Digital Marketing is always changing.
This is both a good and a bad thing. It’s good because marketers will always be in high demand, provided that they are always learning. And it’s a bad thing because it requires constant learning, trial and error and experiments.
In this post, I show you 3 new technologies to help you keep on top of your game.
TF- IDF Analysis
TF-IDF stands for Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency. As you can probably guess, it has to do with a numerical statistic that determines how important a term to a document in a collection of pages is. In other words, it answers the question of which terms you need to add to your copy.
It’s not actually new in digital marketing, in particular within the SEO niche, it has been around for a while, however, not many SEO consultants have used it or talked about it extensively.
Search engines specifically said TF-IDF is not a ranking factor, however, I have been using it for the last few months on my client with astonishing results in ranking boosts and have also share my case studies at the SEO Summit in March 2021.
There is a process for applying TF-IDF.
First of all, you need to have a post published already on your website targeting a particular keyword. Once, you have determined that that piece of content is not ranking as it should lagging between page 2 to page 10 on SERPs, you can plug in a TF-IDF tool for determining which terms you need to add to your copy.
Finally, just add the suggestions coming from the tool and re-publish the post again. If you have incorporated the suggestions into your copy in a way that seems natural, then you should see ranking improvements.
Python for SEO
Python is an open-source, object-oriented interactive programming language that is interpreted line by line. Used by some of the biggest organisations to perform data analysis and run machine learning models.
Don’t get overwhelmed though, Python is one of those languages that is easy to learn and to apply to SEO. I am not going to teach you Python here, it would require an article on its own, but I am going to show you how to apply it.
In a variety of ways, Python empowers SEO professionals as it not only helps to automate repetitive tasks, but also to extract and analyse massive amounts of data.
In turn, this saves valuable time and enables us to be more successful.
Let’s see a number of selected use cases for Python:
- Get number of indexed pages on multiple sites. Using Python, you can generate a CSV of indexed pages for a list of URLs
- Find keywords cannibalisations using Google Search Console and Python. Cannibalisation is a huge issue in SEO, with Python you can find the pages that compete for the same keyword.
- Web scraping with Python, in other words, selecting information from a page and returning it into a CSV file, for example broken links, prices, headings, words, etc…
Voice search
In 2016, 42 percent of the entire global population used their mobile phones to search for voices. 72% of 2,000 people surveyed by Microsoft reported that they use voice search on their devices on a regular basis in a more recent study in 2019.
The thing is now here, because voice queries require a very specific answer, unlike desktop/mobile searches where the number of responses is up to 10 per page, most queries are long-tail and very long-tail.
You wouldn’t inquire for “car insurance” from Alexa or Siri, but you would type it in to Google to determine your choices. That’s why you become laser-focused on the best answer when using voice search.
This means that in the top 10 standard results, voice searches would be limited in options and include only the first source. Imagine Google or Bing’s voice search with only 1 result.
To the question, then, ‘how can you optimise for voice search?’ Google has specifically said back in 2016 that optimising for Featured Snippets, also known as position ‘0’, will increase your chances to be answered in voice search.
These digital technologies will, without any doubt, play a significant role, even if some of them are still in development.
As you work in marketing, you might want to learn more about those technologies to become more skilled at your work.
*
Luca Tagliaferro is a highly experienced SEO Consultant working for some of the UK’s biggest brands. Nominated by Yahoo! Finance in 2019 as one of the Top 20 Digital Marketing Influencer to follow, Luca is also a contributor to many marketing blogs.
