SEO
Finding Keywords for Content No One Else Has
In the rapidly evolving world of SEO, staying ahead of the curve is critical.
Traditional SEO focuses on optimizing for keywords and topics directly related to your business.
However, as markets become increasingly saturated, new strategies are needed to stand out and reach a broader audience. That’s where tangential SEO comes in.
Tangential SEO involves creating and optimizing content for topics that are tangentially related to your core business. This allows you to engage with audiences who may not be actively looking for your products or services but who could still find them relevant or useful.
It is a strategy designed to build brand visibility, establish authority, attract a wider audience, and ultimately drive more traffic to your site.
Whether you’re a content marketer seeking to diversify your strategy, a business owner aiming to extend your online reach, or a newcomer to the field eager to learn, this guide is for you.
Not only will I explain what tangential content is at a broader level, but I’ll also show you how we find alternative keywords using untraditional methods.
You’ll have a methodology for finding keywords none of your competitors have even thought about.
Excited?
Let’s begin.
What Is “Tangential Content”?
Quite simply, tangential content is content that is not directly related to your product or service offering.
For example, instead of only focusing on sportswear, Nike might generate content around topics like music playlists for different moods or workout routines, exploring various global music trends.
It could even discuss urban design and its impact on outdoor physical activities. These are topics not directly related to Nike’s products but themes that would likely resonate with its audience.
Let’s give some more examples for context:
- Starbucks: Beyond coffee, Starbucks could create content discussing books and literature, considering that many people enjoy reading while sipping its coffee. The brand could start a book club, share reviews, and host author interviews.
- Apple: Apple might deviate from its technology-centered content to explore topics like interior design, highlighting aesthetic and minimalistic arrangements that complement its devices or discussing how different spaces foster productivity and creativity.
- IKEA: While primarily focused on furniture, IKEA could develop content around topics like urban gardening, offering tips for creating green spaces in small city apartments, or sharing recipes to create using limited kitchen tools.
Why Create Tangential Content?
Creating tangential content can have numerous benefits, particularly when it comes to reaching a wider audience, building brand authority, and improving SEO performance.
As a food lover, I wanted to try and squeeze a food analogy in, so I’m going to do it here. Let’s consider the benefits of creating tangential content as a master chef in the culinary world.
- Broader audience reach: Just like a versatile chef caters to various palates, tangential content allows your brand to cater to a wider audience – which is especially important for weirder or more abstract niches.
- Increased engagement: Changing up the menu keeps diners interested, just like a variety of content can keep your audience engaged. By showing that your brand can whip up more than just the standard fare, you’re demonstrating a deeper understanding of your audience’s diverse tastes.
- Building brand authority: When you create a variety of dishes, you prove your culinary skills beyond your signature dish. Similarly, creating content on a range of topics positions your brand as an authority in your field, enhancing your reputation and influence.
- Creating more emotional content and aligning with customer lifestyle: Tangential content is akin to designing a themed dining experience that aligns with your customer’s lifestyles and preferences. For instance, if you know your customers are environmentally conscious, you might focus on farm-to-table ingredients or share stories of local farmers. This not only provides content that resonates emotionally but also aligns your brand more closely with your customer’s values and lifestyles.
- Link building: Just as a unique fusion dish might get rave reviews and recommendations, tangential content often has a higher potential to be shared, earning you backlinks from various domains. These backlinks boost your site’s authority, much like word-of-mouth boosts a restaurant’s reputation.
- SEO performance: By offering a variety of dishes, you’re catering to more tastes and attracting more diners. Similarly, by covering a range of topics, you’re likely to rank for more keywords, attracting more organic traffic to your website.
While the benefits of publishing tangential content are clear, don’t overlook the value in the research process itself.
The analogy continues like so: consider researching tangential content ideas similar to the time a chef spends experimenting in the kitchen and interacting with their customers.
It’s during this phase that the chef discovers which dishes their customers can’t get enough of, which ones they’re not too fond of, and what cuisine they’re yearning to try next.
In the same way, when you research diverse topics for your tangential content, you’re not only gathering material for your next post – you’re also gaining a broader understanding of your customers’ unmet needs or interests.
This insight is just as valuable, if not more so, as it can guide the development of new products, services, or post-purchase support articles.
So, even before you’ve served up your tangential content to your audience, the research phase itself can help you refine your ‘menu,’ making your brand more attuned to your customers’ tastes and more valuable in their eyes.
Hopefully, the hokey simile made sense, hasn’t made you hungry, and you’re sold on the concept of tangential content.
I’ll now show you how we generate tangential content ideas.
How To Generate Tangential Content Ideas?
To walk through the following process, I’m going to use an example as if I was doing this research for a fictional hair removal company.
Step 1: Establish Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are essentially fictional representations of your ideal customers, often based on real data and market research about your existing customers. They help us understand our customers (and potential customers) better and make it easier for us to “get into their minds.”
These personas can include information such as demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, goals, challenges, values, and fears.
Sometimes your marketing department will already have one of these, but if they don’t, you could ask our new friend, ChatGPT, to produce one.
Step 2: Create A Mind Map
A mind map typically starts with a central idea, placed in the middle of your page. From this central idea, you’ll draw lines that branch out into main topics.
It’s like a tree sprouting branches.
These main branches can further sprout smaller branches, each representing related subtopics or ideas.
In our scenario, we’ll plant the name of the buyer persona as the seed of our mind map. From there, we’ll let branches grow out, each representing key values, aspirations, preferences, and hobbies that we’ve identified for this persona.
Remember, this isn’t the stage for keyword research; there’s no need to think about keyword volume data. This is more about emptying out your mind and exploring potential questions this persona might have.
This process is about trying to see the world through their eyes.
If you find that you’re not the best match for this persona – for example, if the persona is a 28-year-old woman and you’re not a 28-year-old woman (as I am not) – then it could be beneficial to bring in someone who aligns more closely with the persona.
This way, you can ensure you’re covering all bases and not missing any important insights.
In any case, here’s one I started doing for a persona I called “Sarah Thompson.”
Also, it’s wise to create several mind maps to cater to different segments of your target audience.
For instance, when I analyzed a renowned hair removal company’s website data using Similarweb, I discovered a substantial interest from males in hair removal.
As a bald male, I had to confront my own biases that initially made me overlook a significant demographic. To make the most of this exercise, it’s crucial that you don’t let your personal biases cloud your judgment.
In light of my realization, I did create a mind map for the male audience, following the same steps. However, to avoid repetition, I won’t detail that process again.
Always remember: diversity in perspectives can enrich your content strategy!
Step 3: Find The Data To Support Ideas
This is where the fun begins! I simply take all the questions I’ve brainstormed in my mind map and pop them into Google to see what surfaces.
If you take a look at the screenshot below, you’ll see that my initial search query doesn’t have any search volume (highlighted in the red box).
Despite this, Google still fetches a bunch of relevant results. Interestingly, each of these results does rank for a certain number of keywords, as indicated by the green boxes.
So, even without search volume for the initial query, there’s still relevant content out there capturing people’s interest.
You’re going to want to gather all these keywords. Honestly, this is where I find the Ahrefs toolbar to be a gem.
It allows me to click on each search result and conveniently export the keywords associated with each one. This makes the whole process much more streamlined and efficient.
Of course, you don’t need Ahrefs for this; there are other great tools to get the keywords for each URL. I just find the toolbar incredibly useful here.
Step 4: Rinse And Repeat With Each Of Your Content Ideas
You’ll want to enter each of your ideas into Google and get all the keywords for the articles that rank – even if your original query had no search volume.
Step 5: Find Additional Keywords None Of Your Competitors Will Have
At this point, you should have a list of keywords that are tangentially related to your target brand.
These keywords correspond to the questions and pain points of your buyer persona, providing a strong foundation for content that’s relevant and engaging for your target audience.
But because you’ve downloaded these keywords from an SEO tools database, your competitors have them, too.
They may not be your direct competitors, but someone has them (otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to get them from the SEO tool).
So how do we get the keywords no one has? We need to seek additional sources of inspiration.
I generally turn to forums or late UGC sites. Why? Dynamic forums like Reddit and Quora have a huge user base, all of whom are asking questions that many of them can’t find the answers to elsewhere online.
On forums like Reddit, we can zero in on specific topics and subreddits to surface popular questions that get a lot of engagement.
Keep in mind that many individuals resort to forums to seek answers to questions that the internet doesn’t readily provide.
On user-generated content (UGC) sites, the same question can be phrased in countless ways, which means conventional keyword tools might not capture this diversity.
Now, if you find a slew of keywords phrased differently but asking the same question, all registering as “zero volume” yet showing substantial engagement (in the form of likes, upvotes, shares, etc.), can we truly label them as zero volume?
I’d argue most certainly not. There’s clearly an active interest and engagement there, and that’s what truly matters.
Back to our hair removal example. There were also thousands of unanswered questions and ideas on Quora.
Anyway, we want all these “keywords” too.
The easiest and quickest way is to make a little scraper that searches for keywords and pulls all these. There are plenty of Python libraries for the more “well-known” forums, like this one for Quora and this guide for Reddit.
If you’re not inclined towards coding, don’t have the skills, or perhaps the niche you’re exploring doesn’t readily present good ideas on major forums, there’s a solution for you.
Chrome extensions like Scraper are excellent tools for this. You can simply right-click and use it to scrape all the relevant questions.
Step 6 (Optional): Use AI To Make The Questions Less “Chatty”
Of course, when people ask questions on forums, they word them in weird, colloquial ways with misspellings and local abbreviations. We can use ChatGPT here again to make all of our scraped questions “less chatty.”
Use the following prompt to make them more readable:
“Reword the following Reddit questions and reword them into a simple question. Please present the results in a table”
This particular example isn’t the most exciting I’ve ever encountered, as all the questions sort of made sense in their original state without the AI.
Reflecting back again on the time we did this exercise for the condom brand, the quirks were countless. We had a plethora of strange abbreviations and peculiar phrasings, and the AI’s knack for “translating” these into coherent questions was incredibly beneficial.
Step 7 (Optional): Get All The Related Questions, Too
Once I’ve got all my forum questions, normalized or not (this step still works without using AI to make the questions more “sensical”), I like to get all the related questions too.
There are plenty of tools and ways to scrape these for every keyword in your dataset. I personally like to use People Also Asked, as you can bulk upload to it.
Step 8: Get The Search Volumes For All Your New Queries
The keyword data you’ve downloaded from your go-to SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush will already include search volumes, so there’s no need to fuss over those.
However, all the fresh queries that you’ve discovered should also be plugged into an SEO tool to check if they hold any search volume.
This batch includes any of the keywords you extracted (and potentially standardized using AI), as well as any related People Also Ask questions that surfaced during your research.
Don’t worry if many of the queries show no volume; in fact, that’s to be expected. As we’ve already touched on, you’ll notice the same question is frequently asked, just worded in a variety of different ways.
Pair that with the fact that many of these questions tend to gather significant engagement on social platforms, and you’ll realize these so-called “zero volume” keywords aren’t truly “zero volume.”
To spot these repeating questions, we need a quick way to group similar queries together.
Step 9: Cluster Your Keywords
Grouping keywords together, or clustering, helps us organize our data. It turns a potentially overwhelming list of keywords into smaller, more manageable groups.
By clustering keywords, we can better understand which pages to create and pinpoint recurring questions within those elusive “zero volume” keywords.
There are many keyword clustering tools out there, but ensure you use one which clusters keywords by the search engine results and not natural language processing.
The former ensures you’re grouping keywords based on how a search engine understands them, not a language model.
Most clustering tools require you to upload a single CSV, meaning you may have to go through and combine all your reports at this stage. If all the columns match up, you could use an online CSV merging tool like this.
Remember to de-duplicate the keywords, too, so that you don’t have double data in there.
If you opt for Keyword Insights as your clustering tool, it offers you the freedom to upload any number of CSVs, regardless of whether the columns align.
The tool will guide you in mapping out the columns. Additionally, it conveniently de-duplicates the keywords for you.
(Disclosure: I am one of the co-founders of Keyword Insights, but there are many other great clustering tools out there).
Once you have your clustering report ready, you’ll start noticing the trends I mentioned earlier. For instance, observe the number of queries around variations of “Can you recycle razor blades?”
Traditional keyword research might overlook this term because other SEO tools reported it as having only “60 monthly searches.” However, the total sum of all similar questions asked is likely much higher.
Also, keep in mind these “zero volume” queries were selected based on the engagement they garnered (likes, shares, comments, etc.). So, they’re undoubtedly relevant topics to address.
Example Insights
After following the above steps for a hypothetical hair removal company, I found myself with a pool of 12,590 keywords, which could be organized into 975 clusters.
Below are some insights we could potentially highlight, confident in the knowledge that it’s likely our competitors haven’t addressed some, if not most, of these topics.
Pre-Purchase
There were many obvious clusters of questions that hadn’t been answered about what potential users were asking before they waxed or around alternative methods of waxing. For example:
Here’s another example:
Look at how diverse the wording of the same question is. There’s likely a lot more search volume to the query “what to do before waxing” than SEO tools are reporting.
Post-Purchase
It’s quite uncommon to see brands excel in creating “post-purchase” content. “Post-purchase content” refers to valuable materials designed to assist their customers after they’ve already utilized their products (or similar ones).
Creating high-quality post-purchase content is a valuable strategy for any business. It demonstrates a sustained commitment to your customers beyond the point of purchase.
By providing this kind of support, you’re nurturing a relationship that extends beyond the transaction, reinforcing that your brand truly cares about their experience.
Moreover, this approach can potentially decrease the volume of customer service queries as you’re proactively addressing common questions and concerns. This not only streamlines your operations but also enhances the customer’s experience with your brand.
One such large cluster I came across that a hair removal company might wish to cover is this one:
Investigating the issue of “ingrown hair after waxing” can bring significant advantages for a hair removal brand.
Let’s explore why.
Firstly, individuals are continuously in search of solutions. The aftermath of waxing isn’t always smooth; dealing with ingrown hairs can be challenging. If your brand can offer relevant and effective advice, it positions you as a trusted expert in the field.
Moreover, consider those online users who are seeking advice for their ingrown hairs. While they may not be actively searching for hair removal products at the moment, if they come across an informative article from your brand, they’ve just made a connection with you.
Essentially, you’ve expanded your reach to prospective customers who were previously unknown.
For your existing customers, providing such value-added content strengthens your relationship. You’re not just a vendor selling them products, but a trusted adviser, enhancing their loyalty to your brand.
From a technical standpoint, producing consistent, quality content increases your visibility to search engines, potentially improving your search rankings. Furthermore, you may gain additional backlinks and social shares, furthering your reach and visibility.
Lastly, offering knowledgeable advice on a topic that is indirectly related to your product underscores your understanding and expertise in the broader field.
You’re not just a product seller; you’re an active participant in the ongoing dialogue, which can enhance your brand’s credibility and influence.
Lifestyle And Advice
The research found a ton of ideas that would resonate with our target audience’s lifestyle needs.
Remember, we’re selling products to real people with real problems. If there’s any content that can help them, even if it’s only “tangentially related” to what we sell, it’s in our best interest to produce it.
Here are some examples:
Promoting body positivity can offer a strategic advantage for a hair removal brand. From a psychological perspective, it fosters self-acceptance and challenges negative beauty norms, reducing body-related anxiety among consumers. This approach can encourage healthier behaviors, reduce harmful social comparisons, and cultivate resilience against societal pressures, all while promoting inclusivity and a sense of value regardless of physical appearance. The indirect influence on sales could be substantial: by aligning the brand with a cause that resonates with many consumers, it may enhance brand perception and customer loyalty. Consequently, customers may prefer to buy from a brand that genuinely aligns with their values, leading to increased sales and stronger brand loyalty. Nevertheless, the brand’s values must be communicated authentically for the impact to be truly meaningful.
Similar ideas include:
And:
Along with:
By engaging in this broader conversation about attractiveness, the brand can connect more deeply with its audience and demonstrate an understanding of their concerns, thus building trust and strengthening customer relationships.
New Product Ideas
As I mentioned at the beginning, when you explore various topics for your tangential content, it’s more than just collecting ideas for upcoming posts.
You’re actually delving deeper into your customers’ needs and interests that haven’t been addressed yet. This valuable insight can potentially steer the direction for the creation of new products.
We’ve already seen numerous examples of questions people were asking about societal expectations and beauty standards surrounding body hair. It’s natural, therefore, for men to seek out suitable products for addressing these concerns:
Including:
Cast your mind back to the buyer persona we created. One of the key values our person has is being “environmentally friendly.”
It’s great, therefore, that our research has surfaced many potential new product ideas that align with this:
Of course, these are just a few samples of what I found. Across the 975 clusters in my research, there were loads of new content and product ideas.
Conclusion
It’s crucial for brands to incorporate tangential keyword research into their strategies in order to stay relevant and connect with a wider audience.
By exploring related topics and keywords, brands can uncover new opportunities, engage diverse audiences, and establish themselves as industry leaders.
Tangential keyword research enables brands to identify emerging trends, understand unique customer needs, and develop innovative content and products that resonate with their target market.
Embracing tangents allows brands to outshine competitors, foster customer loyalty, and achieve long-term success in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.
To discover tangential ideas, follow these steps:
- Understand your target consumer: Put yourself in their shoes and identify the type of content and questions they may have that are tangentially relevant to your business.
- Explore existing content: Check if any content already addresses these concerns. Use your preferred SEO tool to extract ranking keywords by entering relevant URLs.
- Enrich your tangential content ideas: Uncover unique keywords that your competitors may not have discovered. Seek inspiration beyond traditional sources of keyword research on forums or social media platforms where people ask questions that aren’t adequately answered elsewhere online.
- Cluster your keywords: So that you more easily spot patterns and add “volume” to these technically “zero volume” keywords, the keywords need to be grouped together.
- Analyze clusters for trends: Categorize your insights into main categories, such as pre-purchase, post-purchase, new product ideas, lifestyle, and advice. This will help you identify interesting trends and capitalize on them effectively.
In the practical example, we gathered a significant portion of our keyword ideas by scraping Reddit and Quora.
It’s important to note that not all niches can benefit from these channels (for instance, a website selling broadband cables is unlikely to find much insight there).
However, rest assured that there is always a forum or social channel available for every niche; the key lies in discovering it.
Happy keyword hunting.
More resources:
Featured Image: REDPIXEL.PL/Shutterstock
SEO
How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO
Quick question: What do you typically do with your old blog posts? Most likely, the answer is: Not much.
If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Many of us in SEO and content marketing tend to focus on continuously creating new content, rather than leveraging our existing blog posts.
However, here’s the reality—Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated in evaluating content quality, and we need to adapt accordingly. Just as it’s easier to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases, updating old content on your website is a more efficient and sustainable strategy in the long run.
Ways to Optimize Older Content
Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort.
Refresh Content
If your blog post contains a specific year or mentions current events, it may become outdated over time. If the rest of the content is still relevant (like if it’s targeting an evergreen topic), simply updating the date might be all you need to do.
Rewrite Old Blog Posts
When the content quality is low (you might have greatly improved your writing skills since you’ve written the post) but the potential is still there, there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely.
This is not a waste—you’re saving time on brainstorming since the basic structure is already in place. Now, focus on improving the quality.
Delete Old Blog Posts
You might find a blog post that just seems unusable. Should you delete your old content? It depends. If it’s completely outdated, of low quality, and irrelevant to any valuable keywords for your website, it’s better to remove it.
Once you decide to delete the post, don’t forget to set up a 301 redirect to a related post or page, or to your homepage.
Promote Old Blog Posts
Sometimes all your content needs is a bit of promotion to start ranking and getting traffic again. Share it on your social media, link to it from a new post – do something to get it discoverable again to your audience. This can give it the boost it needs to attract organic links too.
Which Blog Posts Should You Update?
Deciding when to update or rewrite blog posts is a decision that relies on one important thing: a content audit.
Use your Google Analytics to find out which blog posts used to drive tons of traffic, but no longer have the same reach. You can also use Google Search Console to find out which of your blog posts have lost visibility in comparison to previous months. I have a guide on website analysis using Google Analytics and Google Search Console you can follow.
If you use keyword tracking tools like SE Ranking, you can also use the data it provides to come up with a list of blog posts that have dropped in the rankings.
Make data-driven decisions to identify which blog posts would benefit from these updates – i.e., which ones still have the chance to recover their keyword rankings and organic traffic.
With Google’s helpful content update, which emphasizes better user experiences, it’s crucial to ensure your content remains relevant, valuable, and up-to-date.
How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO
Updating articles can be an involved process. Here are some tips and tactics to help you get it right.
Author’s Note: I have a Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist you might also be interested in following while you’re doing your content audit.
Conduct New Keyword Research
Updating your post without any guide won’t get you far. Always do your keyword research to understand how users are searching for your given topic.
Proper research can also show you relevant questions and sections that can be added to the blog post you’re updating or rewriting. Make sure to take a look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section that shows up when you search for your target keyword. Check out other websites like Answer The Public, Reddit, and Quora to see what users are looking for too.
Look for New Ranking Opportunities
When trying to revive an old blog post for SEO, keep an eye out for new SEO opportunities (e.g., AI Overview, featured snippets, and related search terms) that didn’t exist when you first wrote your blog post. Some of these features can be targeted by the new content you will add to your post, if you write with the aim to be eligible for it.
Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags
If you want to attract new readers, consider updating your headlines and meta tags.
Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:
- Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
- Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
- Appeal to your target audience – who may have changed tastes from when the blog post was originally made.
Remember that your meta tags in particular act like a brief advertisement for your blog post, since this is what the user first sees when your blog post is shown in the search results page.
Take a look at your blog post’s click-through rate on Google Search Console – if it falls below 2%, it’s definitely time for new meta tags.
Replace Outdated Information and Statistics
Updating blog content with current studies and statistics enhances the relevance and credibility of your post. By providing up-to-date information, you help your audience make better, well-informed decisions, while also showing that your content is trustworthy.
Tighten or Expand Ideas
Your old content might be too short to provide real value to users – or you might have rambled on and on in your post. It’s important to evaluate whether you need to make your content more concise, or if you need to elaborate more.
Keep the following tips in mind as you refine your blog post’s ideas:
- Evaluate Helpfulness: Measure how well your content addresses your readers’ pain points. Aim to follow the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
- Identify Missing Context: Consider whether your content needs more detail or clarification. View it from your audience’s perspective and ask if the information is complete, or if more information is needed.
- Interview Experts: Speak with industry experts or thought leaders to get fresh insights. This will help support your writing, and provide unique points that enhance the value of your content.
- Use Better Examples: Examples help simplify complex concepts. Add new examples or improve existing ones to strengthen your points.
- Add New Sections if Needed: If your content lacks depth or misses a key point, add new sections to cover these areas more thoroughly.
- Remove Fluff: Every sentence should contribute to the overall narrative. Eliminate unnecessary content to make your post more concise.
- Revise Listicles: Update listicle items based on SEO recommendations and content quality. Add or remove headings to stay competitive with higher-ranking posts.
Improve Visuals and Other Media
No doubt that there are tons of old graphics and photos in your blog posts that can be improved with the tools we have today. Make sure all of the visuals used in your content are appealing and high quality.
Update Internal and External Links
Are your internal and external links up to date? They need to be for your SEO and user experience. Outdated links can lead to broken pages or irrelevant content, frustrating readers and hurting your site’s performance.
You need to check for any broken links on your old blog posts, and update them ASAP. Updating your old blog posts can also lead to new opportunities to link internally to other blog posts and pages, which may not have been available when the post was originally published.
Optimize for Conversions
When updating content, the ultimate goal is often to increase conversions. However, your conversion goals may have changed over the years.
So here’s what you need to check in your updated blog post. First, does the call-to-action (CTA) still link to the products or services you want to promote? If not, update it to direct readers to the current solution or offer.
Second, consider where you can use different conversion strategies. Don’t just add a CTA at the end of the post.
Last, make sure that the blog post leverages product-led content. It’s going to help you mention your products and services in a way that feels natural, without being too pushy. Being subtle can be a high ROI tactic for updated posts.
Key Takeaway
Reviving old blog articles for SEO is a powerful strategy that can breathe new life into your content and boost your website’s visibility. Instead of solely focusing on creating new posts, taking the time to refresh existing content can yield impressive results, both in terms of traffic and conversions.
By implementing these strategies, you can transform old blog posts into valuable resources that attract new readers and retain existing ones. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into your archives, and start updating your content today—your audience and search rankings will thank you!
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.
The new guide has six sections:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment
The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.
Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.
To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.
The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.
Google explains:
“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”
Read the new Google Trends documentation:
Get started with Google Trends
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero