How To Improve Your SEO Ranking In The Time Of Google AI

How To Improve Your SEO Ranking In The Time Of Google AI

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a sci-fi concept but is used by technology companies every single day. Google use it to help sort photos, translate websites, provide chat bots on healthcare websites and even to detect new planets. How they rank websites in their search results is also determined to an ever-increasing extent on the basis of their AI algorithm known as RankBrain.

This has changed the way that Search Engine Optimisation works over the years (and as an SEO consultant, in my mind, for the better). While keyword research and having a healthy keyword balance on different elements of your site is still important, spammy backlinks, keyword stuffing, spun articles and a whole bunch of black hat SEO techniques simply don’t work anymore.

So, how do you improve your SEO ranking?

The solution is to create a website that:
Has a good user-experience (loads quickly, is mobile friendly, easy to navigate, and secure). See https://developers.Google.Com/search/docs/guides/page-experience for links to a range of tests Google provide for free that help you determine if your site meets these criteria. In 2021, Google will be releasing a new Google Page Experience Algorithm Update that will make these factors more important still.
Has great content – studies show that blogs with more than 2,000 words get far more shares on social media than those with under 1,000 words, and the average web page on the first page of Google has around 2,000 words too. These words have to be well researched, lovingly crafted and written for the appropriate audience. Content that is structured into sub-headings and bullet points and has charts or images that illustrate the most important points are also most likely to rank higher with Google.
Has high authority, relevant backlinks – the backlinks to your site are just as important as the content that is on it. Google’s AI looks for a natural backlink profile that includes engagement on social media, links from relevant articles on high traffic sites, and a wide variety of other links using a naturally diverse anchor text ratio. Don’t be tempted by any offers for hundreds of links and avoid making all your links contain keywords in the anchor text – that will only get you into trouble!

In short, Google AI is now sufficiently complex that you can almost pretend search engines weren’t driven by an algorithm. Ask yourself, if Google’s rankings were determined by millions of people sitting in their cubicles, manually going through the results on the web, all looking for the best web page for any particular query, what result would they choose?

Taking this approach will give you a better ranking with Google than just ignoring the human factor and focusing on the algorithms.

If you’re looking for a successful SEO company to help get you to the top with Google, then it’s well worth asking yourself if you like their writing style, if they will understand the local audience (or audiences if you have an international focus) and if their own site has an engaging blog on it. While technical SEO has its place, many CMS systems will take care of this for you to some extent. Remember that being able to write well is now an absolute essential for a successful SEO campaign.

How AI has changed keyword research





As web development trends change this has impacted how to use your keyword research.

The process itself is very similar to what it was a decade ago – use a keyword tool like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Soovle or Jaaxy to name a few. Find relevant keywords and choose one or two priority keywords that have a high monthly search volume per page. If you have a new website, for optimal SEO, focus on keywords that also don’t have too much organic competition. If you have an established website, you can go for some of those more competitive keywords with higher search volumes.

Having chosen your keywords, include it (with the correct spelling and grammar) in your page’s Meta Title, Meta Description, URL and h1 title once (maybe twice for the Meta Title and Meta Description if the keyword’s short) the simplest way of determining this is to enter the keyword in Google and use a similar format to the top competitors.

That’s where the similarity ends.

Google’s AI is now smart enough that it has a broader understanding of what a keyword means. Many searchers will speak a phrase, rather than typing it, meaning actual searches are longer and more varied. Google can also contextualise in much the same way as a human can. It will ignore typos or missing accents for foreign language searches and make an educated guess based on which search results have received the most clicks for a particular keyword previously, whether visitors are searching for a product, service, blog, or news item.

Before you write a page targeting any keyword, best SEO practice is to do a quick search in Google to see what pages rank top. If all the top 10 competing pages are blog pages, don’t try to rank a product page for that keyword, as it will be extraordinarily difficult, instead write a blog that includes links to your products.

Let’s look at another example, if you search for “France holiday”, then you get information on where to go on holiday in France, plus travel websites.





On the other hand, if you search for “French holiday”, you get information on public holidays in France.





This suggests that most people searching for “French holiday” clicked a result about public holidays and that if you have a holiday accommodation website, it would be pointless targeting this keyword with anything other than a page about public holidays! It also tells you the intent behind most people searching for this keyword is actually to find dates of public holidays, so if you want to target holiday-makers, you might be better choosing a different keyword altogether.

How to write content to boost your SEO ranking

The simplest strategy is once you’ve completed the keyword research and decided on the title and overall structure of a page, then write the rest of the article, product details, etc. Completely ignoring SEO.





The reason I recommend this approach is that this allows you to focus 100% on writing meaningful, engaging content that presents information clearly. Afterwards, go through it and make sure that you use the most important keywords, or close variants of them occasionally throughout the content in a natural way. If you realise you’ve barely used them, add them a handful of times. If you realise that you’ve accidentally used them too often, and it might come across as keyword stuffing, then reword some sentences to use them less.

There are several useful SEO blogging tools that will help you to remove superfluous words from your writing, find keywords that your competitors’ use and design images for inclusion in your blog and it’s worth taking a look at these too.

Further improve your ranking with quality backlinks

Once you’ve created a website with a positive user-experience and written some great pieces of content to go on your site, it’s time to build some high-quality backlinks to it.

Google’s AI is looking for signs that other people are spontaneously linking to your site and indeed, the best solution is to write content that is truly of interest to a large number of potential readers and has the potential to go viral. However, to go viral, first someone needs to see it and share it, so at the very least you will need to build the first few links yourself.

You can do this by:
Writing a few guest posts that are related to your product or service and contacting webmasters or journalists to ask if they will add them to their site. A few of these will get you a lot further up Google’s search results ladder than most other types of link.
Sharing your blogs on social media – LinkedIn and Facebook both have groups where you can reach others interested in the same topic, and you could also find a sub-reddit with the same goal.
Searching for target keywords and submitting to any directories that appear or asking webmasters to include your link as part of an existing article or page of resources.

SEO for Google AI

Did you know that Google AI is now so complex that the top experts in Google no longer understand how it works?

Therefore, no-one would expect you to. Instead trust that as time progresses it will get smarter and smarter and to improve your ranking, the best strategy is to:
Create a fast, mobile-friendly, and user-friendly site.
Write great content for the site (and keep expanding it!)
Build relevant backlinks from high quality blogs and on social media.

Focusing your efforts on the above and keeping your potential customers and other website visitors in mind will give you the best results and help you to achieve your SEO goals.

This article was written by the team at Indigoextra Ltd, an international SEO company based in Europe who have helped 100’s of clients rank well with Google over the last 14 years. We hope you found it useful!



Does Google Use Sentiment Analysis To Rank Web Pages?

Many SEOs believe that the sentiment of a web page can influence whether Google ranks a page. If all the pages ranked in the search engine results pages (SERPs) have a positive sentiment, they believe that your page will not be able to rank if it contains negative sentiments.

The evidence and facts are out there to show where Google’s research has been focusing in terms of sentiment analysis.

I asked Bill Slawski (@bill_slawski) , an expert in Google related patents what he thought about the SEO theory that Google uses sentiment analysis to rank web pages.

“Sentiment is like a flavor, like vanilla or chocolate. It does not reflect the potential information gain that an article might bring.

Information gain can be understood by using NLP processing to extract entities and knowledge about them, and that can lead to a determination of information gain.

Sentiment is a value that doesn’t necessarily reflect how much information an article might bring to a topic.

Positive or negative sentiment is not a reflection of how much knowledge is present and added to a topic.”

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Bill affirmed that Google tends to show a range of opinions for review related queries.

“I don’t believe that Google would favor one sentiment over another. That smells of showing potential bias on a topic.

I would expect Google to want some amount of diversity when it comes to sentiment, so if they were considering ranking based upon it, they would not show all negative or positive.”

Bill makes an excellent point about the lack of usefulness if Google search results introduced a sentiment bias.

Some SEOs believe that if all the search results have a positive sentiment, then that’s a reflection of what searchers are looking for. That’s a naive correlation.

There are many known ranking factors such as links that can account for those rankings. There are other factors such as users wanting to see specific sites for specific queries.

Simply isolating one factor and saying, “Aha, all the sites have this so this is why it’s ranking” is naive, it’s cherry picking what you want to see.

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For example, the same SEO can look at those search results and see that they all use the same brand of SEO plugin. Does that mean the SEO plugin is the reason those sites rank?

The answer is no.

Similarly, the sentiment expressed in the search results does not necessarily reflect what the searcher is looking for.

This is why I say it is naive to look at one factor such as sentiment and say that’s the reason a site is ranking. Just because you see a correlation does not mean it’s the reason a site is ranking.

Does Google Use Sentiment Analysis for Ranking?

Google’s been largely silent on sentiment analysis since 2018.

In July 2018, someone on Twitter asked:

“…it seems like your search algorithm recognizes and takes into account sentiment. Is there a sentiment search operator?”

Danny Sullivan answered:

“It does not recognize sentiment. So, no operator for that.”

Danny made it clear that Google’s search algorithm does not recognize sentiment.

Earlier that year Danny published an official Google announcement about featured snippets where he mentioned sentiment. But the context of sentiment was that for some queries there may be a diversity of opinions and because of that Google might show two featured snippets, one positive and one negative.

“…people who search for “are reptiles good pets” should get the same featured snippet as “are reptiles bad pets” since they are seeking the same information: how do reptiles rate as pets? However, the featured snippets we serve contradict each other.

A page arguing that reptiles are good pets seems the best match for people who search about them being good. Similarly, a page arguing that reptiles are bad pets seems the best match for people who search about them being bad. We’re exploring solutions to this challenge, including showing multiple responses.”

The point of the above section is that they are exploring showing multiple responses.

Since 2018, Google has stopped showing featured snippets for vague queries like “are reptiles good pets?” and encouraging users to drill down and choose a more specific reptile.

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Danny wrote:

“There are often legitimate diverse perspectives offered by publishers, and we want to provide users visibility and access into those perspectives from multiple sources,” Matthew Gray, the software engineer who leads the featured snippets team, told me.”

Those statements directly contradicts the SEO idea that if the sentiment in the SERPs leans in one direction, that your site needs to lean in the same direction to rank.

Rather, Google is asserting that they want to show diversity in opinions.

Positives and Negatives in Reviews

A Google research paper titled, Structured Models for Fine-to-Coarse Sentiment Analysis (PDF 2007) states that a “question answering system” would require sentiment analysis at a paragraph level.

A system that summarizes reviews would need to understand the positive or negative opinion at the sentence or phrase level.

This is sometimes referred to as opinion mining. The point of this kind of analysis is to understand the opinion.

Here’s how the research paper explains the importance of sentiment analysis:

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“The ability to classify sentiment on multiple levels is important since different applications have different needs. For example, a summarization system for product reviews might require polarity classification at the sentence or phrase level; a question answering system would most likely require the sentiment of paragraphs; and a system that determines which articles from an online news source are editorial in nature would require a document level analysis.”

The paper further describes how sentiment analysis is useful:

“parsing and relation extraction (Miller et al., 2000), entity labeling and relation extraction (Roth and Yih, 2004), and part-of-speech tagging and chunking (Sutton et al.,2004). One interesting work on sentiment analysis is that of Popescu and Etzioni (2005) which attempts to classify the sentiment of phrases with respect to possible product features.”

What stands out about that research is that it is strictly about understanding the sentiment of text.
There is no context for using it to show search results that are biased toward the sentiment in a user’s search query.
The context is not about ranking text according to the sentiment.

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Yet even though the context is not about ranking because of the sentiment, some SEOs will quote this kind of research and then tack on that it’s being used for ranking. And that’s wrong because the context of this and other research papers are consistently about understanding text, well outside of the context of ranking that text.

Sentiment Analysis Encompasses More than Positive and Negative

Another research paper, What’s Great and What’s Not: Learning to Classify the Scope of Negation for Improved Sentiment Analysis (PDF 2010) presents a way to understand the sentiment of product reviews.

The scope of the research is finding a better way to deal with ambiguity in the way ideas are expressed.

Examples of these kinds of linguistic negation phrases are:
“Given the poor reputation of the manufacturer, I expected to be disappointed with the device. This was not the case.”
“Do not neglect to order their delicious garlic bread.”
“Why couldn’t they include a decent speaker in this phone?”

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The above examples show how this research paper is focused on understanding what humans mean when they structure their speech in a certain way. This is an example of how sentiment analysis is about more than just positive and negative sentiment.

It’s really about the meaning of words, phrases, paragraphs and documents.

The paper begins by stating the usefulness of sentiment analysis in several scenarios, including question answering:

“The automatic detection of the scope of linguistic negation is a problem encountered in wide variety of document understanding tasks, including but not limited to medical data mining, general fact or relation extraction, question answering, and sentiment analysis.”

How would accurately classifying these kinds of sentences help a search engine in question answering?

A search engine cannot accurately answer a question without understanding the web pages it wants to rank.

It’s not about using that data as ranking factors. It’s about using that data to understand the pages so that they then can then be ranked according to ranking criteria.

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One way of looking at sentiment analysis is to think of it as obtaining candidate web pages for ranking. A search engine cannot select a candidate if it cannot understand the web page.

Once a search engine can understand a web page, it can then apply the ranking criteria on the pages that are likely to answer the question.

This is especially important for search queries that are ambiguous because of things like linguistic negation, as described in the research paper above.

If sentiment analysis is used by Google, a web page isn’t ranked because of the sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis helps a web page be understood so that it can be ranked.

Google can’t rank what it can’t understand. Google can’t answer a question that it can’t understand.

More Sentiment Analysis Research

SUIT: A Supervised User-Item Based Topic Model for Sentiment Analysis (PDF 2014)

This research paper studies how to better understand what users mean when they leave online reviews on websites, forums, microblogs and so on.

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This is how it describes the problem being solved:

“…most of existing topic methods only model the sentiment text, but do not consider the user, who expresses the sentiment, and the item, which the sentiment is expressed on. Since different users may use different sentiment expressions for different items, we argue that it is better to incorporate the user and item information into the topic model for sentiment analysis.”

Speech Sentiment Analysis via End-To-End ASR Features (PDF 2020)

ASR means Automatic Speech Recognition. This research paper is about understanding speech, and doing things like giving more weight to non-speech inflections like laughter and breathing.

The research shares examples of using breathing and laughter as weighted elements to help them understand the sentiment in the context of speech sentiment analysis, but not for ranking purposes.

These are the examples:

“1. Yeah, so [LAUGHTER] he’s calling now.2. Yay, well congratulations, that’s so cool. [BREATHING] I can’t wait.3. Exactly, [LAUGHTER] I think that’ll go over great, don’t you?4. That would be wonderful, that would be great seriously. “

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The paper describes the context of where it is useful:

“Speech sentiment analysis is an important problem for interactive intelligence systems with broad applications in many industries, e.G., customer service, health-care, and education.

The task is to classify a speech utterance into one of a fixed set of categories, such as positive, negative or neutral.”

This research is very new, from 2020 and while not obviously specific to search, it’s indicative of the kind of research Google is doing and how it is far more sophisticated than what the average reductionist SEO sees as a simple ranking factor.

No Sentiment Analysis Bias at Google

Google has consistently stated that they try not to show pages that reflect a searcher’s sentiment intent (are geckos bad pets?)

In fact, Google says the opposite, that it tries to show a diversity of opinions. Google tries not to be led by a sentiment expressed in the search query.

Example of Google Showing Diversity of Opinion

As you can see in the above screenshot, Google does not allow the negative sentiment expressed in the search query to influence it into showing a web page with a negative sentiment.

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This directly contradicts the idea that Google shows search results with a specific sentiment bias if that bias exists in the search query.

You can dig around for Google research and patents about sentiment analysis and you will see that the context is about understanding search queries and web pages.

You will not see research that says the sentiment will be used to rank a page according to its bias.

If the pages that Google is ranking all have the same sentiment, do not assume that that is why those pages are there.

It is clear from Google research papers, statements from Google and from Google search results that Google does not allow the sentiment of the user search query to influence the kind of sites that Google will rank.



9 SEO Tips That Can Improve A Website’s Google Ranking

If you want more visitors to your website, one of the first things you’ll want to do is improve your website’s ranking on Google. This process is called search engine optimization (SEO). It is a crucial element of managing a successful website or online store.

Many things have been said about SEO, including that it is more luck than skill or that it’s a pay-to-play system, where the highest-paying sites get the best visibility. Neither of these is true.

In this article, we will provide you with several basic steps you can take to improve your SEO strategy and ensure that your website is shown prominently on Google searches.

What are organic results?

When someone makes a Google search, they are shown two types of results: paid results and organic results.

Paid results are those from websites that have paid Google directly for their website to be shown above organic results. Studies have shown that while this is one way to increase traffic to your site, Google users prefer to click on organic results.

Organic results are not paid for and are determined by a variety of factors, including the page’s content and metadata, and how closely these relate to the search query. Therefore, the goal of SEO is to increase the number of organic results that lead to visits to your website.

How search engines determine what pages to show and how to show them is complicated and goes well beyond this article’s scope. However, a few essential points should be made.

First, search engines use bots or computer programs to trawl the web, following links and visiting all publicly accessible websites. They then use this information to build enormous indexes that are consulted each time an internet user performs a Google search.

Once a user has entered a query, the search engine will refer to these extensive indexes, incorporating tens or hundreds of different factors into complex ranking algorithms. These, in turn, determine what content to display on the search results page. PageRank, Google’s preferred algorithm, relies on over 200 different metrics to determine Google search rankings.

You can leverage these hundreds of metrics to improve your website’s Google ranking. Although we won’t be able to look at all 200, we’ll discuss the most important ones.

9 steps to success

Let’s look at nine essential steps that you can take to improve your website’s Google ranking.

1. Creating a sitemap is one of the easiest things you can do to improve your website’s search rankings. This will enable Google’s bots to quickly and efficiently index your entire site, and it will ensure that no pages are missing (and cannot be found through Google searches). You can submit a sitemap file to Google via their Webmasters website.

2. Make sure you provide the necessary information to bots with a robots.Txt file. More information is available on this website, but basically, keeping on the bots’ good side is one of the best things you can do to ensure your website features prominently in Google searches.

3. Here’s a simple one: Delete duplicate content. Search engine bots hate duplication, and it’s one of the easiest ways to see your site tumble down the Google search rankings. Some website managers think that creating pages designed to detect search engine bots is a good idea, but it will backfire and hurt your website’s SEO rankings.

4. Although less crucial than in the past, it still helps to create static versions of your webpages. Static content is more easily interpreted by search engine bots, at least more efficiently than dynamic content.

5. Create permalinks for your pages using keywords (for example: “/products/fridges/dynatech-coolfreezepro/”). These will result in better search rankings than permalinks containing mostly numbers or other random information. A good rule of thumb is that the more identifiable data you can provide the bot, the better.

6. An organized website with clear internal linking architecture will have higher Google rankings. This means displaying important information on the homepage and ensuring that similar content is grouped together on dedicated pages. A menu such as the one below makes it easy for search engine bots to index your site.

Example: www.Mysite.Com/news/products/category-1/category-2/blog/about/contact.

7. When creating text-based content, use keywords that your audience is likely to search for. These should be used throughout your text (don’t overdo it, though) and featured in the title of your article and its permalink. And remember, search engine bots can’t read images or text. If your site posts have many pictures, videos, or screenshots of text, add captions or descriptions that bots will be able to interpret.

8. Make sure your keywords are related to your business objectives. If you don’t know which ones are most relevant to your field, look them up. Finding the right keywords is essential if you want to feature prominently on Google searches.

9. One of the main ways that Google and other search engines rank content is by the number of sites that link to yours. If your webpages are frequently mentioned on other websites, your site will quickly begin shooting up the Google rankings. However, this is not always simple, and entire businesses exist to increase the number of inbound links to your website.

Time to call an SEO expert?

While the advice in this article will undoubtedly help you improve your website’s Google rankings, there’s only so much that you can do yourself. SEO agencies or experts have worked in this field for years and have an intuitive understanding of search engine algorithms.

Trustworthy SEO agencies will provide results-based testimonials that show how they improved a business’s SEO and Google rankings. However, be wary of SEO experts promising top-ranking Google results or radical increases in traffic to your site. Real SEO is a process of gradual improvement rather than overnight success.

A final point worth making is that when it comes to SEO, money can only get you so far. An in-house SEO strategy or a trustworthy SEO agency can certainly help you improve your Google search ranking. But the only guaranteed way to do this is to create high-quality content. Without that, even the best SEO strategy will only get you so far.