How to gain Rank Zero position with original images and improve your SEO – smart strategies for a steady growth

by Gennaro Cuofano | 19 July 2018

The origin story of my blog

When I started blogging back in 2015, I thought I only had to produce the so-emphasized quality content to rank on Google.

Quality content seems almost a utopia in the digital marketing world. Everyone talks about it, we all agree on it. Yet we all think about different things.

So what do I mean when I say “quality content?”

In my mind quality content can be summarized in three simple ways: in-depth but essential, useful and well researched, educational yet actionable.

In short, you don’t need to write a 2000+ words article, just because Google is thirsty for content. You need to follow the length that is congenial to the article, based on the topic you’re covering.

Of course, quality content might mean – at least for me – something that is useful for an audience and well researched. Many small business owners are too busy focusing on keeping their enterprise profitable to spend time on researching SEO or other related topics.

Last but not least, you want to make sure people learn something they can apply quickly. However, it doesn’t have to be dull. In short, also a “how to” can be compelling if adequately written.

Long story short, when I started to write content that fit those guidelines, I didn’t get any traffic. Nothing at all! What was going on?

I simply missed the proper mindset. In this article, I want to show you the SEO hacking mindset. Based on continuous experimentation, curiosity and lack of preconceived ideas of what works and what not to compete against large publishing outlets!

Background story

A few weeks back in one of our daily conversations with Andrea Volpini, WordLift’s CEO, we were discussing a few SEO strategies.

With Andrea, we often discuss at great length about SEO, the future of the internet and how search engines, Google, in particular, react to that.

Our conversations are a way to brainstorm ideas. That day we were walking through Via Giulia, an old street in the historic center of Rome; a road that runs parallel to the Tiber River.

One of the most famous streets in Rome during the Renaissance, Via Giulia became the home of antique dealers in the past decades. Yet today due to the crisis of antique trade, the street has become home of modern shops.

Among those shops there is WordLift. A small startup that operates at the cutting edge of semantic technologies applied to the web. That is where I work as a Head Of Business Development.

When we walk through Via Giulia, a feeling of being part of something greater permeates us, and it feels like you go back to the past, when Rome was the most powerful Empire ever existed. These feelings make ideas flow incessantly.

In that scenario, Andrea had just revealed to me a secret about Google.

I’ll summarize in this way: images have their own life in Google’s SERP, and if you take the time to produce original images and redirect them to your blog. That can become an effective SEO strategy to bring traffic back to your site.

It all started from there. When I heard that I began to run a few experiments.

This strategy is beginning to pay off. In this featured snippet on the keyword “cash conversion cycle” with a volume of 18,100 Google is picking the content from Investopedia and the image from my blog.

You’ll notice that the image redirects back to my blog. In this article, I show you what I did and how you can do it too.

Let’s take a few steps back.

It all starts with an editorial strategy

Many think of an editorial strategy as a calendar filled up with articles for the next year. That is not the way I see it.

An editorial strategy for me is about having clear in mind what are the 2-3 topics you want to cover at great length.

Based on that you need to be flexible, and opportunist. In short, you want to keep an eye open for opportunity windows that allow you to rank on large volume keywords.

Long story short I’ve implemented an editorial strategy on FourWeekMBA.com by creating content that targeted specific keywords around business modeling.

Yet those articles would hardly rank for those keywords as I was competing against large websites like Investopedia.

What to do then? Either I had to change my editorial strategy or be doomed to failure. Unless…

All you need is passion and an audience

I didn’t want to change my editorial strategy. In fact, I’m passionate about business modeling, and I know I can keep researching this topic for years.

Also, that is a topic with a broad audience. Thus, I had the two conditions I believe are critical to building a profitable website. I also needed a secret recipe to start ranking on those keywords though.

I began creating companion infographics with my articles, which had the size of a LinkedIn post. The aim was to provide a snapshot of business, quickly.

Those graphics would target the same keywords in the article.

Why?

Images have their own life on Google SERP, take advantage of that

If you look at the percentage of search results from Google there is one phenomenon to notice:

In this analysis by SparkToro in collaboration with jumpshot one thing is straightforward: images play a key role in Google search results.

As pointed out by Rand Fishkin, there are two things to take into account. Number one, “Google Images shrunk, but almost entirely because Google web search took that traffic for themselves (dropping the tabs to image search, embedding more image results in the web SERPs, etc.).”

Number two “given that Google Images is sending out an even more significant portion of traffic (due to their recent changes on “view image”), investing in visual content that can perform there (and appear in a web search) feels like a no-brainer for content creators.”

In other words, Google is integrating more and more images in the search results, thus making them part of the user experience. Therefore, you should be not surprised to see your pictures floating around the web, disjoined from your content and inserted in other contexts.

In fact, more and more often, images appear in the so-called featured snippets. Other times they are included in the knowledge panels.

That opens up an exciting opportunity: having original images might be a critical strategy to power up your SEO strategy. And I want to show you how to use them to gain featured snippets on very competitive keywords.

However that also opens up another challenge: as Google is thirsty for relevant content, be it text, image or video, it will happen more often than these contents will be stripped out from the context of your website to get offered in different formats.

From search results, featured snippets, knowledge panels, or voice assistants. It doesn’t matter how Google will serve that content; it will be Google to make the rules of the game unless you make sure to follow two strategies.

Number one, bring all the traffic generated through those graphics or infographics toward the original blog post that features them with a simple redirection.

Second, make sure to label your images with your brand, website or whatever can help you build awareness and help you build up search volume around the so-called “branded keyword.”

We’ll see those two aspects more in detail in a few paragraphs.

How to find featured snippet opportunities for your images

The first step I took when I was looking for featured snippet opportunities by using original graphics was to look at featured snippets where Google only had text. Some examples below:

As you can notice from this example, this featured snippet is very competitive as you might be going after Wikipedia, the same applies to the other examples:

One thing you might have noticed though is that this featured snippet only comprises text. There is no image in it. Why?

One possible reason might be that Google didn’t find relevant images to include in those featured snippets.

In short, even though Wikipedia is a trusted source of information, it doesn’t seem to provide original, and valuable images that Google can use within the featured snippet.

That is where the opportunity to get in that featured snippet comes in!

Let’s go back to our case study and what I did to get there.

Target a competitive keyword, but with your original infographic

When I was looking for featured snippet opportunities, I had identified a long-tail keyword with a large volume: amazon cash conversion.

That keyword, at the time of this writing, has an 18,100 in monthly volume. Even though that keyword was already taken and it looked like this:

In other words, Investopedia had a text featured snippet, but there was no image. The reason being they didn’t have any compelling infographic in the text, as you can see from below:

That is where I could have an opportunity even though there was no way Google would have taken my content in place of Investopedia. So I wrote the piece and worked on an original “companion” infographic.

Make your infographic relevant, compelling by targeting the featured snippet

I went on and produced the piece on Amazon cash conversion cycle, and that is the infographic I produced associated with the article:

There are a few aspects you will notice.

The infographic is informative, it is quick, and it is branded.

I also picked a color that resembled The Economist infographics. Thus, making it more trusted at first glance (at least for people that know The Economist).

Structured data is the foundation of your featured snippet strategy

Structured data is about converting your content in a format that search engines can efficiently process. In other words, to make your content more sticky for the Google algorithms, structured data has become a must.

For instance, in this specific case, I used WordLift to mark up the content on my blog posts:

The significant part is the WordLift converts my content in structured data in a few clicks and with no coding so that Google can better process it. And it does that by using a format called JSON-LD that doesn’t affect the performance of the page:

WordLift passes up a set of metadata to search engines that describe the context of the page. That also includes relevant information about the infographic featured in the article!

Redirect traffic from your infographic back to your blog post

As I use WordPress as CMS, I used a simple plugin to have traffic redirected from the image – in case it ranked through Google – to the original blog post it belonged.

In short, when you have a website, you have a list of pages that you can prioritize based on a so-called sitemap. Put it shortly; the sitemap is the way you want Google and other search engines to look at your website.

That doesn’t mean Google will stick to it, but that is an indication that helps it understands a website.

Within the sitemap, you need to have also your images. In this way, you allow Google to more easily index, thus rank them (again Google will decide whether or not it makes sense, yet you give it an indication).

For that, I use a simple plugin, XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress. 

Once I had the images in the sitemap, I made sure those images would be redirected via Yoast Plugin:

Within the “Search Appearance” on Yoast, you need to go inside “Media” and set as “Yes” at the question “Redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself?”

Here you go:

When you click on the image of the featured snippet it will open it up:

If you click on that image, see where it goes:

Exactly, back to my blog post!

Create search volume for your branded keyword

Another critical aspect of your infographic is about generating search volume for your branded keyword. A branded keyword is merely a keyword that represents your brand.

For instance, in my case, that would be FourWeekMba, or four-week-mba and other possible variations.

Why is that important? A branded keyword is significant for several reasons.

First, gaining search volume on a branded keyword might tell Google that your brand/website is relevant.

Second, when you build up volume over time, you also start diversifying your marketing mix.

Thus, you’ll notice more direct traffic to your blog. That’s good as you don’t need to rely solely on Google for a consistent stream of traffic.

With those infographics I’ve been building a bit of search volume around my brand:

Of course, that is still very small. Yet when I look at my search console you can see some interesting findings:

For the sake of simplicity, I’m just showing you the main branded keyword. In fact, in my search console, I have other variations (like fourweekmba).

What’s interesting here is that on this branded keyword the click-through rate is pretty high (47,83%).

In fact, the click-through rate shows how many times, based on the number of impressions from the search results, the user clicks on my page.

That is critical as that points to Google that this is what the user was looking for. Thus, that – in theory – should make my website more trusted (this is wholly speculative).

There is also another aspect that is critical for this story.

SEO is not a short-term game

I published the article on February 26th, 2018 and for a while I just let it rank organically.

A few days ago, at the beginning of July I started to notice in the last days I was getting some organic traffic on the keyword “cash conversion cycle” yet I could not find it on the SERP:

In fact, I was on the third page. So that made me think, and I went to check right away what happened and that is what I saw:

In short, after about three months I managed to gain a half featured snippet with an image with my small blog by competing with Investopedia, one of the largest and most trusted sites when it comes to business.

If you’ll be implementing a strategy based on positioning your images on the featured snippet, how can you make sure you’re doing it right?

How to check the traffic coming from images

One way to keep track of this strategy is by using the Google search console. All you need is to go in Search Traffic > Search Analytics and filter it by images:

In this way, you can track your marketing effort in gaining organic traffic via original infographics.

Key takeaway

As search engines evolve new opportunities arise. Thus, by keeping an open eye, you can take advantage of those opportunities even if you have a small blog.

In fact, in this case study, we saw how you can take advantage of existing text featured snippets by following this process:

• look for featured snippet opportunities: when you see a featured snippet that has only text there is an excellent opportunity to position your infographic
• create content on that featured snippet opportunity together with a compelling infographic targeting the same keyword
• use structured data as the foundation for your featured snippet strategy
• set up redirections from those images toward the blog post to which they belong
• brand those infographics to generate search volume around your branded keyword
• be patient and wait for it to be positioned in the featured snippet. SEO is not a short-term game!
• By the time to time, you can check whether your effort is paying back by filtering the search traffic to see organic traffic from images
• when that happens, double down on that strategy to gain more visibility

One key aspect to keep in mind. SEO hacking is not about finding the latest trick to win some traffic.

SEO hacking is a mindset – that mixed with limited resources, experimentation, and creativity – allows you to gain traction even on competitive terms. You just need to think unconventionally and experiment quickly.

Oh, wait! There is another critical aspect. That pertains to voice search. What do I mean? Look at this short video:

When you shift your mindset and start targeting featured snippets, interesting things can happen. 

Indeed, this is even more interesting than the featured snippet itself. In fact, in the featured snippet the image is too small for users to click on. Yet on the voice search assistant on your smartphone, the opposite happens. 

The infographic “eats up” the text coming from Wikipedia!

In fact, not only the image seems part of Wikipedia (Google is tricking you) but when you tap on it you land on my blog!

But that is another story we’ll tackle in another case study 😉

How to make your own SEO-friendly Machine-Readable Entity IDs

by Andrea Volpini | 5 July 2018

This article is about putting to use Machine-Readable Entity IDs to gain back control of the data that matters for you or your business and to help others find you unambiguously and… yes, this does lead to better SEO. ?

While considered an advanced SEO strategy by some, creating and managing Machine-Readable Entity, is a new way to do content curation and to revitalize traditional backlinking. It is indeed also about taking back control of the data but, let’s start from the beginning.

The web is a matrix really, an intricate maze made of convoluted patterns that for many years search engines have helped us solve by proposing us the best pathways to learn more about a topic, to help us find the very best sushi restaurant in our neighborhood and…let’s be frank, to watch endless videos of kittens jumping around.

What are Machine-Readable Entity IDs?

An entity IDs is a unique identifier for a single thing, person, place, or object that a machine can understand. In the field of information extraction entity IDs or named entities can be abstract concepts like compassion or have a physical existence like WordLift, our startup.

Let’s make a step backward. How is knowledge organized in libraries?

In the physical world knowledge for centuries has been condensed into books and books have been organized in libraries. Every book inside a library use a code like 615.1 INT and this code follows a scheme called the Dewey Decimal Classification system. This system uses numbers from 000 to 999 to describe a specific subject area (ie. 300 for Social Science and 700 for Arts and Recreation and so on). Decimal points are used to drill down into a specific knowledge domain, for example, Pharmacology is characterized by the code 615.1. The three letters following this number, are usually taken from either the title of the book or from its author. The shelfmark that we usually find in a library on the spine of a book is the equivalent of an Entity ID in the World Wide Web.

Shelfmarks for classifying digital resources (or to describe things that exist in our world) on the Web are machine-readable identifiers and are expressed with URI (Universal Resource Identifiers).

Wikidata 101 for SEO

The equivalent of a library for books, in the realm of structured data, is Wikidata. “A free, linked database that can be read and edited by both humans and machines” (so we read on the main page). Wikidata is a focal point for all Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikisource but most importantly it can be interlinked with other open datasets on the linked data web.

Why is Wikidata important for SEO?

Search Engines like Google, Bing , and Yandex use Wikidata as one of their sources to answer to users queries like “how old is WordLift?”

Google answer to the question “How old is WordLift?”

Wikidata structures information in a semantic network of entities, attributes , and relationships that allow a machine to tap into a vast knowledge base of facts. It is a very broad knowledge base entirely built on the principles of linked data with both machine-extracted information from wikipedia, contributions from the crowd and automated data curation.

It also provides a public, accessible and super fast SPARQL 1.1 end-point that can be used to develop linked data application.

How is Wikidata organized?

Wikidata’s somehow obscure and criticized data model (read Paul Wilton’s article if you want to dig deeper into the bad and the ugly parts of Wikidata ? it is very instructive) starts with entities (or Items as they are called in Wikidata). Every entity has its own unique identifier that starts with a Q like Q149 for the world famous meme of Nyan Cat ?. For each entity that are individual statements (or facts) made of claims that are composed of properties and values with qualifiers that are, hopefully, sustained by at least one reference. Nyan Cat has an official website for instance Property:P856 in Wikidata) accessible at the url http://www.nyan.cat/ (and no references nor qualifiers in this specific example).

Everyone can contribute and there is a broad selection of properties in the Wikidata ontology that can help us describe concepts we’re familiar with. My very personal advice is to start by looking at existing items, carefully review the interactive tutorials or play the Wikidata Game but above all always remember that Wikidata is a community-driven initiative (and you need to be very respectful of others) and that data quality is crucial!

How can I backlink my data from Wikidata? Does it really matter?

Backlinking is still extremely valuable in today’s SEO. The quantity, the quality and the relevance of backlinks are among the factors search engines use to evaluate a page.

When it comes to data published in large graphs like Wikidata or DBpedia things are somehow similar. An entity can be linked to an equivalent entity in another knowledge graph as long as it is published following the Linked Data principles. This is important for two reasons:

1. a machine (a crawler, an application or a smart agent) can disambiguate the entity and get a clear evidence that we’re referring to the same concept, person, thing or organization
2. a machine can gather more information (in the form of statements) for that same entity

Let’s have a look at an example. Here I am, this is my entity on Wikidata.

You can see in the visualisation that I am using Wikidata Property:P2888 exact_match to create a link between my instance on Wikidata Q28085380 and the entity created with WordLift and published as linked data on http://data.wordlift.io/wl0216/entity/andrea_volpini.html

This way it becomes possible for a machine:

1. to easily disambiguate me from my esteemed homonyms,
2. to understand from Wikidata that I work for WordLift (Property:P108 in Wikidata) and that I am friend with Teodora Petkova (schema:knows link’s Teodora’s entity on http://data.wordlift.io/wl0216/entity/teodora_petkova).

Two different statements, in this example, are inferred from two knowledge bases that have been interlinked in both directions using Wikidata’s exact_match property and owl:sameAs (to connect Wikidata’s entity from the entity on data.wordlift.io).

The impact of Machine-Readable IDs on Google Search

Google is using Machine-Readable IDs (MREIDs) across multiple services including Google Trends, Google Maps, Google Lens and Google Reverse Image Search but above the user experience on Google Search is deeply influenced by MREIDs and the semantic networks behind it. As noted by Mike Arnesen in his latest articles on Leveraging Machine-Readable Entity IDs for SEO Google now uses two different classes of entities:

1. Freebase Machine-Readable IDs for entities being discovered and created while Freebase was still available. They use the format /m/[a-z0-9]+ (Here is my entity created a long time ago /m/0djtw2h that is behind my knowledge graph.
2. New Machine-Readable IDs for entities created after Freebase was terminated. They use the format /g/[a-z0-9]+ (here is the entity for Gennaro Cuofano /g/11f3sj8_tw

6 steps to master your own SEO-friendly Machine-Readable Entity IDs

We use and test different approaches on a regular basis and here is the ultimate list to boost your MREIDs.

1. Use structured data in your web pages and reference back (or interlink) linked data entities, Wikidata Items or existing MREIDs from Google using the schema:sameAs property. Do the same with any Social Media presence you might have. Search Engines are well aware of Social Profiles and can infer more information from there as long as you are giving them the confidence that this is the right entity. See the example below ?

Google knows that I am WordLift CEO

This is a featured snippet that Google created from my LinkedIn account whose statement is “confirmed” by the data published on data.wordlift.io and Wikidata. Featured snippets are extremely volatile because they tend to be error-prone. On the contrary, when enough data is provided on other well-known data sources, it gets easier for a search engine to trust the validity of the statement and to display. There is an interesting patent that Bill Slawski discovered a while ago on how Google might use a Knowledge Base Trust to asses the validity of a statement being scraped from a website.

1. If you are dealing with a Business or an Organisation make sure the Google My Business has been created and it is well managed.
2. Publish metadata in linked data using WordLift or any tool you might like. It is the most accessible and standard way to speak to machines. Linked data and Semantic Technologies provide a formal way to publish entities, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain. Search engines, more and more are depending on innovative artificial intelligence features like Google’s Featured Snippets and do require semantically rich data.
3. Curate entities that matter for you and your business on Wikipedia and Wikidata. Use for Wikidata the exact_match Property:P2888 property to interlink entities that you have published as linked data and mentioned with the structured data on your website.
4. Verify your Entity on Google. Since few weeks Google introduced the possibility for any person, organization, sports team, event and media property with an existing Knowledge Panel, to get verified and to suggest edits to the information presented in the SERP (read it all here from the Google’s blog). It is a super simple process and the most direct way to suggest edits that will be added to the Google Knowledge Graph. You can start by clicking on the phrase that starts with “Do you manage the online presence for xyz?”. You will receive an email from The Google Search Team that will allow you to keep the data on Google always up to date.

How to update your MREIDsThe email from The Google Search Team after being verified

5. Pay attention to the multiple sources that a search engine might use to infer its knowledge and do your best to curate the entities you care about. Local directories like Yelp, for instance, are extremely valuable as they are considered trustworthy by search engines and personal digital assistant like Apple Siri. To let a machine properly match an entity available on a third party directory like 9 Yelp make sure that the Name, the Address, and the Phone number are always consistent with the data published on your website.

How can I link an entity in the Google Knowledge Graph with the same entity in Wikidata?

If you are dealing with an entity that has already a MREIDs in the Google Knowledge Graph and you want to link the entity with the equivalent entity in Wikidata you have two options:

1. For FreebaseMachine-Readable IDs of entities created in the Freebase era you can use the property Freebase ID (Property:P646)
2. For New Machine-Readable IDs of entities created after Freebase that use the format /g/[a-z0-9]+ you can use the Google Knowledge Graph ID (Property:P2671)

Conclusions

Taking control of your data is vital, it is true for SEO but it is also true to keep the web an open and democratic platform as recently said by Tim Berners-Lee on Vanity Fair.

Handling consciously the data that machines use for delivering services to billions of connected people is the first step to a more decentralized web infrastructure.

Creating your own Machine-Readable Entity with linked data means that you can choose where your data is stored and what applications can use this data. Imagine the difference between having your own website for promoting your business or using a Facebook Page. 

Letting crawlers, search engines and social networks access our data using unique identifiers that we can control is different from having them entirely manage our own content and digital identities.