SEO
How Marketers Can Reach Gen Z On Social Media
Born between 1997 and 2012, Generation Z (Gen Z) is the first generation to have grown up with the internet, social media, and smartphones as part of their everyday lives.
More than just very demure and very mindful, they’re a complex demographic myriad businesses and industries are vying to target – with their own unique set of ideals, values, and interests that vary drastically from older generations.
For social media marketers, effectively reaching Gen Z requires more than injecting buzzwords and phrases into your messaging.
It requires a strategic approach that starts with obtaining a comprehensive understanding of this specific audience.
Unlike previous generations, Gen Z came into the world with the internet already having made a significant impact for both business and consumers alike.
Smartphones were well on their way to becoming a household necessity, with the first iPhone being introduced on June 29, 2007. Myspace was also about to become a phenomenon that would inspire and forever shape the social media technology movement.
Given the breadth of experience Gen Z has with smart devices, technology, and social media, it’s imperative for marketers to tailor their social media strategies to successfully capture and convert potential Gen Z customers.
As marketers, now is the time to uncover what motivates Gen Z and how to capture the largest market segment to improve return on investment, maximize your marketing efforts, and drive more qualified business.
Let’s unpack exactly who this generation is and proven strategies for increasing Gen Z engagement across numerous social media platforms.
Demystifying Gen Z: Who Are They Exactly?
Gen Z comprises a little over one-fifth (20.69%) of the U.S. population.
Gen Z is unique among current generations – not just for the social structure they have come up in, but also for their spending habits, which differ from other generations.
According to Statista, Gen Z isn’t as motivated to purchase a product after seeing an ad on TV, with only about a third of this demographic saying a TV ad has prompted them to make a purchase.
Social media’s influence, however, was proven to be much more profound.
Gen Z And Social Media
Two-thirds of Gen Zers say they’ve been influenced to make a purchase after seeing a social media advertisement.
Additionally, 33% of the Gen Z population is interested in buying from a brand founded by an influencer, a stark contrast from the minuscule 4% of Baby Boomers who expressed interest in doing the same.
Social media is woven into the fabric of their lives.
A 2024 report by Morning Consult found that 54% of Gen Zers favor YouTube over any other social media platform, with 80% spending their time on it. Instagram is another platform after YouTube, with 75% of Gen Zers gravitating towards spending time there. TikTok (69%) and Snapchat (63%) are also popular platforms for Gen Zers.
Furthermore, the same report indicates 35% of Gen Zers spend over 4 hours a day using social media, and only 4% spend less than 1 hour a day.
Knowing that Gen Z spends ample time on social media regularly highlights the need for marketers to focus their attention and efforts on this dominating channel.
This holds especially true for the social channels Gen Z frequents most, which are YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat.
Gen Z’s Dual World: Online Convenience Meets In-Person Experience
When it comes to online versus in-person shopping, it’s more of a toss-up.
Gen Z is accustomed to the convenience of online shopping, but they value real-life experiences, as well as the ease of same-day pickup.
A Deloitte study in 2023 also found a 50/50 split between Gen Zers and Millennials who see online interactions as meaningful replacements to in-person experiences, and those who prefer the real thing.
All of this suggests that an omnichannel approach to the customer experience is best for Gen Z, but still poses an interesting conundrum for marketers.
We know where Gen Zers are spending their time and how to reach them, but what does it take to connect with them authentically? And what drives them to log off and shop in person?
Here are six social media best practices to consider when targeting a Gen Z audience.
1. Embrace Partnership With Creators
The concept of the traditional “influencer” – who does sponsorship deals, goes on brand trips, and sells an aspirational lifestyle attainable to their followers through the purchasing of products – dominated the 2010s.
But for Gen Z, that heyday is proving to be behind us. As they become savvier about when and how they’re being sold to, the creator economy is king.
In this new paradigm, authenticity and originality are lauded over aspiration.
TikTok creator Alix Earle jumps to mind as a prime example. Earle has seen rapid fame in just a few short months, surpassing 5 million followers today.
She has all the marks of a traditional influencer – the travel, high-end products, and aspirational lifestyle – but her unpolished and relatable tone is arguably what garnered her a massive audience, and what keeps them around as her lifestyle appears to become less attainable.
When she recommends a product to an audience, it feels organic, like a recommendation from a friend.
As a brand, encouraging, engaging with, and platforming this type of user-generated content (UGC) – where your product might not be the star of a scripted video, but a detail in a larger story – can be very effective with Gen Z.
2. Give The Brand A Persona Online
In addition to outsourcing content to creators with their own audiences, we’re also seeing the emergence of brands becoming influencers in their own right.
Some do this by bringing on a well-known creator to represent their brand’s social presence. For example, Kyle Prue, a TikTok creator with over 1.4 million followers, has become jointly known for the personal finance brand, Fizz.
Stylistically, the content for Fizz is virtually indistinguishable from his personal content – except for the fact that it’s about personal finance.
Others employ a character or a staff member to become the face of the brand online.
The popular language learning app, Duolingo, has amassed over 6.5 million TikTok followers making videos featuring its mascot, the Duolingo owl (and most of these videos have nothing to do with learning a language).
Another example with a different twist is the bag brand, Baboon to the Moon, which leverages a few of its Gen Z team members to make content that often features products prominently but feels snarky and off the cuff – a tone that tends to resonate well with the Gen Z audience.
3. Focus On Engagement Over Follower Count
Gen Z is far less brand loyal than its predecessors.
They’re frequently served content from social media main pages like TikTok’s For You page, Instagram’s Discover tab, and YouTube’s Recommended page.
An eye toward individual post engagement and visibility can be a better indicator of success than follower count by profile.
From a local experience (LX) perspective, this also means that there can be value in creating profiles for local stores to build a more personal connection with those locations.
Showing the location, offers, or events specific to that store and the people who work there could encourage more engagement.
For example, the TikTok profile for a Barnes and Noble location in Canton, Connecticut, has 15,600 followers and nearly 686,000 likes on its posts.
Democratizing content creation in this way can be a great way to generate more overall engagement, especially at the community level, and foster a sense of ownership with your staff.
4. Use Video To Your Advantage
Video marketing is a primary purchase driver for the Gen Z demographic. Not only does this audience like to watch videos, but they can also compel them to take action and purchase a product or service.
The previously cited report from Morning Consult found that over half (53%) of GenZers have purchased an item shown in a review video, and 40% have done the same from haul videos.
“Get Ready With Me (GRWM)” videos also inspire purchasing, with 37% of respondents saying this has led to a purchase as well.
The video purchasing trend aligns closely with the fact that Gen Z prefers to engage with platforms that allow for easy video creation, such as TikTok and Instagram.
When creating videos, it’s important for your business and any influencers you partner with to remain authentic and genuine.
Gen Zers are quick to abandon ship and take their money elsewhere if they feel a brand is being deceitful or if an influencer’s testimonial appears forced.
This is why it’s crucial to partner with influencers within your niche and who already have an understanding of your industry.
It’s beneficial to also examine the influencer’s reach and average post engagement to ensure your dollars are being well spent.
Scripts should also be avoided as this can appear inauthentic. Give influencers or your employees talking points to cover during their video, but stray away from regurgitating a word-for-word speech.
Your videos should be conversational, fun, and valuable for the intended audience.
5. Optimize Your Google Business Profile
Let’s say that you successfully build the authentic connection and positive association necessary to attract a Gen Z buyer.
At the local level, their experience begins when they open a new tab on their computer or switch apps on their photo to search for your brand – and there’s a strong chance that they are turning to Google to do that.
In a 2022 study of local consumer search behavior (Disclosure: I work for Rio SEO), we found that:
- 47% of Gen Zers said they very frequently use Google Search and Google Maps to find information about businesses in their area.
- 65% of the most frequently searched information on local business listings is the business address/directions – followed by reviews (56%), hours of operation (54%), and website (54%).
- 68% of Gen Zers conduct online searches a few times per day.
- 65% of Gen Zers want to travel 10 miles or less for a business’s products or services.
To progress your Gen Z leads from social media marketing into conversion, managing your LX and optimizing with your Google Business Profile (GBP) is key.
Your GBP should be optimized for mobile and up-to-date, with correct store hours and addresses with GPS directions, as well as quick visibility into in-store inventory, payment options, and other store highlights.
6. Create Short-Form Content
Capturing the attention of a Gen Z audience can be daunting as they prefer quick and short snippets of information. Gen Z isn’t interested in consuming cumbersome videos.
They crave content that’s easy to digest and gets to the point right away.
Businesses should focus on incorporating short-form content into their social media strategy, such as 10-, 30-, and 60-second videos on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.
Each of these formats is designed to entice the viewer in a short timeframe, ensuring they don’t tune out before your message is delivered.
Incorporating current trends can also help capture Gen Z’s attention.
A video from TikTok creator Jools Lebron gained lightning-speed traction when she modeled her “demure” workplace-friendly makeup. She quipped the look was “Very demure. Very mindful.”
The video’s popularity has since skyrocketed, prompting businesses and consumers alike to adopt and insert the phrase into their everyday jargon.
Businesses have since capitalized on the trend, adding the phrase into their own posts and videos to stay current with the Gen Z audience.
Popular, renowned brands such as Netflix, Zillow, and Lyft hired Lebron for marketing campaigns, where she uses her now iconic phrase “very demure, very mindful” in ads for the respective businesses.
While the demure trend may not last much longer before the next viral video steals the spotlight, it’s crucial for businesses to pay close attention to what’s trending to captivate Gen Z’s attention across their most visited social media platforms.
In Conclusion
The key takeaway is this: Gen Z social media marketing requires striking a balance between adaptability of medium and consistency of voice to bring in an engaged audience.
Optimizing online, social media, and local experience will equip brands to convert that audience into customers.
The brands that make both sides a priority will be the best poised to break through to this notoriously elusive generation.
More resources:
Featured Image: DavideAngelini/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