ryan jones of sapientnitro #sejsummit: the future is today

#SEJSummit@RyanJones

3 Takeaways1. Focus On Searcher Intent

2. Don’t ask “how do I..” ask “what do they..”

3. Don’t React To Change, Leverage It

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com


• Manager SEO & Analytics – SapientNitro• 2006 Time Person of the Year• Chief Evangelism Officer - WTFSEO.com

Photo Credit: Provided by the speaker


Let’s Start At The Beginning



Early Search Engines Focused on Keywords on the page.

20 years later, we still think like this



Then Google and PageRank Came Around…..



…..So SEO Became This



The Customer Journey Is Evolving

Old Model New ModelPhoto Credit: Provided by the speaker


Our Understanding Has Increased


META KeywordsDirectories

Words On Pages

Links

Other Shit Not Relevant To This Presentation

Search Is Evolving TooMachine Learning

Entities



What is Machine Learning?Photo Credit: Provided by the speaker


How Does A Neural Net Work?

x

y

z

Bias

W1

W2

W3

W4

F(x)Hidden layer


Neural Networks Are About Patterns



Neural Networks Rely On Training Sets. Which makes Me Think Of…..

• Human Raters• Live Experiments• Panda• Penguin• Spam Reports


It doesn’t matter how it works.It matters what the inputs are.

• Quality• Relevance• Trust• Speed• Etc.


Go Read Eric Enge’s Post:stonetemple.com/rankbrain-myth-busting/

Also AJ Kohn’s Post:blindfiveyearold.com/rankbrain-survival-guide



Word2Vec, Ngrams, & Query Understanding In Action


What RankBrain Does NOT Do

• Anything with links• Penalize sites• Change any ranking factors about your site.

Google never said it was a “ranking factor” they said it was the “3rd most important signal contributing to results.”

That’s because RankBrain helps understand your query – and better decide what sites are relevant.


Crawling• Discovery• Finding Pages

Indexing• Like a book. List of words on pages.• Paragraph vectors, B+ trees, nofollow, canonical, etc.

Retrieval (relevance)• How relevant is this to my query? • Query Understanding, entities (is jaguar an animal or a car?)

Ranking (Post Retrieval)• Order by pagerank desc limit 10• Penalties, Speed, HTTPS, Mobile Friendly, etc.

How A Search Engine Works

Note: Google doesn’t separate these. This is for

illustration



Let’s Talk About Retrieval & Ranking



• 10 years ago we talked about TF-IDF

• Relevance was measured against the corpus of results.



So Why Wouldn’t Other Factors & Algorithms Work This Way?



“The Future Of Search Is Verbs”

Bill Gates, 2009



Verbs = Intent

Words On

Pages

I Want To…Go somewhereDo SomethingAccomplish A

Task


How We Search Changes



And We Should Leverage That

• HTTPS• AMP• Mobile Friendly• Schema.org


Why We Search Doesn’t ChangeStop trying to give me words on a page.

Give me a solution. Help me accomplish something.



How do we leverage that?Stop Asking:

How Do I Rank For “Keyword?”

What Tricks Can I Use?

Start Asking:

What Would People Search for “Keyword” Find useful? What Are They Trying To Do?

Then Build Something To Help Them


The Big Secret?If you’ve been doing SEO right, machine learning changes nothing!



3 Takeaways1. Focus On Searcher Intent

2. Don’t ask “how do I..” ask “what do they..”

3. Don’t React To Change, Leverage It



Thank You!@RyanJones

Linkedin.com/in/jonesy

Owdy.co/ryanjones

RyanMJones.comWtfseo.com

Publicis.sapient.comPhoto Credit: Shutterstock.com

ryan jones of sapientnitro #sejsummit: the future is today

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