SEO News

The following chart, supplied by PI Datametrics, shows how different brands are ranking for ‘christmas decorations’ over the last 12 months. 

While three of the retailers here are ranking consistently on page one of Google, the other two (Selfridges and Wilko) are all over the place. 

So what’s the difference? 

(Click image for a larger version)

For obvious reasons, this is a seasonal term, with big spikes in the run up to Christmas and little or no interest in between, as this Google Trends chart shows. 

John Lewis has a dedicated page for Christmas decorations which it doesn’t change too much. It also has no other pages competing for the term. 

NotOnTheHighStreet.com has a similar strategy, which produces the same results. 

In contrast, Selfridges doesn’t seem to have a strategy for this particular term, and has been publishing a number of pages which compete against each other for the term.

As I mentioned in a previous post, more content doesn’t always help, and in this case the competing pages are harming the overall rankings for the term. 

We see the same pattern from Wilko, with five pages ranking for the term at various times of the year. 

This means that Wilko’s search ranking has fluctuated between 11 and 82 over the course of 12 months. 

We see similar patterns in searches for ‘Christmas Toys’. Amazon has barely touched this page, and therefore ranks steadlily throughout the year. 

Argos, since just before last Christmas, has ranked steadily, but seems to have muddied the waters by adding more pages lately. 

We can see this in the rankings for the past few months: 

John Lewis had the right strategy for decorations, but is cannibalising its own search rankings on this term with five competing pages. 

Toys R Us has no stability at all, with 11 pages ranking for this term at various times of the year.

This means that, when the Christmas traffic spike arrives, it has no control over which page will rank for the term and where it will sit on Google.

So what’s the best strategy for seasonal pages? 

There are a number of factors: 

• Publish well in advance of the target event. Longevity is a factor here, and those brands, like Amazon, that have published the pages more than 12 months ago are still ranking highly. 
• Don’t mess with the pages. Come January, these pages may no longer be relevant or attract any traffic but that doesn’t mean they should be unpublished. Just leave them be. 
• Decide which page you want to rank. Set a landing page for your target term and make sure all other pages on the topic link to it.

  This sends a clear signal to Google of which page is more important, and can prevent unneccesary competition between pages on the same site. 

• More content isn’t always the answer. Just publishing more pages on the topic won’t help you rank unless the underlying strategy is there. 

On one hand, this is due to the expanding number of smartphones and the greater time spent by users on these devices. On the other hand, given the small screen size and keyboards of phones, it is a lot simpler to search (either by text or voice), rather than type a long, complex URL into the address bar when you are on the go.

The rise of mobile is consequently changing the search landscape, with an estimated 26.7% of Google’s ad revenues expected to come from mobile search in 2014.

The results that search engines deliver on phones and computers vary dramatically. Our own data found that 36% of web pages (URLs) shown in mobile Google search results are different to those that appear for the same searches carried out on a desktop or laptop.

Nearly a quarter (23%) were from completely different websites (domains). This reflects Google’s increasing focus on the context and intent behind queries, which vary dramatically from device to device and are also strongly related to local aspects.

Given these factors, how should marketers approach their overall search strategy? Do they look to keep content the same or vary it, according to device?

Based on our experience, here are six key considerations to keep in mind.

And for more on this topic, download the Econsultancy Mobile and Local SEO Best Practice Guide or read our post on 30+ compelling mobile search statistics.

1. Focus on the context

As I’ve said the intent behind a search query is often radically different between devices. If you search for pizza on your laptop, you are more likely to be at home looking to order a delivery.

On mobile you are probably on the move, and hence searching for a restaurant nearby (which is why the factor ‘local’ is much more important when performing mobile searches).

This is also why mobile search is particularly strong in specific sectors. For example, Google reports that 30% of all restaurant searches and 25% of all film searches are performed on a mobile device.

Additionally a mobile search can be more time-critical and less speculative – typing ‘petrol station’ could well mean that your car is running low and you need one now, rather than just researching a future purchase.

2. Speed is a factor

People read less,and want information faster when accessing content on their mobile devices. Screens are smaller, and searchers are usually on the move, so they don’t have the time or inclination to read long-form content.

Attention spans are shorter on smartphones, meaning bounce rates are higher. Essentially people want information quickly and immediately, rather than having to scroll through pages of results. Answers have to be briefer, relevant and easily understandable, otherwise they simply will not be read. 

3. Search engines treat mobile differently

As our results show, mobile results vary from other devices when it comes to Google searches. This is due to better understanding of the context, particularly as Google has additional information about the mobile searcher, such as exact location, to help it provide more relevant results.

With the form factor, particularly screen size, being different on a mobile device, Google displays results in a simpler way, using features such as Knowledge Graph to deliver answers in a straightforward, easily readable manner.

Knowledge Graph results

Hence, organic results are sometimes not visible without scrolling because the Knowledge Graph is delivered above them due to space constraints.

4. Content type is important

Figures from comScore reveal that the time spent consuming rich media (such as video) on mobile devices is actually higher than on the desktop. This could well be down to the fact that it is easier to listen or watch rich media than pure text while on the move.

Consequently marketers needs to factor this into their planning, ensuring that they offer a range of content types, optimised for different devices.

5. Mobile ranking factors are different

The factors that correlate with high rankings for mobile search are different to those on other devices.

A Searchmetrics study indicates that mobile search results on Google.com tend to include pages with fewer backlinks from other sites than comparable results for the same searches on desktop and laptop.

This makes sense because mobile content contains fewer ad hoc links, as mobile users are much less likely to link to pages, preferring to share/like through social media.

Additionally, mobile results often feature shorter content and also tend to display pages with a smaller file size on average than those delivered on desktop or laptop.

This could be because smaller pages will be quicker to download on a mobile and use less of a phone subscriber’s data allowance.

Marketers need to be aware of these differences and optimise content accordingly.

6. From responsive design to responsive content

Through techniques such as responsive design and HTML5, many organisations are creating web pages that change to fit different screen sizes and device interfaces.

The next step in this process is going to be responsive content. Take the example of a retailer – its traditional website should be optimised for desktop and laptop searches, with long-form, text-based content that covers all potential areas of interest to searchers.

For smartphone searchers, content should be condensed to what is relevant to them, perhaps using video rather than text, with the option to click to access the fuller desktop style article. 

We now live in a mobile-first world, which has a significant impact on how brands engage with consumers when it comes to search.

Marketers therefore need to understand how ranking factors vary between smartphone, tablet and desktop/laptop computer and put in place a strategy that delivers optimised content, whatever device the search is carried out on.

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

“What is this page about?”

As marketers, helping search engines answer that basic question is one of our most important tasks. Search engines can’t read pages like humans can, so we incorporate
structure and clues as to what our content means. This helps provide the relevance element of search engine optimization that matches queries to useful results.

Understanding the techniques used to capture this meaning helps to provide better signals as to what our content relates to, and ultimately helps it to rank higher in search results. This post explores a series of
on-page techniques that not only build upon one another, but can be combined in sophisticated ways.

While Google doesn’t reveal the exact details of its algorithm, over the years we’ve collected evidence from interviews, research papers, US patent filings and observations from hundreds of search marketers to be able to explore these processes. Special thanks to Bill Slawski, whose posts on
SEO By the Sea led to much of the research for this work.

As you read, keep in mind these are only
some of the ways in which Google could determine on-page relevancy, and they aren’t absolute law! Experimenting on your own is always the best policy.

We’ll start with the simple, and move to the more advanced.

1. Keyword Usage

In the beginning, there were keywords. All over the page.

The concept was this: If your page focused on a certain topic, search engines would discover keywords in important areas. These locations included the title tag, headlines, alt attributes of images, and throughout in the text. SEOs helped their pages rank by placing keywords in these areas.

Even today, we start with keywords, and it remains the most basic form of on-page optimization.

Most on-page SEO tools still rely on keyword placement to grade pages, and while it remains a good place to start, research shows its
influence has fallen. 

While it’s important to ensure your page at a bare minimum contains the keywords you want to rank for, it is unlikely that keyword placement by itself will have much of an influence on your page’s ranking potential.

2. TF-IDF

It’s not keyword density, it’s
term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). 

Google researchers
recently described TF-IDF as “long used to index web pages” and variations of TF-IDF appear as a component in several well-known Google patents.

TF-IDF doesn’t measure how often a keyword appears, but offers a measurement of
importance by comparing how often a keyword appears compared to expectations gathered from a larger set of documents.

If we compare the phrases “basket” to “basketball player” in
Google’s Ngram viewer, we see that “basketball player” is a more rare, while “basket” is more common. Based on this frequency, we might conclude that “basketball player” is significant on a page that contains that term, while the threshold for “basket” remains much higher.

For SEO purposes, when we measure TF-IDF’s
correlation with higher rankings, it performs only moderately better than individual keyword usage. In other words, generating a high TF-IDF score by itself generally isn’t enough to expect much of an SEO boost. Instead, we should think of TF-IDF as an important component of other more advanced on-page concepts. 

3. Synonyms and Close Variants

With over 6 billion searches per day, Google has a wealth of information to determine what searchers
actually mean when typing queries into a search box. Google’s own research shows that synonyms actually play a role in up to 70% of searches.

To solve this problem, search engines possess vast corpuses of
synonyms and close variants for billions of phrases, which allows them to match content to queries even when searchers use different words than your text. An example is the query dog pics, which can mean the same thing as:

• Dog Photos   • Pictures of Dogs   • Dog Pictures   • Canine Photos   • Dog Photographs

On the other hand, the query
Dog Motion Picture means something else entirely, and it’s important for search engines to know the difference.

From an SEO point of view, this means creating content using
natural language and variations, instead of employing the same strict keywords over and over again.

Using variations of your main topics can also add deeper semantic meaning and help solve the problem of
disambiguation, when the same keyword phrase can refer to more than one concept. Plant and factory together might refer to a manufacturing plant, whereas plant and shrub refer to vegetation.

Today, Google’s
Hummingbird algorithm also uses co-occurrence to identify
synonyms for query replacement.

4. Page Segmentation

Where you place your words on a page is often as important as the words themselves.

Each web page is made up of different parts—headers, footers, sidebars, and more. Search engines have long worked to determine the most important part of a given page. Both Microsoft and Google hold
several patents suggesting content in the more relevant sections of HTML carry more weight.

Content located in the main body text likely holds more importance than text placed in sidebars or alternative positions. Repeating text placed in boilerplate locations, or chrome, runs the risk of being discounted even more.

Page segmentation becomes significantly more important as we move toward 
mobile devices, which often hide portions of the page. Search engines want to serve users the portion of your pages that are visible and important, so text in these areas deserves the most focus.

To take it a step further,
HTML5 offers addition semantic elements such as <article>, <aside>, and <nav>, which can clearly define sections of your webpage.

5. Semantic Distance and Term Relationships

When talking about on-page optimization,
semantic distance refers to the relationships between different words and phrases in the text. This differs from the physical distance between phrases, and focuses on how terms connect within sentences, paragraphs, and other HTML elements.

How do search engines know that “Labrador” relates to “dog breeds” when the two phrases aren’t in the same sentence?

Search engines solve this problem by measuring the
distance between different words and phrases within different HTML elements. The closer the concepts are semantically, the closer the concepts may be related. Phrases located in the same paragraph are closer semantically than phrases separated by several blocks of text.

Additionally, HTML elements may shorten the semantic distance between concepts, pulling them closer together. For example,
list items can be considered equally distant to one another, and “the title of a document may be considered to be close to every other term in document“.

6. Co-occurrence and Phrase-Based Indexing

Up to this point, we’ve discussed individual keywords and relationships between them. Search engines also employ methods of indexing pages based on
complete phrases, and also ranking pages on the relevance of those pages.

We know this process as
phrase-based indexing.

What’s most interesting about this process is not how Google determines the important phrases for a webpage, but how Google can use these phrases to
rank a webpage based on how relevant they are.

Using the concept of
co-occurrence, search engines know that certain phrases tend to predict other phrases. If your main topic targets “John Oliver,” this phrase often co-occurs with other phrases like “late night comedian,” “Daily Show,” and “HBO.” A page that contains these related terms is more likely to be about “John Oliver” than a page that doesn’t contain related terms.

Add to this
incoming links from pages with related, co-occurring phrases and you’ve given your page powerful contextual signals.

7. Entity Salience

Looking to the future, search engines are exploring ways of using relationships between entities, not just keywords, to determine topical relevance.

One technique, published as a Google research paper, describes assigning relevance through
entity salience.

Entity salience goes beyond traditional keyword techniques, like TF-IDF, for finding relevant terms in a document by leveraging
known relationships between entities. An entity is anything in the document that is distinct and well defined.

The stronger an entity’s relationship to other entities on the page, the more significant that entity becomes.

In the diagram above, an article contains the topics
Iron Man, Tony Stark, Pepper Potts and Science Fiction. The phrase “Marvel Comics” has a strong entity relationship to all these terms. Even it only appears once, it’s likely
significant in the document. 

On the other hand, even though the phrase “Cinerama” appears multiple times (because the film showed there), this phrase has weaker entity relationships, and likely isn’t as significant.

Practical tips for better on-page optimization

As we transition from keyword placement to more advanced practices of topic targeting, it’s actually easy to incorporate these concepts into our content. While most of us don’t have the means available to calculate semantic relationships and entity occurrences, there are a number of simple steps we can take when crafting optimized content:

1. Keyword research forms your base. Even though individual keywords themselves are no longer enough to form the foundation of your content, everything begins with good keyword research. You want to know what terms you are targeting, the relative competition around those keywords, and the popularity of those terms. Ultimately, your goal is to connect your content with the very keywords people type and speak into the search box.
2. Research around topics and themes. Resist researching single keywords, and instead move towards exploring your keyword themes. Examine the secondary keywords related to each keyword. When people talk about your topic, what words do they use to describe it? What are the properties of your subject? Use these supporting keyword phrases as cast members to build content around your central theme.
3. When crafting your content, answer as many questions as you can. Good content answers questions, and semantically relevant content reflects this. A top ranking for any search query means the search engine believes your content answers the question best. As you structure your content around topics and themes, make sure you deserve the top ranking by answering the questions and offering a user experience better than the competition.
4. Use natural language and variations. During your keyword research process, it’s helpful to identify other common ways searchers refer to your topic, and include these in your content when appropriate. Semantic keyword research is often invaluable to this process.
5. Place your important content in the most important sections. Avoid footers and sidebars for important content. Don’t try to fool search engines with fancy CSS or JavaScript tricks. Your most important content should go in the places where it is most visible and accessible to readers.
6. Structure your content appropriately. Headers, paragraphs, lists, and tables all provide structure to content so that search engines understand your topic targeting. A clear webpage contains structure similar to a good university paper. Employ proper introductions, conclusions, topics organized into paragraphs, spelling and grammar, and cite your sources properly.

At the end of the day, we don’t need a super computer to make our content better, or easier to understand. If we write
like humans for humans, our content goes a long way in becoming optimized for search engines. What are your best tips for on-page SEO and topic targeting?

Special thanks to
Dawn Shepard, who provided the images for this post.

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