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How to Create Boring-Industry Content that Gets Shared

Posted by ronell-smith

If you think creating content for boring industries is tough, try creating content for an expensive product that'll be sold in a so-called boring industry. Such was the problem faced by Mike Jackson, head of sales for a large Denver-based company that was debuting a line of new high-end products for the fishing industry in 2009.

After years of pestering the executives of his traditional, non-flashy company to create a line of products that could be sold to anglers looking to buy premium items, he finally had his wish: a product so expensive only a small percentage of anglers could afford them.

What looked like being boxed into a corner was actually part of the plan.

When asked how he could ever put his neck on the line for a product he'd find tough to sell and even tougher to market, he revealed his brilliant plan.

"I don't need to sell one million of [these products] a year," he said. "All I need to do is sell a few hundred thousand, which won't be hard. And as far as marketing, that's easy: I'm ignoring the folks who'll buy the items. I'm targeting professional anglers, the folks the buyers are influenced by. If the pros, the influencers, talk about and use the products, people will buy them."

Such was my first introduction to how it's often wise to ignore who'll buy the product in favor of marketing to those who'll help you market and sell the product.

These influencers are a sweet spot in product marketing and they are largely ignored by many brands

Looking at content for boring industries all wrong

A few months back, I received a message in Google Plus that really piqued my interest: "What's the best way to create content for my boring business? Just kidding. No one will read it, nor share information from a painter anyway."

I went from being dismayed to disheartened. Dismayed because the business owner hadn't yet found a way to connect with his prospects through meaningful content. Disheartened because he seemed to have given up trying.

You can successfully create content for boring industries. Doing so requires nothing out of the ordinary from what you'd normally do to create content for any industry. That's the good news.

The bad news: Creating successful content for boring industries requires you think beyond content and SEO, focusing heavily on content strategy and outreach.

Successfully creating content for boring industries—or any industry, for that matter—comes down to who'll share it and who'll link to it, not who'll read it, a point nicely summed up in this tweet:

I just don't understand the mindset of 'build content --> build links to it'. Identify link opps FIRST, then create content to service them.
— Jon Cooper (@PointBlankSEO) April 7, 2015

So when businesses struggle with creating content for their respective industries, the culprits are typically easy to find:

• They lack clarity on who they are creating content for (e.g., content strategy, personas)
• There are no specific goals (e.g., traffic, links, conversions, etc.) assigned regarding the content, so measuring its effectiveness is impossible
• They're stuck in neutral thinking viral content is the only option, while ignoring the value of content amplification (e.g., PR/outreach)

Alone, these three elements are bad; taken together, though, they spell doom for your brand.

If you lack clarity on who you're creating content for, the best you can hope for is that sometimes you'll create and share information members of your audience find useful, but you likely won't be able to reach or engage them with the needed frequency to make content marketing successful.

Goals, or lack thereof, are the real bugaboo of content creation. The problem is even worse for boring industries, where the pressure is on to deliver a content vehicle that meets the threshold of interest to simply gain attention, much less, earn engagement.

For all the hype about viral content, it's dismaying that so few marketers aren't being honest on the topic: it's typically hard to create, impossible to predict and typically has very, very little connection to conversions for most businesses.

What I've found is that businesses, regardless of category, struggle to create worthwhile content, leading me to believe there is no boring industry content, only content that's boring.

"Whenever we label content as 'boring,' we're really admitting we have no idea how to approach marketing something," says Builtvisible's Richard Baxter.

Now that we know what the impediments are to producing content for any industry, including boring industries, it's time to tackle the solution.

Develop a link earning mindset

There are lots of article on the web regarding how to create content for boring industries, some of which have appeared on this very blog.

But, to my mind, the one issue they all suffer from is they all focus on what content should be created, not (a) what content is worthy of promotion, (b) how to identify those who could help with promotion, and (c) how to earn links from boring industry content. (Remember, much of the content that's read is never shared; much of what's shared is never read in its entirety; and some of the most linked-to content is neither heavily shared nor heavily read.)

This is why content creators in boring industries should scrap their notions of having the most-read and most-shared content, shifting their focus to creating content that can earn links in addition to generating traffic and social signals to the site.

After all, links and conversions are the main priorities for most businesses sharing content online, including so-called local businesses.

(Image courtesy of the 2014 Moz Local Search Ranking Factors Survey)

If you're ready to create link-earning, traffic-generating content for your boring-industry business follow the tips from the fictitious example of RZ's Auto Repair, a Dallas, Texas, automobile shop.

With the Dallas-Forth Worth market being large and competitive, RZ's has narrowed their speciality to storm repair, mainly hail damage, which is huge in the area. Even with the narrowed focus, however, they still have stiff competition from the major players in the vertical, including MAACO.

What the brand does have in its favor, however, is a solid website and a strong freelance copywriter to help produce content.

Remember, those three problems we mentioned above—lack of goals, lack of clarity and lack of focus on amplification—we'll now put them to good use to drive our main objectives of traffic, links and conversions.

Setting the right goals

For RZ, this is easy: He needs sales, business (e.g., qualified leads and conversions), but he knows he must be patient since using paid media is not in the cards.

Therefore, he sits down with his partner, and they come up with what seems like the top five workable, important goals:

1. Increased traffic on the website - He's noticed that when traffic increases, so does his business.
2. More phone calls - If they get a customer on the phone, the chances of closing the sale are around 75%.
3. One blog per week on the site - The more often he blogs, the more web traffic, visits and phone calls increase.
4. Links from some of the businesses in the area - He's no dummy. He knows the importance of links, which are that much better when they come from a large company that could send him business.
5. Develop relationships with small and midsize non-competing businesses in the area for cross promotions, events and the like.

Know the audience

(image source)

Too many businesses create cute blogs that might generate traffic but do nothing for sales. RZ isn't falling for this trap. He's all about identifying the audience who's likely to do business with him.

Luckily, his secretary is a meticulous record keeper, allowing him to build a reasonable profile of his target persona based on past clients.

• 21-35 years old
• Drives a truck that's less than fours years old
• Has an income of $45,000-$59,000
• Employed by a corporation with greater than 500 employees
• Active on social media, especially Facebook and Twitter
• Consumes most of their information online
• Typically referred by a friend or a co-worker

This information will prove invaluable as he goes about creating content. Most important, these nuggets create a clearer picture of how he should go about looking for people and/or businesses to amplify his content.

PR and outreach: Your amplification engines

Armed with his goals and the knowledge of his audience, RZ can now focus on outreach for amplification, thinking along the lines of...

• Who/what influences his core audience?
• What could he offer them by way of content to earn their help?
• What content would they find valuable enough to share and link to?
• What challenges do they face that he could help them with?
• How could his brand set itself apart from any other business looking for help from these potential outreach partners?

Putting it all together

Being the savvy businessperson he is, RZ pulls his small staff together and they put their thinking caps on.

Late spring through early fall is prime hail storm season in Dallas. The season accounts for 80 percent of his yearly business. (The other 20% is fender benders.) Also, they realize, many of the storms happen in the late afternoon/early evening, when people are on their way home from work and are stuck in traffic, or when they duck into the grocery store or hit the gym after work.

What's more, says one of the staffers, often a huge group of clients will come at once, owing to having been parked in the same lot when a storm hits.

Eureka!

(image source)

That's when RZ bolts out of his chair with the idea that could put his business on the map: Let's create content for businesses getting a high volume of after-work traffic—sit-down restaurants, gyms, grocery stores, etc.

The businesses would be offering something of value to their customers, who'll learn about precautions to take in the event of a hail storm, and RZ would have willing amplifiers for his content.

Content is only as boring as your outlook

First—and this is a fatal mistake too many content creators make—RZ visits the handful of local businesses he'd like to partner with. The key here, however, is he smartly makes them aware that he's done his homework and is eager to help their patrons while making them aware of his service.

This is an integral part of outreach: there must be a clear benefit to the would-be benefactor.

After RZ learns that several of the businesses are amenable to sharing his business's helpful information, he takes the next step and asks what form the content should take. For now, all he can get them to promote is a glossy one-sheeter, "How To Protect Your Vehicle Against Extensive Hail Damage," that the biggest gym in the area will promote via a small display at the check-in in return for a 10% coupon for customers.

Three of the five others he talked to also agreed to promote the one-sheeter, though each said they'd be willing to promote other content investments provided they added value for their customers.

The untold truth about creating content for boring industries

When business owners reach out to me about putting together a content strategy for their boring brand, I make two things clear from the start:

1. There are no boring brands. Those two words are a cop out. No matter what industry you serve, there are hoards of people who use the products or services who are quite smitten.
2. What they see as boring, I see as an opportunity.

In almost every case, they want to discuss some of another big content piece that's sure to draw eyes, engagement, and that maybe even leads to a few links. Sure, I say, if you have tons of money to spend.

(Amazing piece of interactive content created by BuiltVisible)

Assuming you don't have money to burn, and you want a plan you can replicate easily over time, try what I call the 1-2-1 approach for monthly blog content:

1: A strong piece of local content (goal: organic reach, topical relevance, local SEO)
2: Two pieces of evergreen content (goal: traffic)
1: A link-worthy asset (goal: links)

This plan is not very hard at all to pull off, provided you have your ear to the street in the local market; have done your keyword research, identifying several long-tail keywords you have the ability to rank for; and you're willing to continue with outreach.

What it does is allow the brand to create content with enough frequency to attain significance with the search engines, while also developing the habit of sharing, promoting and amplifying content as well. For example, all of the posts would be shared on Twitter, Google Plus, and Facebook. (Don't sleep on paid promotion via Facebook.)

Also, for the link-worthy asset, there would be outreach in advance of its creation, then amplification, and continued promotion from the company and those who've agreed to support the content.

Create a winning trifecta: Outreach, promotion and amplification

To RZ's credit, he didn't dawdle, getting right to work creating worthwhile content via the 1-2-1 method:

1: "The Worst Places in Dallas to be When a Hail Storm Hits"
2: "Can Hail Damage Cause Structural Damage to Your Car?" and "Should You Buy a Car Damaged by Hail?"
1: "Big as Hail!" contest

This contest idea came from the owner of a large local gym. RZ's will give $500 to the local homeowner who sends in the largest piece of hail, as judged by Facebook fans, during the season. In return, the gym will promote the contest at its multiple locations, link to the content promotion page on RZ's website, and share images of its fans holding large pieces of hail via social media.

What does the gym get in return: A catchy slogan (e.g., it's similar to "big as hell," popular gym parlance) to market around during the hail season.

It's a win-win for everyone involved, especially RZ.

He gets a link, but most important he realizes how to create content to nail each one of his goals. You can do the same. All it takes is a change in mindset. Away from content creation. Toward outreach, promote and amplify.

Summary

While the story of RZ's entirely fictional, it is based on techniques I've used with other small and midsize businesses. The keys, I've found, are to get away from thinking about your industry/brand as being boring, even if it is, and marshal the resources to find the audience who'll benefit from from your content and, most important, identify the influencers who'll promote and amplify it.

What are your thoughts?

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An Introduction to Schema.org Markup for Emails

Posted by kristihines

If you are a Gmail user, you have likely received some emails that stand out from the rest with a call to action button within the subject line.

If you've booked a flight recently, your airline may have sent you an email that includes an interactive way to view your travel plans.

Similarly, Google Inbox app users might have seen emails that look like this.

These calls to action are courtesy of Schema.org markup for email. Just like Schema.org markup for web pages helps web pages stand out in search results, Schema.org markup for emails helps certain emails stand out from the rest in your inbox.

The goal of email markup is to allow people to take action on emails as quickly and simply as possible. For marketers, there are both pros and cons of this feature. In this post, we're going to look at the email markup options currently available, who can use it, and if it's worth it.

Should you use email markup?

Email markup is currently available for Gmail email recipients only. The number of Gmail users was over 350 million in 2012. To determine whether you should use it, you shouldn't go off a three-year-old statistic, but rather a survey of your own email list or customer database.

Most email service providers (like GetResponse, shown in the example below) allow you to search your subscriber list for specific criteria. Search yours for emails containing Gmail to determine the number of Gmail addresses your emails reach.

Of course, this isn't the whole picture. There are likely more people that use Gmail for business with their own domains. So although their emails do not say Gmail, they open their emails in the Gmail web browser or app.

Another consideration for using email markup is tracking. If you rely heavily on the ability to track email opens and clicks to trigger autoresponders and other marketing automation actions, you may not want to give your subscribers the option to bypass opening your email and clicking on your link.

Once you've determined the approximate number of Gmail users you reach and whether you need the ability to track email actions, your next job is to see if you qualify to use email markup.

Register for email markup with Google

Before you can use email markup, you must register with Google. Google will check to make sure you meet email sender quality guidelines, bulk sender guidelines, and action / schema quality guidelines.

Here are some of the key guidelines you need to know. Emails must be authenticated via DKIM or SPF. The domain of your from email must match the signed-by or mailed-by header.

You must send a minimum of a hundred emails per day to Gmail users for a few weeks before applying. Google will want to see that you have a very, very low rate of spam complaints from Gmail recipients.

Bulk email guidelines include using the same IP address to send bulk mail, using the same from email address, only adding subscribers to your list that have opted in (preferably with a double opt-in or confirmation), and allowing list members to unsubscribe easily. These guidelines will not only help you get approved for use of email markup, but will also help your emails get delivered to more Gmail users without being marked as spam.

Action / schema guidelines boil down to making sure you use the appropriate action markup when possible. When an action markup is not available, or the process is more complex than can be handled inside Gmail, a go-to action should be used. Go-to actions should link directly to a page where the email recipient can complete the action as labeled on the call to action button.

An introduction to email markup actions

Actions created by email markup allow email recipients to interact with your business, product, or service within Gmail. There are currently four types of actions to choose from using email markup.

One-click actions

One-click actions are those where a task can be completed with one click within Gmail or Inbox. For example, when someone signs up for an email list, they need to confirm their subscription.

One-click actions are broken into two categories: confirm actions and save actions. The above example is a confirm action. Save actions can include adding an item to a queue or saving a coupon. Both confirm and save actions can only be interacted with once.

RSVP actions

RSVP actions allow email recipients to confirm whether they will attend an event using an invite from Google Calendar. Your email will include the event card you usually see in emails from meeting invites.

Having people confirm their attendance to your event will help ensure that they don't forget by getting it on their calendar.

Review actions

Review actions allow email recipients to add a star and comment review for your business, products, and services right from the subject line of their email in Gmail.

You can see an end-to-end example of the scripting necessary to create a review action for a restaurant to get reviews from a Gmail user's inbox to the Datastore using Python.

Go-to actions

Actions that do not fall under the above types are considered go-to actions. These are used when you need to take an email recipient to your website to complete an action that is too complex to be handled within the recipient's Gmail or Inbox app.

All of the following are examples of go-to actions that take email recipients to do things on another website.

The call to action on these can be customized, so you are not limited to just viewing orders, tracking packages, and opening discussions. You can tailor them for specific uses, such as resetting a password, reviewing questionable transactions on your credit cards, and updating payment information.

An introduction to email markup Highlights

Another use for email markup is Highlights. Highlights summarize key information from specific types of email for users of the Inbox app. For example, Highlights are used for these order confirmations to show the products ordered.

Another example is this flight reservation using Highlights to show the round-trip flights purchased.

Specifically, there are six Highlights that businesses can use. They are as follows:

• Flight reservations - Includes options for displaying basic flight confirmation information, boarding pass, check-in, update a flight, cancel a flight, and additional options. This Highlight is also supported in Google Now.
• Orders - Includes options for displaying basic order information, view order action, and order with billing details.
• Parcel deliveries - Includes options for displaying basic parcel delivery information and detailed shipping information.
• Hotel reservations - Includes options for displaying basic hotel reservation information, updating a reservation, and canceling a reservation. This Highlight is also supported in Google Now.
• Restaurant reservations - Includes options for displaying basic restaurant reservation information, updating a reservation, and canceling a reservation. This Highlight is also supported in Google Now.
• Event reservation - Includes options for basic event reminders without a ticket, event with ticket & no reserved seating, sports or music event with ticket, event with ticket & reserved seating, multiple tickets, updating an event, and canceling an event. This Highlight is also supported in Google Now.

Note that while Highlights are a great feature, they only work for Gmail Inbox users. If Google continues to push Gmail users to using Inbox, this user base will grow exponentially.

Test email markup before sending

While you are waiting to be registered with Google, or prior to sending out emails with Schema.org markup, you should run some initial tests to ensure that your markup is correct. You can start by copying and pasting your code into the Email Markup Tester to check for basic errors.

You can also add email markup to emails you send from and to yourself on Gmail. It's important to test as one of the action / schema guidelines is a low failure rate and fast response for action handling. You can learn how to send test emails to yourself in this tutorial using script.google.com.

The tutorial gives you some simple code you can copy and paste as directed.

When you save and run the project as directed, you will immediately get the following result:

You can then begin to experiment with the code for the email markup you want to use.

Run your script again and again to produce new emails.

Any approved business can use the go-to actions to link the subject line of their email to any portion of their website. As you continue to experiment, think of new ways to engage your audience with email markup.

Final questions to answer

Here are some final questions you need to answer before you invest in email markup are the following.

1. Will you get more of your desired results by adding Schema.org actions to your emails? For example, if you use the review action, will you actually get more reviews for your business?
2. How much time will it take to revise your emails if / when Google standardizes email markup with Schema.org? It might pay to wait until email markup has been standardized and make the time and coding investment all at once.
3. Will email actions be supported by other email platforms in the future? Schema.org is a collaboration between Google, Bing, Microsoft, Yandex, and Yahoo. So while not guaranteed, it can be assumed that all of the major email platforms on the web could embrace email markup in the future.

If, after answering these questions, you can see a real need for email markup, then find out if you meet the guidelines set by Google to use it and register.

If your business uses email markup, be sure to share your experiences and results in the comments!

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Search Trends: Are Compound Queries the Start of the Shift to Data-Driven Search?

Posted by Tom-Anthony

The Web is an ever-diminishing aspect of our online lives. We increasingly use apps, wearables, smart assistants (Google Now, Siri, Cortana), smart watches, and smart TVs for searches, and none of these are returning 10 blue links. In fact, we usually don't end up on a website at all.

Apps are the natural successor, and an increasing amount of time spent optimising search is going to be spent focusing on apps. However, whilst app search is going to be very important, I don't think it is where the trend stops.

This post is about where I think the trends take us—towards what I am calling "Data-Driven Search". Along the way I am going to highlight another phenomenon: "Compound Queries". I believe these changes will dramatically alter the way search and SEO work over the next 1-3 years, and it is important we begin now to think about how that future could look.

App indexing is just the beginning

With App Indexing Google is moving beyond the bounds of the web-search paradigm which made them famous. On Android, we are now seeing blue links which are not to web pages but are deep links to open specific pages within apps:

This is interesting in and of itself, but it is also part of a larger pattern which began with things like the answer box and knowledge graph. With these, we saw that Google was shifting away from sending you somewhere else but was starting to provide the answer you were looking for right there in the SERPs. App Indexing is the next step, which moves Google from simply providing answers to enabling actions—allow you to do things.

App Indexing is going to be around for a while—but here I want to focus on this trend towards providing answers and enabling actions.

Notable technology trends

Google's mission is to build the "ultimate assistant"—something that anticipates your needs and facilitates fulfilling them. Google Now is just the beginning of what they are dreaming of.

So many of the projects and technologies that Google, and their competitors, are working on are converging with the trend towards "answers and actions", and I think this is going to lead to a really interesting evolution in searches—namely what I am calling "Data-Driven Search".

Let's look at some of the contributing technologies.

Compound queries: query revisions & chained queries

There is a lot of talk about conversational search at the moment, and it is fascinating for many reasons, but in this instance I am mostly interested in two specific facets:

• Query revision
• Chained queries

The current model for multiple queries looks like this:

You do one query (e.g. "recipe books") and then, after looking at the results of that search, you have a better sense of exactly what it is you are looking for and so you refine your query and run another search (e.g. "vegetarian recipe books"). Notice that you do two distinct searches—with the second one mostly completely separate from the first.

Conversational search is moving us towards a new model which looks more like this, which I'm calling the Compound Query model:

In this instance, after evaluating the results I got, I don't make a new query but instead a Query Revision which relates back to that initial query. After searching "recipe books", I might follow up with "just show me the vegetarian ones". You can already do this with conversational search:

Example of a "Query Revision"—one type of Compound Query

Currently, we only see this intent revision model working in conversational search, but I expect we will see it migrate into desktop search as well. There will be a new generation of searchers who won't have been "trained" to search in the unnatural and stilted keyword-oriented that we have. They'll be used to conversational search on their phones and will apply the same patterns on desktop machines. I suspect we'll also see other changes to desktop-based search which will merge in other aspects of how conversational search results are presented. There are also other companies working on radical new interfaces, such as Scinet by Etsimo (their interface is quite radical, but the problems it solves and addresses are ones Google will likely also be working on).

So many SEO paradigms don't begin to apply in this scenario; things like keyword research and rankings are not compatible with a query model that has multiple phases.

This new query model has a second application, namely Chained Queries, where you perform an initial query, and then on receiving a response you perform a second query on the same topic (the classic example is "How tall is Justin Bieber?" followed by "How old is he?"—the second query is dependent upon the first):

Example of a Chained Query—the second type of Compound Query

It might be that in the case of chained queries, the latter queries could be converted to be standalone queries, such that they don't muddy the SEO waters quite as much as as queries that have revisions. However, I'm not sure that this necessarily stands true, because every query in a chain adds context that makes it much easier for Google to accurately determine your intent in later queries.

If you are not convinced, consider that in the example above, as is often the case in examples (such as the Justin Bieber example), it is usually clear from the formulation that this is explicitly a chained query. However—there are chained queries where it is not necessarily clear that the current query is chained to the previous. To illustrate this, I've borrowed an example which Behshad Behzadi, Director of Conversational Search at Google, showed at SMX Munich last month:

Example of a "hidden" Chained Query—it is not explicit that the last search refers to the previous one.

If you didn't see the first search for "pictures of mario" before the second and third examples, it might not be immediately obvious that the second "pictures of mario" query has taken into account the previous search. There are bound to be far more subtle examples than this.

New interfaces

The days of all Google searches coming solely via a desktop-based web browser are already long since dead, but mobile users using voice search are just the start of the change—there is an ongoing divergence of interfaces. I'm focusing here on the output interfaces—i.e., how we consume the results from a search on a specific device.

The primary device category that springs to mind is that of wearables and smart watches, which have a variety of ways in which they communicate with their users:

• Compact screens—devices like the Apple Watch and Microsoft Band have compact form factor screens, which allow for visual results, but not in the same format as days gone by—a list of web links won't be helpful.
• Audio—with Siri, Google Now, and Cortana all becoming available via wearable interfaces (that pair to smart phones) users can also consume results as voice.
• Vibrations—the Apple Watch can give users directions using vibrations to signal left and right turns without needing to look or listen to the device. Getting directions already covers a number of searches, but you could imagine this also being useful for various yes/no queries (e.g. "is my train on time?").

Each of these methods is incompatible with the old "title & snippet" method that made up the 10 blue links, but furthermore they are also all different from one another.

What is clear is that there is going to need to be an increase in the forms in which search engines can respond to an identical query, with responses being adaptive to the way in which the user will consume their result.

We will also see queries where the query may be "handed off" to another device: imagine me doing a search for a location on my phone and then using my watch to give me direction. Apple already has "Handover"which does this in various contexts, and I expect we'll see the concept taken further.

This is related to Google increasingly providing us with encapsulated answers, rather than links to websites—especially true on wearables and smart devices. The interesting phenomenon here is that these answers don't specify a specific layout, like a webpage does. The data and the layout are separated.

Which leads us to...

Cards

Made popular by Google Now, cards are prevalent in both iOS and Android, as well as on social platforms. They are a growing facet of the mobile experience:

Cards provide small units of information in an accessible chunk, often with a link to dig deeper by flipping a card over or by linking through to an app.

Cards exactly fit into the paradigm above—they are more concerned with the data you will see and less so about the way in which you will see it. The same cards look different in different places.

Furthermore, we are entering a point where you can now do more and more from a card, rather than it leading you into an app to do more. You can response to messages, reply to tweets, like and re-share, and all sorts of things all from cards, without opening an app; I highly recommend this blog post which explores this phenomenon.

It seems likely we'll see Google Now (and mobile search as it becomes more like Google Now) allowing you to do more and more right from cards themselves—many of these things will be actions facilitated by other parties (by way of APIs of schema.org actions). In this way Google will become a "junction box" sitting between us and third parties who provide services; they'll find an API/service provider and return us a snippet of data showing us options and then enable us to pass back data representing our response to the relevant API.

Shared screens

The next piece of the puzzle is "shared screens", which covers several things. This starts with Google Chromecast, which has popularised the ability to "throw" things from one screen to another. At home, any guests I have over who join my wifi are able to "throw" a YouTube video from their mobile phone to my TV via the Chromecast. The same is true for people in the meeting rooms at Distilled offices and in a variety of other public spaces.

I can natively throw a variety of things: photos, YouTube videos, movies on Netflix etc., etc. How long until that includes searches? How long until I can throw the results of a search on an iPad on to the TV to show my wife the holiday options I'm looking at? Sure we can do that by sharing the whole screen now, but how long until, like photos of YouTube videos, the search results I throw to the TV take on a new layout that is suitable for that larger screen?

You can immediately see how this links back to the concept of cards and interfaces outlined above; I'm moving data from screen to screen, and between devices that provide different interfaces.

These concepts are all very related to the concept of "fluid mobility" that Microsoft recently presented in their Productivity Future Vision released in February this year.

An evolution of this is if we reach the point that some people have envisioned, whereby many offices workers, who don't require huge computational power, no longer have computers at their desks. Instead their desks just house dumb terminals: a display, keyboard and mouse which connect to the phone in their pockets which provides the processing power.

In this scenario, it becomes even more usual for people to be switching interfaces "mid task" (including searches)—you do a search at your desk at work (powered by your phone), then continue to review the results on the train home on the phone itself before browsing further on your TV at home.

Email structured markup

This deserves a quick mention—it is another data point in the trend of "enabling action". It doesn't seem to be common knowledge that you can use structured markup and schema.org markup in emails, which works in both Gmail and Google Inbox.

Editor's note: Stay tuned for more on this in tomorrow's post!

The main concepts they introduce are "highlights" and "actions"—sound familiar? You can define actions that become buttons in emails allowing people to confirm, save, review, RSVP, etc. with a single click right in the email.

Currently, you have to apply to Google for them to whitelist emails you send out in order for them to mark the emails up, but I expect we'll see this rolling out more and more. It may not seem directly search-related but if you're building the "ultimate personal assistant", then merging products like Google Now and Google Inbox would be a good place to start.

The rise of data-driven search

There is a common theme running through all of the above technologies and trends, namely data:

• We are increasingly requesting from Search Engines snippets of data, rather than links to strictly formatted web content
• We are increasingly being provided the option for direct action without going to an app/website/whatever by providing a snippet of data with our response/request

I think in the next 2 years small payloads of data will be the new currency of Google. Web search won't go away anytime soon, but large parts of it will be subsumed into the data driven paradigm. Projects like Knowledge Vault, which aims to dislodge the Freebase/Wikipedia (i.e. manually curated) powered Knowledge Graph by pulling facts directly from the text of all pages on the web, will mean mining the web for parcels of data become feasible at scale. This will mean that Google knows where to look for specific bits of data and can extract and return this data directly to the user.

How all this might change the way users and search engines interact:

1. The move towards compound queries will mean it becomes more natural for people to use Google to "interact" with data in an iterative process; Google won't just send us to a set of data somewhere else but will help us sift through it all.
2. Shared screens will mean that search results will need to be increasingly device agnostic. The next generation of technologies such as Apple Handover and Google Chromecast will mean we increasingly pass results between devices where they may take on a new layout.
3. Cards will be one part of making that possible by ensuring that results can rendered in various formats. Users will become more and more accustomed to interacting with sets of cards.
4. The focus on actions will mean that Google plugs directly into APIs such that they can connect users with third party backends and enable that right there in their interface.

What we should be doing

I don't have a good answer to this—which is exactly why we need to talk about it more.

Firstly, what is obvious is that lots of the old facets of technical SEO are already breaking down. For example, as I mentioned above, things like keyword research and rankings don't fit well with the conversational search model where compound queries are prevalent. This will only become more and more the case as we go further down the rabbit hole. We need to educate clients and work out what new metrics help us establish how Google perceive us.

Secondly, I can't escape the feeling that APIs are not only going to increase further in importance, but also become more "mainstream". Think how over the years ownership of company websites started in the technical departments and migrated to marketing teams—I think we could see a similar pattern with more core teams being involved in APIs. If Google wants to connect to APIs to retrieve data and help users do things, then more teams within a business are going to want to weigh in on what it can do.

APIs might seem out of the reach and unnecessary for many businesses (exactly as websites used to...), but structured markup and schema.org are like a "lite API"—enabling programmatic access to your data and even now to actions available via your website. This will provide a nice stepping stone where needed (and might even be sufficient).

Lastly, if this vision of things does play out, then much of our search behaviour could be imagined to be a sophisticated take on faceted navigation—we do an initial search and then sift through and refine the data we get back to drill down to the exact morsels we were looking for. I could envision "Query Revision" queries where the initial search happens within Google's index ("science fiction books") but subsequent searches happen in someone else's, for example Amazon's, "index" ('show me just those with 5 stars and more than 10 reviews that were released in the last 5 years').

If that is the case, then what I will be doing is ensuring that Distilled's clients have a thorough and accurate "indexes" with plenty of supplementary information that users could find useful. A few years ago we started worrying about ensuring our clients' websites have plenty of unique content, and this would see us worrying about ensuring they have a thorough "index" for their product/service. We should be doing that already, but suddenly it isn't going to be just a conversion factor, but a ranking factor too (following the same trend as many other signals, in that regard)

Discussion

Please jump in the comments, or tweet me at @TomAnthonySEO, with your thoughts. I am sure many of the details for how I have envisioned this may not be perfectly accurate, but directionally I'm confident and I want to hear from others with their ideas.

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!

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Search Trends: Are Compound Queries the start of the Shift to Data-Driven Search?

Posted by Tom-Anthony

The Web is an ever-diminishing aspect of our online lives. We increasingly use apps, wearables, smart assistants (Google Now, Siri, Cortana), smart watches, and smart TVs for searches, and none of these are returning 10 blue links. In fact, we usually don't end up on a website at all.

Apps are the natural successor, and an increasing amount of time spent optimising search is going to be spent focusing on apps. However, whilst app search is going to be very important, I don't think it is where the trend stops.

This post is about where I think the trends take us—towards what I am calling "Data-Driven Search". Along the way I am going to highlight another phenomenon: "Compound Queries". I believe these changes will dramatically alter the way search and SEO work over the next 1-3 years, and it is important we begin now to think about how that future could look.

App indexing is just the beginning

With App Indexing Google is moving beyond the bounds of the web-search paradigm which made them famous. On Android, we are now seeing blue links which are not to web pages but are deep links to open specific pages within apps:

This is interesting in and of itself, but it is also part of a larger pattern which began with things like the answer box and knowledge graph. With these, we saw that Google was shifting away from sending you somewhere else but was starting to provide the answer you were looking for right there in the SERPs. App Indexing is the next step, which moves Google from simply providing answers to enabling actions—allow you to do things.

App Indexing is going to be around for a while—but here I want to focus on this trend towards providing answers and enabling actions.

Notable technology trends

Google's mission is to build the "ultimate assistant"—something that anticipates your needs and facilitates fulfilling them. Google Now is just the beginning of what they are dreaming of.

So many of the projects and technologies that Google, and their competitors, are working on are converging with the trend towards "answers and actions", and I think this is going to lead to a really interesting evolution in searches—namely what I am calling "Data-Driven Search".

Let's look at some of the contributing technologies.

Compound queries: query revisions & chained queries

There is a lot of talk about conversational search at the moment, and it is fascinating for many reasons, but in this instance I am mostly interested in two specific facets:

• Query revision
• Chained queries

The current model for multiple queries looks like this:

You do one query (e.g. "recipe books") and then, after looking at the results of that search, you have a better sense of exactly what it is you are looking for and so you refine your query and run another search (e.g. "vegetarian recipe books"). Notice that you do two distinct searches—with the second one mostly completely separate from the first.

Conversational search is moving us towards a new model which looks more like this, which I'm calling the Compound Query model:

In this instance, after evaluating the results I got, I don't make a new query but instead a Query Revision which relates back to that initial query. After searching "recipe books", I might follow up with "just show me the vegetarian ones". You can already do this with conversational search:

Example of a "Query Revision"—one type of Compound Query

Currently, we only see this intent revision model working in conversational search, but I expect we will see it migrate into desktop search as well. There will be a new generation of searchers who won't have been "trained" to search in the unnatural and stilted keyword-oriented that we have. They'll be used to conversational search on their phones and will apply the same patterns on desktop machines. I suspect we'll also see other changes to desktop-based search which will merge in other aspects of how conversational search results are presented. There are also other companies working on radical new interfaces, such as Scinet by Etsimo (their interface is quite radical, but the problems it solves and addresses are ones Google will likely also be working on).

So many SEO paradigms don't begin to apply in this scenario; things like keyword research and rankings are not compatible with a query model that has multiple phases.

This new query model has a second application, namely Chained Queries, where you perform an initial query, and then on receiving a response you perform a second query on the same topic (the classic example is "How tall is Justin Bieber?" followed by "How old is he?"—the second query is dependent upon the first):

Example of a Chained Query—the second type of Compound Query

It might be that in the case of chained queries, the latter queries could be converted to be standalone queries, such that they don't muddy the SEO waters quite as much as as queries that have revisions. However, I'm not sure that this necessarily stands true, because every query in a chain adds context that makes it much easier for Google to accurately determine your intent in later queries.

If you are not convinced, consider that in the example above, as is often the case in examples (such as the Justin Bieber example), it is usually clear from the formulation that this is explicitly a chained query. However—there are chained queries where it is not necessarily clear that the current query is chained to the previous. To illustrate this, I've borrowed an example which Behshad Behzadi, Director of Conversational Search at Google, showed at SMX Munich last month:

Example of a "hidden" Chained Query—it is not explicit that the last search refers to the previous one.

If you didn't see the first search for "pictures of mario" before the second and third examples, it might not be immediately obvious that the second "pictures of mario" query has taken into account the previous search. There are bound to be far more subtle examples than this.

New interfaces

The days of all Google searches coming solely via a desktop-based web browser are already long since dead, but mobile users using voice search are just the start of the change—there is an ongoing divergence of interfaces. I'm focusing here on the output interfaces—i.e., how we consume the results from a search on a specific device.

The primary device category that springs to mind is that of wearables and smart watches, which have a variety of ways in which they communicate with their users:

• Compact screens—devices like the Apple Watch and Microsoft Band have compact form factor screens, which allow for visual results, but not in the same format as days gone by—a list of web links won't be helpful.
• Audio—with Siri, Google Now, and Cortana all becoming available via wearable interfaces (that pair to smart phones) users can also consume results as voice.
• Vibrations—the Apple Watch can give users directions using vibrations to signal left and right turns without needing to look or listen to the device. Getting directions already covers a number of searches, but you could imagine this also being useful for various yes/no queries (e.g. "is my train on time?").

Each of these methods is incompatible with the old "title & snippet" method that made up the 10 blue links, but furthermore they are also all different from one another.

What is clear is that there is going to need to be an increase in the forms in which search engines can respond to an identical query, with responses being adaptive to the way in which the user will consume their result.

We will also see queries where the query may be "handed off" to another device: imagine me doing a search for a location on my phone and then using my watch to give me direction. Apple already has "Handover"which does this in various contexts, and I expect we'll see the concept taken further.

This is related to Google increasingly providing us with encapsulated answers, rather than links to websites—especially true on wearables and smart devices. The interesting phenomenon here is that these answers don't specify a specific layout, like a webpage does. The data and the layout are separated.

Which leads us to...

Cards

Made popular by Google Now, cards are prevalent in both iOS and Android, as well as on social platforms. They are a growing facet of the mobile experience:

Cards provide small units of information in an accessible chunk, often with a link to dig deeper by flipping a card over or by linking through to an app.

Cards exactly fit into the paradigm above—they are more concerned with the data you will see and less so about the way in which you will see it. The same cards look different in different places.

Furthermore, we are entering a point where you can now do more and more from a card, rather than it leading you into an app to do more. You can response to messages, reply to tweets, like and re-share, and all sorts of things all from cards, without opening an app; I highly recommend this blog post which explores this phenomenon.

It seems likely we'll see Google Now (and mobile search as it becomes more like Google Now) allowing you to do more and more right from cards themselves—many of these things will be actions facilitated by other parties (by way of APIs of schema.org actions). In this way Google will become a "junction box" sitting between us and third parties who provide services; they'll find an API/service provider and return us a snippet of data showing us options and then enable us to pass back data representing our response to the relevant API.

Shared screens

The next piece of the puzzle is "shared screens", which covers several things. This starts with Google Chromecast, which has popularised the ability to "throw" things from one screen to another. At home, any guests I have over who join my wifi are able to "throw" a YouTube video from their mobile phone to my TV via the Chromecast. The same is true for people in the meeting rooms at Distilled offices and in a variety of other public spaces.

I can natively throw a variety of things: photos, YouTube videos, movies on Netflix etc., etc. How long until that includes searches? How long until I can throw the results of a search on an iPad on to the TV to show my wife the holiday options I'm looking at? Sure we can do that by sharing the whole screen now, but how long until, like photos of YouTube videos, the search results I throw to the TV take on a new layout that is suitable for that larger screen?

You can immediately see how this links back to the concept of cards and interfaces outlined above; I'm moving data from screen to screen, and between devices that provide different interfaces.

These concepts are all very related to the concept of "fluid mobility" that Microsoft recently presented in their Productivity Future Vision released in February this year.

An evolution of this is if we reach the point that some people have envisioned, whereby many offices workers, who don't require huge computational power, no longer have computers at their desks. Instead their desks just house dumb terminals: a display, keyboard and mouse which connect to the phone in their pockets which provides the processing power.

In this scenario, it becomes even more usual for people to be switching interfaces "mid task" (including searches)—you do a search at your desk at work (powered by your phone), then continue to review the results on the train home on the phone itself before browsing further on your TV at home.

Email structured markup

This deserves a quick mention—it is another data point in the trend of "enabling action". It doesn't seem to be common knowledge that you can use structured markup and schema.org markup in emails, which works in both Gmail and Google Inbox.

Editor's note: Stay tuned for more on this in tomorrow's post!

The main concepts they introduce are "highlights" and "actions"—sound familiar? You can define actions that become buttons in emails allowing people to confirm, save, review, RSVP, etc. with a single click right in the email.

Currently, you have to apply to Google for them to whitelist emails you send out in order for them to mark the emails up, but I expect we'll see this rolling out more and more. It may not seem directly search-related but if you're building the "ultimate personal assistant", then merging products like Google Now and Google Inbox would be a good place to start.

The rise of data-driven search

There is a common theme running through all of the above technologies and trends, namely data:

• We are increasingly requesting from Search Engines snippets of data, rather than links to strictly formatted web content
• We are increasingly being provided the option for direct action without going to an app/website/whatever by providing a snippet of data with our response/request

I think in the next 2 years small payloads of data will be the new currency of Google. Web search won't go away anytime soon, but large parts of it will be subsumed into the data driven paradigm. Projects like Knowledge Vault, which aims to dislodge the Freebase/Wikipedia (i.e. manually curated) powered Knowledge Graph by pulling facts directly from the text of all pages on the web, will mean mining the web for parcels of data become feasible at scale. This will mean that Google knows where to look for specific bits of data and can extract and return this data directly to the user.

How all this might change the way users and search engines interact:

1. The move towards compound queries will mean it becomes more natural for people to use Google to "interact" with data in an iterative process; Google won't just send us to a set of data somewhere else but will help us sift through it all.
2. Shared screens will mean that search results will need to be increasingly device agnostic. The next generation of technologies such as Apple Handover and Google Chromecast will mean we increasingly pass results between devices where they may take on a new layout.
3. Cards will be one part of making that possible by ensuring that results can rendered in various formats. Users will become more and more accustomed to interacting with sets of cards.
4. The focus on actions will mean that Google plugs directly into APIs such that they can connect users with third party backends and enable that right there in their interface.

What we should be doing

I don't have a good answer to this—which is exactly why we need to talk about it more.

Firstly, what is obvious is that lots of the old facets of technical SEO are already breaking down. For example, as I mentioned above, things like keyword research and rankings don't fit well with the conversational search model where compound queries are prevalent. This will only become more and more the case as we go further down the rabbit hole. We need to educate clients and work out what new metrics help us establish how Google perceive us.

Secondly, I can't escape the feeling that APIs are not only going to increase further in importance, but also become more "mainstream". Think how over the years ownership of company websites started in the technical departments and migrated to marketing teams—I think we could see a similar pattern with more core teams being involved in APIs. If Google wants to connect to APIs to retrieve data and help users do things, then more teams within a business are going to want to weigh in on what it can do.

APIs might seem out of the reach and unnecessary for many businesses (exactly as websites used to...), but structured markup and schema.org are like a "lite API"—enabling programmatic access to your data and even now to actions available via your website. This will provide a nice stepping stone where needed (and might even be sufficient).

Lastly, if this vision of things does play out, then much of our search behaviour could be imagined to be a sophisticated take on faceted navigation—we do an initial search and then sift through and refine the data we get back to drill down to the exact morsels we were looking for. I could envision "Query Revision" queries where the initial search happens within Google's index ("science fiction books") but subsequent searches happen in someone else's, for example Amazon's, "index" ('show me just those with 5 stars and more than 10 reviews that were released in the last 5 years').

If that is the case, then what I will be doing is ensuring that Distilled's clients have a thorough and accurate "indexes" with plenty of supplementary information that users could find useful. A few years ago we started worrying about ensuring our clients' websites have plenty of unique content, and this would see us worrying about ensuring they have a thorough "index" for their product/service. We should be doing that already, but suddenly it isn't going to be just a conversion factor, but a ranking factor too (following the same trend as many other signals, in that regard)

Discussion

Please jump in the comments, or tweet me at @TomAnthonySEO, with your thoughts. I am sure many of the details for how I have envisioned this may not be perfectly accurate, but directionally I'm confident and I want to hear from others with their ideas.

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!

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​The 3 Most Common SEO Problems on Listings Sites

Posted by Dom-Woodman

Listings sites have a very specific set of search problems that you don't run into everywhere else. In the day I'm one of Distilled's analysts, but by night I run a job listings site, teflSearch. So, for my first Moz Blog post I thought I'd cover the three search problems with listings sites that I spent far too long agonising about.

Quick clarification time: What is a listings site (i.e. will this post be useful for you)?

The classic listings site is Craigslist, but plenty of other sites act like listing sites:

• Job sites like Monster
• E-commerce sites like Amazon
• Matching sites like Spareroom

1. Generating quality landing pages

The landing pages on listings sites are incredibly important. These pages are usually the primary drivers of converting traffic, and they're usually generated automatically (or are occasionally custom category pages) .

For example, if I search "Jobs in Manchester", you can see nearly every result is an automatically generated landing page or category page.

There are three common ways to generate these pages (occasionally a combination of more than one is used):

• Faceted pages: These are generated by facets—groups of preset filters that let you filter the current search results. They usually sit on the left-hand side of the page.
• Category pages: These pages are listings which have already had a filter applied and can't be changed. They're usually custom pages.
• Free-text search pages: These pages are generated by a free-text search box.

Those definitions are still bit general; let's clear them up with some examples:

Amazon uses a combination of categories and facets. If you click on browse by department you can see all the category pages. Then on each category page you can see a faceted search. Amazon is so large that it needs both.

Indeed generates its landing pages through free text search, for example if we search for "IT jobs in manchester" it will generate: IT jobs in manchester.

teflSearch generates landing pages using just facets. The jobs in China landing page is simply a facet of the main search page.

Each method has its own search problems when used for generating landing pages, so lets tackle them one by one.

---

Aside

Facets and free text search will typically generate pages with parameters e.g. a search for "dogs" would produce:

www.mysite.com?search=dogs

But to make the URL user friendly sites will often alter the URLs to display them as folders

www.mysite.com/results/dogs/

These are still just ordinary free text search and facets, the URLs are just user friendly. (They're a lot easier to work with in robots.txt too!)

---

Free search (& category) problems

If you've decided the base of your search will be a free text search, then we'll have two major goals:

• Goal 1: Helping search engines find your landing pages
• Goal 2: Giving them link equity.

Solution

Search engines won't use search boxes and so the solution to both problems is to provide links to the valuable landing pages so search engines can find them.

There are plenty of ways to do this, but two of the most common are:

• Category links alongside a search
  
  Photobucket uses a free text search to generate pages, but if we look at example search for photos of dogs, we can see the categories which define the landing pages along the right-hand side. (This is also an example of URL friendly searches!)

• Putting the main landing pages in a top-level menu
  
  Indeed also uses free text to generate landing pages, and they have a browse jobs section which contains the URL structure to allow search engines to find all the valuable landing pages.

Breadcrumbs are also often used in addition to the two above and in both the examples above, you'll find breadcrumbs that reinforce that hierarchy.

Category (& facet) problems

Categories, because they tend to be custom pages, don't actually have many search disadvantages. Instead it's the other attributes that make them more or less desirable. You can create them for the purposes you want and so you typically won't have too many problems.

However, if you also use a faceted search in each category (like Amazon) to generate additional landing pages, then you'll run into all the problems described in the next section.

At first facets seem great, an easy way to generate multiple strong relevant landing pages without doing much at all. The problems appear because people don't put limits on facets.

Lets take the job page on teflSearch. We can see it has 18 facets each with many options. Some of these options will generate useful landing pages:

The China facet in countries will generate "Jobs in China" that's a useful landing page.

On the other hand, the "Conditional Bonus" facet will generate "Jobs with a conditional bonus," and that's not so great.

We can also see that the options within a single facet aren't always useful. As of writing, I have a single job available in Serbia. That's not a useful search result, and the poor user engagement combined with the tiny amount of content will be a strong signal to Google that it's thin content. Depending on the scale of your site it's very easy to generate a mass of poor-quality landing pages.

Facets generate other problems too. The primary one being they can create a huge amount of duplicate content and pages for search engines to get lost in. This is caused by two things: The first is the sheer number of possibilities they generate, and the second is because selecting facets in different orders creates identical pages with different URLs.

We end up with four goals for our facet-generated landing pages:

• Goal 1: Make sure our searchable landing pages are actually worth landing on, and that we're not handing a mass of low-value pages to the search engines.
• Goal 2: Make sure we don't generate multiple copies of our automatically generated landing pages.
• Goal 3: Make sure search engines don't get caught in the metaphorical plastic six-pack rings of our facets.
• Goal 4: Make sure our landing pages have strong internal linking.

The first goal needs to be set internally; you're always going to be the best judge of the number of results that need to present on a page in order for it to be useful to a user. I'd argue you can rarely ever go below three, but it depends both on your business and on how much content fluctuates on your site, as the useful landing pages might also change over time.

We can solve the next three problems as group. There are several possible solutions depending on what skills and resources you have access to; here are two possible solutions:

Category/facet solution 1: Blocking the majority of facets and providing external links

• Easiest method
• Good if your valuable category pages rarely change and you don't have too many of them.
• Can be problematic if your valuable facet pages change a lot

Nofollow all your facet links, and noindex and block category pages which aren't valuable or are deeper than x facet/folder levels into your search using robots.txt.

You set x by looking at where your useful facet pages exist that have search volume. So, for example, if you have three facets for televisions: manufacturer, size, and resolution, and even combinations of all three have multiple results and search volume, then you could set you index everything up to three levels.

On the other hand, if people are searching for three levels (e.g. "Samsung 42" Full HD TV") but you only have one or two results for three-level facets, then you'd be better off indexing two levels and letting the product pages themselves pick up long-tail traffic for the third level.

If you have valuable facet pages that exist deeper than 1 facet or folder into your search, then this creates some duplicate content problems dealt with in the aside "Indexing more than 1 level of facets" below.)

The immediate problem with this set-up, however, is that in one stroke we've removed most of the internal links to our category pages, and by no-following all the facet links, search engines won't be able to find your valuable category pages.

In order re-create the linking, you can add a top level drop down menu to your site containing the most valuable category pages, add category links elsewhere on the page, or create a separate part of the site with links to the valuable category pages.

The top level drop down menu you can see on teflSearch (it's the search jobs menu), the other two examples are demonstrated in Photobucket and Indeed respectively in the previous section.

The big advantage for this method is how quick it is to implement, it doesn't require any fiddly internal logic and adding an extra menu option is usually minimal effort.

Category/facet solution 2: Creating internal logic to work with the facets

• Requires new internal logic
• Works for large numbers of category pages with value that can change rapidly

There are four parts to the second solution:

1. Select valuable facet categories and allow those links to be followed. No-follow the rest.
2. No-index all pages that return a number of items below the threshold for a useful landing page
3. No-follow all facets on pages with a search depth greater than 1.
4. Block all facet pages deeper than x level in robots.txt

As with the last solution, x is set by looking at where your useful facet pages exist that have search volume (full explanation in the first solution), and if you're indexing more than one level you'll need to check out the aside below to see how to deal with the duplicate content it generates.

This will generate landing pages for the facets you've decided are valuable and noindex the landing pages which are low-quality. It will only create pages for a single level of facets, which prevents duplicate content.

---

Aside: Indexing more than one level of facets

If you want a second level of facets to be indexable, e.g. Televisions - Facet 1 (46"), Facet 2 (Samsung), then the easiest option is to remove the fourth rule from above and either add links to them using one of the methods in Solution 1, or add the pages to your sitemap.

The alternative is to set robots.txt to allow category pages up to 2 levels to be indexed and all facets to be followed up to two levels.

This will, however, create duplicate content, because now search engines will be able to create:

• Televisions - 46" - Samsung
• Televisions - Samsung - 46"

You'll have to either rel canonical your duplicate pages with another rule or set-up your facets so they create a single unique URL.

You'll also need to be aware that unless you set-up more complicated logic, all of your followable facets will multiply. Depending on your setup you might need to block more paths in robots.txt or set-up more logic.

Letting search engines index more than one level of facets adds a lot of possible problems; make sure you're keeping track of them.

---

2. User-generated content cannibalization

This is a common problem for listings sites (assuming they allow user generated content). If you're reading this as an e-commerce site who only lists their own products, you can skip this one.

As we covered in the first area, category pages on listings sites are usually the landing pages aiming for the valuable search terms, but as your users start generating pages they can often create titles and content that cannibalise your landing pages.

Suppose you're a job site with a category page for PHP Jobs in Greater Manchester. If a recruiter then creates a job advert for PHP Jobs in Greater Manchester for the 4 positions they currently have, you've got a duplicate content problem.

This is less of a problem when your site is large and your categories mature, it will be obvious to any search engine which are your high value category pages, but at the start where you're lacking authority and individual listings might contain more relevant content than your own search pages this can be a problem.

Solution 1: Create structured titles

Set the <title> differently than the on-page title. Depending on variables you have available to you can set the title tag programmatically without changing the page title using other information given by the user.

For example, on our imaginary job site, suppose the recruiter also provided the following information in other fields:

• The no. of positions: 4
• The primary area: PHP Developer
• The name of the recruiting company: ABC Recruitment
• Location: Manchester

We could set the <title> pattern to be: *No of positions* *The primary area* with *recruiter name* in *Location* which would give us:

4 PHP Developers with ABC Recruitment in Manchester

Setting a <title> tag allows you to target long-tail traffic by constructing detailed descriptive titles. In our above example, imagine the recruiter had specified "Castlefield, Manchester" as the location.

All of a sudden, you've got a perfect opportunity to pick up long-tail traffic for people searching in Castlefield in Manchester.

On the downside, you lose the ability to pick up long-tail traffic where your users have chosen keywords you wouldn't have used.

For example, suppose Manchester has a jobs program called "Green Highway." A job advert title containing "Green Highway" might pick up valuable long-tail traffic. Being able to discover this, however, and find a way to fit it into a dynamic title is very hard.

Solution 2: Use regex to noindex the offending pages

Perform a regex (or string contains) search on your listings titles and no-index the ones which cannabalise your main category pages.

If it's not possible to construct titles with variables or your users provide a lot of additional long-tail traffic with their own titles, then is a great option. On the downside, you miss out on possible structured long-tail traffic that you might've been able to aim for.

Solution 3: De-index all your listings

It may seem rash, but if you're a large site with a huge number of very similar or low-content listings, you might want to consider this, but there is no common standard. Some sites like Indeed choose to no-index all their job adverts, whereas some other sites like Craigslist index all their individual listings because they'll drive long tail traffic.

Don't de-index them all lightly!

3. Constantly expiring content

Our third and final problem is that user-generated content doesn't last forever. Particularly on listings sites, it's constantly expiring and changing.

For most use cases I'd recommend 301'ing expired content to a relevant category page, with a message triggered by the redirect notifying the user of why they've been redirected. It typically comes out as the best combination of search and UX.

For more information or advice on how to deal with the edge cases, there's a previous Moz blog post on how to deal with expired content which I think does an excellent job of covering this area.

Summary

In summary, if you're working with listings sites, all three of the following need to be kept in mind:

• How are the landing pages generated? If they're generated using free text or facets have the potential problems been solved?
• Is user generated content cannibalising the main landing pages?
• How has constantly expiring content been dealt with?

Good luck listing, and if you've had any other tricky problems or solutions you've come across working on listings sites lets chat about them in the comments below!

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Extract SEO Value from SERPs with Knowledge Graph and Answer Boxes - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Many SEOs are frustrated by the ever-expanding repertoire of answer boxes and results from the Knowledge Graph on Google's SERPs. One thing we can be sure of is that they're not going away anytime soon, so in today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers some strategic advice (as well as several tactics) for getting SEO value from those SERPs, and even from those boxes.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high-resolution image in a new tab!

Howdy, Moz Fans!

...and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about the rich answers, instant answers, direct answers, whatever you want to call them, that Google and Bing are providing in search results, that are taking away a lot of clicks from those search results that people look for.

4 Types of challenging results

I think the big four that SEOs are concerned about are what I'm going to walk through first, and then we'll talk about some tactical ways that marketers can actually work around them or even take advantage of them.

#1 - Customized instant answer (a.k.a. answer boxes)

So the first one here is what I'm calling the "customized instant answer." This is where Google has essentially said, "Hey, we're going to custom-build something for this type of a query that shows this kind of an answer box." You can see these for math equations, for weather kinds of searches.

The one I'm showing here is specifically around sports and schedules. So I search for Seattle Mariners, the local baseball team here in Seattle, who today, as of filming, it is their opening day, April 7. So Seattle Mariners' schedule is actually showing. Well, it's actually showing the score in real time, since the game's going on as I'm filming, but below that it shows scores and schedules. It says, "4-6 versus the Angels, live at the bottom of the 6th, 4-7 versus the Angels 7:10 p.m." etc., etc.

Then, it actually goes all the way down here, and if you click on any of these, you'll get more detail about where the game's being hosted and where you can watch it on television. Google's essentially said, "Hey, you know what? No one should ever have to click on any results to get all of the key information about the schedule." If you're looking for far-out scheduling stuff or very specific kinds of things, maybe you might go to there, but they even have links in here directly to buy tickets online. So really, they're taking away a lot of the clicks here.

#2 - Knowledge Graph answer

Second, the Knowledge Graph answer. This is where Google essentially is using their Knowledge Graph to provide a specific answer. You can think of this as connecting up with entities or concepts, brands, those kinds of things. I search for "Mariners mascot," Google will give me this little box from their Knowledge Graph that says, "Mariner Moose, the Seattle Mariners, mascot," and they have a little logo there. They don't actually show a picture. I have to scroll down if I want to get images. But the next link there, of course, is the Mariner Moose webpage on Seattle.Mariners.mlb.com, that's a lot of sub-domains, Major League Baseball, but we'll deal with that later.

#3 - Knowledge Graph sidebar

Then the third one, Knowledge Graph sidebar, this is probably what we're most accustomed to when it comes to the Knowledge Graph, where I search, I get a list of results, but then there's also a Knowledge Graph piece on the right-hand side. This one is showing Seattle Mariners baseball team. There's the logo, arena, location, our manager, some details about the team, where some of this data is extracted from, etc. Typical Knowledge Graph kind of result off to the side.

#4 - Extracted instant answers

Then fourth, and potentially most perturbing, I think for many SEOs, many marketers, is the extracted instant answer. This is an answer that Google has pulled from a website, potentially your website, and they're showing right in the results that full answer, without a searcher needing to visit the page. Most of the time they will cite the page. Some of the time they don't even cite where the page, where the answer came from, which means you don't even have an opportunity to earn that click. Even more insanely frustrating.

But in this case I've searched for baseball, how many players on a baseball team. You can phrase this query in a bunch of different ways, and you will get Major League Baseball rosters, a roster of players able to play, blah, blah, blah, blah, the 25-man roster, and the 40-man roster. Do there are two different kinds of rosters in baseball, and Google is building a big, long answer to try and explain this and then sending you to the Wikipedia page if you need more detail.

So these four kinds of things are causing a ton of consternation in our field. There was a study from Stone Temple Consulting, out in Boston, that Eric Enge and Mark Traphagen put together, where they looked and saw that over a large quantity of search results, I believe it was 800,000 search results set, almost 20%, 19% of those had rich answers in some format, direct answers in the SERPS, like one of these, and I think that even excluded number three here, the Knowledge Graph. So that's a lot of queries where Google is taking away, potentially, a ton of traffic.

You might say "Hey, well, in the long tail and in the chunky middle, it's probably not as bad as it is in the fat head of query demand." But this is still very significant for a lot of folks. So there are two ways to think about this. One is strategically, and one is tactically.

Strategic plans to consider

My first advice is on the strategy side of SEO. So when you're thinking about Knowledge Graph and instant answers and these kinds of things, how they affect your results, I'd ask;

#1 - Decide whether branding is worth it

"Is the branding of extracted answers a worthwhile SEO investment?" If you get this, like Wikipedia has here, is that actually worthwhile for you? Or is that something where you say, "You know what? We're not going to concentrate on it?" Therefore from saying, "Hey, that's not an investment for us, any time we start to see these types of results, we're no longer going to make a considerable SEO investment there. We don't really care if our competition gets it. We'd rather focus our energy, attention, dollars, people, time on the organic results, where we think we can earn a higher click-through rate and actual traffic, rather than just the brand association." Or you might say, "Brand association matters hugely. We want very much to be associated with baseball. We're trying to build this up. It would be great if we could replace Wikipedia here. We'd be thrilled even if we didn't get the traffic."

Then, you need to go through the step of actually building some analytics. We need to say, "Hey, how are we going to measure, when we get these kinds of results, the potential volume that's going on there, and then how are we going to record that as a success?" You won't be able to see it in your visitor analytics or in any metric that is directly associated with your website.

#2 - Evaluate the likelihood of Google replacing your content

What kinds of content investments could Google replace with instant answers? Content investments that we are making or that we are planning to make. If they could replace them, how likely do we think that is, and does that change our strategy around what we want to invest in from a content perspective, from an SEO perspective, for the future?

If we say "Hey, you know what? We are in the online printing business, and we think that Google will soon have a price comparison, in-search, direct answer kind of a thing, like they have for flight search, in our field. You know what? Maybe we want to shy away from that, and we want to go down a different avenue for the content that we're going to create." That could be something that goes into your calculus around decision-making. I would urge you to at least consider the possibility and know where your threat vectors are from a "Google taking us over in the SERPS" perspective.

#3 - Decide if customized answers will help or hinder your plans

Do we want more customized answers? If you're Major League Baseball or the Seattle Mariners, this is actually probably a godsend. This is a wonderful thing, reason being it helps folks directly find, so fast, where they can watch it on television, where to buy tickets online. This is actually probably wonderful for the Seattle Mariners. They don't actually care that much, at least from a strategic perspective and overall perspective, whether this is costing them a lot of traffic to their website, because it's bringing great value to the brand. Google is sending folks directly to the authoritative site. So this means, from an SEO perspective, you don't get spammers or manipulators or ticket resellers, who are taking over this search space for them.

So depending on the kind of brand you are, the kind of organization you are, instant answers might be a great thing, in which case you might want to think about, "How can we partner more deeply with Google? What can we provide in a structured format? How do we get that information to them in that kind of way, where they will, hopefully, replace a lot of these fat-head queries with exactly what we're hoping they do in a fast, efficient manner for searchers?"

Tactical plans to consider

Next up is tactical plans to consider, and I think the first one's most important here.

#1 - Evaluate SERP opportunity

When you are doing your keyword research and your keyword evaluation, I think one of the things that many, many folks are still missing from this is a column that looks at keyword opportunity. So historically, we've had a bunch of things when we do keyword research. Here's our keyword column. We look at difficulty. We might look at volume. We might look at potential value to the business. Maybe we're looking at how successful it was when we purchased that keyword and what the conversion rates were like, all those kinds of things, path to conversion, etc., etc.

But one of the things we have not historically focused on is keyword opportunity, meaning the click-through rate opportunity. You could do something like a bucket -- high, medium and low. I put HML here. You could say something like, "Hey, we think that this alters the click-through rate curve, random guess 30%, 40%, whatever it is," and use some numbers to classify those so that when you're actually doing keyword research and choosing which keywords to consider, you make the right kinds of decisions, because a lot of the time you might see, hey, this has high volume, the difficulty's not that bad, oh shoot, but Google has an instant extracted answer that is taking up 30% of the above-the-fold space or 40% of the above-the-fold space. SERP number one is probably getting 20% of the click-through rate that it would ordinarily get if that instant answer weren't there. So that needs to be a part of our calculations going forward.

#2 - Identify content and intent gaps in Knowledge Graph and answer boxes

What kinds of content and kinds of event are searchers who are not satisfied by the Knowledge Graph or instant answer listing, what are they searching for and how? That is an opportunity for us to get around this problem. If I search for "Seattle Mariners schedule," but what I'm actually looking for is I only want to see away games that are in three states that I'm going to be visiting, well, you know what? Actually, this isn't enough. I need to go directly to the page, and so that might be an intent that I'm going to try and serve very easily from a user experience perspective on the page that ranks first that's on seattle.mariners.mlb.com.

That question, if you can answer that effectively and find a bunch of those, you may, in fact, over time be able to get rid of those instant answers. You've probably seen, there have been examples, where Google had an instant answer, had a Knowledge Graph, got rid of it, and my perception is that a big reason for that is that searchers weren't clicking those. They weren't taking advantage of them and instead they were choosing results below the fold, below the instant answer, and so Google got rid of it. So nice thing there.

#3 - Decide if structuring data for Google helps or hurts your cause

Should we be creating or avoiding structured data for Google to use, and will our competition do that? So you need to make a decision. Hey, should we create structured data that Google can easily pull into Knowledge Graph, easily pull into instant answers? If we don't do it, will our competition do it? Do we care if they do it, if we don't do it? It's a little bit of prisoner's dilemma sometimes, but you've got to make the call there, and I think that's something SEOs should do in their tactical plan around keywords.

#4 - Create control data (where possible) for search traffic analytics

Next, do we need to control for search traffic changes with Knowledge Graph and instant answers in our analytics or our forward-looking estimates? So if you say to yourself, "Hey, we started seeing some tests here. We expect Google's going to roll this out in our space, around our site. How is that going to impact us, and what does that mean for our year-over-year search estimates for SEO, traffic estimates for SEO? Or what does it mean for how much we think we can grow this year or in the future, that kind of thing?" Looking backwards, if this has been introduced, how much did that change our results sets and our traffic, and do we think that could happen more or less? Have we put that into our analytics so that we recognize, hey, our SEOs did great work. Google just took a lot of the traffic away from us, from an opportunity perspective?"

#5 - Focus on longer-tail searcher intent

Then the last one I think we need to think about is very deep in the tactical trenches, but that is: Did the titles, descriptions, and even the keyword targets that were focused on, those need to focus on longer-tail or more specific types of questions and searcher intent. So we might say, "Hey, you know what? I'm willing to sacrifice ranking for 'Mariners mascot', but I really want to rank for 'Mariner Moose videos.' Or I really want to rank for 'Mariner Moose costumes.' I really want to rank for whatever those extra intents, those things deeper down the funnel, and those long-tail parts of the query might be." That could change the types of content and keywords that you invest in.

All right everyone, I know Knowledge Graph and instant answers can sometimes be very frustrating for us. But I hope you'll apply these tactics and recommend some more in the comments and that we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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