By Jayne Schultheis — Imagine walking into a brand new store in your area and finding exactly what you need without asking an employee for help or looking for signs.

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That's the kind of magic that effective local SEO can provide — guiding local customers straight to your business's virtual doorstep. In today's digital landscape, understanding and harnessing the power of local SEO is crucial for any business aiming to capture the attention of nearby customers.

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This article will delve into the key elements of local SEO, from optimizing your Google Business Profile to leveraging local link-building strategies. Let's dive in!

Understanding local SEO

Local SEO is a pivotal strategy for businesses aiming to boost their visibility in local search results. By optimizing for local rankings, businesses can attract more nearby customers who are searching for their products or services. Consumers increasingly rely on search engines to find local businesses that meet their needs, especially when it comes to restaurants, entertainment, and in-person services. Local SEO not only helps improve search visibility but also enhances your overall digital presence, making it easier for potential customers to find and engage with your business.

Key elements of local SEO

Local SEO hinges on several crucial elements that combine to establish your local credibility with search engines.

NAP consistency in local SEO

NAP is short for Name, Address, and Phone number, and NAP consistency is a vital aspect of local SEO success. Accurate and consistent business listings on Google and other search engines, as well as local business directories, builds credibility with search engines. This consistency helps potential customers easily find and contact your business, and shows Google that you're a reliably consistent establishment.

Optimize your Google Business Profile for better visibility

To enhance local SEO, a well-optimized Google Business Profile, formerly called Google My Business, is crucial. This is the sidebar that pops up on Google when you type in the name of a specific business or restaurant. It can show photos, customer reviews, hours, website, phone number, and other helpful information. It’s a form of digital storefront. When the profile is accurate and complete, your visibility is boosted in local search queries, attracting more local customers.

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One of the most important SERP features for local businesses is the Local Pack, the map and listing of local businesses in an area that appear when someone does a search like "find the nearest X to me." If you haven't thoroughly filled out a Google Business Profile, you won't appear on that Local Pack, but your competitors might.

Geo-targeting

Geo-targeting goes hand in hand with local SEO. Make sure your website is set up to determine a user's location and have content ready that is based on their location. For example, if you have multiple locations, have a separate landing page for each one with specific "Contact Us" information for each branch.

Conduct keyword research for local SEO

To effectively target local audiences, businesses must focus on identifying relevant local keywords. Start by analyzing what potential customers in your area are searching for, using tools like Google Keyword Planner or Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

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It’s essential to include location-specific terms and phrases that reflect the local culture and community. This will help you align your content with local search queries, enhancing visibility and driving more local traffic to your business.

How to do effective local keyword research

Let's assume that you're opening a vegan bakery in Denver, Colorado. These are the steps you should take when you're ready to build engaging content that will boost your local SEO.

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Understand your audience. Identify your target demographic and their needs. In this case, you'd be looking to target vegans with a sweet tooth. Consider their location, interests, and search behaviors. Are there places in Denver where you'd be more likely to find these people? What other types of products and services would they be searching for?

Brainstorm seed keywords. Start with broad keywords related to your business. For example, if you own a bakery, your seed keywords might include “bakery,” “cake,” "vegan," and “pastries.”

Assess the competition. Look at local competitors’ websites and their keyword strategies. What keywords do they rank for and what gaps can you exploit?

Use keyword research tools. Use Rellify, Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, or similar services to find keyword ideas and search volumes. Look for local-specific keywords by including your city or region. Focus on long-tail keywords that may have lower search volumes but are more specific and often lead to higher conversion rates (e.g., “gluten-free birthday cake in [Denver]”).

Understand the user intent behind the keywords, too. Are users looking to make a purchase, find information, or compare options? This will help you create content that meets their needs.

In our example, users could be looking to buy a snack. But they might also be compiling a list of vegan restaurant options in the area or comparing vegan catering options for a wedding. Rellify is unique in its ability to use deep machine learning and AI to understand your niche market and search intent, suggesting keywords that are already doing well in your sector and local area.

Incorporate local modifiers. Add geographic terms to your seed keywords. For example, “best vegan bakery in [Denver]” or “vegan cupcakes near me.”

Monitor and adjust. Regularly check the performance of your chosen keywords using analytics tools. Tools like Moz Local, BrightLocal, and Google Analytics can offer insights into local search performance, helping you refine your SEO strategies. Adjust your strategy based on what’s working for the search engine algorithms.

Craft geo-specific content for local audiences: Community engagement

To truly resonate with a local audience, create geo-targeting content that speaks directly to the community's unique characteristics and needs. This involves incorporating location-specific details and cultural nuances into your content to make it more relatable and engaging.

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Mentioning specific landmarks or local events to establish a connection with your audience. In our above example, we might include a blog post on the "Denver Union Station Farmers Market." This summer event features local produce and vegan vendors, and would likely be an interesting event for vegans searching for local places to grab food (like your bakery).

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It's not just what you know about the local area, but who you know. Content marketing with blog posts can be one of your most effective local SEO tools. However, if you can diversify your efforts and make real-world tie-ins within your content, search engines are much more likely to rank you as the best answer to what the locals are looking for.

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You could use social media to reach out to travel bloggers or local influencers who make specific content like "best places to grab breakfast in Denver" or "vegan-friendly restaurants in Denver." You could reach out to local news channels and let them know about your grand (or soft) opening, and share the video content on social media. The more you can pair local SEO content and efforts with real-world community engagement, the more familiarity and trust you'll build with both search engines and potential customers who use them.

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Local reviews and customer feedback also play a pivotal role in enhancing your local SEO. Positive reviews boost your credibility while improving your visibility in search results. Engaging with feedback, whether positive or negative, demonstrates responsiveness and builds trust, encouraging more local customers to choose your business. Reviews are important for online directories and listings. It's a good policy to encourage customers to post reviews. Then, take the time to respond to comments on your blog content, social media posts, and review sites.

Leverage local link-building strategies

Another way to bolster your SEO is by building local partnerships in the digital realm. By collaborating with nearby businesses and organizations, you can create valuable link-building opportunities that boost your website's authority and search engine rankings. Local link building not only improves your visibility in search results, but also enhance your position as a trusted and integral part of the local community.

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In our Colorado vegan bakery example, consider your target audience. At the risk of making generalizations, they might also be interested in small, local groceries, clothing exchanges, and eco-friendly and sustainable brands. As you write content about "the health benefits of going vegan," you could link to a local integrative medicine clinic that focuses on holistic health. In your article on "the power of non-processed foods," you could link to a local no-packaging co-op that sells food and toiletries in bulk. No matter what kind of connections you make, be sure that they're willing to link back to your website so you can mutually benefit from local link-building.

On-page SEO techniques for local search optimization

To effectively enhance local search optimization, it’s important to use robust on-page SEO techniques. We’ve touched on the importance of integrating local keywords naturally within your content. It also pays to use them in titles, headings, alt tags, and meta descriptions to align with local search queries. Implementing schema markup can help boost local SEO by giving search engine crawlers detailed information about your business.

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Is your website mobile-friendly? Many users conduct local searches on their smartphones. According to research from Exploding Topics, in 2024, over 60% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. When you consider that someone who's looking for a local spot is potentially roaming around your city, smartphone in hand, it becomes evident how mobile optimization is crucial for any business hoping to get local traffic.

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Voice search is another crucial consideration when you're working on local optimization. According to Synup, more than 58% of smart device users use voice search to find local businesses. What's more, businesses with complete Google Business Profiles are 70% more likely to attract location-based inquiries via voice search. The better you optimize for local SEO, the more likely you'll be drawing in traffic from [Denver] users who use voice search to find " [vegan bakeries] near me."

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Page speed is another crucial part of the user experience. Can you imagine being hangry at 10 a.m. on a Saturday in Denver and the website that promises a hot, melt-in-your-mouth vegan cinnamon bun takes 45 seconds to load? A seamless and intuitive website layout keeps visitors engaged, reduces bounce rates, and makes you a more trustworthy resource for your target audience. A streamlined website can help you achieve higher traffic, click-through rates, and sales.

Let Rellify help you optimize content for local SEO

Content optimization for local SEO takes quite a bit of research, effort, and know-how. Fortunately, Rellify has built a simple, intuitive content intelligence platform that puts AI-powered deep machine learning at your fingertips. Rellify's SEO tools can optimize every aspect of your content creation with a fraction of the time and effort it would take on other platforms.

With a custom Relliverse™ you can conduct keyword research within your specific niche and quickly build out a content plan that will guarantee results. Ready to get started? Contact one of our experts for a brief demo to find out exactly how Rellify can transform the way you do content and maximize your returns.

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By Jayne Schultheis — Keyword research is a fundamental part of search engine optimization, but there's a crucial piece of the process that's often overlooked: user intent. In this article, we'll look at how keyword research and consideration of user intent can intersect to help you build the perfect content strategy. Let's dive in!

What is keyword research?

If you've spent any time writing SEO-optimized blogs, you've probably done some keyword research. Keyword research is the process of identifying and analyzing the terms and phrases that users enter into search engines when they are looking for information, products, or services. The goal is to understand what keywords are most relevant to your audience and to optimize your content so that it ranks higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for those keywords and gets more organic traffic.

Tools for keyword research

Fortunately, it's not too difficult to find keywords — lots of tools are built specifically to help content marketers find words and phrases that boost your chances of ranking on SERPs for certain topics, including:

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• Google Keyword Planner
• Semrush
• Ahrefs
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Rellify

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But Rellify isn't your run-of-the-mill keyword research tool. Our magic starts with content strategy itself. With a Relliverse™, a custom-AI subject-matter expert trained on your relevant focus topics, you can make data-driven strategic decisions about which topics and keywords are exactly right for your brand's content. Then, after writing and publishing, you can have Google Analytics and insights pulled directly into the platform, where you watch your optimized content climb the search engine rankings.

What is user intent?

In the context of SEO, "user intent" refers to the underlying purpose or motivation behind a user's search query. Understanding user intent helps in creating content and optimizing websites in a way that aligns with what users are actually looking for when they perform a search.

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There are a few different user search intent categories:

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• Informational intent. The user is looking for information or answers to a question. This can include how-to guides, definitions, or explanations. For example, a search query like “how to bake a pie” indicates the user is seeking a recipe or baking instructions.
• Navigational intent. The user intends to find a specific website or web page. For example, “Instagram login” suggests the user wants to navigate directly to Instagram’s login page. Why didn't they just type it into the URL? We don't know, that's none of our business.
• Transactional intent. The user is ready to make a purchase or complete a transaction. This could be indicated by queries like “where to buy the newest iphone.”
• Commercial investigation. The user is in the research phase before making a purchase decision. Queries like “best keyboards for gaming” or “top-rated Korean skincare products” show that the user is comparing options and seeking reviews or comparisons.

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Categorizing query type is easy enough, but understanding and mastering the match between your keywords and user intent can be more challenging. You're competing with other high-quality content that also aligns with the same (or at least, similar) user intent, and uses the same keywords. Differentiating your own content with long-tail keywords, unique insights, added value can be a tough, but necessary task.

How should keyword research and user intent work together?

Keyword research and user intent are interrelated components of an effective SEO strategy. When combined thoughtfully, they help your content rank well in search engine results while also meeting the needs of your audience. They work together to create a fuller, clearer picture of the different "buyer personas" you should be targeting with your content.

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Here’s how keyword research and user intent should work together to optimize your SEO efforts:

Use keyword tools to analyze the data

Use keyword research tools to gather data on keyword difficulty, search volume, competition, and variations. This type of SERP analysis helps you understand the types of queries users are entering and what information or actions they are seeking.

Categorize keywords by intent, then create content accordingly

Group keywords based on their user intent — informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial investigation. This helps you target content more effectively. For example:

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• Informational keywords might include “how to clean a white sneakers.”
• Transactional keywords might include “buy shoe cleaner.”

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Develop content that directly addresses the intent behind the keywords. For example, informational queries lend themselves to detailed guides, how-to articles, and tutorials. Transactional queries are a better fit for product pages, reviews, or buying guides that facilitate purchase decisions.

Optimize the content

Pay attention to keyword placement throughout your optimization process. Make sure that the content structure — headings, subheadings, and formatting — aligns with the intent behind the keywords, too. Use clear, concise headings for informational content and persuasive language for transactional content. You can even use specific questions that users are typing into search engines as headers.

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The keywords that are most relevant to the user intent should also be incorporated in title tags and meta descriptions. For example:

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• An informational title could be “How to Clean White Sneakers: A Step-by-Step Guide.”
• A transactional title might be “Top 10 Sneaker Cleaners for 2024: Reviews and Buying Guide.”

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Backlinking and internal linking are also factors that signal to search engines you understand the user intent behind the queries you're hoping to rank for. When you're linking, whether externally or internally, choose to link with anchor text that reflects that intent.

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Let's use our "sneaker" example from above, assuming we are a luxury shoe company. If we wrote the article, "Top 10 Sneaker Cleaners for 2024: Reviews and Buying Guide," then we would select the keyword phrase "sneaker care" to anchor a link to our other blog article about how to correctly care for shoes.

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Assuming that your target audience is stylish, image-conscious, young professionals who take a lot of pride in their appearance, this would be a way to signal to search engines that you're in-step with your buyer persona and user intent, a true expert in the industry who deserves the subsequent domain authority status.

Adapt to trends and changes

Search trends and user behavior can change over time, in addition to ranking factors and algorithms set by search engines. Keep an eye on your click-through rate and bounce rate. Regularly update your keyword research and content strategy to stay aligned with what's current. With the continued advancements in voice search and AI, how users express intent and search for information is ever-changing, too. Adjust your content optimization strategy to accommodate these changes. It can seem tedious, but it's the only way to make sure you can stay on top of your audience's shifting semantic searches and google algorithm updates.

Address multi-intent queries

For queries with multiple intents, develop content that addresses different aspects of the user’s needs. For example, a query like “best budget smartphones” could be addressed with a guide that includes buying tips, product reviews, and comparisons.

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You can also address this issue by guiding users to relevant content within your site that meets different aspects of their intent, like the "shoe cleaner" example we mentioned above. This helps provide a more complete answer to their queries and improving overall user experience.

Rellify: Search engine optimization experts

Rellify doesn't just guess about user intent — our state-of-the-art Relliverse™ is customized content intelligence — AI that deeply analysis and understands your company, topics, and keywords. With our competitive analysis, we provide insights beyond your typical keyword research tools. Our platform can guide your content creation every step of the way with SEO tips and suggestions. Ready to maximize your conversion rates with top-notch content? Hop on a call with one of our experts to find out exactly how Rellify can super-charge your content marketing returns with just a fraction of the effort.

Do you remember when you could ask a cartoon butler named "Jeeves" a question and he would search the internet for your answer?

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How times have changed. RIP, Jeeves. Tell "Clippy" we say hello.

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The evolution of search engines has been revolutionary, constantly changing the way we research, do business, and function in the digital world. In this article, we'll take you through the timeline of how search engines have changed over the years, and take a look at how you can best implement search engine optimization (SEO).

The internet without search: A new frontier

Before the advent of search engines, the World Wide Web (hence the "www") was a more fragmented and less navigable space — a "Wild West Web," so to speak.

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In the early 1990s, users primarily accessed content through static web pages sometimes reached through hyperlinks. The web was essentially a collection of individual sites, organized by directories like Yahoo!, which required manual categorization and browsing. Finding specific information often meant knowing the exact URL or relying on word of mouth to discover new sites.

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Without search engines, users had a lot more trouble locating the information they needed. Resources were often scattered across various platforms, and the lack of centralized indexing made it tedious to navigate. Many people relied on bookmarking favorite sites or engaging in discussions on forums to share and find useful links.  

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The emergence of search engines fundamentally transformed this landscape, allowing efficient information retrieval and significantly improving the web’s usability.

The evolution of search engines: A timeline

Search engines didn't have one particular "inventor," they evolved through contributions from various individuals and teams. The first search engine, Archie, was developed in 1990 to index File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites, allowing users to search for and locate downloadable files across the internet.

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The name "Archie" is a play on the word "archive," reflecting its primary function of indexing and retrieving files. Unlike modern search engines that index web pages, Archie focused on file names and directory structures, generating a list of available files that users could browse. Users could query the Archie database using simple search terms, making it easier to discover resources that would otherwise require knowing specific URLs. This innovation laid the groundwork for the development of more advanced search technologies.

1. Early beginnings (1990s)

• Basic indexing. The first search engines were developed. These included tools like Archie, which indexed FTP sites, and Veronica, which searched Gopher servers.
• Web crawlers. In 1994, WebCrawler became the first search engine to index entire pages, allowing users to search for any word on a page, not just titles or URLs.
• Directory-based search. Yahoo! started as a directory of websites, where human editors categorized links. This model was popular until the volume of web content exploded.

2. The rise of algorithmic search (Late 1990s)

Search engines became increasingly complex, employing algorithms to improve the relevance and speed of search results.

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• AltaVista and Ask Jeeves. AltaVista (1995) introduced more advanced search capabilities, including natural language queries. Ask Jeeves (1996) focused on user questions, attempting to provide direct answers.  
• PageRank. In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed PageRank as part of their PhD project, which later became the foundation for Google. It evaluated web pages based on their link structure, promoting high-quality, relevant pages.
• Launch of Google. In 1998, Google was officially launched, quickly becoming the preferred search engine due to its clean interface and superior search results driven by PageRank.

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By the end of the 1990s, search engines had transformed from rudimentary tools into essential components of the internet, facilitating easier access to information and significantly shaping online behavior.

3. Google’s dominance (2000s)

After the world survived Y2K and kept spinning on Jan. 1, 2000, search engines underwent significant transformations driven by technological advancements and evolving user needs. The evolution of search engines was, for the most part, represented by the evolution of Google.

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• Personalization and localization. Google introduced features like personalized search results and localized content, leading to a better user experience based on individual preferences and geographical location. Local SEO became a helpful new tool for marketers who wanted local shoppers to find and patronize their businesses.
• AdWords. In 2000, Google launched AdWords, revolutionizing how businesses could advertise online through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which contributed significantly to Google’s revenue.
• Real-time search. In 2009, Google began incorporating content from social media and news sites into search results.

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One of the most notable developments was the refinement of algorithms to improve search result relevance and page rankings on SERPs. Google's PageRank algorithm, which assessed the importance of web pages based on backlinks, became a benchmark for search quality. This era also saw the introduction of personalized search results, which tailored the user experience based on individual preferences and behavior.

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The rise of social media and user-generated content further influenced search engine functionality. Search engines began to integrate social signals and real-time data, leading to features like news search and video search capabilities. Mobile search also emerged as a critical focus, prompting engines to optimize for mobile-friendly sites.

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Overall, the 2000s marked a shift towards more sophisticated, user-centric search technologies that not only provided better results but also adapted to the changing dynamics of online information consumption.

4. Semantic search and user intent (2010s)

This is when things really start to pick up! Overall, the 2010s marked a move toward more intuitive, personalized, and multimedia-rich search experiences, fundamentally transforming how users interacted with search engines.

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• Caffeine. In 2010, Google introduced a new infrastructure for faster indexing and more frequent updates, including Google+, which placed a stronger emphasis on social signals in search results.
• Knowledge graph. Launched in 2012, this feature presented information in a structured format, giving users direct answers without clicking through to other websites.
• Hummingbird algorithm. In 2013, Google introduced Hummingbird, which focused on understanding the context and intent behind qu. eries, improving its ability to provide relevant results.
• Featured snippets. Introduced by Google in 2014, this feature aimed to provide users with quick answers to their queries directly at the top of the search results page, highlighting concise information from relevant web pages.
• Mobile search. Google adapted to mobile search by emphasizing mobile-friendly websites in 2015 with an algorithm update known as "Mobilegeddon." A voice search feature followed in 2016 when users could speak directly into their phones and ask search engines questions.
• RankBrain. In 2015, Google incorporated RankBrain, a machine learning component that helps process search queries and improve results based on user interactions.

5. AI and machine learning (Late 2010s to present)

Search engines became so integrated into our everyday lives, it's hard now to even imagine a world without them. During this time, it because commonplace to hear people say things like: "Hey, Google! Find me a local Italian restaurant with outdoor seating!"

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• BERT. Launched in 2019, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) significantly advanced the understanding of natural language, allowing Google to better grasp the nuances of user queries.
• Mobile-first indexing. Google further advanced its mobile search capabilities with the introduction of mobile-first indexing in 2019. This meant that the mobile version of a site would be considered the primary version for ranking purposes. This shift underscored the importance of mobile optimization search as a central focus for search engines and web developers alike.
• Voice search. Though voice search already existed, the proliferation of voice-activated devices (like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa) led to increased emphasis on optimizing search for conversational queries.

6. Current trends and future directions (2020s)

Artificial intelligence and natural language processing have launched search engines into a new trajectory, and content marketing experts have their jobs cut out for them as they adapt and modify their approaches SEO.

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• AI and chatbots. AI continues to evolve, with search engines integrating conversational AI to enhance user interaction and provide instant answers. Machine learning is playing a crucial role in transforming the search engine landscape, as this for of AI can self-train and adapt when it's presented with new information.
• Visual search. Platforms like Google Lens allow users to search using images, making search more intuitive and practical.
• Privacy concerns. As awareness of data privacy grows, search engines are adapting by offering more transparent data usage policies and options for users to control their data.
• Sustainability. There's a growing focus on the environmental impact of digital services, prompting search engines to consider eco-friendly practices in data centers and operations.

How to use search engines for content marketing.

Since AI integration and summarization has become such a prominent feature in how users engage with search engines, you might be wondering how it will affect your content marketing strategy. How will AI integration impact SEO if you rely on content to draw in organic traffic from search engines?

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The short answer is: You have to create better content.

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You don't just need to add more keywords, but better keywords. Your content should reflect the search intent of your target audience, meaning that it directly answers their specific questions or provides niche information that they're seeking. Are they looking for a specific product? Do they need detailed background information about a certain subject? What stage of the customer journey are they in and how do you craft your content to meet them there?

Search engine optimization has always been at the core of long-form content marketing, at least as long as search engines algorithms have crawling been around. We'll look at some of the core aspects of this process, so you can make sure you're staying on top of SERPs.

Search engine optimization in the age of AI

Think "E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)." Google's algorithm places a lot of weight on these as it ranks your content on its pages. Here are some other ways you can boost your domain authority and stay on top of algorithm updates:

Choose your topics and keywords wisely

Research relevant topics. Tools like Google Trends, Semrush, or Ahrefs can help you identify trending topics in your niche that resonate with your audience and align with their search intent. But if you need an expert tool that seamlessly integrates AI, Rellify is your solution. With a custom Relliverse™, you can use machine learning to provide detailed insights into what topics and keywords are going to resonate best with your target audience.

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Long-tail keywords. When you're doing keyword research, target long-tail keywords that reflect specific queries. These tend to have lower competition and higher conversion rates, allowing you to capture a more defined audience. For example, an article with the focus key phrase, "ladders" would be much harder to rank for than "retractable steel ladders"

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Content relevance. Make sure your content is comprehensive and directly answers user questions. This not only boosts your relevance in search results but also helps boost user satisfaction.

Develop a fool-proof linking strategy

Quality backlinks. Focus on acquiring backlinks from reputable and authoritative websites in your niche. High-quality inbound links signal to search engines that your content is valuable.

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Internal linking. Create a strong internal linking structure to guide users through your content and help search engines understand the relationships between different pages on your site. Choose anchor text that reflects the topics and keywords of your other valuable content.

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Outreach and collaboration. Engage in outreach efforts to connect with other creators and websites. Guest blogging, partnerships, and collaborations can help you earn valuable backlinks and increase your site's visibility.

Mind your technical SEO

Technical SEO is just as important as the topics and keywords, just a bit more tedious.

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Site speed optimization. Make sure your website loads quickly on both desktop and mobile devices. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify and address issues that may slow down your site.

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Mobile-friendliness. Implement responsive design to make your website accessible and functional on all devices. Google prioritizes mobile-friendly sites.

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Schema markup. Use structured data (schema markup) to help crawlers navigate your site and search engines better understand your content.

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Secure your site. Implement HTTPS to secure your site. It adds a layer of security to the data exchanged between a user's browser and a web server. Google considers security a ranking factor and it helps build trust with your users.

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Monitoring. Most importantly, you should regularly monitor your core web vitals and organic site traffic. Look at click-through rates and bounce rates. Note how you need to adjust to your content as you evaluate what is and isn't working. Rellify pulls in this kind of information directly into the platform, so you can keep all your relevant content data all in one place.

Rellify can help your audience find your content

Rellify embraces search engine innovations and works to make content creation an increasingly effective and efficient marketing tool for clients. With a custom Relliverse™, you can leverage AI tailored to your niche to find the right topics, use the right keywords, and answer the right questions. That way, you're set to start climbing the search engine rankings. Ready to get started? Contact a Rellify expert today.

By Jayne Schultheis — Have you ever stopped to wonder how search engines work? How do they know what's on the pages they rank and feature? Their intricate processes are made possible by a collection of behind-the-scenes bots that do a lot of hard work: crawlers.

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Search engine crawlers, also known as spiders or bots, are software programs used by search engines for site discovery and content indexing on the web.

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When we visualize a search engine crawler, we like to picture a little inchworm wearing a neon Google vest. He scours through web text line by line, gobbling up the information he deems the most important, then presents it to his Google overlord in an organized fashion. It's fun to think of it that way, but it's actually a lot more complicated.

How do search engine crawlers work?

Here's a high-level overview:

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• Crawling and discovery. Crawlers start with a list of web addresses (URLs), which they use as the initial seeds for their crawling. This list is often compiled from previous crawls or from sitemaps submitted by website owners. They visit these URLs and fetch the content from the web pages. This involves downloading the HTML code and any other resources linked from the page, such as images, CSS files, or JavaScript.
• Parsing. After fetching the content, the crawler parses the HTML to extract useful information. This includes identifying and following links to other pages, which enables discovery of new content and sites. The links found within the page are added to the list of URLs to be crawled. This process helps the crawler navigate through the web and build a map of interconnected pages.
• ‍Indexing. The information from the crawled pages is stored in a large database called an index. This index is optimized for quick retrieval and is structured to allow efficient searching. The content is also analyzed to understand the relevance and context. This involves extracting keywords, understanding page structure, and evaluating other factors like page load speed or mobile-friendliness.
• ‍Ranking. When a user enters a search, the search engine uses complex algorithms to rank the indexed pages based on their relevance to the search query. Factors influencing ranking include keyword relevance, page quality, and user experience (UX). The search engine then displays the most relevant results on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
• ‍Re-crawling.The web is an ever-changing space, so crawlers revisit pages periodically to update the index with new content or changes to existing content. The frequency of crawling can vary depending on the page authority and how often you update it.

How can I make sure crawlers discover my site?

Content optimization for crawler bots is one of the key facets of an SEO strategy. If the web crawlers can't find your site, leads and prospective customers won't either. These bots have a "crawl budget," which refers to the number of pages a search engine crawler is willing to crawl on your website within a given time period. Crawl budgets are different, based on factors like site size, health, and how often you update it.

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We'll look at the key components of your website's SEO that help crawlers find, navigate, and understand your content, and get the most out of crawlers' budgets for your site.

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• Submit your site to search engines. Use tools like Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and others to submit your site’s URL. This helps search engines discover your site faster.
• Create and submit a sitemap. Generate an XML sitemap and submit it through search engine webmaster tools. Sitemaps help crawlers understand the website structure and navigate seamlessly through all your important pages.
• ‍Optimize your robots.txt file. Make sure your robots.txt file is properly configured to allow search engines to crawl your site. This file should not inadvertently block important pages or directories from being indexed.
• ‍Use internal links. Link between pages on your site to help crawlers discover and navigate your content. A well-structured internal linking strategy, using strategic anchor text, allows search engines to find and index all your important pages.
• ‍Make sure your site is crawlable. Check for technical issues that might prevent crawling, like broken links, server errors, or blocked resources.
• ‍Improve your website speed and performance. Make sure your site loads quickly and performs well. Fast-loading pages are more likely to be crawled and indexed effectively.
• ‍Create quality content. Regularly update your site with high-quality, relevant content. Search algorithms favor sites that offer valuable content to users. More on this later. ‍
• Monitor crawl activity. Use tools like Google Search Console to monitor crawl activity and identify any issues or errors that might affect how your site is indexed.‍
• Use structured data. Implement structured data (schema markup) to help search engines understand the content of your pages better and potentially improve visibility in search results.‍
• Implement a good backlink strategy. Pages with more backlinks, particularly those from high-authority sites, are often prioritized for indexing. Backlinks can also indicate the relevance of your content. If multiple sites link to a page using relevant keywords, it signals to search engines that the page is relevant for those topics, which can help it get better rankings.‍
• Correctly use redirects. URL redirects send both users and search engines to a different URL than the one they originally sought. They're especially helpful if you're conducting a website or page migration, dealing with broken links, or doing website maintenance. 301 redirects are permanent while 302 redirects are temporary. They should be used sparingly and only as necessary, as too many can cause crawlers to get lost and experience redirect loops and other indexing issues. If you have duplicate content, use canonical tags to signal to crawlers which version of a URL you want them to index.‍
• Promote your site with social signals. Improve your site’s visibility by promoting it through social media, email campaigns, and other content marketing channels. More external links and traffic can help search engines find and index your site.

Write great content

We've talked about how to get Googlebots and other crawlers to start indexing your site. But there's one crucial aspect of the process that needs to happen before all that: You need to create relevant, SEO-optimized content that will resonate well with your target audience. Ultimately, that's what crawlers are looking for. All the technical SEO factors just make it easier for bots, and readers, to find it.

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For this task, thorough and expert keyword research is going to be your best bet. You want to signal to search engine crawlers that you're a thought leader in your industry with a high domain authority and trustworthy expertise. This shows that your site deserves higher page rankings.

How do I know if crawlers are having issues with my site?

The short answer: Use Google Search Console.

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Google Search Console provides a "coverage report" that relays information on how Googlebot is crawling and indexing your site. Look for errors like "404 Not Found," "Server Errors," or "Redirect Errors." These issues can prevent crawlers from accessing your pages.

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Additionally, the "crawl stats report" shows how often a Googlebot visits your site, how many pages it crawls, and the total crawl time. If you see a significant drop in crawl activity, it might indicate a problem.

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Finally, check out the "URL inspection tool," which allows you to check the status of individual URLs. It can show you how crawlers see the page, including any crawl or indexing issues.

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Rellify imports insights from Google Search Console directly into the Rellify platform, so you don't have to add another step to your processes.

Common crawl errors to watch out for

• Server errors (5xx). Errors like "500 Internal Server Error" indicate server problems that prevent crawlers from accessing your pages. Check server logs for more details on these errors.
• 404 errors. If pages return a "404 Not Found" error, it means that the URL is not available. Check that important pages aren’t returning 404 errors unless intentionally removed.
• Redirect errors. Issues with redirects (such as redirect loops or chains) can prevent crawlers from reaching your content. Make sure redirects are set up correctly and avoid long redirect chains.

How search engines work with Rellify

Let Rellify help boost your search visibility. With a custom Relliverse™, you can leverage AI tailored to your niche to find the right topics, use the right keywords, and answer the right questions. Ready to get started? Contact a Rellify expert today to find out how you can revolutionize your content processes and create content that gets better results.

How to Use Competitor Keyword Analysis to Boost Your SEO

What are your competitors publishing on their website these days?

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While focusing exclusively on your own web content might seem like the best way to stay relevant, there's a lot to be said for keeping tabs on the competition. A huge part of a robust marketing strategy is making sure you're covering all your bases. Sure, you can visit their site and take a peek at the UX design and get a general feel for their on-page SEO, but the most useful information comes from the keywords themselves. Let's take a look at all the ways you can use a competitor keyword analysis to gain a competitive edge for your content needs.

What is a competitor keyword analysis?

A competitor keyword analysis is a process of examining the keywords that your competitors are targeting in their online content and SEO strategies. The goal is to understand which search terms and long-tail keywords your competitors are using to attract visitors, rank in search engine results, and drive traffic to their websites. Also known as a "keyword gap analysis," this helps you identify opportunities and threats in your own SEO strategy. A competitor keyword analysis can lead to a boost in your SEO when you successfully identify high-value keywords that your competitors are ranking for, then target similar terms with your own optimized content.

How do I perform a competitor keyword analysis?

It's pretty straightforward — most of what you'll do in a competitor keyword analysis is the same as what you'd do in your own content analysis, with just a few more steps.

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Identify competitors. Determine who your main competitors are in your industry or niche. These can be direct competitors (offering similar products or services) or indirect competitors (which offer different products or services but still compete for the attention and resources of the same target audience).

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Use keyword research tools. Rellify, as well as tools from Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz and others, can help you gather data on the keywords your competitors are ranking for. Check for metrics like:

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• Search volume. The number of searches for a particular keyword.
• Keyword difficulty. How competitive it is to rank for that keyword.
• Ranking position. What position their keywords are ranking for on SERPs.

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Content analysis. Review the type of content your competitors are creating around these keywords. Are they blog posts, landing pages, or product descriptions? Evaluate how well their content aligns with the targeted keywords. Is there a more appropriate or effective way you could incorporate the keywords in your own content, providing a better user experience?

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Opportunity identification. When you look at all facets of their content and keywords, search for opportunities to outperform them. Are there words with lower competition or a higher relevance to your audience? Take note of any gaps that you can fill.

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Strategy adjustment. The overarching goal here is to boost your SEO and user experience with specific keyword opportunities you glean from insights. Based on your findings, take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Do you need to pivot your entire content strategy, or can you just make some tweaks? Adjust to capitalize on opportunities, address weaknesses, and set your brand apart.

After the competitor analysis, create your content

We've mentioned "filling in the gaps" in your competitions' content and using your insights for content optimization. But what exactly needs to happen with the insights you glean from your research?

Select target keywords

Choose keywords that are relevant to your audience and have a good balance of search volume and competition. Focus on those keywords where you can provide superior content compared to your competitors. Long-tail keywords (more specific phrases) are a good choice, because they typically have lower competition but high relevance. Here are the key factors to consider when selecting target keywords:

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• Relevance. The keywords should be closely related to your products, services, or platform.
• User search intent. Target phrases with transactional intent first. These are the ones that will attract users who are further along in the buying cycle, increasing the likelihood of converting visits into sales or leads.
• Search volume. Higher search volume often means more potential traffic.
• Keyword difficulty. How competitive is it to rank for the keyword? Be realistic about the likelihood of your content outranking the competition with certain keywords, and how much effort you'll need to put forth to make that happen.

Create a content outline

Develop an outline for your content that will incorporate the chosen keywords naturally. Your content needs a clear structure, with headings that align with (and sometimes incorporate) your target keywords. Break down the main topic into subtopics that cover various aspects of the keyword. Use insights from competitor content to identify additional subtopics or related questions.

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Rellify makes the creation of blog outlines seamless, with a drag and drop feature that allows you to integrate keywords wherever you think they'd best fit.

Develop high-quality content

Your content should be comprehensive and provide more value than competitor content. This is where you're going to use the information you gathered from the analytics on your competitor. Aim to cover the topic thoroughly, addressing common questions and providing actionable insights. High-quality content greatly benefits from a robust backlink profile, with lots of high-value, relevant sites linking back to your pages. This helps establish authority in your brand, one of the key metrics Google uses when ranking pages.

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Also, don't forget to incorporate elements that boost user engagement, such as visuals (images, infographics), multimedia (videos, podcasts), and interactive elements (quizzes, tools).

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Rellify is the platform many companies trust to develop content strategies, create content, and deliver measurable results. With a Relliverse™, you can have a customized AI subject-matter expert that shows your team exactly where you need to focus to get your content on page one of SERPs.

Optimize the on-page SEO elements

It's not enough to have all the right keywords in the body of your text. Optimization means strategically incorporating the keywords into every facet of the publication.

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• Title tag and meta description. Craft a compelling title that includes the primary keyword. Make sure it is descriptive and within the recommended length (50-60 characters). The meta description should also include the target keyword and encourage clicks from curious readers. Aim for 150-160 characters.
• Headers and subheaders. Use your primary and secondary keywords in headers (H1, H2, H3) to structure the content and make it easier to scan.
• URL structure. Keep URLs short, use hyphens to separate words, and include target keywords. The URLs should be user-friendly and easy to understand.
• Alt text. Use descriptive and relevant keywords, avoid keyword stuffing, and make sure the text accurately represents the image content.
• Links. There are two different kinds, internal and external. With internal, you're linking to other relevant pages on your website to improve navigation and provide additional context. With external, you're citing authoritative sources and linking to high-quality external content to add credibility and provide further information.
• Page speed. This is how quickly the content on your webpage loads and becomes visible to users. It directly impacts both user experience and search engine rankings.  

Evaluate and adjust

Once you've published your optimized, relevant content made from expert research, keep an eye on how well it performs. Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to monitor the performance based on metrics like organic traffic, bounce rate, click-through rate (CTR) and keyword rankings. If you have a social media presence, promote your content with intriguing excerpts and insights, linking back to the content so users can click through.

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Based on performance data, make adjustments to your content to improve its relevance and effectiveness toward conversion rates. Don't forget to update it regularly to keep it fresh and aligned with current trends.

Let Rellify help your brand knock out the competition

When it comes to leveraging content marketing insights from your top competitors, Rellify is the tool you need to make it happen. With Rellify, you can make data-driven strategic decisions based on a custom-AI subject-matter expert trained on your relevant focus topics. You can find out what topics and keywords are already ranking within your specific niche, so you can build a content strategy that'll drive organic traffic, get more clicks, and turn interested readers into valuable customers.

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Want to really see what Rellify can do? Hop on a call with one of our experts to find out how Rellify can revolutionize your content process and results.

When you're building a content plan for digital marketing, you want to search high and low for the perfect topics and keywords that will resonate with your target audience. Fortunately, keyword extraction is a process that can help. In this article, we'll take a look at the operations behind this type of analysis, and how it's used in the context of content creation and, in particular, how it can be used with social media.

What is keyword extraction?

Keyword extraction is a form of data mining that involves identifying the most relevant words or phrases from user-generated content. In the context of social media, keyword extraction is performed on the content of platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others. Once these words are identified, content analysis is performed to simplify, summarize, and classify the content.

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Keyword extraction can involve supervised learning,  which requires labeled data to train models that can predict or classify keywords based on features extracted from the text. Conversely, it can involve unsupervised learning, in which no labeled data is required. Unsupervised learning methods rely on statistical and linguistic features to identify keywords based on their frequency and importance within the text.

Techniques and tools for keyword extraction

First comes a bit of data preprocessing. This is the preparation and cleaning of raw data to improve the quality and accuracy of the extraction process. We'll look at the processes first, and then the tools you can use to employ them.

Data preprocessing in keyword extraction from social media

Your first task is eliminating irrelevant characters, symbols, and formatting issues (e.g., HTML tags, special characters) from the text. All of the words should be in the correct case, too.

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Now, you're ready for tokenization, where the text is broken into individual words or tokens. This helps when it comes to analyzing the frequency and importance of each term.  

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Filter common words (e.g., "and," "the," "is") that don't carry significant meaning in the context of keyword extraction. These are known as "stop words" and can clutter the analysis.

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Reduce words to their base or root form (e.g., "running" to "run") through stemming or lemmatization. This helps in treating different forms of a word as the same term, improving the accuracy of keyword extraction. Synonyms or variations of terms should be merged to ensure that different representations of the same concept are considered as a single keyword.

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Exclude non-textual elements like images, videos, or other media types that do not contribute to the textual analysis. The data should be in a uniform format, which can be especially important for numerical data if it's involved in the text analysis.

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Finally, segment long texts into meaningful units or chunks, which can help in more accurate keyword extraction by focusing on specific sections or themes.

NLP tools for running text analytics on social media text

Now you're ready to do some analysis. Natural language processing tools are crucial for analyzing and extracting insights from the vast and diverse texts generated on social media platforms. These are the tools you can use to efficiently process unstructured data. They employ tasks such as semantic analysis, noise reduction, trend detection, and keyword extraction, which are crucial for understanding user behavior and adjusting engagement strategies.

Statistical methods

• Term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). Measures the importance of a term in a document relative to its frequency in the entire corpus.
• Frequency analysis. Counts occurrences of terms or phrases to determine their relevance.

Linguistic approaches

• Part-of-speech tagging. Identifies nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., to extract meaningful words.
• Named entity recognition (NER). Detects names of people, places, organizations, and other specific entities.

Machine learning models

• Topic modeling. Uses algorithms to identify themes within the text, then clusters the data by main topics and subtopics.
• Deep learning. Employs neural networks to capture complex patterns and contextual information.

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Some organizations combine statistical, linguistic, and machine learning approaches to improve accuracy. It all depends on your goals and bandwidth.

What are some challenges that come with keyword extraction from social media?

Keyword extraction from social media presents several distinct challenges that stem from the unique nature of social media content.

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One major issue is the informal and varied language used, including slang, abbreviations, and unconventional grammar. This linguistic diversity can make it difficult to accurately identify and extract meaningful keywords. Just think of how quickly nonsensical catch-phrases and ear-worms enter and exit our online lexicon.

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Social media texts are also pretty noisy, with a high volume of irrelevant, redundant, or off-topic content that can obscure valuable information. You'll often find bots or swarms of trolls that throw off the statistical significance of certain texts or phrases by spamming with (often inappropriate or nonsensical) posts.

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Another challenge is the context sensitivity of keywords. Words and phrases can have different meanings depending on their context, complicating the task of extraction and requiring sophisticated algorithms to sort out through sentiment analysis. Furthermore, the rapid and dynamic nature of social media means that trends and topics can shift quickly, requiring keyword extraction systems to be both timely and adaptable.

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The sheer volume of data generated on social media platforms also presents scalability issues, making it hard to process and analyze large datasets efficiently. Addressing these challenges requires a combination of advanced natural language processing techniques, machine learning models, and real-time processing capabilities.

Applications

Keyword extraction is an important step in lots of different processes, including:

Social media monitoring

Brands and organizations use keyword extraction to monitor mentions and conversations on social networks. By identifying trending topics and popular keywords, marketers can tailor their campaigns to align with current interests and preferences. This helps in creating more relevant and engaging advertisements.

Competitor analysis

By extracting keywords related to competitors, businesses can gain insights into their rivals’ strategies and performance, helping them to position themselves more effectively in the market. Rellify can provide expert competitive analyses. With a custom Relliverse™, we use deep machine learning to find topics and keywords that are already resonating with audiences in your specific industry or niche. That way, you can create the right content for the right people, bringing better results.  

Content curation

By relying on keyword extraction, and subsequent analysis of keywords related to user interests and interactions, you can build a content plan that's perfectly tailored to maximize your user engagement. Rellify can help with this, too. By providing data visualization, cluster analysis, and lots of other helpful AI-powered data analytics, you can find the right topics that will maximize your ROI.

Which NLP tools are best for social media text analysis?

Fortunately, there's no shortage of tools that can help with information extraction from social media. Check out the different features and interface with each solution, and find one that best matches your goals and preferences. Here are a few examples of popular tools.

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• NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit). NLTK provides a comprehensive suite of text processing libraries and resources, including tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, and text classification. Its highly customizable and includes lots of different linguistic resources and tools for different text analysis tasks, making it suitable for in-depth analysis.
• BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). BERT is a transformer-based model developed by Google that excels in understanding context and relationships in text. Its ability to capture nuanced meanings and context makes it highly effective for sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and understanding complex social media interactions.
• RapidMiner. RapidMiner is a data science platform that includes tools for text mining and sentiment analysis with a user-friendly interface. Its visual interface and integration capabilities make it accessible for non-programmers and useful for quickly building and deploying text analysis workflows.

How Rellify uses keyword extraction

Social media is just one way to find out what your target audience is talking about in their online communities. Search engines are another important focus, especially for B2B and B2C marketers.

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At Rellify, we focus on SEO, using deep machine learning models to process large sets of data that are relevant to your industry or niche. Keyword extraction is just one piece of the puzzle, and the rest is a breeze with a custom Relliverse. If you're ready to experience 10x the returns on your SEO efforts with 10x less effort, contact an expert at Rellify today for a free demo.

What's in a name? Well, for search engines, it's complicated. While we, as humans, have a naturally nuanced understanding of language, search engines need a little extra help sorting things out. Let's take a look at one example: the mechanics of named entity recognition. It's the mechanism used by search engines to determine what on earth we, as humans, are trying to say.

What is named entity recognition?

Named entity recognition (NER), sometimes called entity chunking or entity extraction, is a component of information retrieval in natural language processing (NLP). It involves identifying and classifying key parts of a text into predefined categories such as people, organizations, locations, dates, and other specific groups.

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For example, in the sentence "NASA launched the Mars Rover on July 30, 2021, from Cape Canaveral," NER would identify:

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• "NASA" as an organization
• "Mars Rover" as a specific project or mission name
• "July 30, 2021" as a date
• "Cape Canaveral" as a location

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This type of recognition helps in categorizing and extracting relevant information from text for better analysis and understanding.

What is the role of NER in search engine algorithms?

Named entity recognition (NER) is crucial to search algorithms because it helps to improve the textual understanding of bots and the relevance of search results. When you consider the capabilities of AI in contrast to human understanding, it's easy to see how the ambiguity and nuances of language can make categorization difficult — and necessary. Look at this sentence:

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China (group of athletes) won 48 gold medals at the 2008 Olympics in China (location).

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NER enables computers to understand that the same word used twice in one sentence can have different meanings: a group of athletes who share a nationality and a geographic location.

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If you went to Google and asked, "how many gold medals did China win at the 2008 Olympics?" Google wouldn't be scratching its head wondering how a location could win a medal in diving. Instead, NER allows the Google algorithms to know that you're asking about how many gold medals the athletes representing China won at the 2008 Olympics in China.

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Now that you have an example, here’s how NER further contributes to search engine algorithms:

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• Better natural language understanding. NER helps search engines identify and categorize key people, places, and organizations in web content. By recognizing these entities, search engines can better understand the context and subject matter of a page through deep learning, leading to more accurate indexing and retrieval.
• Improved query matching. When users enter search queries, NER helps search engines match those queries with relevant content by identifying and interpreting the named entities in both the query and the indexed pages. NER also helps search engines understand the context and user intent in which named entities are mentioned. This improves the ability to differentiate between entities with similar names. Another term for this is "semantic search."
• Rich snippets and structured data. Search engines use NER to improve the display of search results with rich snippets and structured data. By recognizing entities like products, events, and organizations, search engines can present additional details such as reviews, ratings, or event dates directly in the search results, adding value to the results.
• Content categorization. Search engines use NER to categorize content more effectively. By identifying and tagging entities, search engines can organize content into relevant categories and topics, which helps improve content recommendations and personalization.
• Text summarization. NER enables text summarization to focus on the most important entities and interactions so it can capture the core factual content of the text, rather than just the keywords. NLP tools like GPT and Google's Gemini use this method of text processing.

How does NER work?

We're so glad you asked.

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The process begins with preprocessing, where the text is cleaned and prepared for analysis. This involves removing unnecessary characters, correcting typos, and sometimes normalizing text.

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Next, the text is tokenized, meaning it is broken down into smaller units like words or phrases. Tokenization helps analyze the structure and meaning of the text more effectively. In the sentence,  "John Lennon co-founded the Beatles," it would be split into tokens, "John," "Lennon," "co-founded" and "Beatles."

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Next, the NER system applies feature extraction. This step involves identifying and creating features or characteristics of the text that might be relevant for recognizing named entities. Features can include part-of-speech tags, word shapes, or even surrounding context. In this case, it would be the capital 'L' in Lennon and 'B' in Beatles, which indicates that these are proper nouns.

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Now, we're at the core of NER: entity classification. At this stage, the system uses pre-trained models, which may be based on machine learning algorithms or deep learning networks, to classify each token or sequence of tokens into predefined categories like "Person," "Organization," or "Location." In this case, "John Lennon" would be classified as "person" and the Beatles, an "organization."

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Once the entities are classified, the system proceeds to post-processing. This step involves refining and validating the results to ensure accuracy. It may include resolving ambiguities, such as distinguishing between a person's name and a common noun. This kind of quality control prevents "Beatles" from being classified as group of insects instead of talented rock stars.

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Finally, the system outputs the recognized entities along with their categories, making it easier for users to extract meaningful information from the text. Thanks to NER, you'll receive a wealth of information from a search engine about a group of talented young men from Liverpool who formed one of the most popular bands of all time.

How can I use NER to improve my SEO?

Understanding NER gives you a better grasp of how search engines assess your content and generate SERPs. Your best option is leveraging the insights gained from NER to improve content relevance and quality, creating a better user experience on your website. Here are some more specific strategies to help you incorporate NER into your content strategy and SEO efforts:

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• Optimize for specific entities.  Do some content marketing research. Are there specific companies, products, or locations that are big players in your industry? Make sure that your content includes these entities naturally in the text.
• Create targeted content. Create content around topics that are already doing well in your industry. This should help you align your content with what users and search engines find valuable. Rellify is the expert in content optimization, using deep machine learning to cluster topics and develop keywords that will naturally rank well on SERPs.
• Improve your technical SEO. Include relevant entities in your metadata (title tags, meta descriptions, and headers). This can improve the relevance of your pages for specific queries related to those entities. You should also implement structured data (schema markup) for entities identified through NER.
• Internal linking. Identify important entities in your content and use them to create internal links to related pages on your site. This helps search engines understand the context and relationships between your pages, improving your site's SEO.
• Voice search optimization. Voice search often involves questions about specific entities. Use NER to identify common entities and incorporate them into content designed to answer voice search queries. This improves your chances of being featured in voice search results.

Let Rellify use NER to boost your returns

Rellify is no stranger to the value of NER and natural language processing. We strategically use it in the context of deep learning to better understand your brand and your audience. If you're ready for a content revamp, or looking for ways to boost your digital marketing returns, a custom Relliverse™ from Rellify is the way to go. With a Relliverse™, you can use artificial intelligence with deep machine learning to cluster topics, find keywords, and build content that's relevant and naturally ranks well on search engine results pages. Ready to find out more? Schedule a brief demo with one of our experts today!

Aug. 28 – Rellify Inc., the Virginia-based SaaS content marketing company, ranks third in the Best of Technology Award - an international competition - in the category AI Product Innovation. Rellify is considered the world's leading developer of enterprise AI-as-a-service software platforms that cover the entire end-to-end content development process.

Enterprise-specific vertical AI models

Rellify's flagship product, the Relliverse, uses company-specific vertical AI models to provide its users with unique insights into market-specific content trends and performance metrics. The platform enables companies to significantly accelerate the entire content development process, from ideation to publication - while ensuring that every piece of content is both relevant and engaging.

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Peter Kraus, CEO of Rellify, was delighted about the repeated award: “After taking first place in the Marketing & Sales category last year, third place in the AI Product Innovation category is a further confirmation of our work,” said Kraus. “Our team has worked hard to create a solution that enables marketers to use AI where it brings the greatest benefit - in content strategy and curation. This enables our customers to optimally serve the natural language needs of their target groups. The Relliverse helps companies to master the challenges of content creation precisely and efficiently and stands out from the competition through the insights gained and the high level of efficiency.”

Combination of advanced topic analysis and visual performance comparisons

The Relliverse combines in-depth topic analysis with user-friendly visual performance comparisons and allows users to filter and save views to optimize data analysis. This comprehensive approach improves content strategy and enables marketers to identify relevant topics in a targeted and efficient manner. In addition, the platform's robust article management offers seamless organization and filtering of content, further simplifying the creation and publishing process.
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Jürgen Kranz, CTO of Rellify, highlights the practical benefits of the platform: “The Relliverse was developed to solve three key problems that content marketing experts face today: First, it provides deep, customer-specific insights that cannot be covered by generic AI models such as ChatGPT. Second, these insights are immediately actionable, so that our clients can focus on the most relevant topics and keywords. And third, our AI-powered Relliverse ensures that content creation is both cost-effective and brand-true.”

Redefining the boundaries of digital content creation

Third place at the Best of Technology Award in the AI Product Innovation category underlines Rellify's commitment to redefining the boundaries of digital content creation. By focusing on delivering high-quality and relevant content, Relliverse helps content teams avoid information overload and misinformation, while fostering a more credible and trustworthy online ecosystem.

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Rellify's successes and ongoing innovations continue to have a significant impact on numerous industries. Rellify's solutions not only help companies create better content, but also ensure that it resonates with target audiences, ultimately increasing engagement and success in the digital world.

Best of Technology in Marketing and Sales

Rellify already won the Best of Technology Award from WirtschaftsWoche in the Marketing & Sales category in 2023. This year's award shows that Rellify continues to be a leader in innovation in content intelligence, offering its customers both high added value and maximum flexibility.

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For more information about Rellify and its cutting-edge solutions, visit rellify.com.

Contact: Rellify Inc.
Email: info@rellify.com
Phone: 628-228-6230
Website: www.rellify.com

By Jayne Schultheis — The ethics of white hat/black hat SEO are worth exploring as search engines continuously assess the efforts of content creators who try to "cut through the red tape" of optimization. The ethics of SEO are complicated, but important to keep in mind as you build your content marketing strategy. Let's look at both ethical and unethical SEO techniques, and the types of returns you can expect from each.

What are white hat SEO techniques?

White hat techniques refer to legitimate and ethical SEO strategies used to improve a website’s search engine ranking.

Examples of white hat techniques

These techniques are in line with the guidelines set by search engines like Google, aiming for sustainable and long-term success.

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• Quality content creation. Develop high-quality, relevant, and valuable content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience. This includes well-researched articles, engaging blog posts, and informative videos.
• Keyword research and optimization. Identify relevant keywords and incorporate them naturally into your content, titles, headings, and meta descriptions to improve visibility in search results. This is one of Rellify's secret weapons. With AI-driven tools, Rellify is able to find unique topics and keywords within your particular niche that will naturally rank well in search engines.
• On-page SEO. Optimize individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic. This includes proper use of HTML tags (like title tags and meta descriptions), optimizing images with alt text, improving page load speed, and implementing a mobile-friendly design.
• Technical SEO. Does the website meet technical requirements for search engines? This involves improving site architecture, optimizing XML sitemaps, fixing broken links, and maintaining proper use of redirects.
• Earn quality backlinks. Earn links from reputable and relevant websites through outreach, guest posting, and creating valuable content that naturally lends itself to link-building.
• User experience (UX) optimization. Improve the overall user experience on your website by making sure it's easy to navigate, visually appealing, and provides clear calls to action. A good UX can reduce bounce rates and increase engagement.
• Local SEO. Claim and optimize your Google My Business listing. Encourage local reviews and make sure that your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information is consistent across all local directories.
• Social media engagement. An active social media presence can help drive traffic to your website, engage with your audience, and build brand awareness. While social signals themselves may not directly impact SEO, social media can still help increase visibility as another form of online presence.

What are black hat SEO techniques?

Black hat techniques in SEO are unethical and manipulative strategies used to artificially boost a website’s search engine ranking.

Examples of black hat SEO

These methods violate search engine guidelines and can lead to severe SEO risks and penalties, including de-indexing, lowered search visibility, loss of organic traffic, or a ban from search engine results.

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• Keyword stuffing. This is overloading a web page with keywords or phrases in an unnatural way to try and manipulate search rankings. It  often results in awkward, unreadable content.
• Cloaking. You present different content to search engines than what you're presenting to users. This may be done to deceive the search engine into ranking the page higher.
• Invisible text and links. Some sneaky web designers set the text to match the background color or use very small font sizes. Users can't read it, but search engines can. This is usually done to include more keywords or backlinks without them being visible to users.
• Link farms. Link farming is the process of creating or participating in networks of low-quality websites that link to each other to artificially inflate the number of backlinks to a site. These links are not earned naturally and are often irrelevant.
• Paid links. When you buy or sell links with the intent of manipulating search engine rankings, search engines like Google view it as a violation of their guidelines.
• Content scraping. This is the practice of copying content from other websites and republishing it as your own. This can lead to duplicate content issues and is considered theft of intellectual property. With the proliferation of AI-generated content, this is a practice that's rampant, as most generative AI is produced from content scraped from other websites. This is why fact-checking and humanizing any AI-generated text is so important to your brand credibility.
• Doorway pages. This is when you create multiple pages optimized for specific keywords that lead to a single destination, providing a poor user experience.
• Negative SEO. Some websites try to harm a competitor's site by building spammy backlinks to it or employing other tactics to get it penalized by search engines. Don't do it — you're better than that!
• Entirely AI-generated content. When you use software like OpenAI to create large volumes of low-quality content quickly, you're signaling to both readers and search engines that you're not actually an expert in your field. Experts write content that's unique.

What to do if you've been penalized for using "Black hat techniques"

Noticeable drops in organic traffic or search engine rankings can indicate that you have been penalized. Check Google Search Console for any notifications that indicate a manual action or penalty. Google often provides specific details about the type of penalty and the reasons behind it.

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Conduct a website audit and look for the types of "black hat" issues and strategies we mentioned earlier.

Address the issues

If you have acquired unnatural or spammy backlinks, use the Google Disavow Tool to indicate which links should not be considered. Reach out to webmasters to request removal of harmful links if possible. Correct or remove any hidden text, doorway pages, or other deceptive practices.

Update your content strategy

Shift to creating high-quality, valuable, and original content that adheres to SEO best practices. Work toward ethical SEO that follows search engine guidelines such as proper keyword usage, on-page optimization, and quality link-building. Focus on user experience, too, including site usability, load speed, mobile responsiveness.

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The sooner you change course, the better your chances of avoiding reputation damage. Playing by the rules may be time-consuming and slow to show results, but it’s still your best bet in building an authoritative and enduring web presence. 

Submit a reconsideration request

If you’ve received a manual penalty, prepare a reconsideration request through Google Search Console. In your request, detail the issues, provide evidence of the steps you've taken to rectify the issues, and show a genuine commitment to adhering to SEO compliance and best practices going forward. Don't worry — it's not the end of the world. Recovery from penalties might take some time, and maybe a few algorithm updates, but you'll most likely bounce back from any algorithmic penalty or traffic loss.

Let Rellify help get your SEO on track

Avoiding black hat techniques and focusing on long-term SEO strategy centered on authoritative content is your best bet for boosting organic growth. At Rellify, we're committed to white hat SEO. We help our clients create relevant, optimized, and well-researched content that naturally ranks well on search engines. And with a state-of-the-art Relliverse,™ you can leverage custom AI to find the right topics, use the right keywords, and answer the right questions. Ready to find out more? Schedule a quick demo with one of our experts today.

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By Dan Duke — To get top results from content creation and content marketing, it pays to direct your content toward the specific people who will be the most interested in it. The best way to do that as you plan, create, and publish content is to consider the customer journey map that your target audience follows.

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‍Creating your own customer journey map can pay big dividends. It helps you figure out how a shopper becomes a customer and then, ideally, an advocate who creates more customers. Once you understand that path, or paths, you can figure out how to make it as easy as possible for more customers to follow.

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Here’s a look at how to use the customer journey concept to make smart decisions about your content marketing efforts — decisions that will affect not only your brand, but also your bottom line.

What is the customer journey?

The customer journey is every step a customer takes to achieve a goal with a company. A typical journey would begin with the customer gaining awareness of the business and end with post-purchase messages from the company, like a thank you note. But the journey also could involve joining a loyalty program or signing up for a newsletter.

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Have you ever dealt with a company that seemed to make it hard for you to buy something, or at least didn’t much care if you did or not? Did that make you want to skip that brand and check out its competitors? Or perhaps after you made a purchase, the company did things to sour the customer experience and make it unlikely that you would recommend it to your friends, such as hounding you with texts, emails, and social media posts?

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Those examples of negative customer journeys show why mapping can be a valuable exercise.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping creates a visual aid to help the members of a business understand their customers’ experiences. It’s a way to determine customer motivation, the key interactions that can result in a sale, and the points of friction that might drive away business.

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‍Creating such a map is a complex undertaking that requires goal-setting, research, open internal communication, and follow-through. You might find it necessary to chart maps for different parts of your operation because the interactions with your customers are so varied and complicated, and your goals are multi-faceted.

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Start by having a clear business goal in mind. Examples of goals are:

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• Encourage consumers to refer my business to others.
• Assign the right personnel to key touchpoints.
• Keep people from bouncing out of my website before I make a sale.

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Many samples of customer journey mapping are available on the internet. Keep your goals in mind to help you decide which is right for you.

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The important thing is that the people in the business think hard about its customers. Who are they? What drives them? What do they see when they look at your business? Methodically consider every step they take, everyone they interact with, every marketing message they see and hear.

The phases of the customer journey

Before working on a journey map, we need to consider the phases of the customer journey. Different experts define them differently. Many marketers identify four stages:

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• Awareness stage. A customer begins searching for the answer to a problem and encounters your brand for the first time.
• Consideration stage. The consumer researches your brand and your competitors. He or she is visiting your website, review sites, and other informational sites, examining ads and marketing material, and perhaps visiting stores.
• Decision stage. The consumer is done researching and is ready to commit.
• Retention. Your customer is evaluating his or her experience with you and evaluating what you do to create brand loyalty through customer service.

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Some sources identify five stages: Awareness, acquisition, adoption, assimilation, and advocacy. A similar five-stage way of looking at it is: Awareness, education, sample, purchase, and refer.

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The important thing is to use the stages as a frame for looking at each step of your customer journey. If your goal, for example, is getting the right personnel assigned at key touchpoints, you should look at how each stage of the consumer journey can contribute to that goal.

The role of content in creating customers

The customer journey map can be a big help when you are developing a content distribution plan. It will help you create content that speaks to your customers’ specific needs as they make decisions about a purchase.

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You can also use the sales funnel model, which can be summarized in a simple format as: Awareness, Consideration, Intention, Conversion. It is not a coincidence that it closely resembles the basic model of the customer journey. At each stage, the funnel narrows, representing the smaller number of consumers making it from one stage to the next. Content marketing can drive sales by increasing the number of people who travel all the way through the sales funnel for a complete the customer journey. This leads to a key question about the customer journey: How does your content creation strategy address each customer journey stage?

Awareness

For this stage, create content that describes your business or product and its value and benefits. Distribute it as widely as you can across as many channels as you can to build brand awareness. You’re trying to offer solutions to customers’ needs or problems. The content format used most often here is the blog post. This is the stage most often targeted by businesses using content marketing. You can best market your business by blogging about your product or service and being sure to use SEO best practices to put your content at the top of search engine results. Develop social media posts, checklists, how-to videos, tip sheets, ultimate guides, and other tools to tell potential consumers exactly what your business offers.

Consideration

To drive people from awareness to this next phase, use your knowledge of your customers’ problems, concerns and desires to develop intriguing, knowledgeable, welcoming content that directly addresses those issues. This is the stage to showcase your brand and build a relationship — one of trust and caring — with the customer. The tools that best fit this stage are marketing via email; remarketing (reminding them of their prior interest in your business); offering a product comparison guide, a free trial, a consultation, or a coupon; and using social media. Use a call to action in the content to promote lead generation. For example, ask people to download a guide or sign up for a weekly newsletter.

Decision

At this next stage, the customer decides to buy a product or service. By understanding the pain points and problems that customers are trying to solve, content can show them that you have the best solutions. This is where sales outreach comes in. End your blog post with a powerful call to action to encourage them to "call today for an appointment" or "book a meeting with your sales department." Use the expertise and authority of your content to lock in reader engagement. At this stage, it's good to use email, remarketing, and social media.

Retention

The quality of your product will be paramount here, but remembering the customer journey in your outreach can make a major difference. You want the purchasing and delivery experiences to be quick and easy. Make sure the UX design (or user experience) on your site is optimized. Once someone becomes a customer, he or she can become an advocate for your business, as well. When you strengthen your customer relationship after the sale, you can engender a lifetime customer and advocate. Make it easy for new customers to review your product online. At this stage, content like guides, FAQs, and listicles can help people get off to a great start with their new purchase. Set up a landing page that invites people to sign up for a loyalty program. ‍Email, remarketing, and live chat/chatbots are useful here, too.

The path to successful customer journey mapping

There are many ways to develop a customer journey map and many formats for them. Hubspot, a leading developer, and marketer of software for marketing, sales, and customer service, lists an eight-point process for journey mapping. Many other sources list six crucial steps:

Research

Without data, journey mapping will do little more than confirm the mindset inside your company. Now is the time to get customer feedback. Learn about the decision-making process of your customers and the ones who go to your competitors.

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‍Interview customers directly and in-depth, if possible. If you can’t, talk to the workers who deal directly with consumers. If you use affiliate marketing partners, get them on board as well. Conduct surveys and questionnaires. Send them to customers by email. (A small reward will boost participation.) Brick-and-mortar businesses can survey visitors onsite.

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Look at your social media analytics and your website’s usage metrics. Perform a Google Analytics goal flow report and behavior flow report, and run user testing with your product. You need the answers to questions like this:‍

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• What problems are potential customers trying to solve?
• How did they find your website or company?
• How long do they typically spend on your website?
• Was the site or app easy to navigate? Did they ever need customer support? How helpful was it?
• What competitors did they look at?
• What sets your brand apart from others? Why did they choose (or reject) your product?
• Have they ever gone to your website to buy something, then decided not to? Why? What is your conversion rate?
• What do they like about your company? Do they find things that frustrate them? Can they suggest improvements?‍

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Identify personas

Use the research to identify your core customers. Go all-in to develop buyer personas. Give them names and attach a photo to these blends of demographics (like gender, income, age, occupation) and behavioral profiles (including shopping habits and motivations).

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‍If you are a B2B company, compile similar profiles on the businesses that matter most to your sales. Each buyer persona will have a different type of customer journey. It’s recommended that you focus on the one or two personas that have the most impact on your business.

Find the touchpoints and pain points

A touchpoint occurs any time a consumer interacts with your brand. Some touchpoints, like referrals and online research, are not even under your control and occur before the consumer has any direct contact with you. They can happen online, in person, over the phone, or through your content marketing efforts.

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First, identify the phases or stages that best describe the customer experience (CX) at your business. Consider each persona as they go through each phase of the journey. This mapping process is best served by involving as many people from your business as possible. No one person can think through all the variations that come into play here.‍

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To help find touchpoints, imagine that you are a customer and must figure out what to do if you want to find a product or service that you need, or have decided to buy something from your company, or need help and have questions after the purchase.

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Pain points, also called friction points, are just what they sound like. Expectations are not being met. The consumer journey is rocky here, and your customers are frustrated. Maybe shipping prices are too high. The wait times in your call center are too long. The login process is too demanding. Pain points push buyers toward your competition. Analyze how your customers are reacting to them and what you can do to smooth the path.

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You might be surprised by how many pain points your research turns up throughout the phases of the journey. It might be best to focus on the most important one or two to attack.

Take the journey yourself

Researching, brainstorming, and mapping are valuable exercises. Now take what you have discovered and go on the customer journey yourself. Test the findings by pretending that you are a customer and go through every phase. For example, pretend to be a potential customer searching for a product or service you sell.

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‍If your company doesn’t show up until the second or third page of Google results, you might need a content performance platform like Rellify, which helps companies produce relevant content that naturally ranks high in search engine results.

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‍Have new employees do this exercise as well, because they are able to bring a fresh perspective. This exercise will give you greater insight into the level of pain and frustration your customers are experiencing. It also can help generate ideas about what departments are falling short and what resources you need to fix the problems. The insights gained here make it easier to prioritize, too.

Prioritize and fix

Some touchpoints have more impact than others. Are you seeing a big drop from one phase to another? Are customers finding a nuisance or a roadblock that stops a purchase?

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‍The main goal is conversion, getting a response to your call to action that turns a looker into a buyer. Identify the biggest conversion problem and fix it. It can be better to address one touchpoint at a time because it allows you to measure the success of that one change.‍

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A blog post at medium.com recommends setting these priorities: put retention first, followed by getting new customers into your funnel, turning customers into active users, getting them to buy more, and getting them to become advocates for your business.

Revisit and revamp

Customer journey mapping is not a one-and-done exercise. Write into your journey map your plan for regularly reviewing the work, perhaps on a quarterly basis. Identify personnel who are responsible for working through the prioritized list of fixes for the pain points and for measuring the success of the measures taken and the ROI (return on investment).

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‍Keeping the map alive as a work in progress will not only help you find ways to improve results but also be good for morale. No one likes going through a painstaking process like customer journey mapping only to see it fall by the wayside. It also will help your organization nurture a "customer first" approach.

How do you develop content for every stage of the customer journey?

The key is to write to your target audience. ‍Mining your customer data and considering the phases of the customer journey help you determine what types of content can serve as stepping stones.

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Think of your content as signposts on your customers’ journey. And put those signposts in the right places, which are the various channels available to you.

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Shoppers in the Attention and Consideration stages are looking for answers, research, education, resources, and insights. People in the Intention and Conversion stages want to know exactly what it means to be one of your customer. Can you solve their problems? How easily?‍

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A customer journey map can help you create high-quality content. It can be a difficult process, but it can bring you gains in key performance indicators (KPI) such as customer satisfaction, and retention rate.‍ Rellify can help you make data-driven strategic decisions based on a custom-AI subject-matter expert trained on your relevant focus topics — a Relliverse™.

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Our tools will help you identify the right topics, use the right keywords, and answer the right questions. Book a meeting today with Rellify to learn how our content performance platform can help you create and execute a successful marketing strategy.