importance of ‘links and authority’ may have declined, it is still a massively influential ranking factor with a strong correlation to ranking positions. 

What we therefore have is two marketing tactics that are dependent on each other.

SEO needs content, but it doesn’t have to be glamorous

Search engine optimisation has relied on content. Even during the pre-Penguin period where everyone was rushing for links, links and more links, content was still crucial. 

But does this content have to always be the glamorous, big-bang creative ideas that get noticed in order to be effective? Well, not really.

And ask yourself, is your brand or agency really resourced to deliver that in the timeframe that you need it? After all, quality creative can be very resource intensive. 

For sure, it has to be good content, it has to be something that delivers some value to the reader, but it has to ultimately fulfil its purpose; it has to function. 

Functional content is very much the staple of your entire web presence, and can cover anything from your company information and your store finder pages, through to the copy on your product and sales pages.

It may be overlooked in the pursuit of shares and engagement, but functional content plays a vital role in any digital strategy. 

It establishes what your page is ultimately about, and it guides your customer through their journey. 

Content relies on SEO to move

Content marketing doesn’t work unless it moves – another one that we’ve all heard before, and there are plenty of ways in which we can make our content move.

Influencer engagement, social media, paid content distribution, email marketing, PR – the list is almost endless. 

But search also remains a huge channel for content discovery.

Content is still actively searched for and, for all of the click-bait headlines and optimised descriptive titles, content still needs a solid foundation upon which it can be discovered.

These foundations are fundamentally built through technical SEO. 

The collaboration to bring these skills together

SEO and content marketing are two very distinct skillsets, and this is often the root cause of this disconnect between content and SEO. 

But these skillsets, departments and stakeholders need to collaborate in order to deliver a complete digital strategy.

SEO needs content marketing, content marketing needs SEO, and both of these functions need the support of the wider business in general.

If you want to get your ideas off the ground and in front of your audiences, you’re going to need to get other people on board and a single, unified voice is much more effective at doing this than multiple ideas and ambitions all vying for limited resource.  

Don’t neglect the value of sound foundations because if you do, it is highly likely that your content will fall down.

Integrate these two key marketing tactics with the rest of your organisation. That is how you will engage your audiences with an effective digital strategy. 

It seems like it’s getting harder to find people willing to talk about the virtues of good, solid search engine optimisation; the core technical proficiencies that make the web work.

Instead, people want to talk about content, creative, social engagement and all manner of audience metrics.

While that is, and always was, undoubtedly part of any sound digital marketing strategy, there’s a sense that perhaps, just perhaps, some marketers have jumped on the content bandwagon a little incautiously. 

What we have seen, in a relatively short period of time, is a rise in the number of brands banging the content drum above all else.

Many agencies have largely followed that same beat, and it has changed the mind-set of the brands that they are talking to. 

There are lots of good reasons for this. Google algorithm changes are obviously a key driver behind the shift.

Content was important before, and it is certainly important now, but has the industry allowed itself to lurch to the other end of the spectrum; where big-bang creative and the pursuit of ‘engagement’ have overtaken consideration for just, you know, doing the basics and doing them really, really well?

And is content simply an easier sell than some of the more technical and less glamorous aspects of digital?

That idea that may cause some raised eyebrows for any content marketer that has had to wrestle with the idea of proving the ROI to the board, but at the very least, content is visible, it’s fashionable and, ultimately, it’s what puts people and brands in the spotlight. 

But content cannot be a strategy around which every other element of digital and search engine optimisation is built, it has to be a tactic that is part of a wider and much more balanced strategy. 

Digital is all about balance

People love to talk about content.

It’s creative, it’s exciting, it’s interesting and it allows both marketers and brands to express themselves in ways that few other tactics do on the same cost and resource level. 

But when speaking to various marketers recently, there was a notion that perhaps the love affair with content has arguably come at the expense of other core elements of search marketing.

That isn’t to say that marketers aren’t doing the other fundamental elements of digital, but the question is over the extent to which these elements are integrated together – if they are integrated at all. 

This isn’t a particularly new debate, but while the virtues of integrating content marketing with SEO have been discussed at length, the issues still persist.

Indeed, in the light of Google’s Penguin and Panda updates, it’s arguable that the disconnect has become even greater, and in an environment where search engines are decreasing the reliance on links and focusing on content, UX and engagement, it is only natural that minds will focus in a particular direction. 

But while content-related factors are undeniably an important part of a digital strategy, so too are some of the more traditional and technical elements of digital.

Stickyeyes’ own Roadmap tool highlights that although the importance of ‘links and authority’ may have declined, it is still a massively influential ranking factor with a strong correlation to ranking positions. 

What we therefore have is two marketing tactics that are dependent on each other.

SEO needs content, but it doesn’t have to be glamorous

Search engine optimisation has relied on content. Even during the pre-Penguin period where everyone was rushing for links, links and more links, content was still crucial. 

But does this content have to always be the glamorous, big-bang creative ideas that get noticed in order to be effective? Well, not really.

And ask yourself, is your brand or agency really resourced to deliver that in the timeframe that you need it? After all, quality creative can be very resource intensive. 

For sure, it has to be good content, it has to be something that delivers some value to the reader, but it has to ultimately fulfil its purpose; it has to function. 

Functional content is very much the staple of your entire web presence, and can cover anything from your company information and your store finder pages, through to the copy on your product and sales pages.

It may be overlooked in the pursuit of shares and engagement, but functional content plays a vital role in any digital strategy. 

It establishes what your page is ultimately about, and it guides your customer through their journey. 

Content relies on SEO to move

Content marketing doesn’t work unless it moves – another one that we’ve all heard before, and there are plenty of ways in which we can make our content move.

Influencer engagement, social media, paid content distribution, email marketing, PR – the list is almost endless. 

But search also remains a huge channel for content discovery.

Content is still actively searched for and, for all of the click-bait headlines and optimised descriptive titles, content still needs a solid foundation upon which it can be discovered.

These foundations are fundamentally built through technical SEO. 

The collaboration to bring these skills together

SEO and content marketing are two very distinct skillsets, and this is often the root cause of this disconnect between content and SEO. 

But these skillsets, departments and stakeholders need to collaborate in order to deliver a complete digital strategy.

SEO needs content marketing, content marketing needs SEO, and both of these functions need the support of the wider business in general.

If you want to get your ideas off the ground and in front of your audiences, you’re going to need to get other people on board and a single, unified voice is much more effective at doing this than multiple ideas and ambitions all vying for limited resource.  

Don’t neglect the value of sound foundations because if you do, it is highly likely that your content will fall down.

Integrate these two key marketing tactics with the rest of your organisation. That is how you will engage your audiences with an effective digital strategy. 

Posted by dohertyjf

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

As a startup founder myself, it feels weird to talk about startups through the lens of backlinks. After all, there are so many other things to worry about — how’s my cash flow? Are my employees getting paid? How does the deal flow look? Are we going to hit our targets for this month/quarter? Why is the website/app so slow? Did that vendor pay us that huge amount they owe?

What if I told you that I’ve seen (and helped) companies land funding off the back of solid SEO practices, including link acquisition and content creation? By integrating SEO into PR, outreach, and content initiatives, one specific startup has gone on to do great things.

Startups need to care about marketing

Startups should care about marketing, too. While the SF Bay Area, where I live, is all aflutter over “growth hacking” and some well-known investors are telling startups to not focus on marketing, I tend to disagree with them. (Of course, I’m a marketer!)

Whether or not startups should be doing PR and paid acquisition (I’d argue they should be doing a bit of both), SEO is beautiful in that it sits across or is in constant discussion with a lot of the “marketing” activities — PR, content, email, paid. Want to grow your company and get feedback on your new product faster? You need to be thinking about SEO.

A holistic marketing process

But as we all know, the different marketing channels all work together to help with SEO. Gone are the days of putting content online and predicting where it will rank and for which keywords. Your PR efforts can be very effective in building links for SEO as well as driving referral traffic back to your site, increasing those ever-important signups or purchases. As a startup, showing traction can help you get more mentions from sites that help with VC deal intelligence — sites like Mattermark, Tracxn.com, and Pitchbook. And getting mentioned on these sites can drive more mentions, which build links and drive referral traffic. It’s a virtuous cycle!

Because I’m very interested in how startups get traction and build their companies, I wanted to look at where the top 100 startups, according to Pitchbook’s valuation metric (thanks to Rob Toledo for the data), get links from.

My hope for this post is twofold. First, to educate you about how startups build links these days, and second, to show startups where they should be looking to get links. Of course, I’d be remiss to not also point out that you don’t just want to copy what your competitors are doing. Think about the mentions that will actually get you in front of your target audience. We all want to be written up in Techcrunch, but unless your true customers are VCs or other startups, you likely won’t see a bump from this (though you should retarget all of these visitors and try to get their emails so you can qualify them through your marketing funnel).

Ok, with all of that out of the way, let’s begin!

Who are the top startups?

It’s not necessary to list all of the startups I pulled the linking domains for, simply because the list would be long and that’s not what this post is about. The criteria that we used to pull the startups was fairly simple. I didn’t want the huge ones that everyone’s heard of (e.g. Uber), but I wanted startups that have shown some traction and were able to close a round of funding. The criteria were:

• The top 100 Angel–Series B companies…
• Sorted by valuation…
• That have raised financing from January 1st 2014–present.

This way, we get current companies that are assumedly still alive and building. This includes companies like Porch.com, Tilt.com, ZipRecruiter, Tune, and Mapbox.

Enough already. Give me the links!

Patience, my friend! Here are the top 55 domains that appear most often within the backlink reports (pulled from Open Site Explorer, of course) of the top 100 startups:

You’ve probably heard of many of these sites, as they tend to be the ones that a lot of us in the technology world read (for better or for worse).

I was then curious about the type of links these are. So, I went through and categorized them accordingly. Remember, there are 55 unique domains here so this isn’t quite representative of all of their links, but if you’re looking to build a bed of links for your company this should give you an idea of the channels that work:

As you can tell, by far the most common are from PR, then placed by the startup themselves on their profiles around the web (think Crunchbase), then links that are editorially given. Interestingly, we also see that email providers that by default make the emails sent public (like MailChimp) get crawled and the links counted.

How “normal” are their backlink profiles?

The next question I asked myself was how natural-looking their backlink profiles are. To do this, I graphed the Domain Authorities of all the domains pulled from OSE as linking to these sites. To make it as accurate as possible, I de-duplicated the domains before making this graph.

For many of us who have been in the SEO world for years, this graph should look pretty familiar. Years ago, we would often talk about natural link profiles and point out how many sites who hadn’t engaged in active link building, targeting sites with high Domain Authority, would often see a left-leaning bell curve. This is exactly what we see above. Basically, the reason we expect to see this is that Domain Authority works on an exponential scale. It’s quite easy to go from 0 to 20, but then becomes progressively harder to move that needle. It works a lot like PageRank in that way. So, there are a lot of sites online with a DA under 30–35 and not as many above.

I’ll be honest though when I say that it’s been quite a while since I looked at the link graphs of many sites. So let’s compare the above to a few other sites that have some links. Remember, we’re just looking for directional patterns, not prescriptions.

My personal site, johnfdoherty.com

Uber’s corporate site, uber.com

Techcrunch.com

As you can see, the overall link spread of the top 100 startups is pretty in line with what one could consider “normal.” I’m sure you can find anomalies at an individual site level, but at a 10,000-foot view, they’re natural. This is important because it means that at least most of these startups are not actively manipulating the link graph in a way that could hurt them in the future. Basically, don’t pull a Thumbtack.

Do links vary by stage of company?

The final question I had was how each startup’s site varies with domain authority and number of linking root domains by stage of company (seed, Series A, Series B). Intuition tells me that the further along the company is, the more links it will have and the stronger their site will be. But is this what the data tell us?

To get this data, I used the Moz API to pull the metrics via a Google doc cobbled together from many places. The final working one was sent to me by Tim Allen at Distilled London. Thanks man. I pulled the Series level (Angel, Series A, Series B) from Mattermark’s company profile pages. I had to remove two companies, one Series A and one Funding Unknown, because OSE had no link metrics.

Here are the average number of links (not linking root domains) by Funding Series.

This chart is a bit misleading, however, because one Series A company (Crowdrise) and one Series B company (Porch) have exponentially more links than the other sites in the dataset. Porch has, according to Moz, 142k external links, while Crowdrise has 40k. The next highest is Canva at 18.5k, and the average across all the rest after Porch and Crowdrise is 1,695.

When we remove Porch and Crowdrise from the dataset as outliers, we get a much clearer view of the landscape. Series A companies still have more links on average than Series B or C, which may be explained by the increasing proliferation of tech blogs and the recent funding boom that that occurred in 2013–2015 (which now seems to be cooling). Here’s the look:

Takeaways

So what can we take away from all of this? First of all, let’s all remember that links are a lagging indicator of success, but they can also to some degree tell us who’s popular. And of course, the more quality and high-authority links you have, the better you will rank.

Second, remember the first graph. The ways that the top startups build links are via:

1. PR
2. Placed links (profiles, etc.)
3. Editorial
4. Blogs

It seems that social bookmarking is dead as a linkbuilding tactic for startups. I’m heartened by this, as it seems that startups focus (as they should) on links from places that will also drive them traffic. If you’re looking for inspiration and more tactics around how to build links, I definitely recommend checking out the Link Building category of the Moz blog.

What takeaways or further questions do you have?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!