How and why content on-site is important for being seen by Google, your brand and your website as a whole. Presented at the Melbourne SEO Collective meetup on 6 Sep 2022.

1. content for the win
floq.co
SEO Collective
6 Sep 2022

2. floq.co
what’s what
Google & content
01
Burn down the way we do
content strategy
02
How we should approach
it instead
03
Receipts
04
Who tf am I?
05

3. google has been trying to understand content and intent for a
long time
2005
Bourbon
“Bourbon changed how
duplicate content and
non-canonical URLs were
treated”
2009
Real Time Search
2010
Mayday
2011
Attribution update
Schema announced
Panda #1-9
Freshness update
2012
Panda #10-23
Penguin
Knowledge graph x2
2013
Panda #24-25
Penguin
Knowledge Graph
In-depth articles
Hummingbird
2014
Panda #26, 27
Pigeon (local intent)
2015
Quality Raters
Guidelines released
Panda #28 -
Rank Brain
2017
Fred
2018
Medic
Updated
Quality Raters
guidelines
released
2019
3x core updates
BERT
2020
Core update
Featured snippets
2022
Helpful
content
update

4. google has been trying to understand content and intent for a
long time
Panda
Diminishing low quality
content
Quality Rater
Guidelines
Confirming high quality
content
Hummingbird
Understanding user
intent through entity
mapping
BERT & MUM
Understanding user
intent through natural
language processing

5. That’s more than 50 major
algorithm changes over the span of
15 years to try and understand the
quality and intent of content.

6. and that’s not all.

7. Our syntactic systems predict part-of-speech tags for each word in a
given sentence, as well as morphological features such as gender and
number. They also label relationships between words, such as subject,
object, modification, and others. We focus on efficient algorithms that
leverage large amounts of unlabeled data, and recently have
incorporated neural net technology.
On the semantic side, we identify entities in free text, label them with
types (such as person, location, or organization), cluster mentions of
those entities within and across documents (coreference resolution),
and resolve the entities to the Knowledge Graph.
Source: https://research.google/research-areas/natural-language-processing/
natural language processing means google is seeking to understand what makes someone an expert

8. natural language processing has helped google build its own
wikipedia…
● Entity databases
● Co-occurrence
● Knowledge graphs and entity relationships
● Disambiguations and ontology
Source:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&S1=08538984&OS
=PN/08538984&RS=PN/08538984
http://www.seobythesea.com/2014/01/entity-associations-websites-related-entities/
http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/05/should-you-be-doing-concept-research-instead-of-keyword-research/
http://www.seobythesea.com/2017/06/fact-answers/
http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/11/ranking-webpages-relationships-co-occurrence-patent/
http://www.seobythesea.com/2013/08/relationships-search-entities/
http://static.twoday.net/blackcat/files/applying%20meaning%20to%20information%20management.pdf
http://www.seobythesea.com/2013/08/relationships-search-entities/
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&S1=08504562&OS
=PN/08504562&RS=PN/08504562
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=7,877,371.PN.
&OS=pn/7,877,371&RS=PN/7,877,371

9. …and understand topical relationships in context of the vertical
NLP and entity recognition helps
Google generate position 0 results,
find the answer to your question and
present it to you in search results.

10. …and understand topical relationships in context of the vertical
But it doesn’t always get it right. The data it returns is only as good as the data we feed it.
Shameless plug - go to https://floq.co/seo-strategy/tactics-strategy/ to read what I see SEO strategy to be all about
A bad example:

11. entities
http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220130238594%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20130238594&RS=DN/20130238594
Ranking scores for Related entities can be
based at least in part on:
● How often you search related terms
● Search volume
● How often related queries come up in
searches together
● If searches tend to happen in a
particular hierarchical order
● If we know the search is related to a
broader search

12. entities & user-based context
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=10,496,691.PN.&OS=PN/10,496,691&RS=PN/10,496,691
Basically, what you see in a search result is taking into consideration much
more than what words a visitor types into Google, but also things like:
● already-known correlations with the search
● already-known related topics
● already-known disambiguations
● your own personal search history
● the context of both the page and your query
● and what broader topic your search is a part of.

13. google quality rater guidelines
Source: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf
For informational content: very high
quality MC is original, accurate,
comprehensive, clearly communicated,
professionally presented, and should
reflect expert consensus as appropriate.
All types of very high quality
informational content share common
attributes of accuracy,
comprehensiveness, and clear
communication, in addition to meeting
standards appropriate to the topic or
field.

14. So why do we still publish content
on our websites the same way we
did 7 years ago?

15. why are people still doling out this advice??
Shameless plug - go to https://floq.co/seo-strategy/tactics-strategy/ to read what I see SEO strategy to be all about
https://backlinko.com/seo-content

16. why are people still doling out this advice??
Shameless plug - go to https://floq.co/seo-strategy/tactics-strategy/ to read what I see SEO strategy to be all about
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seo-strategy

17. creating an article for each keyword variant makes no sense
when if you’re an expert writing editorially on a topic you’ll
use all of that language in one article

18. blog articles don’t work because they’re intrinsically siloed,
time bound and a footnote to the brand

20. google’s mission is to organise the world’s
information and make it universally accessible
and useful.
our job as SEO professionals and website
owners is to accelerate that process and make
our website as easy to digest as possible.
a blog doesn’t do that.

21. First — content consolidation, or
pruning.*
*this is not about link juice.
Fuck that shit.

22. Find your duplicates, your
near-duplicates, your “keyword
targeted” pages that are actually
keyword stuffed…
and properly sunset them all.

24. *ahrefs database
updates
70%
organic traffic to
key middle of funnel
guide
130%
organic traffic to
supporting middle of
funnel guide
64%
organic traffic to
entire blog baselined
against entire site
consolidating content can be super beneficial because google
likes it when finding related information is easy
Source: client Google Analytics, organic landing pages for specific page groups

25. actually approach your content with a business integrated
method
Know your audience
What problem are you
trying to solve, what’s the
job to be done?
Organise it
Put it and link to it from
where customers are likely
to need it in their journey.
Not randomly on some blog.
Know what you have
Do a big eff off content
audit. Find those blog
articles from 2013 that you
thought died. Know what
works for your audience.
Keep it evergreen
There’s no assumption the
solution I’m putting forward
is the best one. The goal is to
find the workable middle
ground.
01
02
03
04
05 Rinse and repeat

26. every search in google is trying to
answer a question.
figure out the context of that
question with jobs to be done.

27. “When I’m looking for a new phone I want the least
expensive one because mine is broken and I need
one that I can afford, quickly.”
[cheap phones same day delivery], [best phones
under $300 officeworks]
“When I’m looking for a new phone I want one that
can multi-task between work and life because I don’t
want to carry two phones around with me all the
time”
[best work phone australia], [samsung fold reviews]
jobs to be done not only looks at intent, but context as well.

28. https://www.portent.com/onetrick/#listwhatyouvegot
a content inventory looks something like this. From here you can see your multipliers to conversion - the topics or information that is really
swaying your audience to take that step.

29. We don’t need 2,000 words on how
to do something that takes 2
sentences or a 30 second video to
explain. Cater to your context. Be
concise with your answer.

30. [...]If we know this category is
associated with these other
subcategories then that’s a
clear connection that we have
between those parts[...]help[ing]
us understand how these things
are connected[...].
Whereas if it’s very flat, then we
think, oh all of these are equally
important and we don’t really
know which of these are
connected to each other.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pyramid-site-structure/394528/#close

31. make it explicit with schema & rich markup — and test it!
https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/case-studies/seo-split-test-lessons-adding-price-review-schema-product-pages/
Proof of concepts are your BFF
This test was the second run
my Search Pilot and they saw a
20% uplift with just review
schema, inconclusive with
both review & product schema

32. sources for evergreen content are more immediate than a google
search
Customer verbatims via NPS
surveys
Customer service team
Google’s Knowledge graph
panels (people also ask, etc)
Answerthepublic
https://ai.google.com/resear
ch/NaturalQuestions
Case studies
Competitor comparisons
Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/r-enAOPw8Rs

33. consider zero-search topics
Source: https://www.singlegrain.com/seo/zero-search-volume-keywords/

34. Link to the content where it makes sense —
from the product page, in FAQs, in the help
section, from other articles…
This content is a part of your overall brand and
should be treated as such!

35. So you may need to manage your
stakeholders, and get buy in.
TL;DR — it’s never about you, it’s
about them. Do your research &
stalk them a little.

36. DEV COORDINATION
Consulted with dev team
about how best to put
content in the product
hierarchy
Technical buy-in
TARGETED TOPICS
Reviewed topic intent,
historical opportunity and
vendor positioning to write
Matching keyword intent
LIMITED WRITERS
With limited capacity from
the editorial team, it got done
through the willingness to do
the writing myself.
JFDI
challenger telco builds
longtail through product
content
incremental
increase in
purchase
when content
was a part of
the journey
21%
DUE DILIGENCE
Worked closely with legal
team to understand their red
flags in order to write and
publish content smoothly.
Understanding risk

37. boutique hotel
beats OTA’s with
localisation
I worked with a boutique hotel fighting
with OTAs (online travel agents).
By focussing on localised, long-tail searches
rather than chasing broad searches, they
improved their revenue dramatically
year-on-year.
Incremental
increase in year
on year organic
revenue.
30%

38. about amanda
email: floq.co@gmail.com
SEO Consultant
Seasoned
Has worked in the SEO
industry since 2010, across
agency, in-house enterprise
and start-up, in the US and
AU.
Process-compliant
Working enterprise for a
highly regulated industry
means there’s clear
understanding of different
compliance processes
Data-driven
Built, led and executed on
the Data & Analytics
product offering. Including
executing CRO.
Solution-focused
There’s no assumption the
solution I’m putting forward
is the best one. The goal is to
find the workable middle
ground.
01
02
03
04

39. 39
5 takeaways
Google works very, very hard to understand what your
content is about, so help Google by researching (and
writing about) related topics
1
Google is always trying to interpret people’s intent, and
is constantly improving – so do the same to your
content
2
Google wants content that answers your customers
questions – so answer them. Use personas, and your
own internal data
3
Google is a machine. So make it easier for them to
understand your content by speaking their own
language – schema, a website architecture that makes
sense
4
Google cares about your content and its relevance to
your brand, so you should too.
5

40. thank you
Amanda King
0498002962
floq.co@gmail.com