The SEOs Diners Club - Issue #8 - Weekly SEO Tips & News

April 17, 2022

Here are the weekly SEO insights for the SEOs Diners Club members. In addition, you can also join our free SEO Diners Club network to ask questions and share your thoughts on these topics and more.

Google MUM update: What Can SEOs Expect In The Future?

Is MUM Google's next step towards becoming a purely semantic search engine? Let's explore what MUM could mean for the future of SEO.

Recently, I followed a semantic SEO expert named Olaf Kopp. He shares valuable and mind-opening content.

His latest post was published on the Search Engine Land blog this week. Olaf looked at what Google's MUM algorithm is likely to bring to SEO in the future. I am sharing a summary of it below; I recommend that you take the article to your archive and read it thoroughly.

First, let me introduce you to Google MUM if you don't know it already.

Google's MUM Roadmap

1. Short-term development: Firstly, knowledge transfer between languages.

2. Medium-term development: Multi-modal search with text, image, and video.

3. Long-term development: Understanding complex questions and offering greater depth of relevant knowledge.

4. Content engagement: Google spokespersons insist that MUM will not turn Google into a question-answering system.

Advice to SEO Experts:

Search engine marketers need to keep a close eye on MUM, and its potential impact as Google continues to evolve the technology.

SEOs may have to look at search data this year, as these developments will be in the background. Therefore, we will not receive announcements, and Google will not reveal much (if any) about their impact.

You should notice the changes in search engine results quickly and take action.

We see that the concept of User Intent plays a decisive role in Google results, and Google can change the page titles and descriptions that appear in the search results when necessary to achieve this.

In 2022, I think that the concept of producing quality content that best meets user expectations will be adopted instead of the idea of "SEO-friendly content." With the increasing importance of BERT and MUM algorithms, many SEO professionals will focus on the quality of the content and whether it meets the reader's expectations instead of producing SEO-friendly content.

Olaf Kopp's Tips for SEOs

According to Olaf Kopp, technical SEO will remain important. Still, along with MUM, technical SEO improvements, structured data implementations, etc., will lose their importance, content quality, reputation, and reliability-authority of the site, and meeting user expectations will become much more critical.

SEOs focus primarily on text content. But with MUM, Google makes SERPs significantly more diverse in terms of media formats, as it gets better at understanding and contextualizing video, images, audio, and text. For example, you can already see this when looking at the classification of images in image search or the automatic marking of timestamps in YouTube videos.

So, according to Kopp, with MUM becoming more active, SEOs will have to do SEO for different media types, not just text-based ones.

Kopp says that with MUM, Google is starting to answer more search queries in Google results, this will increase, and sites will run the risk of getting less and less organic traffic.

It also means that only sites that create the best content and that can best meet their users' design, and semantic expectations will survive.

You can read all their explanations in the article below:

Is MUM Google's next step toward becoming a purely semantic search engine? Learn what MUM could mean for the future of SEO.

The State of Search 2022: Insights, Trends, and Opportunities

This comprehensive report from Semrush sheds light on SEO developments in 2022 and beyond.

The free report prepared by Semrush is so comprehensive that it is almost a book full of information. Unfortunately, I could only fit part of the table of contents on one screen. You can find complete and mind-opening information on any SEO topic you can think of.

You can download the report by clicking the link below and filling out the form you will see:

Will search ever be the same again? Take a deep dive into the latest trends, Google updates, SEO, and keyword data shaping the post-pandemic Search landscape.

How to Automatically Group Keywords with Serpstat Keyword Clustering Tool

Serpstat seems to have brought a new breath to the industry with its Keyword Clustering tool, which I have never seen in other SEO tools.

“Topic Cluster” and “Topical Authority” are concepts we have frequently heard about in recent years and have become familiar with in SEO articles. Both brought a different perspective to keyword research.

Topical Authority can be defined as “depth of expertise.” Achieved by consistently writing original high-quality, comprehensive content covering the topic.

It is necessary to discover Topic Clusters to do this. Topic Clusters refer to the grouping of searches made under a specific topic.

We can do Topic Clusters manually by grouping them from the keyword sections of classic SEO tools. However, this is a time-consuming and error-prone method.

What is Keyword Clustering?

Keyword clustering is the process of grouping keywords so that keywords in the same group (or cluster) are relevant to a particular website page.

You have a list of keywords: iPhone 6s, iPhone 7, BMX, mountain bike, road bikes, and MacBook. After clustering the following sets, here's what you get: {iphone 6s, iPhone 7}; {bmx, mountain bike, road bikes}; {macbook}.

Why Do We Group Keywords?

  • grouping related keywords;

  • automatic analysis of semantic links;

  • collecting the right keywords for specific pages;

  • keyword distribution among pages for a site's SEO structure;

  • discovering website keywords that fall outside of all obtained groups.

The Serpstat SEO tool, which I have started using recently, has automated the keyword clustering process. After activating the tool's trial version, you can try it under the Keyword Clustering heading.

If you want to learn how to do it step by step through a guide, you can read the following blog post on the Serpstat blog:

The updated version of Clustering tool helps you automatically group a list of keywords and check their quality before adding on a website

How Rebelmouse Improved Loyalty and Engagement by Optimizing Core Web Vitals

While not interpreted as such by SEO experts, improving Core Web Vitals may not be a top priority for SEO performance.

Sometimes I have difficulty explaining this issue to our customers. However, the primary purpose of Core Web Vitals is not to improve SEO performance. John Mueller emphasizes this repeatedly:

Thanks to John Mueller's tweet I shared above, I became aware of the Rebelmouse case study published on Web.dev. I find it very useful for you to see through a case that the priority of Core Web Vitals is not SEO.

You can access the case analysis from the link below:

A case study measuring the full impact and benefits of high performance scores on Core Web Vitals.

Join BrightonSEO 2022 Online Sessions for Free on April 21–22

BrightonSEO conferences help search marketers come together, learn and do their jobs better.

You can follow the BrightonSEO 2022 sessions online and free on April 21-22. All you have to do is to register using the link below.

Learn to do your job a little better with two days of talks to stream live for free.

It may not be possible to join all sessions. After registering, I recommend adding the sessions you want to follow as an event to your Google calendar after getting them to the "Watchlist."

Google Authorship: Is It Still Important For SEO?

Maybe not in its heyday in the Google+ days, but it's not gone forever.

Authorship refers to including an author linked to a piece of content and often a picture and biography of them.

When applied to SEO, authorship indicates authority on the subject. Simply put, authorship is a trust factor for the end-user experience, and that trust can be exploited.

Authorship is valid only for certain types of content, i.e., articles and blog posts. For example, you won't find an author listed on a product page.

While Google+ existed, authoring was a much more prominent and popular app. Particular snippets identified the authors. We could see the authors in the Google results. However, after Google+ shut down, Google chose to remove them.

Author reputation and credibility are widely mentioned in the Google Quality Raters Guideline today. It means that the true purpose of the Google Authorship project never dies, even if its explicit impressions in the SERPs never return.

You can find some exciting ideas on this topic in the following article:

Most In-demand Marketing Jobs in 2022 According to LinkedIn

A new report from LinkedIn shows the most in-demand marketing skills and professional positions in demand.

According to a report released last month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are currently 11.3 million job postings in the United States. In addition, the total number of marketing jobs is expected to increase by 10% by 2030.

As part of its series analyzing the state of marketing jobs in 2022, LinkedIn explored the skills most sought after by employers, current positions, and how marketers adapt to a changing economy.

I focused on the subheading part of the report, as I think it is the area that interests us the most:

Best Demanded Marketing Skills

According to LinkedIn's report, there is a clear favorite for the most in-demand skills and learning: Digital Marketing.

The most sought after marketing skills in North America are:

  • Merchandising

  • Event marketing

  • Digital Marketing

  • Social media marketing

  • Property management

The most valuable skills in Europe and the Middle East are:

  • Digital Marketing

  • Merchandising

  • Ad Serving

  • Email marketing

  • Search Engine Optimization

Asian employers are looking for marketing professionals with the following skills:

  • Digital Marketing

  • Ad Serving

  • Affiliate Marketing

  • Facebook Marketing

  • Social Media Marketing

According to LinkedIn Learning, which follows professional development trends with millions of users, marketing professionals strive to improve their time management and interpersonal communication skills.

I attribute the efforts of professionals to developing these skills because they had to conduct online interviews during the pandemic. However, there are stark differences between online and face-to-face meetings.

You can read more details at the link below:

A new report from LinkedIn reveals the most in-demand marketing skills and sought-after professional positions.

Google Lens For Desktop Chrome Just Got a Whole Lot More Useful

You can copy text, translate phrases, and even directly open an image search.

Google is working on integrating Lens with many other apps to help users find information about images quickly. The tool has been part of the Google Chrome mobile app since 2019 as the de facto way to perform image searches. However, Lens has finally arrived as a new feature in desktop Chrome instead of right-clicking image search and updated to do more than just search images.

With this update, right-clicking an image in Google Chrome brought the "Search for images with Google Lens" option. Clicking it will take you to a lens.google.com/search website with that image (with crop and focus) on the left, and the generated results appear on the right. In addition, with the new update, the left column with the image now gives you three new options: Search, Text, and Translate.

This new Lens feature can be handy in our daily work. You can find the details in the article below:

You can copy text, translate phrases, and even directly open an image search

Book of The Week: Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

I read this book when we, as Stradiji, started to provide conversion optimization consultancy on top of SEO services in 2019. Worth re-reading from time to time.

The founders of the Conversion Rate Experts (CRE) wrote this book. It is an international consultancy that scientifically optimizes the profitability of online businesses.

The book's methodology is based on the authors' award-winning work growing many of the world's biggest web companies--plus hundreds of smaller, market-leading companies in over eighty different industries.

In this book, you'll get:

  • What successful web businesses do differently (and others get wrong)

  • How to quickly identify your website's most significant opportunities

  • A treasure trove of proven solutions for growing businesses

Discover how to grow your profits--by making winning websites that people love.

Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites [Karl Blanks, Ben Jesson] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

I hope you enjoyed my weekly SEO insights. Hope to see you next Sunday in the new episode. I wish you all a great week.

Best,

Mert Erkal