This is the presentation given by Bill Sebald at the Digital Marketing Suburbia Meetup #1 - https://www.meetup.com/Digital-Marketing-Suburbia/ This presentation focuses on Google's ability to read and understand website content and the intent of queries.

2. How Google is Reading and
Ranking Content in 2016

4. 1. Link Building
2. Crawlability
3. Content
What do you think of when you hear SEO:

6. Just Do Some Keyword Research...

7. Make Pages For Each Keyword...

8. 8

9. Keyword Research was a cornerstone to
getting content ranked.
You Knew It…
… But So Did Your Competitors

11. (Yes, that means SEO takes longer these days!)

12. 12

13. https://moz.com/google-
algorithm-change

17. Hummingbird Update — August 20, 2013

19. Contextual search is a form of optimizing web-based search results based on context provided
by the user and the computer being used to enter the query. Contextual search services differ
from current search engines based on traditional information retrieval that return lists of
documents based on their relevance to the query. Rather, contextual search attempts to
increase the precision of results based on how valuable they are to individual users.

22. Conversational search is a new kind of philosophy for
human/computer interaction. The principle behind
conversational search is that a user can speak a sentence
into a device, and that device can respond with a full
sentence. This principle is also applied to searches: where
traditional searches mostly analyzed individual keywords, a
conversational search looks at the whole string of words, to
return human-like responses.

23. In order to find and display the most relevant results, Google looks for help from search
entities. In short, it is a process by which searches performed by users establish a set
relationship that help identify the importance of the various documents and, therefore,
influence the information displayed.

24. #2

25. Wikipedia Example

26. Rich Answers (and other rich snippets)

28. 28

29. • Write to educate your users and search engines
• Consider long-form content
• Make your pages 10x more valuable than page ranking first
• Write to keep your users on your page, and in your website
• Layer in concepts related to your topic (AlchemyAPI or Cloud
Natural Language API can support here)
What Can You Do?

30. • Write to help Google match the intent of your article to the
intent of the query (if your page is about Jaguar cars, be very
clear)
• Synonyms are good. Google is better at understanding
synonyms so you don’t need to keyword stuff.
• Traditional keyword research and traditional on-page
optimization should still be done, but not alone.
What Can You Do?

31. Greenlane Search Marketing, LLC
Bill Sebald
bill@greenlaneseo.com
http://www.twitter.com/billsebald