Dark Sky
Banned - leaving fake reviews.
- Apr 3, 2019
- 1,610
- 2,729
Over the past few months. I've been focusing on keyword research a lot. I've done it for a few years now, and one thing I'm seeing a lot more commonly, is low strength sites outranking more powerful sites. I mean this isn't a surprise with topical authority right?
But the gap between low strength sites and high strength sites is becoming greater and greater.
And last week, finally baffled me.
I saw a keyword, 8k search volume, 60 difficulty in Ahrefs. (Which of course indicates strong sites)
The top 10 SERPS were all 60+ DR, except for one site in 3rd position. 0 DR, 8 UR.
What was more interesting, this site in question wasn't even targeting the 8k volume keyword. It was just a H2 in his big article. Meanwhile the authority sites were targeting this keyword in their H1.
So we already know topical authority exists but that wasn't why he was ranking. Want to know how I know? His site only had 16k words, and the article in question was 7k words. Yep... he had 3 articles on his site. Not related to eachover.
So then I started to think "Wtf?" only one mention of this topic, on a relatively new site, with barely any backlinks? How the fook is he ranking 3rd for a keyword like that, and ahrefs estimated his articles was getting 6k traffic from that article.
I began my quest. Looking at newer tools such as keyword cupid, to reading case studies on semantic search.
It finally clicked.
Topical Depth. And by depth, I mean he's covered more than his competitors combined on the topic, he's using unique headings with unique RELEVANT words, by unique I mean his competitors are not using them and by relevant I mean it's relevant to the niche.
E.G for cars, the word "engine" in the RIGHT CONTEXT is relevant to an article on cars, and if your competitors are not using the word "engine" in their article, and you manage to fit it in with good context, then that's a brownie point from google. Keep doing this in your article, and you basically have a new article with unseen information that's relevant.
Google want's to display this. Googles aim is not to display repeated information for the top 10 SERPS, nor will it ever be. It wants diversity.
His headings are also related to each over in the eyes of google (Yes there are ways to identify this)
It's basically an article on steroids to google. And google is rewarding this article heavily.
I probably haven't explain this too well, as my own brain is a maze in itself. But I've been seeing this behaviour the last few months more and more. And I've usually just passed it off as topical authority, until this article where topical authority no longer applies.
Rankbrain + BERT are a force to be reckoned with. And in 2021, it's more important than ever to understand them both as much as possible to get ahead. You won't be able to reverse engineer them, but you will get an advantage my understanding them, the more the better.
This is T-SNE. Using higher dimensional data points to form clusters of information. I believe this applies site wide (topical authority) and page specific as in content/images/links bla bla bla.
And this, is how BERT works. (Not googles BERT, just general BERT)
As you can see this is 2021, this is what is happening already, these are the algorithms being used. It's complex.
So is keyword research dead? No, it can come in handy especially for search vol and traffic estimates, but the difficulty score is becoming less and less relevant.
Does this mean backlinks are dead? No, not yet. Probably not for the foreseeable future. But I anticipate they will keep getting weaker. As googles aim isn't to use backlinks to discover good content, it's aim is to use it's own algorithm to decipher which content/sites users will most likely want to be.
Conclusion? Content is becoming stronger and stronger, year after year, and understanding topics rather than keywords is becoming incredibly important. I could be wrong on everything I have said here, literally. But that's my take on my past few months studying big SEOs, case studies, new tools and my own manual research.
Let me know your thoughts. I like eyes from a different angle at all times.
But the gap between low strength sites and high strength sites is becoming greater and greater.
And last week, finally baffled me.
I saw a keyword, 8k search volume, 60 difficulty in Ahrefs. (Which of course indicates strong sites)
The top 10 SERPS were all 60+ DR, except for one site in 3rd position. 0 DR, 8 UR.
What was more interesting, this site in question wasn't even targeting the 8k volume keyword. It was just a H2 in his big article. Meanwhile the authority sites were targeting this keyword in their H1.
So we already know topical authority exists but that wasn't why he was ranking. Want to know how I know? His site only had 16k words, and the article in question was 7k words. Yep... he had 3 articles on his site. Not related to eachover.
So then I started to think "Wtf?" only one mention of this topic, on a relatively new site, with barely any backlinks? How the fook is he ranking 3rd for a keyword like that, and ahrefs estimated his articles was getting 6k traffic from that article.
I began my quest. Looking at newer tools such as keyword cupid, to reading case studies on semantic search.
It finally clicked.
Topical Depth. And by depth, I mean he's covered more than his competitors combined on the topic, he's using unique headings with unique RELEVANT words, by unique I mean his competitors are not using them and by relevant I mean it's relevant to the niche.
E.G for cars, the word "engine" in the RIGHT CONTEXT is relevant to an article on cars, and if your competitors are not using the word "engine" in their article, and you manage to fit it in with good context, then that's a brownie point from google. Keep doing this in your article, and you basically have a new article with unseen information that's relevant.
Google want's to display this. Googles aim is not to display repeated information for the top 10 SERPS, nor will it ever be. It wants diversity.
His headings are also related to each over in the eyes of google (Yes there are ways to identify this)
It's basically an article on steroids to google. And google is rewarding this article heavily.
I probably haven't explain this too well, as my own brain is a maze in itself. But I've been seeing this behaviour the last few months more and more. And I've usually just passed it off as topical authority, until this article where topical authority no longer applies.
Rankbrain + BERT are a force to be reckoned with. And in 2021, it's more important than ever to understand them both as much as possible to get ahead. You won't be able to reverse engineer them, but you will get an advantage my understanding them, the more the better.
This is T-SNE. Using higher dimensional data points to form clusters of information. I believe this applies site wide (topical authority) and page specific as in content/images/links bla bla bla.
And this, is how BERT works. (Not googles BERT, just general BERT)
As you can see this is 2021, this is what is happening already, these are the algorithms being used. It's complex.
So is keyword research dead? No, it can come in handy especially for search vol and traffic estimates, but the difficulty score is becoming less and less relevant.
Does this mean backlinks are dead? No, not yet. Probably not for the foreseeable future. But I anticipate they will keep getting weaker. As googles aim isn't to use backlinks to discover good content, it's aim is to use it's own algorithm to decipher which content/sites users will most likely want to be.
Conclusion? Content is becoming stronger and stronger, year after year, and understanding topics rather than keywords is becoming incredibly important. I could be wrong on everything I have said here, literally. But that's my take on my past few months studying big SEOs, case studies, new tools and my own manual research.
Let me know your thoughts. I like eyes from a different angle at all times.
