So my interests have recently turned towards direct response copywriting. I wouldn’t even call it copywriting per se as it is more  psychology and influence. There is this concept call the Zeigarnik effect. Basically humans are pattern matching/finishing machines.  The beginning of something always needs a close. For example take the nursery rhyme and try not to fill in the blank:

Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a ______,

Did you fill in the blank. If so that is the Zeigarnik effect at play.

I was also thinking about a story Steve Blank told back in his B2B warrior marketing days. Basically he slaved over spec sheets for microprocessors his company sold. They were a work of beauty. After he presented it to management, they had an interesting reaction. They took his spec sheet, 16 pages long(remember this was the 80s), put it on a BBQ and burnt it. Horrified Steve asked what he did wrong. The CEO’s response was ‘nothing.’ Basically Steve’s data sheet would’ve stole the thunder of the whole Sales department. If that material was put out, and a customer lead was passed onto Sales, Sales would have nothing new to talk about. EVERYTHING was already disclosed in the data sheet.

This illustrates the tension in B2B companies between Marketing( SEO specifically) and Sales.  As an SEO I want to get as much quality material as I can out there for Google to crawl and index; I’m thinking FAQ pages specifically.  But if Sales gets a lead that knows everything, or worse gets no lead because this person’s questions were already answered, that Sales person is rendered impotent.

The answer to this came to me in reading about the Zeigarnik effect. If you strategically leave out finishing pieces of information for the FAQs, you can still set up Sales to be the hero while getting your content indexed and ranking.  So what would that actually look like for your organization. Well, I’m about to do it right now. Use that contact form to ask me how.

If you want a fun trick to play around with the SERPS you can try messing with url parameters to hack the Knowledge Graph cards. Aaron Bradley is the first one that found this hack. I had so much fun with it I made a video of it below.

I picked on Chris Christie as it looks like he’ll be Trump’s VP nominee. The Washington Post did an interesting job highlighting his opportunistic-hypocrisy. Or this one with a little inner reflection.

But enough about politics, this is a Marketing blog. No need to make Google angry by shifting semantic focus.

So the key to all this is getting Knowledge Graph identifier (a digital Social Security Number for a Person, Place, or Thing). This is the KGMID for Christie:

This is what it looks like for NOW.

Who knows if/when Google plans to kill off access to kgmid paramters.

In the meantime have some fun with it. Share on social. Irritate your grand parents. Prank your boss.  I’d love to see what you come up with.

I just watched the latest SMX vid of Paul Haahr. He was surprisingly forthright. Some notes just to organize in my brain.

What google shows in response to a query is based on two basic scoring signals:

• Query Independent:  ie……Pagerank, Language, Mobile Friendliness
• Query Dependent: ie…..Keywords, Synonyms, Proximity

Paul then shifts gears to talk about pages themselves and brings in quality raters guide. Paul says “If you wonder why Google is doing something[experiments] it is to make it look more like what the raters guidelines say.”  Paul’s statement emphasizes that this is a document that was created with much effort and needs to be digested to fully understand current SEO.

So key metrics for scoring are broken down into two major categories:

• Needs Met
• Page Quality
• Time to Result(pretty simple, be fast)

Needs Met

Needs met translates to relevance. But the more Paul talks, the more he sounds like he is actually talking about intent. That seems to dovetail with what Roger posted on SEJ.  Give searchers what they think they want, not what they ask for.

Page Quality

Paul gives an anecdote about 2009-2011 results being quite high in relevance but awful in quality. He calls that the definition of a content farm.

So page quality is then further divided into Expert, Authority, and Trust. Paul mentions that Trust is more heavily weighted with Your Money or Life pages AS WELL AS “buying a product.” The raters guide say legal and sensitive areas like child adoption or car safety are pertinent. My first thought was SSL.  Probably not the only trust signals?

Some of the things that make High Quality content:

• Good Rep – Gotta be defensive and offensive with ORM
• Expertise – How to establish that your authors are experts? During a Q&A Paul won’t answer directly but does say that manual quality reviewers have the ability to determine that. I’ve got a few ideas on what that means.
• Authority – Thinking this has to do with site/theme historical topicality. Although citations may be in play as well.
• Trust – Too many factors to count. Suffice to say this is where you have to put your big boy digital pants on. Churn and burn sites don’t survive here.
• Sufficient helpful main content which means secondary content isn’t distracting. Oldie but goody of GOOPLA, h/t Gypsy Dave.

Rank Brain

In the Q&A Danny asks about RankBrain. Paul gives up the following:

• “[He] knows how it works but doesn’t know what it is doing.”
• Is part of the post retrieval adjustment segment
• “It sees webpages, queries, and Other Signals.”

What are these other signals? So far most people are only talking about unseen long tail query reformatting.

Brand Bias

Danny asks about brand bias by raters. Paul mentions that they have metrics to try to counter brand bias that aren’t built into quality. He gets quiet….almost somber for a few seconds. But then perks up and mentions that the raters do a great job rating small quality site.

I never paid much attention to Aaron Wall banging on about big company favoritism. Maybe he is on to something though. I don’t think Google is intentionally punitive to small brands but perhaps a flaw in their quality theory.

CTR

Lastly Danny asks about CTR being used in ranking. Both Paul and Gary Illyes squirm in their seats. Gary says engagement is hard to interpret.  Neither outright deny the use of engagement for rank scoring. Again I think it’s one of those things that doesn’t have an easy answer and they’d rather not go down the rabbit hole.  Many panda hit sites see steep increase in traffic before they fall. I’ve always thought it was Google measuring Quality engagement data before a demotion.

Gary Vaynerchuck advises people to jump on the newest social platform and master it as quickly as possible. Doing so gives a temporary first mover advantage. New users of the platform haven’t developed ad blindness nor grown calluses to spam. Eventually they do though. And when users reach peak marination in the new platform, they become immune to shitty marketing. Simply being there first isn’t enough to keep an audience engaged.

This is the way many still treat SEO. 10 or 15 years ago people were enamored with this thing called Google. They didn’t care what company was in the number one spot for “Buy _____.”  “Hey it’s the internet lets choose the first website we see and buy from it.” With this impulse purchase attitude, ranking #1 carried lots of potential. You didn’t really have to be that popular or trusted of a company. You just had to be present in the SERPs. This mindset is how many business owners and C-suite still measure the effectiveness of SEO today.  But as Wil Reynolds points out in his brilliant Conductor talk, ranking isn’t good enough anymore.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is a place for checking the rank of semantic keyword baskets. We want to squeeze as much juice from the SERPS as possible.  But the addiction to keyword rank represents a overly simple measurement that soured years ago. Even if rank did guarantee revenue, not all SERPS are the same. These are just a few of the reasons a #1 rank isn’t universally achievable: personalized search when you are logged into google, different results for mobile devices, different results geographically(not only by country but sometimes by closest metro area). Add to that local results, one boxes,  knowledge graph cards, “people also ask” cards,  and were dealing with totally different real estate.

So if SEO black magic no longer works what does? Brand building is the answer you are looking for. Does this mean that you’ll have to spend more time and energy to drive revenue through your website? Possibly yes, sorry. Does this mean SEO is dead. Absolutely NOT. SEO is doing what it has done since the 1990s, it’s evolving.  Good SEOs evolve with it. Bad SEOs complain how unfair Google is. To illustrate the intersection of SEO and good ole fashion Marketing/Branding, I’ll leave you with another awesome anecdote from Wil.

Ok so I’ve seen a resurgence of talk about Rank Brain chatter amongst the SEOs. I honestly wasn’t familiar with Rank Brain as I wanted to be and because Google is typically cryptic, I went to research. So Rank Brain is similar to Word2Vec as The SEMPost reports. Word2Vec basically attempts give words numerical values, vectors, or coordinates.  So days of the week tend to have close numerical values.  Verbs like can, will, may, and their contractions would have similar numeric values.

So what does this mean? Basically if we can give a numerical value to words, we can mathematically understand the meaning of a word, without the word actually being present. The closer the assigned value of two words, the closer the relationship.

Is this the death of SEO and Keywords? I don’t think so, at least not yet. This is just another step in the direction of Strings to Things. Things are covered by entities in Google’s Knowledge Graph. Rank Brain fills in the holes.

Ok so what are the takeaways. Not much has changed in SEO strategy.  If you didn’t get the memo and you’re new to SEO or have time traveled back from 2005, the message is the same. Keywords aren’t enough. If you’ve got a page about [minimalist running shoes], it’s probably important to talk about subjects surrounding it: the materials it’s made of, injuries sustained by minimalist running shoes, the benefits, how to transition from a thick shoe to a thin one, some good places to take them out for a spin, yada, yada, yada. Even if Rank Brain hasn’t figured a query like “foot gloves that are  great for strengthening plantar fasciitis injuries”, it will soon. Use your exact match keywords, stemmings, modifiers, and synonyms are for the present. Surrounding concepts for the near future. As Andy Grove said “Only The Paranoid Survive.”