The Future of SEO - The Second Annual Virtual Bloggers Conference

Good morning everyone, I'm Chef Dennis Littley and today we're here with day 2 of the 2nd Annual Virtual Bloggers Conference. We had a great day yesterday. If you didn't get to see them all live, please check my YouTube channel and catch up on some of the sessions because we really had a lot of great speakers. And today we're kicking it off with a bang and we're going to talk about SEO and some of the changes in SEO that's coming along the pike and what we can expect possibly in the future and how they have affected us so far. And today we have David Amerland, author of Semantic Search and numerous other books, and Joshua Berg with us. And we're expecting Eric Ng, so hopefully he'll, uh, he'll pop in as we go along. If not, I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk to with these two guys. So if you have questions, please put them in the comments section and we will get to them as soon as we can. But right now I'm going to turn things over to David Amerland, and let's get started with some thoughts on SEO and where he sees us headed in the near future. So David, it's great to have you here today.

Chef Dennis Littley, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. And I think having initiatives like this in Google+, it's absolutely amazing, especially when I sort of frame this a little bit with my very recent experience offline in a very big conference at a high-level setting where people who are not accustomed to this kind of plurality and access to knowledge are actually way behind the curve, way, you know, even further than they should be. And it shows how effective this kind of forum is in terms of spreading the knowledge and creating connectivity and actually driving our site so much further ahead than everybody else. So I'm really grateful to be here.

Thank you. We're happy to have you here. And Joshua, I'd like to say hi to you this morning and thank you so much for showing up today. And always a pleasure to see you. And also thank you for coming in the community so often and answering questions that my bloggers have about SEO. So, uh, how are you doing today?

Thanks, I'm fine. It's great to be here, and it's a pleasure joining and communicating in your community with all the intelligent and interesting bloggers that you have. You know, mostly food blogging community, but You know, that's something that applies to all of us. It's very important. You know, what we do sometimes is a little bit more specialized, but I think there, you know, the food industry is something that's important to everyone, no matter—

We all eat, right?

We all read something. Something about the food and health and all these things. So yeah, I enjoy that. And some very good bloggers too.

Yeah, we do offer a nice diversion on Google+. I mean, we get a lot of the technical stuff, and then you'll see a nice piece of cake or a piece of beef or a cocktail.

I love it because For me, it's always because of the time zone. It's about 2 o'clock in the morning. And I can't get anything out of time. I get really hungry.

I know. I know.

I see some of those pictures. I'm like, OK, turn this off for a while. Got to go.

Well, it reminds you you haven't eaten in a while is what it is too when you get stuck at the computer. So that's the beauty. So we do have a good purpose besides just writing. We do offer a nice diversion. So, all right, well, you know, guys, there's been— we had a recent Panda update or two, or, you know, I don't really know since I look for you guys writing stuff to let me— to keep me informed. And I know they just had the I/O conference, and I don't know if there's anything coming out of that for us that you could share. But if you have any thoughts or ideas on what we should be looking for in terms of SEO, things that we should be concentrating on, or how the changes affected us, you know.

OK, I'll start it off. And Joshua, who's always incredible with his technical detail, can hopefully fill in all the different things which will arise. But let's draw the picture very quickly. You did say there's been a Panda update recently, and there has. And there have been a number of tweaks to the algorithm. And the I/O conference also threw up something very important. Basically, let's look at the updates themselves to the algorithm in terms of search. They've all been aimed at quality results, at filtering out spam, at looking at authority, and basically trying to surface the best content possible. And this is important also because of the— at the I/O update, what came across from a technical side that was presented is that Google is building an incredibly deep ecosystem for us to use. We can use G-Drive to unlimited storage if we're not using top-quality pictures all the time. They're optimized for search primarily, which means that essentially we are at the stage where we can actually start building a very comprehensive online identity in terms of the content we use, the things we write about, how we implement all our different profiles, how we link up all the different dots. And that pretty much answers a lot of the questions in terms of the direction of SEO. People saying, you know, what should we be looking at? And Google has always said, you know, forget search, focus on quality. You know, do the thing you do best, and if you do that, then the search engine will follow you rather than you chasing it, because ultimately search is interested in surfacing the best content possible to specific queries. And all you have to do is produce that best content. And really, in the past, we had the idea that if we understood what people are looking for, we could actually pander to that type of search query. But really, with semantic search, it goes the other way around. We really need to be subject experts and authoritative in our subject, which means we we really need to work hard at projecting that expertise which makes us special. And then we need to also work hard at connecting all those little different web properties we have which are part of that expertise and help flesh out the picture of who we are and what we do. And if that is approached in that kind of sense, then a lot of the technical discussions which center around semantic search markup, which is quite complicated and does require a little bit of knowledge of coding become redundant because ultimately Google is interested in finding that kind of content and then works very hard to index it and structure it in its own index so it can come up in terms of the queries that are being asked. So all this is sort of boils down to be the best you can be and don't ever stop evolving in that direction when— whatever it is you're actually doing. And that applies obviously to food blogging. It applies to pretty much any kind of industry. Especially food blogging, because there's so many different specializations within that and so many different directions that it can sometimes be either hard to be different or easy to get a little bit confused in a direction and lose focus. And now focus and specialization and depth of expertise are really, really important.

We noticed a lot of my friends over on Facebook were talking about, and they're not on Google+ very often, the last update they had a loss of 40 to 50% of their traffic with the last update.

What caused that? Well, Google is interested in essentially moving out, taking away a lot of the diffuse queries or the soft queries which used to give some kind of traffic which wouldn't necessarily convert. And we're beginning to get into the part of semantic search where the results which surface are the ones where Google has high confidence in terms of the content. And that means that those who now get— used to get traffic which was very diffuse get more targeted traffic. And the sites or the companies I actually talked to, the feedback I had is they've all seen a drop. But interestingly enough, they haven't seen a drop in the actual number of conversions, which means that the traffic which they get, the underlying traffic, is actually very targeted. And the picture that's emerging is that this was kind of a filtering process in terms of search, that essentially Google stripped away all the soft queries and serves now the ones which are the best in terms of the content and the subject matter in terms of search query. And that kind of match-up is always very beneficial, and it should really focus the mind in terms of the next type of content that is being created and the next type of approach in terms of optimization, that it has to be absolutely relevant in terms of what you're trying to do, in terms of the information you're trying to focus. And you need to go back to basics. You need to understand what it is that you want to do and then determine how you're going to do it and go from there.

I heard a lot of— actually, I heard some of the people that manage these websites for the people, because then when you're that big, you have someone that manages it for you if you're getting over 1 million hits a month. And they were all blaming Google. It had nothing to do with their expertise in managing their site.

Well, I think— this is an easy question to answer, and Google is an easy target to hit on this one, because essentially they tend to manage search. And every change they do that has a dip in traffic, they're immediately to blame. But if we take a step back and look at the dynamic as a whole, ultimately, Google is heavily invested in returning the best answer to a particular search query. So if this isn't happening, then that would argue that the content you have there isn't good enough, or there are other underlying problems which stop it from being surfaced in terms of answering those search queries. And we need to bear in mind that essentially what Google wants is the best possible results. And if you provide those, then you have absolutely nothing to worry about. And the final thing of this is that the easy metric of simple traffic that we had in the past, because we didn't have a lot of the ability to go into very granular details, is not good enough anymore. We really need to understand not just the traffic we get in terms of numbers and use that as a metric of success, but actually get the traffic we get in terms of targeted traffic— what they do, how long they stay on the website, and then how they're going to convert in whatever conversion metric we have in place. And that is really the real success story.

Any thoughts on that, Joshua?

Any— Yeah. A lot of it now too has to do with building your audience, building relationships and connecting, whereas, you know, when you talk about traffic or they talked about drop in traffic, it's like we're talking statistically. And what David mentions there when he says about targeted and filtered, those are really important. It means Google's doing a better job So your numbers technically would go down, but, you know, you get higher conversions because the right people are coming, more people are finding what they're looking for. And I think we're coming to the stage and moving more to that direction where the people who are building their traffic exclusively through the search engine will get to a point where that becomes more difficult because Google wants to see— and with the, you know, understanding of entities and things now, Google wants to see not only that, you know, people are looking for what it is that you have available, but also that people are looking for you. That people are looking for, you know, your, your business, your, your company, your, your page, your name, and your, you know, along with some of those things. That's as they understand those relationships between, you know, the, the queries and the entities, etc. Then that all comes together more. So when we've built like this in Google+ or, you know, even, even in real life, we're making connections with people and becoming known. That shows up in queries and it shows up in algorithms. It starts to become clearer, you know, you— if you look at some of the topics trending on, you know, even moderately famous people or, you know, queries, you know, related to words, then, or queries related to specific businesses, then those become important and it becomes more important to search and ranking as well. Someone recently asked me, you know, we— I've got this problem with this company, okay, when we type in, you know, this company example, and then all of the words that follow are example scams, you know, business scams and business fails and business frauds, etc. So, you know, how— what can we do? How can we solve this from the SEO perspective? And I said, what you need, okay, really is not an SEO person, you need a PR person because your company needs to work with people and find out what it is. If Google— see, they understand, Google catches the queries. If most of the queries coming up with that business or that name are all, you know, in a negative or something like that, then it's going to be a problem and a challenge for that. And the more intelligent search gets, but not only— the more intelligent people get at searching, these things, they come together and it becomes more and more difficult to hide because we're all, you know, more real, and what it is we do is more real. But not only— our customers are more real. They're not just out there behind You know, they're not just hits on our website anymore. They're actually gonna show up in search, and that's going to affect our business. So those things are coming together much more so, and, and that becomes very important that we are more real as a business, more real as people, and, you know, that we respect our business and we respect our customers and are responsive. In all of those things so that we give the right picture both in search, in social, and in real life.

Excellent. You know, I was thinking this morning, there's a company in Florida and I shop there all the time and I love the store, but whenever I tweet something or have a question to them, or if I'm trying to reach out on social media, they answer immediately, but that's the end of it. I never hear anything from the company. So you've got a social media team that's responsive on social media, but nothing further. They don't finish that picture, you know. So that's, to me, you know, you're talking about being real and engaging, that's almost worse than not engaging back with you at all.

Yeah, and that's an important comment, and I'm very glad, um, Joshua made all these observations because they are absolutely fantastic. Essentially, and I can't stress this enough, it requires a shift in the mindset we have. We tend to think of digital usually as something which is a layer which sort of is applied loosely on what we do because we have to do it. And as Joshua said, this is not the case anymore. It's as real as our real presence. So if you're in a room and I talk to you, you wouldn't dream of looking around, checking your pockets, looking at your watch, and then 3 minutes later saying, "Oh, hi David, how are you doing?" Because that just doesn't work, right? And it's the same thing with digital. You mentioned that the moment somebody actually, the moment you set a question on social media or you send an email, you actually require a reply. The fact that we are sometimes pleasantly surprised that it happens very quickly, shows how much further we have to go in that direction. We really need to take digital now very seriously because the impressions we create have a real impact on the way we work. And I'll give you an example. Very recently I downloaded a new ebook reader on my phone and I tested it. It had a free version and I tested it and it was really good. And because I was impressed, I went in and downloaded the paid version. And then I went on my tab. And although my tab had the free version, I just couldn't get it to update to the paid version, which is annoying, really, because I paid for it. So I sent them a quick email, thinking it's going to be at least 48 hours before I hear anything. And 5 minutes later, they sent me back the reply with the solution to it. And the solution is just that obvious. I just had missed it. But I was really impressed by the speed of the reply because when I sent them the messages it was like midnight my time and I had no idea what time zone they were in, but they came back really quickly. And the amount of money I paid for the paid version was like $3.50 or something, and that's a ridiculously small sum, and yet they took me very seriously and they responded so fast. And I gave them a glowing review because of that, which will have a benefit to their business. But it goes to show how little details now actually matter, pretty much the same way that in a real-life situation, the way we actually connect with people has a real impact on how they perceive us, how seriously they take us, and how then they're prepared to perhaps, you know, if it's a business thing, recommend us to somebody else.

Absolutely. We have one question here from Valerie. Demont, and she said, "To improve SEO, focus on people's needs and how you can help them with quality content." Right?

Valérie, that's a fantastic question and observation. And this is exactly where we're at. This is exactly what Joshua pinpointed. We used to talk about SEO, and it used to be things which were relatively technical. We used to talk about keyword density and links and hyperlinks and anchor text. PR sculpting and all the things which seem like gobbledygook. And we've gone now from that to actually talking about the psychology of people and how we connect to ourselves and how we project ourselves. And it's all very human. And the reason it's human is that, you know, Joshua mentioned entities. Essentially, semantic search is looking to create full-blown entities. And an entity is a thing or a person understood the same way online as offline, and not only that, but actually they're bringing the two versions together so that we understand that they are one and the same when there are two different sort of presences online and offline, which means exactly what you said. You need to approach it the same way, the same way that in an offline environment you would think, how can I create the right impact, what should I do, how should I approach it in terms of psychological pressure points. Well, we have to do the same thing now online, and that's the way forward.

Excellent. Now, we, we're big on Google+. We love Google+. We're here all the time and we're engaging. Is this actually helping me in search?

Well, Joshua has put incredibly detailed posts in the past which explain the value of Google+ from a technical point of view, and they're highly convincing, and he's done incredible work on this. So anybody who wants to find the technical details of that, I would highly recommend checking out Joshua's posts, because they're brilliant. The short answer is absolutely yes. And the reason for that is that essentially Google+ is entirely transparent to Google. And they use it both as a test ground for things which they put in search in terms of ranking and indexing and the creation of entities, and also they use a lot of the signals for some of those things anyway.

So by being on here and engaging then and becoming more real with people, not only am I connecting with more people and available to them in search, but I'm authenticating myself a little more?

I suppose that's a good way of actually presenting it, indeed. And I must stress here that this is not any kind of shortcut in terms of ranking in search. But it is a more, perhaps, realistic way in getting your information indexed a little bit quicker and helping Google understand better and faster what it is that you do, which then can aid in terms of the veracity of the content that you put out there, which then can make it surface a little bit faster in terms of search queries.

Mm. And you know, in— real life, you can be as popular and famous as ever. But if it doesn't translate into, you know, bits, into a digital signal, then still ultimately algorithms are not going to be able to do that much with it. So with Google+, we become something genuinely real in the digital world, you know, and so that, and, and it connects with everything else. It's, it's not just a part of, it's not just Google+, you know, that's what a lot of people are getting. The interview, this came up about the time of the other day, and they were talking about it at the I/O, at Google I/O. It's your— the Google+ connects you with everything else. So you're connected with the Play Store. You're connected with YouTube. You know, reviews, referrals, what have you, with the entire environment of Google, those all become digital connections that are traceable. And, you know, some of those become more important than others, and their relationships Some of those become more important than others. Once you start to understand that, you know, then you, you get the bigger picture. What was meant by Google+ is not just a social, you know, a social media system. That's— some people look, look at it like that, you know, like, oh, Google+ is just like comparing— you can't compare Google+ with another social media platform because it's, it's so much more. It's connecting you digitally across the entire internet, and Google is always looking for and will continue to look for more ways outside of even what we currently have that go even beyond the internet as we currently know it. David, that was the funny thing about the agent rank out— out— patent. When, when you start studying it, there's all this stuff about, you know, these different kind of older types of media and things that aren't even on, you know, connected with the internet. But the point being that— what was it? The point was verification of who people are, who entities are, and, and those things in any way that they can be applied. And in the future, as they branch out to more platforms and what have you, that they will continue to become more important. So anyone that's kind of If you got your business kind of holding back, I'm not sure if you want to jump in. I gotta say that it's imperative, and this is, this is really a key time. This is a significant change. What we have here, what's been going on in the last 3 years, is very significant. To the internet as a whole. And that's why businesses and people, you know, thinking about the future and these digital connections, you know, you definitely want to be here and to find a voice. You know, you may not know what it is right away. But finding that voice and then being unique and something real to other people, that's, you know, in bits that can actually be seen from a digital level. You know, in computers they get everything in, you've got the programs and then everything ultimately goes into machine language and bits. And then mentally, we as people, okay, our minds, we process information in our, you know, CPU in many ways similar to the way a computer's CPU does, but just on many more levels, you know, in parallel, so, so much more. So the direction that's moving, and Google is moving with this in multiple other fields, you know, for example AI and robotics, in branching out to understand more how people will interface with computers and how people will interface in— I mean, take for example the the Google Fit and, and, and the new Google wearable technologies. This is a lot of the things that are coming out in, in the new recent Google I/O. It's about more ways that people are going to interact in ways that can benefit our health or our education and all kinds of ways that we can grow technologically with devices, but in a coherent and more— we interface with them better in a clearer way so that it's not a— we remove more of the barriers that exist between us and these things that are the tools that we can use.

So Google is actually learning from us what we need in order for them to provide us with these tools so they can learn more about us so they can provide us with more tools.

It sounds a bit like a cycle. That's not far wrong. I mean, essentially everything that's happening technologically is about creating the same kind of granularity online that we have offline and eventually removing the online/offline barrier as we understand it today. So online and offline will be always online, perhaps differentiated by different bandwidth and different capabilities. So when you're at your desk, you can fire up perhaps Photoshop and do something really heavy graphically, which you wouldn't be able to do on the move. And that'll be the main differentiation. But the environment will be pretty much the same. But Joshua made an important point here. And I can't stress that enough, because he gave quite a lot of details on this and perhaps the message may be lost, and he essentially said you've got to find your voice, and then Joshua quite rightly went on to say how important it is in terms of differentiating yourself and being real, and that's exactly it. Essentially it doesn't matter what you do, it doesn't matter how you do it, although that's important, but really you need to be able to find your unique selling point, you need to be able to bring across you as an identity, which is the whole point of Joshua's explanation about connecting all the different dots and creating a very cohesive identity. There can be another Joshua on G+, perhaps, with a similar name, but there's only one we know who is Joshua himself, because he's the one who does all the research, talks in a certain way, and we know who he is. And it's that kind of hard coding of our identity in a digital environment that Google is actually trying to help us maintain and create and maintain, and this is what we should be helping happen in terms of the way we interact, engage, and the kind of content we actually create. And with that in mind, we should also remember that essentially— and again, Joshua mentioned that relationships are important the same way that they are important offline. Nobody can function alone and function successfully in any kind of either personal or professional capacity. And this is the same now in the online world. You can't think, well, I've got my website and I know what I'm doing, I don't need anybody else, because you actually do. Without the relationships to help you clarify and amplify your digital presence, without a social media presence and activity, you won't really get very far. And again, that's the point that Joshua was making, which are extremely important. And again, I can't stress this enough, Go and check out his content because it does actually explain in great detail all the things that we're covering here today, and it takes several readings for actually all that to seep through, so it is really worthwhile your time.

So, well, in— besides just being important to us as individuals now, it's even more important for businesses.

Yes, absolutely.

Especially brick-and-mortar businesses.

Yes.

Because you want to get people into your business. So what ways as a business, as a small business owner, can we— what can they use to really improve their presence?

Well, okay, here's the thing. I mean, basically we've said for the last 3 years in many different ways that individuals should behave like brands and brands should behave like individuals. And we sort of try to quantify this from time to time, and this is what it should be. Essentially, in the past, any kind of branding seemed to happen at arm's length. We were using a glossy surface and a logo and a professional seemingly professional appearance to sort of hide behind, we can't do that anymore. If you can't find a way to actually personalize your business, then you won't be able to differentiate it, it will not have a voice, it will not have a distinct identity, you'll be one in the crowd, and what you're going to see is a failing approach to finding your audience. And again, this is— Joshua mentioned this already, when you come into Google+, a lot of it is about finding your audience. There's no way you can find it if you just sound like an automaton, if you don't sound like somebody people would like to engage with and interact with and actually help amplify your message. So the trick here is if you're having a small— if you have a small business, you need to know its character. Why is it different to anybody else? How is it going to talk to its clients or its customers? How is it going to project its content? What is it that makes it unique? You've got to think about these things. From a personal point of view, Well, the uniqueness factor is usually taken care of because we know who we are and there's nobody else like us, and usually what we have to do is act a little bit more like brands, and by that it's not a faceless approach, but it is the consistency of our message because we are hugely emotional and sometimes float with the wind, and we can be very precise one day and very sort of imprecise and soft and fuzzy and blowing the other way the other day, and essentially we need to clarify these things in our approach. And again, in the offline world, because we always operate within very real physical constraints, we do that, we do clarify our message, we behave in a certain way, we don't just say anything that comes out of our heads, we don't dress any way we like because there has to be context in how we dress. We get into the online environment and sometimes we feel, well, there are no limits, I can do whatever. Well, no you can't, you still have constraints, but you need to understand them, realize what they are, and start acting within those boundaries. And traditionally, brands and businesses have actually understood these and have been very good at doing that. What they haven't been very good at is actually projecting the human face, and they find it very hard to do, but they're beginning to get the message and they're beginning to personalize their appearance, and those that do are already enjoying a lot of success.

One of the questions I get from brands sometimes when I talk about this very topic is, well, you know, we can have a face to our company because what if they leave?

Well, I mean, first of all, there are two points there. First of all, if you link as a company your entire approach to just one human face, then I don't think you really understand the character of your business, and certainly you are doing a very poor job at communicating that character internally to every one of your employees who is outward-facing. The second thing is that as a business it doesn't matter who leaves and who comes and goes, the business remains, the character remains, the values remain, and ultimately the voice that you communicate with should remain because it should be part of your internal culture. Because culture is so difficult to actually create in the first place and maintain, a lot of businesses are already failing at that, so when you get questions like that, that's when the red flags should actually go up because it means that the business is still very traditional, very legacy in its approach. It still thinks that, you know, blunt advertising, slick surfaces in terms of websites and ads work, and it doesn't understand the human side of connecting with its customers.

Excellent.

You know, a lot of the things I run into with my food blogger friends is we have been brainwashed for years to believe that we are truly just a brand and a lot of them have spent so much time and energy promoting themselves as this brand that they refuse to be the person behind the brand anymore. And they want to just— I can't— or they're even afraid to give their whole name, like someone's going to come track them down.

Yes, I understand the insecurities. And you know, from a business point of view, businesses also have tremendous insecurity in moving away from the traditional approach they've done that's worked for years and years and years up to about 2005 for them and actually try something new. The hard reality we're in now, and everything that Joshua said backs this up, is that essentially the web has become transparent and interconnected. You're not just a website anymore, you're a business that people work in. If you can't show me that those people who work in it are real people, they have real feelings, real passions, even if sometimes they blow up because they've had a bad day, then I'm disinclined to do business with you because I don't know who you are and what you really stand for. And that's the hard message, and the solution to that is far from easy. But the later that it's left to the point that it has to be tackled, the harder the job is going to become. So it's best to get into it early.

People do business with people, and I think we have to always remember that, is that we like to associate faces with who we do business with. Which confused me a little when Josh and I were talking about this before we started. The recent change in authorship with going from pictures of the people, and now they're putting— with food bloggers anyway, they're putting pictures of our food up, which is a good thing, not a bad thing. But for all this time they've been saying, you know, we connect with people, we connect with people. They're going to see your face and they're going to trust you more. Well, that's gone now.

Well, I'm very glad you brought this up, because there's been a lot of discussion about it. First of all, in a semantic search environment, we need to remember that Google essentially is looking at a big volume of data happening across all its different search properties all the time in real time and adjusting every time something of note happens. So if it looks like we're doing something which perhaps is weighing search unnecessarily, it will adjust it almost on the fly. Very quickly and don't even have to tell us about it. I would say don't. So to come back to the authorship in terms of the pictures, certainly from an ego point of view I think it was great for those of us who had the pictures there, and I think it made sense that you say, okay, we connect with people and visually we go for that. But I think also at some level it was an easy win relatively. It was not very widely adopted or widely known, and perhaps it also gave rise to a little bit of manipulation or a little bit of sort of artificial way because everybody left in that. So going now into the— because we're going to get bylines for that instead of pictures. And I think from an audience point of view or a search audience, connecting with a byline requires a greater mental effort from the part of the searcher, which would reveal perhaps a greater affinity for the person they're actually clicking on. So that might be of greater value. And the other thing to remember is that Google is essentially, from now on, experimenting constantly with these parameters. So we should expect change in search to be a constant part of our lives. And we should focus on the very things we started off this conversation with— basically quality, establishing our identity, and establishing a very real reason of why we do what we do. And then everything else is just the dressing.

I think one thing to point out, too, about this particular change for people to understand is that it was basically a UI change in the search. I talked to John Mueller about it the other day. And he elaborated a bit more on it and was explaining that So they're trying to bring mobile search and online search Chrome together more. And Google's always changing. They're changing how they do this. And they also look at how people react and interact with search. So he, John, particularly talked about some of the eye studies where, you know, depending on what they display on the search at what levels, where people's eyes fall, and then, you know, comparing that with CTR, click-through rate, and where do people click on what they first see Or do they click on, you know, other things that they see further down, and etc. So some of those statistically, we don't know all the details because we can get like the click-through rate, but we can't get the overall bigger picture. The main point I'd like to mention though that John said is that people are changing how they use search. So a few years ago, it was different. And their habits are becoming more different. We're also using search differently. We've got voice search. And when you use search on mobile now— and mobile's become so much more important. And its use is growing exponentially. The search— Google is really targeting their applications and usage more towards being friendly from the mobile perspective. So both are important, but in the past, mobile was secondary. I think it's fairly safe to say that mobile is becoming, you know, each level, each change that you make, it takes extra effort to swing more in that direction. It takes more people, more manpower, more studying and understanding these things and programming and resources. So Google is putting more into that in the mobile area, and that's why that's very important. So people are changing how they use search, and so search is also changing along with that. But we shouldn't look at it in any way like, oh, this is how it's going to be now. Like, to me, I said, I just— I don't hold my breath for these things. And that was what I said to John, you know, I said As long as I've seen, been using Google for the last 20 years, the only constant I can see with Google is change. So just because they're not using images right now doesn't mean they're not going to in the future, or that there won't be another method, or that the user interface will not grow and progress in different ways. You know, they, they look at the, the people, the users, how they interact with that interface and when it changes, and especially like now when it's changing in large scale, uh, for billions of queries, there's a huge amount of data to be learned from that, and then also how people are gonna react to that. So Don't hold your breath, you never know what's going to happen. But yes, this did change. It is an interface change. It doesn't mean Google's thinking less about authorship. That's how some people are mentioning it. Oh, I should just give up Google+. People were commenting to John in comments like, oh well, now I should just quit on Google+. Well, what's the point? And oh, this is just another thing. Oh, Google+ is dying or something. Something like that. It's not. John very specifically said to me, he said, this is a UI/UX change. It's the interface. Google's understanding of entities are still just as important and are growing. They're still getting more important all the time.

Agreed. Agreed totally. And I think the remarks as they've come along on the basis of that UI change, Joshua, very much indicate the perhaps incorrect frame of mind that many people have when they actually come into Google+. And when you actually realize its real value, you realize it's a long-term thing, and it's consistent, and you have to act that way, like you would in the real world. It's not a shortcut to ranking or branding. And shouldn't be used that way.

Yeah, those are the people that get washed out by these kind of changes, right? So exactly, if you're like, oh, well, now I should quit Google+, well, then you're kind of missing it because yes, Google+ is, you know, that has that as a part of it, search as a part of it, but that's just a little piece. You know, what we're doing here is so much more than that, and, and then there's so many other things the way we're gonna interact and connect digitally amongst ourselves. And all of this just brings us all here together, closer, you know, as we interface. I mean, these Hangouts, for example, it's just— who would have thought of this a few years ago, that we could just all sit here and all join each other in a conference? It's like we We get together and we're like old friends because we've been together in a lot of Hangouts. I mean, all of us here have been in Hangouts together and we know each other well. And even watching Hangouts that we didn't participate in. So these things, they change our audience and they change us and how we grow and, you know, can socialize and connect with other people. So we shouldn't look at it, you know, like that little itty-bitty image in the circle. That's just a teeny little thing. I made this little app.

Yeah, that's right.

That's all that John thought was funny. That was like, if you— if this is so important to you, here, here's an extension. This app can get you back your authorship and your search results. You're right, that's kind of like a sarcasm because that's kinda how silly it is because it's just, uh, that's one little thing and it's a change. And, and yes, it was very useful, and but, you know, no changes are not permanent, but you gotta also look at the bigger picture. We're not just here on Google+. For that itty-bitty image.

Exactly, and Joshua, again, I think you drew attention to the fact that we connect like this here and we're having this discussion and others are actually seeing this. We take it for granted now because we've been doing it forever. I've just come back from an EU conference where a lot of money is invested in creating a bespoke digital network amongst professionals working across Europe trying to replicate in many ways what we're doing. And what came across to me very clearly is the fact that even though they have a custom-made digital network they can use, they are nowhere near to the kind of connectivity and understanding of each other that we have here. And they actually meet physically twice a year as well as that. So, you know, I mean, I've never met you physically, and I've never met Chef Dennis Littley, And yet we know what each other thinks, we know where the values lie, we know what we stand for, we know how we speak and how we basically interact and engage, and we know who we can rely upon. And this kind of understanding is really radical and it doesn't exist anywhere else yet, even though efforts have been made to create it. And certainly at the conference I made that point And they're all a bit shocked because they sort of thought they were getting somewhere. And from what I saw in terms of their understanding and the way they exchange information and knowledge and how they gain, they were really missing critical points. And it shows how lucky we are in many ways to actually have this.

Yeah, Google+ really has been a game changer for many people and really has provided us with this type of interaction engagement. That we've never been able to have before. It really expands our way of thinking, how we do business. I know I'm so excited to tell people about it. I want everyone to come on this. Well, maybe not everyone, but people on Facebook and Stereo. I'm only kidding. Really, it offers a unique opportunity, especially for businesses, to get that persona out there. Chefs and restaurants, you know, get behind— make a 1 or 2 minute video every day or every other day. Doesn't have to be long of what you're doing. Get your face out there, get known, let people see you. People are going to respond to that. People, you know, like engaging with other people. That's what we do. We're humans.

Yep, exactly.

Okay, and you know, you mentioned about the business. Okay, the business doesn't know. We if being online matters to us or not as a business. But you, you may be online without knowing it. You know, your customers, if they're looking for you online, if they're searching for you online and writing about you or your business online, then you know, you're effectively, you're already there. So having a voice, and at some point that's gonna happen almost inevitably for medium and then going on down to small businesses and even people. So having that voice and building that voice and that reputation authority is, is important because you you never know when that will happen and that, you know, people are going to be looking for you. And it may be someone else with the same name and a lot of people are finding them instead of you and creating some confusion and stuff. So that's So that's why people should think about that for the future of your business.

We have one question here from Kim Vij. I want to throw up. And for those of us who are not tech savvy, any suggestions for resources to turn to for tasks such as submitting sitemaps for search engines? Also, how to make sure that your Google authorship is showing up on your own site and on guest posts? I think many new bloggers miss out on these opportunities.

OK. Well, I'll say first of all, on authorship, Mark Traphagen has written extensively about it. There are Google guidelines which are very detailed, and they've become easier. And again, Joshua has also mentioned this. Part of, as a blogger these days, part of your ability to succeed online lies in knowing where to get information you need. And rather than thinking, okay, where do I start from that, it comes down to who. You know, follow the right people and that information will be usually readily available in your stream in Google+, or it will certainly be an easy question for them to point you to if you ping them. So Joshua, Mark Traphagen, they should definitely be there. Chef Dennis has done an incredible job time and time again actually collating resources or pointing bloggers to resources. So these are the things which you should have on your horizon. And that's the easiest way to sort of tackle it because it is relatively— it's not highly technical, but it is relatively detailed. And it's not an easy answer to give. Verbally on a Hangout like this. But if you follow them and actually look at their posts, they are step-by-step, easy to understand, easy to implement, and you don't need to know coding. So this is the good news.

Yep.

Absolutely. And I always say, I don't know anything about SEO, but I know a guy that knows SEO. Oh, it looks like Eric's just joined.

If you're on Google+, you probably know a lot of them.

That's my fault.

Eric! Hey, hi.

Eric, just touch your camera.

Hey, Eric.

We have another question here from Kathy Oliver. And she's asking, can you recommend online tools as a new business owner could use to determine search words?

Ah, here's where we all go, no, don't look about search words. What have we been saying?

I know.

OK, I mean, first of all, if you look at Webmaster Tools, they will basically give you the last 90 days' worth of search terms. That brought people to your website. Certainly, I will say that keywords are still important. But if you're actually looking for keywords in order to determine content, that's the wrong way to approach it. And it goes against everything we've been talking about so far. Essentially, you should be thinking about search queries. And let's popularize the term even further. You should be thinking of questions that your potential audience is likely to ask. So if you create content that fully in detail, authoritatively, with great expertise, answers those questions, you're onto a winner. And the keywords you're looking for are probably going to come naturally in that content you create.

Keywords should be organic then. They should be a natural thing. I think a lot of them think about keywords for titles of their blogs a lot of times, or their posts.

Yeah, it helps. I mean, it still helps. Okay, the SEO of the past isn't dead by any stretch of the imagination. But don't get too hung up on it. I mean, I would say that it's a million times better to create a post which is a little bit lacking in terms of SEO expertise and hits absolutely every button in terms of how the human audience will perceive it, because you're going to get a greater win. People will respond better, they'll reshare it better, you will get more traffic because of that. And you could go the other way and create something which is technically perfect from a search engine optimization point of view, and it leaves the human audience feeling so lukewarm about it that they really wouldn't really interact. So think of people first. I mean, this is what Joshua has been saying. This is what Chef Dennis has been saying. People have to come first. Everything else is secondary. And if you follow people and succeed in getting their attention, you will actually win in search. Can I add something to that?

Famous.

Sorry for jumping in so late here. I saw a presentation from Marcus Tober at SMX Advanced, which I thought was actually brilliant. And what he showed is that having semantically rich content, which doesn't focus on specific words, is actually very, very good SEO these days. And the way he showed that is that he did a co-occurrence analysis. Of uses of different types of words on the pages that ranked in the top 10 across 25,000 different search phrases that he tested. And what he found is that there was a set of words that if they are on the— if they're used, first of all, a breadth of them, but also with a certain amount of of overall frequency, that the highest-ranking terms had the highest propensity to use this complete set of words, as opposed to just some. And I know I'm making this complicated, or sound complicated, but the point was that semantically rich content that used a variety of different terms related to your topic rather than just going back to the same keyword over and over again, ranked significantly higher. And there's a very strong correlation between high-ranking people who did that well and those who didn't do it as well.

Makes sense.

Yep, absolutely. Alright guys, well, we're nearing the end of the show right now. I thank you so much for being on. It's been very informative. And, uh, if my viewers have any more questions, leave them in the comments section and hopefully we'll check back on them. A little bit and see if there are. But thank you so much for showing up today. Joshua, always a pleasure to see you. Thank you again for being here, and thanks so much. I look forward to talking to you more in the future. David, I'm gonna see you in just probably another hour. Thanks so much for doing this for me today.

No problem.

Good to see you. I know you're busy schedule too. And Eric, thanks for popping in here. We thought we lost you. No problem.

I'm so sorry I wasn't here from the very beginning. I had it at 1 o'clock Eastern time in my schedule.

That's alright. Life takes funny turns sometimes, but that's the beauty of it. Well guys, thank you for being here today at the Second Annual Virtual Bloggers Conference. This is session 7 and we're moving on to session 8, talking about the state of Google Hangouts in just about an hour. So I'll see you all real soon. Take care.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.