SEO
Leading In SEO Through The Data Science Revolution: A CTO Q&A
Marketers have more data available to us than ever before – and it’s never been more challenging to get to the heart of it.
There was a time not that long ago when the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of a company would have focused almost exclusively on technology infrastructure and engineering.
As the role – and the world in which it exists – has evolved, the answer to the CTO’s mantra of “How can we use technology to meet our organizational goals?” has become increasingly dependent on creating exceptional customer experiences.
And today, more often than not, that customer experience begins with a search query.
We’ve been talking with industry executives in this series about how emerging technologies, evolving consumer behaviors, and ever-changing search algorithms are shaping the future of SEO.
In this interview, we sit down with Lemuel Park, co-founder and CTO of BrightEdge and one of our expert contributors at Search Engine Journal, to talk data science and SEO.
What does it take to succeed and lead a data-driven organization in the current environment?
The Fusion Of SEO & Data Science
You told our audience recently that “2021 was a year of accelerated search.”
How about this year – what trends do you expect to be big for enterprise SEO in 2022?
Lemuel Park: “First, I think that this acceleration will continue.
Large roll-outs such as the Page Experience update and Core Web Vitals will continue to fuel the need for technical SEO.
This year, I see the most significant trend and opportunity happening around the fusion of data science into SEO.
Using our platform as an example, we know that in the last 18 months alone, we have generated 11x more in the volume of site processing data alone.
Furthermore, according to the IDC, worldwide data will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025.
With this exponential growth of data, humans cannot process it without being proficient in machine learning and data sciences.
I think data science will be pivotal in further helping provide SEOs with more innovative, faster, and actionable data-led insights.
This, I believe, represents the future of SEO.
If you look at SEO tasks such as research, on-site analysis, and user intent modeling, they all generate massive amounts of data.
At the same time, if you look at how many SEO tasks now overlap with that as a data scientist, you see even more commonalities such as:
- Forecasting and the prediction of future trends combing with Business Insights.
- Research to identify new market opportunities and detect patterns and shifts.
- Understanding, extracting, and automating insights from complex datasets.
- Building visuals and dashboards based on different data streams.
As website functionality demands increase, SEO needs are becoming more advanced.
At the same time, search engines are getting more sophisticated in how they interact with websites.
The result is a need to be able to obtain, analyze, and extract insights from large datasets.
This is true, particularly in an enterprise environment, where SEOs draw heavily on data science methods and tools to process search data in a way to drive insights.
This can be through statistical analysis, full API access to datasets, data processing algorithms designed for Big Data, or the freedom to experiment through how search data is collected.
The SEO platforms of tomorrow require the capabilities of data science infrastructure at the core of their tech stack.
As a CTO, I believe it is my responsibility to make SEOs even more effective at driving performance using data science without becoming actual data scientists.”
What’s A Typical Day As CTO Like For You?
Lemuel Park: “Instead of a single day, I consider the week. And, the principles that organize my week are based on what the business needs from me.
Right now, at our stage, the company needs me to spend 1/3 on innovation and experimentation, 1/3 on customers and products, and 1/3 on management.
As a result, Tuesdays and Saturdays are innovation and experimentation days. I focus on understanding where we need to go for the year, two years, and three years.
It’s a mixture of industry innovation, market research, and getting my hands dirty on actual technology. My current jam is Google Colab and GPT-3.
Wednesdays and Thursdays are product and customer days. I focus on product reviews across 12 categories, meet with a handful of customers each week, and really focus on product roadmap execution for the next three to six months.
Mondays and Fridays are management days. The objective is to execute on daily and weekly rhythms. Are we on track for our zero-to-three-month roadmap?”
Mapping Out Your Career In SEO
What led you to a career in SEO and what would you tell your younger self to smooth out any speedbumps you experienced?
Lemuel Park: “That’s a good question. My father was a computer scientist and from an early age, I knew I wanted to do something similar and something that made a difference.
However, while I decided on how I could do that, I put ‘engineering’ instead of ‘undecided’ in my haste on my admittance paperwork to University of California, Berkeley.
A decade later, I had spent an internship at Siemens and seven years at Ernst & Young in their Attack and Penetration division, ensuring that Fortune 500 companies had the right security policies and software in place.
In 2007, I met my co-founder, Jim Yu, through a mutual friend.
We already had a shared interest in engineering, and together we saw that businesses were going through the biggest change in decades.
While traditional media outlets were letting go of writers, search was exploding, and brands needed a way to produce and optimize content.
Together, we set up BrightEdge.
Those first few years were challenging but also one of the most memorable times in my life.
Jim had a newborn baby, and I lived with him and slept on the sofa.
Then, operating from a kitchen table with 10 servers underneath, we set out to build the BrightEdge Data Cube.
We built everything – our technology and early customer base – from the ground up. We are delighted that success followed!
As for what would I tell my younger self, I would say, “Always stay humble” and “It’s okay to take risks.”
Humility means that we are always learning; never say that we have all the answers.
In SEO, you have to keep adapting to the changes and that fundamentally keeps us on our toes.
The same goes for building a company – always know that you have to adapt to changes and humility will give you the openness to hear new input and challenge yourself to get better.”
Exploring The Worlds Of Blockchain And Decentralized Technology
What do you think marketers need to know right now about crypto, Web 3.0, and NFTs?
Lemuel Park: “The trends that support Web 3.0 are decentralization, blockchain, and digital tokens.
Instead of walled gardens and power centralized by a few players, the users are given the ability to own their own data.
This will cause the rise to personalization not only to a single site but across the internet for the consumer.
Marketers will need to plug into personalization in a greater way.
Since we are talking about a decentralized web, it’s no longer the highest ad bidder who takes the consumer.
Instead, the power is back to the user, and websites will need to earn the customer with better, structured data about their business and offer the best content.
Whether that’s Schema or your local feeds, how you optimize these data sets will be really important for Web 3.0. You have to reduce your brand to data.
The future has many possibilities, but we’re seeing a beta version of blockchain, crypto, and NFTs right now.
It will mature over the next five to 10 years, and we’ll see major disruptions that will arrive.
It’s like the early mobile web with WAP or online groceries with Webvan back in the late 90s. The ideas were visionary but a little early. These trends are here to stay, but they will need to mature.
The core principles and spirit of SEO will continue.
Every business must optimize its digital presence to win the customer.
The competition will get fiercer since the playing field will become flatter.
But principles like E-A-T and authority will become magnified since the web will continue to optimize.”
Closing Thoughts?
Lemuel Park: “There are so many aspects of SEO that in the past have been underrated.
If you asked a CMO about SEO and its importance a few years ago, they might have looked back a little perplexed. But, ask them today, and they will know what SEO is and how important it is.
Specifically, SERP analysis and technical SEO (especially its importance to digital marketers) have been underrated.
Now, especially as the pandemic highlighted the importance and demand for SEO, we are seeing a shift to mainstream.”
More Resources:
Featured Image & In-post Image: Courtesy of BrightEdge
SEO
Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey
Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.
So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?
Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.
You’ll learn:
- Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
- Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
- Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.
With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy.
Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success.
View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.
SEO
How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords
Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.
Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.
There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.
How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Organic keywords report
The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”
Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:
If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.
How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section
Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.
How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section
You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Paid keywords report
This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.
Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.
You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.
1. Create pages to target these keywords
You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.
However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.
Here’s how to do that:
- Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.
2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics
You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.
How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:
- Export your competitor’s keywords
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
- Look for Parent Topics you already have content about
For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”
If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.
If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”
To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”
3. Target these keywords with Google Ads
Paid keywords are the simplest—look through the report and see if there are any relevant keywords you might want to target, too.
For example, Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter.”
If you’re ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword since it’s relevant.
If you decide to target the same keyword via Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.
You can also see the landing page your competitor directs ad traffic to under the URL column.
Learn more
Check out more tutorials on how to do competitor keyword analysis:
SEO
Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important
Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.
Background Of Links For Ranking
Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.
One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.
The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.
Kleinberg wrote:
“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”
This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.
Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.
What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.
What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?
At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.
Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:
” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″
Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:
“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”
Why Links Matter Less
The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.
But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.
The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.
Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less
In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.
The documentation previously said:
“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.
Links are not just listed as just another factor:
“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.
Mueller explained:
“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”
Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Why Google Doesn’t Need Links
The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.
Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.
Read the research papers
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Featured Image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre
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