Strings to Things: The Move to Semantic SEO

by Matthew Brown – Moz

#MozCon @MatthewJBrown

The 2011 me was a different SEO

3 The rise of Panda

The writing was on the wall

Adios, Keyword-based site architectureRIP: Industrial-Strength “Query SEO”

Semantic SEO: The Pitch

The market corrected

7The solution? Use the semantic web!

8 Entity-based SEO to increase relevancy

9Turns out that’s where Google was headed

“Search is dramatically changing right before our eyes”

Amit SinghalGoogle I/O 2013

Source: Flickr: JD Hancock

“This is our flagship product used by billions of people, and yet we’re saying it’s changing

fundamentally.”

Jason DouglasKnowledge Graph Product Manager

Google I/O 2013

http://bit.ly/17WMS1G

Desktop PC sales: Freefall

13 Mobile. (source: http://slidesha.re/11aymBx)

14Or rather, Mobile ARPU (source: http://slidesha.re/11aymBx)

“The end of search as we know it?”

16

Source: Flickr: David Masters

SEO is NOT dead

17 Source: LinkedData.org

Links aren’t going anywhere

18 Truth: The best SEOs make a lot of bets

Source: Flickr: SLGCKGC

Are sites implementing structured data?

Markup Percent of URLs

Open graph 36.9%schema.org 9.9%G+ publisher 7.1%G+ author 2.2%

And it’s still plenty early to make this bet…

How to level up in semantic SEO

Source: Flickr: Rob Boudon

Step 1: What problem are the engines trying to solve?

#MozCon @MatthewJBrown

Entity extraction from web documentshttp://bit.ly/17WMS1G

Co-reference and the WikiLinks CorpusReading List: UMass Wikilinks Project - SEO by the Sea - Google Research

It’s easy to extract entities from this.

This? Not so much.

Search engines need to do this at web scalehttp://bit.ly/17WMS1G

We see this in their presentationshttp://bit.ly/17WMS1G

We see this in the evolution of Schema.org

We see this in “conversational search”

We see this in Bing Researchhttp://bit.ly/LxwYgh

And they’re carefully measuring intenthttp://slidesha.re/17mS0OM

Step 2: Freebase (and other tools)

#MozCon @MatthewJBrown

Freebase presentation from Google I/Ohttp://bit.ly/YZt6C4

Using the Freebase API to get ranked entitieshttp://bit.ly/12aetM0

Using the Freebase API to roll your ownhttp://bit.ly/13sg2aW

Google’s tilde search operator?

Entity search from Binghttp://explicit.bing.net/entities/search?q=adidas

Bottlenosewww.bottlenose.com

Yahoo Glimmerhttp://glimmer.research.yahoo.com

Fresh Web Explorerhttp://freshwebexplorer.moz.com/

RelFinderhttp://www.visualdataweb.org/relfinder.php

Step 3: Target the entity long tail

#MozCon @MatthewJBrown

Avoid targeting Entity-based SERPs like this

Find the longer tail entity-based queries

Use Freebase and social tools to map entities

46 ‘Entity KW’ stuffing will not look natural

Create a semantic content modelhttp://bit.ly/11drfnY

This is where you add Freebase and other semantic tools

48

Step 4: Profit?!?!

Source: Flickr: Rob Boudon

@MatthewJBrown