How To Optimize Existing Content With Entities, Semantic SEO, & All Things Nice!

by Aiswarya Menon | 21 October 2022

In content marketing, we would leave no stone unturned to ensure that our content reaches the right person – one who is looking for a solution. Some of us can remember the days when we wrote article after article, just like SEOwl shows here.

Content calendar, pillar pages, keyword clustering, content distribution, competitor analysis, social media… Wait a minute! What about your current content that is waiting for a makeover? If these activities have been lost in your To-Do Lists or Trello boards, now is the time to pick them up again!

For some of our clients, depending on their specific goals and OKRs, we have planned some revitalization activities. Let us see how to optimize existing content and how we worked out in two cases.

Case I: Almost Dead Page

We had fluctuating impressions that rarely translated into results. After the changes, we can see how impressions have increased by more than five times and clicks by six times. That’s a start, of course! Not to mention how well the page climbed up the SERP ladder⚡

Case II: Stagnated Page

The webpage had reached a plateau before we started semantic SEO enrichment. As the numbers show, clicks have doubled over time and we are seeing an increase in trends.

Let’s go through how to optimize your existing content, identify the relevant opportunities and then give them a spin, the semantic SEO way!

Optimize Your Existing Content, The Semantic SEO Way!

Whenever we have a new client on board, their goal is to increase business value through SEO. This can be done by improving content, improving their E-A-T ( Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness ) on the web, and making the most of structured data, to name a few examples. Whether it is one or all of these, Semantic SEO is at the heart of all our efforts.

As for content, optimizing existing content on the site goes hand in hand with brainstorming fresh content ideas.

Sherlock-Holming The SERP

1. As always, we start by identifying the content opportunities in Search Console. In most cases, these are search queries with few clicks and many impressions just waiting to be tapped.
2. Once we have identified the relevant search queries and the URLs that need to be revised, it’s time to analyze the content gap – one page at a time. The SERP is one of the best places to understand this.

As you may have already done, analyzing your competitors is a good place to start to find out if your content is missing something crucial. Or if there’s room for improvement.

The results shown will help you get closer to user intent and make sense of the content clusters you have. No wonder, the better you address intent, the better your content is likely to perform.

Tools like Semrush are also good-to-rely sources to explore new content additions to the existing page. For example, some of the queries “what is the difference between cheetah and leopard and jaguar”, “what is the bite force of a jaguar”, and “what is the speed of a jaguar” are high-intent, long-tail, and comparatively easier to rank for.

What’s more?

Hola, Entities!

Does the content revival stop with SERP analysis, more keyword research and competitor analysis? Not quite! There’s so much more you can do with entities.

For those who are new to entities, in the Semantic Web, an entity is a “thing” that:

• can be described easily,
• could be unique,
• is distinguishable & well-defined.

It could be our favorite music star, the next vacation destination we are planning, or our favorite dish. An entity helps computers understand everything you know about a person, organization, or place.

For example, if you are a car dealer, your website must help Google understand that Jaguar is the car for you, not the threatening jungle cat.

With entity-based SEO, this is a cakewalk!

Entities can also lead you to highly relevant topics that can benefit your business. This in turn increases your thematic authority with strong content clusters

Now, of course, the question is: How do I find entities?

Using SEO Add-on for Google Sheets™by WordLift

SEO Add-on for Google Sheets™by WordLift is an extension that lets you perform semantic keyword research and create a JSON-LD that helps Google understand what your content is about.

The SEO Add-on comes in super handy even if you are creating a new content piece or reviving an existing one. Let me walk you through how we use it to enrich a page with entities and implement SEO content optimization.

1. In your Google Sheets, get the WordLift Add-on under Extensions>>Add-ons>>Get Add-ons. Search for WordLift, and you are good!

2. To use the Add-on, you need a WordLift key. If you are already a customer, you can use your key as such. If not, drop us a message, and we’ll help you out.

3. You can either run the SEO Add-on with a set of queries or connect your Google Search Console account to get the data automatically. 

4. Here, I have a set of keywords for the best travel suitcases. 

5. You can go a step further and create clusters to better identify content opportunities. The fab tool Keyword Clustering App by Charly Wargnier is what we use. 

6. From the clusters, choose the keywords and queries that are relevant to your content plan. Open the extension, and choose ‘Analyze SERP.’

7. Voila! The SEO Add-on analyzes the queries you have selected, goes through the SERP, and brings you a list of entities and their DBpedia URL. Oh, and a confidence score denoting relevancy. A higher confidence score indicates that the entity is relevant to your content. Although, this is completely your choice.

8. From the list, we can see some of the entities that are super relevant to the article we are writing – travel & suitcase, for instance. You can also note entities such as Polycarbonate that you can cover when it comes to the material of the suitcase. The same goes for the brand Samsonite.
– In short, when search engines crawl this article, it becomes apparent with these entities that you are talking about travel suitcases, the types, different brands, and more! Make it easy for bots to understand your content.
9. As a final step, you can proceed to Login into your WordPress account, and import these entities to build your Knowledge Graph, wrapping up the process. Alternatively, you can use the data and create the entities on your own, in WordPress, via WordLift’s plugin.

Simplifying Interlinking

Internal linking is quite underrated; the rush to build backlinks and the countless deployments every day outweigh this. For smaller websites, internal linking may be a no-brainer. But what about an e-commerce site with more than 50,000 visitors? Err.

Definitely not impossible, just time consuming.
Is there a way we can do this faster? And with fewer resources? But of course, yes!

When we add entities in WordLift, an internal link is automatically created. And not only that, you can turn this feature off whenever you want.

• If you have a product page, we want to add the product label first, which gives relevant details like availability, price, shipping details and more
• If you mention the product on your follow-up pages, the WordLift plugin will capture those mentions and allow you to mark them as entities and add an internal link.

If you have a website with thousands of pages and products, imagine how things can be simplified, how you can save time and how your team can speed things up without compromising the bottom line!

Propelling FAQs

Earlier this year, there were several decisions that said Google has started displaying more Rich Results in the SERP and that the importance of Q&A and FAQ schema markup is magnificently increasing.
While earlier you had a chance to get a position in the “People Also Ask” section, Google’s core update in May this year helped many website owners to get more space in the SERP with their FAQs.

What are some of the best sources for FAQs?

• Questions posed by your customers to your sales or CS teams
• Google’s People Also Ask
• Google’s dropdown for search and related queries
• Tools like AlsoAsked.com helps you map what users are searching for, relating to a particular query/topic.
• Tools like Semrush offer questions asked by users when it comes to keyword research, making it easy for us to identify some high-intent, low-competition keywords to potentially target.

Of course, it’s not a good idea to force FAQs on all pages in the hope that they will rank well. Depending on the goal of the article and its intention, it’s worth checking if you can accommodate questions and answers on the page.

That’s about it!

Want the growing charts and numbers for your website or more (even better!)? Let us talk about it!

Until next time with another blog, Hey Ho, Let’s SEO🤟

Top 5 Underutilized Schema Markups for Publishers

by Emilia Gjorgjevska | 18 October 2022

Table of contents:

1. What are the most common schema markups for publishers?
2. What are the least common, underutilized schema markups for publishers?
3. What are some potentially useful schema markups that I can watch out for in the future?

The news and blogging industry is not an easy profession. Anyone who has had the opportunity to participate in these article-driven businesses will tell you that it is a very dynamic, competitive and time-sensitive industry – you do not have much time to get your bearings. News articles and events come and go, and readers’ attention spans are short. That’s why it’s important to optimize your content as soon as it’s fresh and interesting to your audience. Especially for those who want to report live or are serious about being in the newsroom.

Google’s VP Scott Huffman will say that “discoverability is not a solved problem.” That’s why we analyzed more than 100 web platforms of news, blogs and magazines such as BBC, BILD, Blick, NYTimes, TNW, SmashingMagazine, CNN, DW, AL Jazeera, Google News and the personal websites of renowned SEOs and identified the most common, but also the most useful (but less known) schema markups for publishers.

We, as schema markup experts, pioneers in using artificial intelligence to grow online audiences and first-to-market content organization, feel the need to share our findings with the wider SEO industry, because we fight for:

1. Open and linked-data knowledge that everyone can benefit from;
2. Helping to establish quality competition which will directly increase the quality of the content that we provide online;
3. Work together with WWW, Schema.org and general schema markup enthusiasts towards making the Internet better, one day at the time;
4. So much more.

What Are The Most Common Schema Markups For Article-Oriented Websites?

Assuming you have regular workflows for producing and publishing content, you may have dealt with the Article, NewsArticle, and BreadcrumbList schema markups. What are the differences between them and what exactly are they used for? Let us take a look at them together.

1. Article is a general type of schema markup, mostly used for magazines’ creative work. As stated on Schema.org, “newspapers and magazines have articles of many different types and this is intended to cover them all”. When it is hard to determine the schema category for your content piece, it is always a great idea to start with Article schema markup;
2. NewsArticle is a schema markup used to report on news or in other words articles that are produced by an established news organization. The NewsArticle schema represents a type of creative work and it formally inherits the Article schema while being more specific than the Article schema itself. NewsArticle schema markup works best when it is accompanied with the following attributes:
   • backstory – a brief explanation of why and how an article was created;
   • articleSection – the news category for the given article;
   • speakable – usually to highlight the most important parts of the article or indicate parts which are the most likely to be useful for general speech purposes (text-to-speech);
   • abstract – a short summary about the article and particularly useful when combined with entity referencing and entity tagging by using the mentions attribute;
   • accountablePerson – the person who is responsible for producing the creative work;
   • award – recognitions for the given article;
   • contributor – referencing additional co-authors and helpers for the piece to be properly produced;
   • conditionsOfAccess – explains the rules for accessing the content, e.g. “Available by appointment from the Reading Room” or “Accessible only from logged-in accounts “.
3. BreadcrumbList – it represents a chain of interconnected webpages, indicating the hierarchy for accessing each one of them. Useful for big websites or category-based websites which need to explain their navigation to users and search engines.

Combining accountablePerson, award and contributor attributes helps in building Expertise-Authority-Trust (EAT) for your creative work which is particularly useful after Google’s Helpful Content Update. It is always great when we can provide more context to search engines about the author and his/hers expertise to write the content. Basically, E-A-T is best developed when we can positively answer questions like:

• When searchers explore content to solve their needs, will they put their trust into your business and expertise provided?
• Does the content itself demonstrates first-hand expertise and showcases good structure and clear purpose?
• Will the users satisfy their searching needs after absorbing your creative work?

While E-A-T itself is not a direct ranking factor, it is still a framework that encompasses many clues that Google picks up on to evaluate and further elevate quality content. Therefore, it’s a good idea to develop a solid knowledge graph and link between your authors’ expertise and your niche topics.

Here are some results that we observed when implementing some of the previous schema markups for publishers to our clients’ websites:

As you can see from the bar chart, annotated articles outperformed non-annotated articles by about 17%. This is a huge improvement, especially for large publishers, but also useful for small authors optimizing their audience.

What Are The Least Common, Underutilized Schema Markups For Publishers?

The news & article webspace is definitely not using the full power of available, non-pending schema markups, including FAQ page, How to, VideoObject, Person,
LiveBlogPosting, Thing for entities (entity linking), TVEpisode, TVSeries, CollectionPage, Series, CreativeWork (Whitepapers, Books), Event, PodcastEpisode. We are going to cover only some of them.

Person

Person is more descriptive than accountablePerson or the contributor attribute, because it provides more context-fields to describe the author like:

• alumniOf – any connection with formal and informal education institutions that can demonstrate author’s competencies is useful to be provided;
• award – a list of concrete achievements that this person managed to secure during its lifetime, think “Best investigative story” for reporters, mentions in relevant associations and so on;
• jobTitle – explains the exact job title that the content piece’s author holds, like Editor in Chief or a more regular reporter. Use this to differentiate;
• knowsAbout – used for expertise building, covering the topics in which the person is expert in;
• sameAs attribute – this one is relatively known for local businesses but rarely appropriately utilized for Person’s schema markup. Use it to connect to relevant social media profiles for the author and anything that can help in disambiguating its entity across the web.

All of these extension, context-based ideas are not possible or easy to achieve with simple contributors or accountablePersons attributes alone.

LiveBlogPosting

LiveBlogPosting is useful when you need to perform an ongoing textual coverage for events that are ongoing and require continuous updates. Think hostage situations, earthquakes, ongoing wars or political elections – most of them are types of events that happen in a defined time interval and are a hot topic for some days and weeks (excluding war situations which are absolutely more complex than that).

Therefore, a typical Article or Blog schema will not be sufficient in these cases. It is also important to note that Google might feature top stories with a live badge when adding this schema, so it is definitely worth it to give it a try.

TVEpisode and TVSeries

TVEpisode and TVSeries are interesting schema markups and particularly useful when websites are performing some sort of TV broadcast and related online content delivery. You can also think of reportages for TV shows like the Bachelor (example: Blick.ch regularly reports on these ones) – it is not a reportage, analysis or typical news article, so it should be appropriately differentiated.

Series

Series is absolutely different compared to TV series (these two should not be mixed up) and it is usually used to connect a group of related items which do not have to belong in the same category or be of the same type. They are useful where there is not an established strict order in which the items should be shown but still require a certain structure to be interconnected together. In practice, you can observe the Kevin Indig’s blog utilizes this schema markup very cleverly:

• He writes long-form articles that belong to different topics but still fall under the global SEO topic, ranging from SEO team structures and up to rocking SEO in the machine learning world;
• Since there is not an established, clear hierarchical structure between the articles, he uses the Series schema markup to connect all these blog-posts together in a series;
• The Series schema helps with content comprehension but also content referral and building a powerful article recommendation engine.

It is simple but still way to underutilized according to our study.

What Are Some Potentially Useful Schema Markups That I Can Watch Out For In The Future?

In some contexts fact checking is important to be done and adding content-based schemas helps in these initiatives: first we need to gather the data in a structured way and then act on it appropriately. There are important initiatives around in the media space that are working in this direction like the Fact Checker tools by Google to help spot misinformation.

At the same time, Schema.org and linked-data knowledge enthusiasts regularly invest time in developing additional schema markups that describe various web concepts on the Internet more accurately. Here are some of the schema markups that are under development and once they are approved, can bring new added value to your business:

NewsMediaOrganization, ReportageNewsArticle, AnalysisNewsArticle, OpinionNewsArticle, ReviewNewsArticle, BackgroundNewsArticle, AdvertiserContentArticle, SatiricalArticle, BroadcastEvent are absolutely some interesting schema markups to watch after. However, they are still in the pending phase and still wait to be implemented.

What schema markups are you using for your article-based business? Are you utilizing their power enough? Let’s talk about it together, Book a Demo with one of our SEO expert.

Content Resilience Is Business Resilience: A Lesson From 1600+ Articles

by Emilia Gjorgjevska | 12 October 2022

Table of contents:

1. Content resilience…what does that even mean?
2. Processes, frameworks, mindsets and knowledge graphs as content resilience enablers
3. Resilience in your SEO content strategy

Covid-19. Inflations. Remote work. New competitors in the market or more competitive business offerings from others in your niche. We have all been there, at least in recent years. One lesson we should have learned by now is how to make ourselves and our businesses more resilient and adaptable to change.

Business resilience is complex and it cannot be built overnight. It requires careful organizational structuring which equally values efficiency and innovation, while ensuring quality supply chain resilience at the same time. You should be able to deliver your products and services to the market in a way that is constant and suffers little change even when the times are uncertain and the market is fluctuating across industries. 

This is where your content and marketing strategy come into play. They should be your most important tools for resilience because they allow you to discover your customers and bring them into your business. They are the tools that guide your online visitors between the awareness and purchase stages, giving you the ultimate data to learn how to improve your offerings and unique selling proposition:

1. Where did your visitors come from?
2. What devices are they using to find you?
3. What makes them stick on the website or leave it immediately?
4. What does their customer journey on your website look like?
5. Do you have a mature branding strategy (brand queries dominate) or do you have a pure, established organic growth marketing channel in place?
6. So much more.

This is why your business teams need to embrace the power of content and learn how to keep going further even when the going becomes tougher.

Content Resilience…What Does That Even Mean?

It all comes down to the mindset.

First things first: your content comes from many places or ideally multiple departments should be able to inform your content strategy. By gathering and unifying data from there, you should be able to answer questions like:

1. Who are your searchers?
2. Who are your customers and how did they convert? Which search queries are the most impactful when it comes to converting online and why?
3. What increases the desirability of your product/service?
4. What helps to reduce the friction in closing deals?
5. How do prospects behave when they use the product/service?
6. What established processes and conventions are established at your company, so that you can make a constant user discovery process?
7. How can you present your information so that you have a clear and well articulated way to change your prospects minds, making them switch to your business solutions?

In the content world, the ability to find a new way to understand and profile your audience, and at the same time the ability to present a new talking point and a new type of content, is called content resilience. This comes with time and practice, but it’s important to start and plan for it.

You must be able to find inspiration by taking data from multiple data sources: it’s all about being data-driven but also imaginative, innovative and deeply, deeply interested to understand the customers in the first phases of the buying journey in order to guide them properly later.

Processes, Frameworks, Mindsets And Knowledge Graphs As Content Resilience Enablers

Analyze what you have on your side. Start documenting your work and then try to find the minimum denomination which applies to all of your content templates. Being able to put structure where there’s none and even more, giving granularity and interoperability to your data is an ultimate content resilience skill:

1. We build knowledge graphs (KG) to provide structure to content;
2. Structure is what is needed to build resilience;
3. AI (still) depends on vast amount of training data – structure helps us scale this training data to “teach” search engines new things and help them find the audience we need;
4. The return of investment (ROI) of a content KG depends on the value of the semantic annotations over time;
5. The value of semantic annotations is to bridge gaps with the right searchers’ personas;
6. A content that is semantically annotated gets stronger over time. Why? Because it enforces interconnectedness among concepts across the web and it becomes semantically understandable what your website is about.

And yes…it takes domain expertise but also great business acumen with an innovative mind to start connecting the dots that were thrown away without any framework behind. Build your foundations just like you would build with LEGO blocks and utilize the power of content knowledge graphs: a blog post on social media lasts for a few hours while an entity-based content strategy (entity mapping) lasts forever. 

Here is an analysis above on 1650+ articles of a client of ours and this is the click through rate (CTR) when we stopped adding new entities. As you can observe, the result goes down once we stop the entity tagging process. 

Know the advantages and disadvantages of different content approaches. It is an ultimate superpower.

Resilience In Your SEO Content Strategy

We won’t make a mistake if we say that content strategy is your first phase of your supply chain process – you’re distributing information to online searchers so that they can make a proper decision on what to buy online. It can get hard if you don’t strategize around your content strategy and understand your unique value proposition inside out.

Your numbers are not adding up at the moment or the executives are not satisfied with the results that they see? Period. If your content is set up to succeed, those are just temporary turbulent periods that you need to overcome and be sure, the sun is there afterwards! They come from time to time, it is a learned skill that helps manage everyone’s expectations. How? Well, here’s the deal:

1.Working with backlinks

If you work with backlinks and you are not a seasoned SEO marketer, you will have tough times articulating your strategic decisions to upper management. It is very likely that you might think that investing time in building high domain authority links to your website is beneficial. 

The problem with links is that they expire and become old or completely obsolete over time. Completely unresilient. They don’t hold value for long, especially if you are not updating them up at scale. It’s not that you do not need them or that you should ditch them, it is more about being more strategic: investing in classic links but also investing in linked-data links, enabling global shared understanding about concepts across the globe. That’s content resilience. That’s link resilience.

2. Being evergreen

Are your content ideas up-to-date? Do you truly, deeply understand your customers? What are some problems that keep popping up all the time or from time to time? What do knowledge graphs across the web teach you about content gaps? Can you fill them to address these issues? Are they evergreen and will this content be reusable when winning new audiences on the Internet over and over again? Be specific and brutally honest to yourself about being evergreen – it is the only way to go forward. 

3. Flexible mindset

Are you a flexible person? Are you able to construct and deconstruct content pieces from ground up and vice versa? Are you able to put new perspectives and fresh, indie thinking into how you keep elements in your core content processes? Are you learning and experimenting with new stuff? One potential idea is working with product knowledge graphs. Have you considered these approaches before? Resilience is adapting to change and if you do not have a flexible mind, you will face difficulties along the way.

4. Third-party SEO vendors

These tools support your keyword research process and link profiling between your website and competitors’ websites, however, they are not reliable in the long run. 

Being dependent on SEO software vendors that do not even work with first-party data and slowly increase the prices of their products is not a resilient-oriented way of thinking. You should build your safety net around the data that you own in the first place, like Google Search console data source and unstructured data in your CMS. Your tech stack should be picked in a way that enables you to grow from there and not be strategically dependent on third-party SEO data vendors.

To sum up, it is important to build your foundations right. Put your data in context. Build around what you already have and then expand from there. You’ll thank us later.

Ready to experiment? Give us a go! Book a Demo with one of our SEO Expert 🤩