 Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise It's a concept that I think is true in life just generally But I also think it particularly applies to us as search marketers The on-page optimization marks one of the most foundational and fundamental tasks in any SEO campaign and generally it looks something like this We'll have our core keyword and we'll place it in key elements of the page Generally, this is really good But too many times as we circle back a second a third a fourth time our on-page optimization start to look more like this The best mattress 2022 the best mattress for all budgets find the best mattress with our expert best mattress guides and reviews best mattress best mattress best mattress and While this is certainly an exaggeration and not true of most teams I think the point still stands that we take this basic task for granted and sometimes we don't look at the on-page optimization creatively and It's for this reason that I think we're in an on-page optimization rut everyone We keep doing the same thing over and over chasing our tails like this poor little guy right here So that all ends right now Today we're gonna flip the on-page optimization on its head and take a look at this fundamental task in an entirely new light So we're gonna go over a few different things today We're gonna cover entities eat freshness historical competitor changes and round it out by talking about testing and segmentation We don't have a ton of time. So let's get into it So how about instead of having a keyword mindset? We shift to an entity mindset For example, let's say we were gonna optimize a page for the term retire early Side note raise your hand if you would like love to retire early Yeah, tomorrow, right? Yeah, me too like all I want to be is like this kid right here someday Like not a care in the freaking world. That's my life goal So if we were going to optimize a page for this term We could utilize the term retire early a bunch of times on the page or instead what we could do We utilize a tool like IBM Watson IBM Watson has a user-facing interface called alchemy language and you can run any URL You want through it here? I took one of the top-ranking URLs from Investopedia ran it through the tool What I get back is a list of the most commonly used entities on the page So what this tells me is that if I want to be optimizing content for retire early Well, I probably should be talking about the fire movement fire Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez two of the top authors in fire And if my content isn't talking about these topics Well, I'm probably at a disadvantage because competitors have much more robust content than I do As well when you shift to this entity mindset, you just start to look at competitor pages differently Here I'm not analyzing how many times are using a keyword on the page instead I'm looking at core topics and themes I can integrate into my own content This page is talking about that fire lean fire and barista fire all topics. You want to talk about in our retire early content This process is so important to us that we've actually built our own internal NLP tool around this process That finds the most commonly used entities across the top-ranking results But anyone wants to see a custom example of this you can just reach out to me on LinkedIn But here I pulled one report for the term Harry Potter You can see I get back results like JK Rowling Lord Voldemort and Ministry of Magic all topics You want to include an our Harry Potter page All right, so now let's talk about eat a little bit Expertise authoritativeness and trustworthiness. We know Google wants to rank trusted expert content But how does this manifest itself in terms of your on-page optimizations? How about for starters just reviewing your author biographies? I know this is more straightforward by still see a ton of sites get this wrong So if anyone needs to see a gold standard, here it is. Take a picture. It's one of the best author biographies I've seen on the web. It's written by Lexi Sack. She writes for Good Housekeeping their text house content so mattresses pillow sheets and Her author bio does an incredible job in showcasing why she's an expert in her particular area It talks about the fact that she has 15 years of experience and a degree in fiber science Not degree. It's from a little place called Cornell may have heard of it And she's written for the New York Times and been on good morning America and has experienced in the fashion and home industries This bio does an incredible job at showcasing why she's an expert in textiles So ask yourself. Do your author biographies look like they were written by Lexi Sacks or do they look like they were written by someone like George? Costanza Lord of all idiots You've seen the show George has had like a million different jobs. He's been in everything from like real estate publishing He worked for the New York Yankees at one point He's also been a bra salesman and a hand model at one point truly an expert in absolutely nothing Or if you need a scale to compare yourself on ask yourself Where does my biography sit when I compare it along what I like to call the Costanza sack scale can be Another helpful way of looking at things a lot of people on the Costanza side actually So another concept you can think about with your on-page optimizations is this concept of information gain scores Lily talked about this earlier And it's probably one of my favorite patents analyzed by the late-rate Beau Sloskey Where he talks about the fact that Google is looking to reward content that adds the search results and doesn't just repeat what's already out There it's looking for net new content So it's one of the reasons I think expert content tends to do really well because experts can add unique data unique insights and perspectives that other people can't So a really good example of this is the site serious eats here You can see their product review page for cast iron skillets Now the problem Google has with this product review content is it's very hard for Google to trust whether they actually review these products Or they just Google a bunch of other articles and said they reviewed these products Serious heat solves for this in a very creative way And one of the ways in which they do that is they use custom data and custom graphics Here what they did was they heated up every single skillet Then they measure the temperature at the center of the pan then measure the temperature of the edges of the pan And then graph that all out This shows Google and users that yes, we can trust they actually reviewed this content is they have data to back it up as Well, this benefits them from an information gain score perspective because they have content in the search results that nobody else has So think about opportunities where you can utilize custom data custom graphics and leverage this concept of information gain scores in your Own content to give yourself a competitive advantage Another way you can improve the trustworthiness of your content is to take it back college style and have bibliography style sections at the bottom The wire cutter is absolutely notorious for that notorious for this any time they say it a fact They actually cite external links to where they found that content So this shows us that hey, they're not making up these facts and here's trusted accredited links where where you can find more Information on this specific topic All right, so now let's shift gears and talk about freshness a bit My hot take of MozCon is this Freshness is the algorithm factor. That's one of the most underrated right now and We recently started to think a lot more about this concept of freshness in the past couple of years We were doing work with business insider and analyzing strategies competitors were using to maintain top stories ranking positions And what we found was that competitors were really aggressively updating timestamps for this particular quarry New York Times and CNN were updating their content every half hour USA Today they were updating their timestamps every eight minutes. It was pretty incredible to watch So this really got us thinking hey this concept of freshness is really important on the news side So you might say okay, that's the new side of things, but how does that apply to the rest of us? Well just out of curiosity I pulled the industry and said hey, how important do you think freshness is for SEO? Just under half said it was very important But actually over 50% said it was only somewhat important to not important at all So what we decided to do was start testing this concept on our own site That's obviously not driven by the news cycle We've run several of these tests at this point, but this is probably the most prominent one Here we had a page that used to rank really well for the term automotive SEO, but it had fallen off from recent years So what we decided to do and it hadn't been updated since 2016 So we decided to do was only make three updates to this page We updated the content to make sure it was all current ended up being less than like five percent of text We added the year to the title tag and then just simply updated the timestamp Almost overnight. We saw rankings improve from page three to page one We then repeated this test on other types of content on our own site and pretty consistently We see noticeable upticks invisibility and traffic as a result of these updates Search Pilot has also done studies that also show noticeable upticks in organic traffic after updating freshness signals and This really shows us that freshness is an on-page tactic You can leverage in your on-page optimizations How many times when content declines over time do we like freak out and start like adding the keyboard more times in the page? instead of taking a step back refreshing the content and updating timestamps to reflect those changes and I think this concept of freshness really makes sense when you start to think about it from multiple perspectives Think about it from like a trustworthiness perspective for a query like this for best camera phones Is Google really gonna want to trust older content for this type of query? Like imagine reading the top articles and they're all recommending that you go out and buy the Nokia and 90 It will be absolutely absurd And if Google thinks the content is outdated. Well, how can it trust that the information is accurate? I also think this makes sense from a competitiveness standpoint one of the biggest weaknesses of any Indexation is it's very hard for it to serve real-time results It's why users might go to platforms like Twitter instead of Google much easier to get real-time information However in the past couple of years We've seen increased prominence in this live blog posting type of content that requires publishers to update their content in real-time And then mark that up with structured data What I think we were trying to do here is incentivize publishers to update content in real-time and then thus at the user Expectation that hey, you don't need to go to Twitter to get real-time updates. You can get that all right here on Google All right, so now let's talk about historical competitor changes I think when we take a look at competitors We're only looking at what they're doing right now, but we're not telling the story of what on page changes They've made to get to that point So I like to do this type of analysis for like really competitive queries Here's an example of the term online degrees and we can see it in the past few years WGU is just in a phenomenal job of improving rankings for this individual keyword So what we can do is we can use tools like the way back machine to analyze What are the most prominent on page changes they've made during this time of improved rankings? It's gonna help us drill down and what the most effective on page changes have been for them So now we're just gonna play a little game where we compare the old version of content against the current version of content Old version of the article heading red like this earn your degree online at an accredited respected university Current version of the page had in changes slightly Online degrees from the credit University in less time change of positioning Old version of page they link to all their online degrees as standard html internal links Current version of the page they've kept these internal links But now they're formatted in expandable modules as well They've included descriptions of every single online degree directly on the page change of content change of UX Old version of the page they have this text at the bottom that basically talks about the benefits of an online degree Current version they've kept this text, but they've added a robust set of FAQs above it and below it have added rich video content Change of content change of UX and by doing this exercise we can drill down into what the most prominent on page changes have been That's going to help us better inform our own on page strategies And as well help us get better buy-in from key stakeholders by visually showing what the most prominent changes Competitors have been making to people making the decisions Another strategy like to do is take an old version of text and then current version of text and run that through a text Compare tool what the tool will then do it will highlight all the changes competitors have made What content are they adding? What are they changing? And also, what are they keeping the same? Alright, so now let's round things out by talking about testing and segmentation I think one of the best ways to go from a beginner to more intermediate SEO is to get more comfortable with this idea of experimentation and Segmentation is a phenomenal way in order to be able to do that So there's a case study of how we developed a more robust on-page optimization measurement framework for a large e-commerce retailer And you can almost be like an AB test if that's like more helpful When there's a retailer came to us, we were doing two different types of on-page optimizations for them The first one will call the simple optimization simple optimization We only change the elements of the page title h1 meta description very straightforward Second type of optimization will call the outline optimization in the outline optimization We outlined and wrote that standard bottom of the category page text you see on e-commerce sites And what they wanted to know was of these two different optimizations Which one is having the biggest impact on our business? We want to invest more resources in the ones that are working and we might want to divest in the ones that aren't as impactful To make this just a little more complicated they were measuring two different groups of keywords for every single page every single page of one primary keyword and Every page had a handful of secondary keywords And what they wanted to know were how the different types of optimizations were impacting the different groups of keywords So this was a pretty big question and one where we needed to lean on this concept of keyword segmentation to be able to figure out an answer for them We what we did was we actually built out keyword segments for all the different groupings the simple primary keywords a simple secondary keywords Leveraging a tool like stat. It's funny We segment our data in Google Analytics all the time and don't think about it But we never segment our keyword data in the same way to get more meaningful insights What we were then able to do was then compare the segments over time and analyze how they all performed against each other and here You can see the results Here the simple optimizations the one through three rankings and we can see that they peaked at the 60-day mark for the primary keyword Improving by 93% from benchmark then dropping off at the 90-day mark. We then can bear that against the outline optimizations Outline optimizations told a bit of a different story They peaked at the 60-day mark, but for the secondary keyword improving by 67% from benchmark Also dropping off at the 90-day mark So it's led to some really great database takeaways that we were able to give to the client about the impactfulness of their on-page Optimizations you want to target one keyword really really well do a simple optimization It's scalable and it's best for targeting the primary keyword for your site If you want to target a larger set of keywords invest the time and resources and do an outline optimization That's better for targeting a larger spread of secondary keywords So this was really really great as this concept of keyword segmentation was able to help them figure out where to better allocate their own Internal resources for their on-page optimizations So while this was really great There was also a third takeaway that from being completely honest it took us off guard a little bit we were not expecting it at all and That third takeaway was that freshness might be playing some type of role here We consistently saw drop-offs between the 60-day mark and the 90-day mark and those continued onward That showed us that we were maybe getting an initial lift upon updating the page and then that was dropping off over time So lean on this concept of keyword segmentation if you update entities if you update freshness if you update something else Create keyword segments create a test group a control group and then compare Against all the different groupings and see which type of on-page optimization is most impactful for your site So you might be wondering what's next? We're floating adrift with all this information So I know in SEO there's a lot that we can be doing at any given time and It can truly feel overwhelming. I Truly believe that you slow down return to the fundamentals and focus on improving your on-page optimizations in the long run You'll be much more poise to see success in the search engines Thank you so much Moscon. It was absolutely awesome. Love you guys