SEO
Social Media Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide
As 4.62 billion people worldwide (54% of the world’s population) spend more time on social media in 2022, it’s no wonder that businesses are spending more time selling and promoting their products or services as well.
Wouldn’t it be fitting to seize every opportunity social media holds for you as a business owner? Social media users have grown to 424 million between January 2021 to January 2022.
If you want more eyeballs for your brand, there is so much to gain from adding social media marketing to your strategy. Acknowledge that social platforms are your odds-on-favorite in acquiring more leads for your business.
Check out our all-inclusive post about social media marketing.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing as another digital marketing method where you can build your brand, increase sales, and drive more site traffic by connecting with your audience on social media.
There are so many reasons why social media marketing can help your business. Some benefits you will get from social media marketing:
It helps increase your brand awareness.
Social media is one most effective marketing channels you can make use of to increase your audience’s awareness of your brand.
With millions of social media users in 2022, it’s no question you can get more eyeballs from your target audience there.
Essentially, what social media does is it organically drives engagement in the form of likes, comments, reposts, and shares.
These types of social engagement help increase your brand awareness.
If there is some social engagement going on between your brand and your audience already, it’ll only be a matter of time before your number of social media followers puffs up.
It generates leads and boosts conversions.
If you haven’t gotten a clue how powerful social engagement is, keep reading.
When you do social engagement and all that jazz, the next thing that will happen is you’ll get more likes and more shares from your followers.
And when you get more content shares, that’s when you could potentially generate more leads.
Yet, we all know that business isn’t just about getting more leads. You need ROI and sales so you need to convert these leads as well.
Here are some ways you can generate leads and boost conversions on social media:
1. Integrate video with your promotions.
If you’re still on the fence about whether short-form or stop-motion videos will work for you or not, stop right there.
Why do Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are the most popular social media platforms for both small businesses and big brands?
Because nowadays, videos are a thing.
If you’re looking to target Millennials and Gen Zs, then it’s high time you include creating video content for your products or service promotions.
In a statistics done by Wyzowl, they surveyed 582 unique respondents and found that:
- 87% of marketers credit video increasing their (website) traffic.
- Video has helped 94% of marketers better explain their product or service.
- 86% of marketers say video helped them generate leads.
- 81% of marketers say video helped them directly increase sales.
- 93% of marketers say video increased brand awareness.
Meanwhile, on the consumers’ side, here’s what Wyzowl found:
- 96% of customers watched an explainer video to learn more about the product or service.
- 88% of people said they were convinced to buy a product or service after watching a brand’s video.
- 78% of consumers say watching a brand’s video convinced them to download an app or software.
Interestingly, 73% of the respondents say they’d prefer to watch a short video when they want to learn more about a product or service.
I hope these numbers will encourage you to start doing short video promotions as early as now. It’s never too late to start.
2. Make compelling calls to action
Over the years, people have become more conscious and savvy when it comes to calls to action (CTA). Unfortunately, hard selling doesn’t work on social media.
Don’t add to the noise by making small changes to your social media profile and captions. Adding a bit of personality to your captions won’t hurt. In fact, it can encourage more engagement with your audiences.
Take a look at one of Melissa’s Instagram image captions. See how they manage to stay relevant with the summer season.
It only goes to show that Melissa values engagement with their followers more than pushing to sell their footwear on the spot.
3. Make your landing page mobile-friendly
With 5.31 billion unique mobile phone users around the world (and still growing at 1.8% every year), it’s in your best interest to create a seamless experience for your customers. To do this, your social landing page must be at the storefront of your social media account.
Let’s take a look at Lander’s Facebook page:
When you click on “Shop on Website” button, it will take you directly to Lander’s site landing page.
As you can see, the featured items on sale above the fold are mostly focused on healthy food. At the same time, you can instantly see the name of the items and prices when you scroll down to its page.
Also, it didn’t take long for the webpage to load. The site speed wasn’t bad as well. Landers made sure that their customers have easy access to their website for smooth checkout.
I also took Google’s mobile-friendly test for Landers to see if they’re mobile-optimized already. Here it is:
If you want to boost conversions for your business, you can use Google’s mobile-friendly test as your benchmark.
To pass the test, you need to make sure that your social landing page or your webpage is optimized for site speed and loading time. When you have both of these important factors, you surely create a seamless experience for your customers.
If you want to increase your sales, nothing is as powerful as using your customers’ photos as your social proof.
In this day and age, people give more prominence to authenticity. They can identify outright if the brand makes enough effort to engage with the customers.
While some brands have wisened up with their marketing strategies, some still need work.
To do this, you may use a short video or a photo taken by your customer with your product in use.
Here’s one great social proof example from Rob and Mara’s Instagram account:
There is not much more evidence you need to know that Rob and Mara appreciate the photos taken from their clients than this.
My two cents? Try to get as much social proof from your customers as you can and use it to gain more leads and boost your sales.
It helps you with an almost instantaneous customer service
As more brands jump into the social media bandwagon, people have begun setting their expectations in getting almost immediate customer feedback and interaction. And you can’t blame customers. They want to make sure that they’re getting the value for what they’re paying.
Some businesses still don’t know that customer service can build meaningful relationships between brands and their customers. In fact, 71% of people who have had a positive experience with a brand on a social media platform are more likely to recommend it to their friends.
Helps build relationships with your customers
When you connect or engage with your social media followers, you’re likely building relationships with them. When you reply with their comments or questions or put the effort into helping your customers in any way that you can, these are ways you’re nurturing them.
The good thing about fostering relationships with your customers is that it’s easier to ask questions about your product or know their challenges that were solved by your product.
Also, if you want to foster loyalty from your customers, you might want to consider a giveaway on occasion to gain their trust.
It helps you understand your competitors
Because most brands and businesses use social media, chances are your competitors are there, too. And with that in mind, social media allows you to check out and understand how your competitor do their marketing strategy or campaigns, interact with their customers and find which product they’re promoting.
Knowing how your competitor moves provide you the opportunity to create a more effective marketing strategy for your brand.
There are 5 pillars that will help make your social media marketing work. These are:
Strategy
You will not be able to do social media marketing right without a sound strategy in place. You need a strategy to identify which goal you need to prioritize, which content resonates with your customers and your brand, and when you should implement your marketing campaigns.
Furthermore, a well-thought-out social media marketing strategy can help you identify which social media channels you might want to focus more of your energy on.
The biggest mistake most brands make is that they try to be present on every social media platform they could get their hands on. This strategy might seem like a good way to find out which platform gets the most engagement, but analyzing the data won’t be easy.
It’s best that you focus on a maximum of 3 social media platforms and put all your efforts to engage with your customers there. If you want to know where most of your customers are, do your research and create your customer avatar or marketing persona.
Creating a marketing persona or customer avatar will also help you choose which content gets the most engagement.
If you want to reach your goals, creating a social media marketing strategy is a must. A social media marketing strategy provides clarity on why you want to reach your goals. I’ll discuss more of this in a while.
Planning and Publishing
Planning saves you time and effort in coming up with ideas for which content gets the most engagement from your audience and figuring out when is the right time to post content. You can avoid adding to the social media noise when you plan your content ahead of time.
You can organize your content schedule by creating a social media content calendar. A social media calendar helps you schedule which content is ideal for your audience, and be consistent in publishing content.
Ideally, you can post content on your social platforms 3-4 times a week for consistency and grow your online presence.
Learn how you can grow your social media presence in 12 steps.
Listening and Engagement
The best way to understand your customers better is through listening and engagement.
A growing following and a business entail conversations with customers. This is when social monitoring and social listening come to your aid.
Social monitoring is a reactive way of keeping track of what your customers say about your brand. You do this by responding to your customers’ feedback, queries, and comments in real-time.
This approach gives you better insight into what your customers say about your product or service. In addition, this provides you the opportunity to engage more with your audience.
Analytics and Report
You can’t measure what you don’t track, so it’s crucial to keep tabs on how your social media marketing performs.
Unlike social monitoring, social listening is proactive. It’s almost similar to social monitoring in the sense that you still do gather feedback and comments from your audience.
Yet for listening, every data gathered is used for analysis to improve your social media marketing strategy.
To do this, you will need social listening tools to help you gather data.
Gathering data can help you gain insight and pick up what’s trending in your industry, and finetune your marketing campaigns to outperform your competitors.
Advertising
Any digital marketing campaign at some point needs a boost that involves both organic and paid advertising. Social media marketing is no exception.
The majority of social media channels offer free sign-ups to users, and for them to provide a better user experience, they offered paid promotions to advertisers.
Don’t get me wrong but paid social media advertising is good in the sense that it helps you get a wider audience reach, apart from your organic social media followers.
If you want to find your target audience, social media advertising platforms can help you precisely identify who they are based on their behavior, demographics, and which electronic device they use.
If you want to build brand loyalty and recognition or increase conversion, invest in social media advertising.
Your social media marketing strategy must provide how you’re going to achieve your social media marketing goals.
Essentially, your strategy will serve as your roadmap so you can get to your destination with success.
To give you a context on how you will create your social media strategy, here are some steps needed:
If you want to reach your goal, you need to answer your “why”.
For your social media strategy to work, you need to have specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. Without SMART goals, you can’t track your progress.
Make at least three social media marketing goals to make them more achievable first.
Learn about your audience by doing research
Nothing can be truer than this quote “If you sell to everyone, you’re selling to no one.”
Don’t fall into the trap of marketing your product or service to everyone. Create your audience persona from the get-go to save you time, effort, and money in running campaigns.
If you don’t know how to create your persona, think about the audience you’re trying to reach and figure out why you’re targeting them for your product or service.
What pain points or problems do they have that you want to solve?
Get to know your followers or customers to a deeper level so you can easily engage with them on your content posts.
Don’t overwhelm yourself by setting up an account on every social media platform you can find.
To get a head start, choose which social media platform you will often post your content.
But, when you do this, make sure you have done your research already and identify which network is best for engaging with your customers, promoting your company culture, customer feedback, and user-generated content.
To track your progress, focus on metrics that provide real value for your business like engagement, reach, conversion rates, hashtag performance, and click-through rates.
Identify what works and what doesn’t, which network the majority of your audience use and how are they using it, and how does your competitor fare with their online presence.
Doing an audit and identifying your most important KPIs will help you focus on your social media marketing goals.
Get to know your industry competitor
When you keep your competitor close, you gain insight into their social media strategy. You can gauge which social media platform is their weakness, and which one is their strength. You can do this with a competitive analysis.
A competitive analysis allows you to determine who your competitor is and what they’re doing well or wrong. With competitive analysis, you can easily identify opportunities to outsmart them.
While it’s not bad to compete for head to head with your brand rival, it’s going to be an uphill battle. If you want to make your social media marketing strategy work, focus on your competitor’s weakness instead.
A social media marketing strategy without a social media content calendar won’t do you good.
Your strategy always comes with a plan. Without a plan, you won’t get to your destination. A social media content calendar serves as your planning tool so you can easily prepare images or videos, and write captions or short content ahead of time.
If you prepare your content ahead of time, you will be able to create posts designed to engage your audience.
Once you’re done creating content, it’s time to schedule these accordingly. See which time of day you receive the most engagement with your content posts and stick to that schedule going forward.
Create engaging and compelling content
A good mix of educational and entertaining content works on almost every social media platform. When you have both of these elements in your content, you’re creating engaging and compelling content.
In addition, if you want to keep your audience engaged with your social media platform, you need to align your posts with what purpose your social media channels serve.
For example, if your goal for LinkedIn is to share your company culture and values, your content must be aligned with it.
If you’re using Facebook for your giveaways, be consistent in creating Facebook Live video content.
Get creative. Create content that is both suited to your audience and to your brand’s purpose.
Also read: 10 Types of Digital Marketing Channels to Try [in 2022]
Now that we’ve covered almost everything you need to know about social media marketing, you might ask:
Which social media platform will get me more leads and increase conversions?
As I mentioned earlier, it entirely depends on your goal.
However, I want to help you choose which social media platform will help you achieve success with your social media marketing.
So, here are the most popular social media platforms in January 2022 including their statistics and their uses:
Users: 2.9 billion monthly active users
Top 3 dominant age groups: 25-34, 18-24, 35-44
Best for: business to consumers, direct to consumers, brand awareness, advertising
Facebook places first in the most active social media platform rankings to this day, in spite of the so-called “adpocalypse”, and surrounding controversies with the platform. 43.4% of Facebook’s advertising audience is female, and 56.6% is men.
YouTube
Users: 2 billion monthly active users
Top 3 dominant age groups: 15-25, 26-35, 36-45
Best for: business to business, business to consumer, how-to videos, brand awareness, long-form edutainment videos
Because YouTube is the second most popular platform, the majority of marketers find it easy to build a community here. In addition, because YouTube is also popular among young demographics, it continues to innovate in terms of content video forms.
Its short-form videos mostly cater to the younger demographic, while long-form videos appeal to a variety of audiences.
Users: 1.4 billion monthly active users
Top 3 dominant age groups: 25-34, 18-24, 35-44
Best for: business to consumer, (emerging) business to business, user-generated content, advertising, high-quality videos and images
Instagram ranks 4th’s most active social media platform in the world. When Instagram launched in 2010, it only took them 3 years to double its user base to 2 billion.
Because Instagram is a visually compelling content social platform, many brands and influencers have successfully promoted their products here, making it a potential e-commerce hub even to this day.
TikTok
Users: 1 billion monthly active users
Top 3 dominant age groups: 10-19, 20-29, 30-39
Best for: business to consumer, (emerging business to business) short-form creative videos, user-generated content, brand awareness
TikTok disrupted the social media world as it has become the most downloaded short-form video platform since its inception.
It became even more popular in 2020. Brands and influencers have jumped on the short-form video bandwagon, and so marketers found TikTok’s potential in building community within their audiences here as well.
Users: 217 million monthly active users
Dominant age groups: 18-29, 30-49
Best for: business to business, business to consumer, customer service, community building, public relations
Surprisingly, Twitter remained consistent every year, although its platform was majorly used by the younger demographics nowadays. This platform became a prime place to discuss events, what’s trending, and breaking news.
On the other hand, Twitter has expanded and offers Spaces, a new audio tool that could potentially breathe life into the platform.
LinkedIn
Users: 810 million monthly active users
Dominant age groups: 25-34, 35-54
Best for: business to business, social selling, business development
LinkedIn is almost similar to Facebook as it’s a social network – for professionals. This platform demographic is mostly B2B professionals and is the marketer’s perfect haven for generating leads.
If you’re seeking new opportunities or simply looking to network with like-minded professionals, this will be your go-to platform.
Key Takeaway
Billions of people are on social media today. If you’re looking to prioritize social media marketing for your business, you’ve made a good choice.
What sets social media marketing apart from other digital marketing types is that it enables you to connect with people instantaneously, in real-time.
There are virtually endless opportunities with this type of marketing. However, determining your business’ course of action can be daunting.
To avoid overwhelm, read more and understand the trends in social media marketing.
Invest the time and effort into researching available resources like this post to gain a deeper understanding of how social media marketing can boost awareness, conversions, and engagement for your business.
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Understanding the Impact of Google’s November 2024 Core Update on Global Search Rankings
Introduction
In November 2024, Google launched its latest core algorithm update, a broad refinement designed to enhance the quality of its search engine results. Rolling out over approximately two weeks, the update continues Google’s ongoing commitment to delivering more relevant, useful, and high-quality search experiences for users worldwide. This article explores the nature of the November 2024 Core Update, its potential impact on websites, and strategies for site owners to adapt and thrive in its aftermath.
1. What Is a Google Core Update?
Core updates are large-scale changes to Google’s search algorithms. Unlike targeted updates aimed at specific sectors or issues, core updates broadly impact all regions and languages. They reflect Google’s effort to re-evaluate how content is assessed and ranked based on relevance, usefulness, and reliability. Previous updates include significant releases like the March and August 2024 updates, illustrating the frequency and scope of these changes.
2. Goals of the November 2024 Core Update
The November update focuses on refining the quality of search results. According to Google’s official statements, it seeks to amplify genuinely useful content while reducing the visibility of content primarily designed to manipulate rankings without meeting user needs. This effort emphasizes Google’s consistent push for “people-first” content—engaging and useful information that serves users, not search engines.
3. Key Features and Characteristics of the Update
- Global Impact: The update affects search rankings on a global scale and is not confined to any particular industry or niche.
- Rollout Duration: Spanning about two weeks, the rollout’s timing allows Google to fully implement algorithmic changes and assess their effects.
- Broad Adjustments: The update doesn’t target specific sites but involves systemic reassessment across Google’s ranking systems.
- Dynamic Search Environment: This core update follows in the footsteps of the August and March 2024 updates, representing a year of significant search result refinement.
4. What This Means for Site Owners
- Traffic Fluctuations: Websites may observe shifts in rankings and traffic during the update’s rollout and subsequent completion. These changes highlight the dynamic nature of Google search and require continuous monitoring and adaptation.
- Recommended Actions:
- Wait and Analyze: Site owners experiencing changes should wait until the rollout’s completion before making significant adjustments.
- Utilize Google Search Console: Compare traffic and ranking data from before and after the update to identify potential areas of improvement.
- Focus on High-Impact Pages: Pages with notable drops in ranking should undergo thorough content evaluation using Google’s guidelines
5. Recovery and Adaptation Strategies
Recovering from a negative impact due to a core update may take weeks or months as Google’s systems adjust and validate content changes. Site owners should prioritize delivering high-quality, reliable, and user-focused content. Specific steps include:
- Content Evaluation: Assess content against Google’s guidelines, focusing on readability, user satisfaction, and factual accuracy.
- No Quick Fixes: Avoid superficial changes aimed solely at improving rankings. Sustainable improvements are more valuable and impactful(November 2024 core upda…).
- People-First Content: Ensure content serves real user needs, as opposed to purely SEO-driven objectives. This aligns with Google’s long-term priorities for search quality
6. Comparative Analysis with Previous Updates
The November 2024 Core Update continues trends observed in previous updates like March and August 2024. While each update has its nuances, their collective goal remains consistent: bettering search quality and delivering relevant results. Comparing data from these updates can reveal patterns and offer insights into Google’s evolving criteria
7. Broader Implications for the SEO Industry
Google’s ongoing core updates underscore the critical importance of a user-centric approach to SEO. For digital marketers and SEO specialists, adapting strategies to these updates involves staying informed, using reliable analytics tools, and keeping content fresh and engaging. The need for adaptability is paramount, as Google continually shifts the parameters of what defines quality content
Conclusion
The November 2024 Core Update serves as a reminder that Google’s algorithmic changes are not designed to punish but to reward helpful, authentic, and user-focused content. Site owners and marketers who embrace this philosophy are better positioned to weather core updates and even benefit from improved rankings and traffic over time. By maintaining a focus on user experience, transparency, and relevance, creators can align with Google’s evolving standards and thrive in the ever-changing digital landscape
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
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