Category: Google

Best SEO Tips in 2021 Featuring Steve Wiideman

I interviewed Steve Wiideman for the Best SEO tips in 2021 and he delivered some incredible content I'm happy to share with you.

(Be sure to read my blog The Reason Why More People Aren’t Entrepreneurs here).

At A Glance

∎ Learn the magic of SEO after Google's Hummingbird Update

∎ 3 principle-based factors on using Google to increase your sales

∎ BONUS: Get access to a $599 SEO course for FREE

Best SEO Tips in 2021

Trevor: I'd like to hear your thoughts on SEO, with some specific questions I have there. I've SEO'd my LinkedIn profile. It has gotten me a lot of business doing that.

Because people search LinkedIn for stuff and people don't realize, uh I guess I should say business owners don't realize how valuable SEO is on all platforms. Whether it's LinkedIn, or their website, or their YouTube videos or whatnot.

If you could share, maybe top 3 tips for folks that are doing SEO themselves or maybe what they should look for if they want to hire someone that does SEO for them.

Optimize LinkedIn & Identify What Search Results You're Pulling

Steve: Sure you make a great point with LinkedIn. Optimizing your LinkedIn profile is fantastic. But when you optimize all of your social media profiles it can help you with your online reputation management as well.

So when someone does a name search your social profiles are there not just on page but off page getting some links to those profiles pages so google feels that’s the results are the most relevant searches for your name.

Do a google search with your name in quotes and see what appears for your name. Figure out which of those things you own and control and optimize the heck out of them.

Drive links to them from blogs, your friends blogs.

Isolate those things you don’t want to appear so you can get those removed or buried and then isolate things that are neutral that you don’t control. So you know in the mix of things here’s what I control.

Here’s what I can’t and that’s ok and here’s what I want to keep an eye on to go away.

Google SEO Tip #1: Solving for the intent of the user

Do I have the most relevant page to solve what people are looking for?

Steve: This for Organic SEO - a principle based approach:Not just the key words - key words died in the Hummingbird update from Google in 2013

It's about solving for the intent of the user now.

What is it they really want?

They searched for title tag principles because they are trying to get their click-thru-rates up in search results. But what do they want?

Higher CTR? Or Higher keyword rankings?

So when you solve for what they are actually looking for...If someone is searching for cheap flights...ask:

What is it that they really want to do?

They want to save money, they don’t want to pay baggage fees right? They want value.

When you answer what your users really want thru survey:

Through customer support, intake calls whatever you need to do so that your page really solves what your customer wants this takes it to the next level.

Rank Brain - the other big update that sits on top of Humming Bird is trying to understand the meaning of words.

You do need to emphasize search terms that have high search volume when you launch a new page because Google is going to crawl that page, identify those phrases and test you in the search results for them.

Long term it’s how users interact with your listing. So you can hack your way to the top with key words but if other pages are doing a better job of solving what users are looking for and provide more of a delightful experience, long term your rankings will go away.

So that’s #1 looking at your on page, being the most relevant and doing a search for the keyword you want to appear for.

• Study the top pages

• Study the on page

• Study what links are coming into those pages

• Study how many people have curated or quoted from the 1st paragraph on that page

• Use this data to inform on how to optimize your page

Google SEO Tip #2: Optimize Your Off Page Results for Google

Steve: Google in particular started with an algo Larry Page coined as Page Rank. It isn’t where you rank on the page but the algorithm that crawls thru the net looking for info to understand what pages have what meaning and are a good match for a phrase someone searches for in the search results.

They are crawling thru links to get to pages and those links count like votes. Like a sign above the door that says what’s behind the door, so before you walk thru it you read the sign and go oh, this room must be about kitchen.

So google reads the text in the link, then read the page and says oh this page being linked to must be about this topic.

Then they crawl analyze the page for titles, headings, the URL the page name.

They look at all these hidden factors and based on the on page and off page this page might be a good match for this search term.

I’m [Google is] going to test it and 1 out of 100,000 times people are searching for this term if it does good I’ll show it twice for every 100K then every 50K.

Then more often you can see this in Google Search Console

It all stems from how often they hit your page and how many other websites are linking and mentioning your website and your content.

This is just organic results, not Google maps, not video search, we’re talking about specifically Google web search (Google depending on your industry having about 80-90% market share is the search engine we want to pay the most attention to).

So those 2 are 2 of 3 principle-based factors.

1. Am i improving the relevancy and helpfulness of my page over time?

2. Am I improving the visibility and mentions of my page over time?

Google SEO Tip #3: Search Appearance & User Behavior Signals

Steve: And the 3rd thing is search appearance and user behavior signals - how users actually interact with your listing.

And in many cases you can almost eliminate everything on page and off page if you’re already ranking in top results If your page is the most helpful - it will stick there at the top.

It’s really around the user signals that tells Google and other search engines that this listing is the most helpful so I’m going to leave it there on the top until they start choosing another listing more often and staying on that listing.

So our goal is to provide a really click enticing, helpful, maybe really rich result by using some of the different technology available maybe using some reviews to the page so you get stars in the search results.

Maybe having some FAQs section at the bottom of the page that will show up in the search results if you use that FAQ market.

Maybe it’s putting some mark up around your video or images so they shows it as a thumbnail in the mobile search results.

It’s making your listing really stand out so it’s not just 1 of 10 listings that have just a title, description and a URL but instead you have some really rich content in the search results.

Trevor: So it’s using these tools to appear more valuable at a glance.

This speaks to value based marketing,versus hard pitches, deliver value first to engender reciprocity to be viewed as more helpful and enhance word of mouth digitally.

Steve: Now we’re talking about attribution and the whole buyer's journey and you’re right there are some biz owners that get myopic of driving people to just sales content:

"I want to make sure my sales pages are #1 don’t waste your time with all this fluff marketing content just get my personal injury or car accident lawyer page #1 that’s all I want."

But the reality is you can’t make that happen without some of the marketing content because that marketing content attracts links and it helps your wholistic SEO and builds authority if your short summary of the page, that long form:

• How to

• Where to

• Why

• What is

• Strategy

• Tips

• Advice

• Checklist type content...

When it’s out there and it gets linked to that can support that sales page that you want to perform that you want to rank.

So it’s hard sometimes convincing the leadership team that we need to create a really strong content marketing strategy around what our customers are looking for before they are ready to hire us.

Maybe even doing some industry content where we get other sites in the industry to reference some data some case studies some research we did that isn’t already available online.

So I think you’re right I think it’s understanding that buyer journey and addressing each phase of it when the user isn’t at the point of making a purchase or ready to make a decision yet.

Trevor: This would align with influencer marketing and getting shoutouts from people that are already established and things like that.

But I mean this is why you have a blog - you develop an audience you provide all this valuable content.

And it serves a secondary function:

So when you’re giving away information and there’s not a sales pitch there maybe there’s a link where hey if you want to find out more feel free to enter the funnel, essentially, without saying those words.

What also helps with that [content marketing] is: it’s a pre-qualifier.

You don’t have to get low quality leads because people are coming here they are attracted here by the content.

Instead of someone that just saw “hey this is for free” let me click on this. It’s a free deal! And then you get everyone that wants the freebies instead of the people that are more invested for a longer CTV for the lifetime journey of the customer.

Steve: It can be a huge win.

With Meineke car care centers, we did this thing where we didn’t necessarily want our best evergreen content on the blog but that’s where they put it.

The blog for me is about industry news, having a voice in conversations that are happening right now what’s new with the company.

It’s really time sensitive and will get buried in RSS feeds over time.

I like to nest up the content that’s more evergreen that will be just as helpful 3-5 years from now under its appropriate silo.

So I can get those really competitive pages to rank well so I’ll nest them in a URL that’s a sub page of that main page and I might use the blog to link to it so those sites that do take RSS feeds and publish that.

If they consume HTML you might get a link back from it. So it’s still worthwhile to mention in a blog.

So with Meineke they did use the blog. We did one every Tuesday we came up with a list using Conductor Searchlight keyword.

We came up with a list of all the different keywords we thought people were looking for.

Every Tuesday we launched a How-to.

• How-to jumpstart your car battery
• How-to check your engine oil
• What’s the difference between standard and synthetic oil

We did this every single Tuesday.

Every post was optimized to rank with unique pictures we took on sight, sometimes videos, a step-by-step it was a really strong campaign and a lot of that content is still up if you want to look at it.

After 5 months we attracted over 500,000 visits.

I think the most visits we had was was during Coachella which was when people were looking for how to jump start your car battery which I thought was really funny.

So anyway in doing that, what was neat about that campaign wasn’t that we drove that much traffic and earned 200 links to the site in the process.

But because everyone needs an oil change and they did at the time every 90 days they were able to use re-marketing.

So for everyone who visited the website we were able to remarket to them with ads you know $14.99 oil change coupon or something.

So not only did we did we attract links, drive traffic to the site, build brand awareness get a lot of those featured answers that now appear in voice searches since Google Assistant will use featured answers in 70% of its results.

We were also able to drive some of that traffic back to the website using retargeting from Facebook, from Google, from Bing and from there continue to build our list.

We were able to almost quadruple the volume of visitors that are coming to the website just by creating that value that you were just talking about.

Trevor: It sounds like you have enough in your brain to build a course. Do you have a course in SEO?

Steve: Yes

Trevor: Where can people go to find out more information?

Steve: I’d like to give everyone free access to it if you want?

Trevor: Sure!

Steve: It’s at academyofsearch.com

What I decided to do 3 years ago which is actually one of my own personal dreams is to teach. I started teaching at Cal State Fullerton, UC San Diego and Fullerton Community College.

At Cal State Fullerton I was teaching a class on strategic SEO.

I took a lot of that course content that inspired an SEO course we have at Academy of Search - like a 6 week program - it’s a $599 course but your listeners can access it for free.

Just use SEOSTEVE and they can get free access.

Trevor: Is there anywhere else people can go to find out more about you and your services that you’d like to give a shout out to?

Steve: Sure I’m actually all over social. My handle is SEO Steve. But if I’m not responding quick enough our team - we have a team of 9 other search geeks like me, no sales people we just love to help. Especially small businesses, we don’t work with a lot of small businesses.

So any help you need as a small business is all free and something we do to try to help the business community.

Just use the handle the Wiideman pretty much anywhere.

Instagram, Facebook all over the web. If there’s anything we can do to help to solve for a problem, a page isn’t ranking, a competitor is doing something spammy you know whatever it and you’d like us to take a look please do that we like to help wherever we can and hopefully build some great relationships.

Who knows maybe one day you’ll be the next digital marketing manager at the next Sketchers and you’ll remember us.

Trevor: That’s such an awesome thing you’re doing for small businesses there.

Steve: Thank you.

Have you used SEO before? What were the results? Comment below!

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5 Quick SEO Tips – How to Increase Your Search Rank Result

SEO basics: Five tips & best practices to consider for your website

SEO explained

Here is an SEO starter guide for those who want the benefits of search engine optimization without spending hours googling and guessing. Let's get started!

Provide useful product or service information

Step 1: Discover What Your Audience is Googling

If you don’t know what your audience is googling you can’t optimize your site, so here is an easy way to find that out.

Imagine you are one of your customers, and start entering in search terms. It seems pretty easy but you’d be surprised how many people don’t experiment with googling things first.

Use short and meaningful page titles and headings

Let’s say you own an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. Now imagine you’re in San Fran, you’re hungry for some pasta or authentic Italian pizza - what would you google?

* Italian restaurants in San Francisco
* Bay area Italian food
* Best Italian restaurant in the Mission District

You now have some of your first search terms. Are these the best search terms with the highest search volume? Maybe, let’s do some more research.

Include details about your business

a) Find The Commonly Used Keywords For Your Business

Searching Google for Italian restaurants in SF produces many results:

Glancing at the search results you can see key phrases used, “Italian restaurant” and “San Francisco” as well as “Italian food.” The reason why we’re seeing this is because websites are using title tags to rank in search results.

We can also see Italian restaurants appear in “best of” lists for more than one website, which may be a good idea to include somewhere on your website, if you’re the owner of an Italian restaurant.

Check image and video tags

Search engines might not always interpret images or videos in the same way people do, so it’s important to use words to help the search engine understand these items. Make sure you adjust the "alt =" text of your images to reflect the keyword you're targeting.

Use descriptions that your potential customers can relate to

b) Find Out New Ways Your Customers Search for the Same Topic

You’ll want to use a Keyword Explorer tool, there are a few free ones on the net, or you can pay for one on sites like SEM Rush, ahrefs, and moz.com I believe offers a free one after you create a profile on their website.

This is where you'll discover more keywords, rated by their search volume and a few other long-tail keywords which consist of entire phrases versus just one or two words.

Knowing these gives you the sense of how people are searching in different ways for the same thing.

c) Research Related Subjects & Themes in Your Niche

You can increase your search rank results by blogging about topics in your niche, increasing the amount of keywords your site ranks for.

But, this won’t be any good, if you’re just guessing and writing content. I’ve heard of more than one person that complains, “Well I’m producing tons of content but nothing ever happens!”

That’s because you need to produce content that is optimized for search engines based on what words your customers are already using.

Going to forums, Quora, Reddit, Facebook groups and finding out what phases your potential customers are using is a great way to create a word bank to fill your blogs with.

Another pro tip is to find pain points and solve them on your website or IRL for your Italian restaurant in this hypothetical example.

Eg: people complain there's no seating at other Italian restaurants - you add an outside patio area and mention on your site, "Unlike other Italian restaurants that don't have seating you'll always have a spot in our new patio area.

You can even subscribe to podcasts by authority figures in your vertical and write down keywords you hear coming up again and again.

Step 2: Optimize Your Website Pages for Search

Make sure your website looks good on mobile and use the data you’ve found from the previous steps in this article to add those keywords and long-tail phrases to pages on your site.

Always start with a keyword phrase at the beginning of paragraphs and in titles or headings on your website.

You can use free and paid plugins on WordPress to optimize your site even more, like the Yoast SEO plugin.
Step 3: Create Content With Search Intent in Mind

There are 3 main search intents when folks are googling:

Navigational: They’re looking for a specific website, e.g., ‘Italian restaurant’
Informational: Looking to learn more about a specific topic, e.g., ‘Italian restaurants in SF’
Transactional: They’re looking to purchase a specific product/service, e.g., ‘book a table in San Francisco’

Typically, informational searches rank the highest with Google - but research your field and back it up with proof.

Step 4: Design Snappy Clean Short Website URLs

Google’s bots crawl website URLs in addition to content on your site. That being said, you want to make sure you get this one optimized from the get go without changing
it later.

The simpler and topic-based URL you have, the better SEO results you’re going to get. This means no long numbers in your URLs, but short URLs that have a major keyword in it will work best.

eg: /italian-restaurant-SF

Step 5: A Few Bonus SEO Tips

Make sure your website loads fast, and install an SSL certificate, which means your site has an HTTPS instead of HTTP.

What's your niche? Comment below!

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AI Facial Recognition – Has It Gone Too Far?

Right now the future of marketing is in AI - artificial intelligence - which employs systems with the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without programming (read last blog about Woke Capitalism here).

But when is this a violation of user privacy? How much is too much for demographic targeting?

AI-driven algorithms build a mathematical model based on sample data, known as "training data", in order to make predictions or decisions.

The way it’s used today can get pretty intimate about your personal details - especially with facial recognition software.

Machine learning correctly determines a lot about you — for example it can tell if you’ve recently got married, predict your sexual orientation, purchased a new home, whether you’re pregnant and even whether you’re about to quit your job.

Marketers can determine race based on the type of Facebook pages you like. Combine that with facial recognition software - and some scenarios feel like Will Smith in Enemy of the State.

Credit: BBC.com

The Chinese government track minorities such as the Uyghurs using facial recognition.

As Tech Crunch Reports:

“The database processed various facial details, such as if a person’s eyes or mouth are open, if they’re wearing sunglasses, or a mask — common during periods of heavy smog — and if a person is smiling or even has a beard.”

“The database also contained a subject’s approximate age as well as an “attractive” score, according to the database fields.”

“The Chinese government has detained more than a million Uyghurs in internment camps in the past year, according to a United Nations human rights committee. It’s part of a massive crackdown by Beijing on the ethnic minority group. Just this week, details emerged of an app used by police to track Uyghur Muslims.”

The world's largest association of computing professionals,The Association for Computing Machinery, is calling for an "immediate suspension" of the private and governmental use of facial recognition technologies for "technical and ethical reasons."

NBC News reports:

"The technology too often produces results demonstrating clear bias based on ethnic, racial, gender, and other human characteristics recognizable by computer systems," the group's U.S. Technology Policy Committee said in a statement.

"Such bias and its effects are scientifically and socially unacceptable."

"The association acknowledged that facial recognition technology can be "benign or beneficial," but it said its use has "often compromised fundamental human and legal rights of individuals to privacy, employment, justice and personal liberty."

At the end of 2019, researchers for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the Commerce Department, discovered facial recognition algorithms falsely identified African American and Asian faces 10 to 100 times more often than Caucasian faces — a glitch proven with the wrongful arrest of Robert Williams.

It isn’t just the abuse of power from ruling classes that may cause many to raise an eyebrow - it’s also the potential of data leaks to jeopardize vulnerable groups of people targeted by racist or religious persecutors.

Security lapse exposed a Chinese smart city surveillance system

On the flip side, activists have used facial recognition, powered by AI to identify police officers who hide their badge numbers in cases of police brutality.

“For a while now, everyone was aware the big guys could use this to identify and oppress the little guys, but we’re now approaching the technological threshold where the little guys can do it to the big guys,” Andrew Maximov, a developer working on a similar project, told the NYT.

“It’s not just the loss of anonymity. It’s the threat of infamy.”

Credit: www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/

How AI-Driven Facial Recognition Works

Facial recognition is built from proprietary algorithms and has 3 main phases:

Detection, Attribution and Recognition.

Detection locates a face inside a picture.

Attribution maps points on a face using the distance between the eyes, the shape of the jaw line, the space between the nose and mouth. Then it converts this into a string of numbers called a “faceprint”

Recognition is where your identity is associated with the figure in the photo.

AI machines are fed thousands of photos to train the machine to recognize faces, the more diverse the collection of photos are the better the algorithm gets at identifying people in the photo.

A Brief Timeline of Facial Recognition

Facial recognition’s first giant shift to the public limelight was in 2001 with much controversy. In 2001, US law enforcement used facial recognition on crowds at Super Bowl XXXV. Critics accurately described it as a violation of Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

Originally started by Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe who developed a system of data point measurements to classify photos of faces in the 1960s unnamed organizations funded his research that was never publicly published. There is evidence indicating the police were interested from the beginning in facial recognition.

2001 also saw the first widespread police use of the technology with a database operated by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, now one of the largest local databases in the country.

Fast forward to 2008, when Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act went into effect, becoming the first law of its kind in the US to regulate the illegal collection and storage of your biometric information, including photos of faces.

Enter the 2010s which jumpstarted the more modern era of facial recognition. The introduction of neural networks made facial recognition a standard feature.

Three years later in 2011, facial recognition confirmed the identity of Osama bin Laden.

In 2014, Facebook publicly revealed its DeepFace photo-tagging software, the same year Edward Snowden released documents showing the depth that the US government was collecting images to build a database of your personal information.

One year later in 2015, Baltimore police used facial recognition to identify people who protested Freddie Gray being killed by the police, breaking his spine while in a police van.

Target revealed a teen was pregnant to her father through sending her coupons for baby items and that was one of the bigger headlines about machine learning in advertising as well.

As of 2020, Microsoft will ban police use of its controversial facial-recognition systems while Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai suggests a temporary ban, as recently suggested by the EU, might be a good step in the right direction.

The Sophistry of Compliance

Facial recognition—the software that maps, analyzes, and then identifies the identity of a face in a photo or video—is one of the most powerful surveillance tools ever made.

It's so part of everyday life as many use facial recognition just as a way to unlock their smartphones or organize their pictures, it's easy to just accept. But how big corporations and governments use it is going have a much bigger effect on our lives.

If it's your phone or computer that you own, you can opt out of or turn off facial recognition, but the prevalence of cameras everywhere makes this tech more and more difficult to avoid in the public space.

Serious concerns about this prevalence are magnified by increased evidence of racial profiling and protester identification.

This has motivated Fortune 500 companies, like Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft, to put a moratorium on selling their software to law enforcement.

Yet, these will end as moratoriums are only for a designated amount of time. Each year, certain types of tech get cheaper and cheaper - the same is happening with facial recognition tech getting both cheaper and more effective.

This brings up hard questions that we all need to answer on how to regulate facial recognition, and the moral compromises many are blasé about making now but have and will jeopardize individual privacy rights.

What do you think? Has the AI machine learning gone too far with facial recognition? Do you want to be tracked at work on whether or not you’re day dreaming or staring at a screen?

If you’d like to opt out for Facebook using facial recognition on you, here’s their page for that:

An Update About Face Recognition on Facebook

Comment below with your thoughts on machine learning and facial recognition: what is acceptable and what is going too far?

Read more about how facial recognition software works here

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Google Search Algorithm Update – Jetski Shaman

Source: https://searchengineland.com/

Google’s Hummingbird Update: How It Changed Search

Google just released a slew of brand new updates for their search algorithm which you'll need to stay on top of if you're using SEO and PPC ads on Google's platform (check out Real Estate price drops in the last blog)

The concept behind this move is to allow consumers to find more accurate data that isn't just what major brands have paid to alter search paths for. There are implications for social media marketers here as well.

Google Hummingbird

1. Hum to Search Audio Algorithms

This is pretty neat as I'm sure you've had a tune in your mind, know the melody but not the name of the song. Now you can just hum or whistle into the search app to find your song.

Google goes into detail here on what their thoughts are on this new feature:

"Starting today, you can hum, whistle or sing a melody to Google to solve your earworm. On your mobile device, open the latest version of the Google app, tap the mic icon and say “what's this song?” or click the “Search a song” button. Then start humming for 10-15 seconds. On Google Assistant, it’s just as simple. Say “Hey Google, what’s this song?” and then hum the tune."

You may not be able to to harness this tool for SEO as much, unless you're running a music podcast, or are creating a catchy tune that has humming as part of the chorus for a new song release.

Hummingbird Defined

2. Spell Check Enhanced

Just like typing in Gmail you'll get suggestions for finishing the rest of your sentence through AI learning, the new spelling suggestions are improved to give you better results.

This is definitely a reason to make sure your website is free of spelling and grammar errors.

A Complete Rewrite Of The Core Algorithm

3. Index Individual Passages of Text

The search algorithm update Google made here is aimed at being able to find detailed information more related to consumer Google searches, by identifying passages of text on web site pages.

This is a trend Google has been following for quite some time, where featured snippets of specific text and parts of videos are highlighted within Google searches.

Google says:

"By better understanding the relevancy of specific passages, not just the overall page, we can find that needle-in-a-haystack information you’re looking for. This technology will improve 7% of search queries across all languages as we roll it out globally."

This will affect page ranks in search queries, as well as a company's performance stats - so be sure to answer in FAQs the most frequent questions customers ask about your business.

Hummingbird Affected 90% Of Searches

4. YouTube Video Segments - Key Moments

To better serve searchers, one of Google's projects has been to index specific sections of YouTube videos and expand this to be included in more search results.

Hummingbird And Natural Language Search

Google says: "Using a new AI-driven approach, we’re now able to understand the deep semantics of a video and automatically identify key moments. This lets us tag those moments in the video, so you can navigate them like chapters in a book."

"Whether you’re looking for that one step in a recipe tutorial, or the game-winning home run in a highlights reel, you can easily find those moments. We’ve started testing this technology this year, and by the end of 2020 we expect that 10% of searches on Google will use this new technology."

This also matches up with YouTube's video chapters where YouTubers can add descriptions per video segment, using the timestamps to allow Google more contextual data for the content contained in each segment.

Now, Google is implementing AI for these video sections to add more data to search results. Make sure to include tags for your video segments.

Does The Hummingbird Update Do New Things?

5. New Subtopics for Greater Diversity of Content.

It's a bit fuzzy on how this is going to be applied but Google is using neural nets to give consumers more clickable subtopics.

Google states:

"We’ve applied neural nets to understand subtopics around an interest, which helps deliver a greater diversity of content when you search for something broad."

Hummingbird Did Not Initially Affect SEO

As an example, if you search for “home exercise equipment,” we can now understand relevant subtopics, such as budget equipment, premium picks, or small space ideas, and show a wider range of content for you on the search results page. We’ll start rolling this out by the end of this year."

This helps you pair your listings to more relevant categories, stemming from the most frequently used filters and search terms which is worth considering when implementing SEO.

For the full deets on Google's Search Algorithm Updates 2020 navigate here.

What's your favorite new search feature and how will you use it? Comment below!

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Google Duplex – AI Machines That Mimic Humans to Book Appointments

Credit: AI Google Blog

"A long-standing goal of human-computer interaction has been to enable people to have a natural conversation with computers, as they would with each other."

- Yaniv Leviathan, Principal Engineer at Google

Google's Duplex is an AI machine that can interact in real time conversations to take care of things like ordering from a restaurant or booking a hair appointment:

Engineers at Google describe the use of neural networks and speech recognition to achieve the flow of conversation between machines and humans:

"At the core of Duplex is a recurrent neural network (RNN)...built using TensorFlow Extended (TFX). To obtain its high precision, we trained Duplex’s RNN on a corpus of anonymized phone conversation data."

For those who haven't run across the term before, a neural network is a network or circuit of neurons. It's an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes.

A neural network can be a biological neural network, made up of real biological neurons, or an artificial neural network, for solving artificial intelligence (AI) problems.

These artificial networks are used in predictive modeling, adaptive control and applications where they are trained through a dataset.

Self-learning resulting from an experience or series of events can occur within networks, which can understand and make conclusions from a complex and seemingly unrelated set of information.

Google's engineers are combining several pieces of tech to create a learning model for AI, to facilitate real time machine and man convos:

"The network uses the output of Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, as well as features from the audio, the history of the conversation, the parameters of the conversation (e.g. the desired service for an appointment, or the current time of day) and more."

The idea is to be able to automation many of the functions that are rote or routine for us, with machines.

"We trained our understanding model separately for each task, but leveraged the shared corpus across tasks. Finally, we used hyperparameter optimization from TFX to further improve the model."

This is all combined in the Google Assistant, piece of software that is your robot helper which has the ability to multitask if you wanted to ask what the weather was like in New York City and Austin.

Here's a model of what a day would look like using the Google Assistant Snapshot powered by Google Duplex, to schedule picking up your groceries from curbside delivery, or notify you when your package has arrived:

Google Duplex was first launched for owners of its Google Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, and Pixel 3 and Google Pixel 3 XL phones. More recently, Google Duplex support has started to roll out to any Android devices running version 5.0 or newer. It’s also starting to roll out to Apple’s iPhones that have Google Assistant installed.

Perhaps the Duplex's biggest limitation at this beta stage is that you can't hear the recording of the Google Duplex calls that’s made on your behalf afterward, or get a written transcript. There’s no word yet if Google will allow Duplex users to have that info going forward.

Another draw back is businesses that screen their calls due to the insane amount of spam calls by robo-dialers that are out of control - many businesses won't pick up a call from Duplex / Google Assistant because the caller ID says "Google" instead of a person's name.

Many servers at restaurants that have received calls from Google Duplex describe it as "Creepy but polite."

A lot of Duplex’s work isn’t actually call-based. When you make a request with Google Assistant for a restaurant booking, it searches for vacancies via third-party booking platforms such as OpenTable, Resy, or Yelp.

If Google Duplex can, it will confirm the time with you and book it, or Duplex will say that time is unavailable and it can't complete the task. The Duplex calling feature only happens for restaurants that aren’t on those sites and who opted into getting calls from Google Assistant on their Google business page.

Gabriel Murphy told The Verge he'd tried the AI out on his staff, monitoring the call in his office. They didn't believe they were talking to a machine.

“None of the staff seemed to have any issue with it, [but] there were plenty of jokes about Skynet and machines taking over,” Murphy says.

Skynet is a fictional artificial neural network-based conscious group mind and artificial general superintelligence system that is the bad guy in the Terminator movie series.

When Skynet gained self-awareness, humans tried to deactivate it, prompting it to retaliate with a nuclear attack, an event known as Judgment Day.

Are we getting closer to that happening in reality? I hope not.

Source: NY Times

In the New York Times article that the gif above comes from, reporters found out that 25 % of the supposed AI-driven calls was actually placed by humans at a Google call center.

The reason why is that Google Duplex just doesn't have enough data yet to operate at 100% machine level. The nature of AI-based-learning in neural networks is you need a lot of data for the machines to parse together accurate responses.

Whether or not we are headed for the Rise of the Machines, as a real threat to human survival, my concerns lie in the cognitive development and social implications that follow when any tech is used to replace human interactions.

Most of the articles we read about new technology that will make our lives easier and automate more of our tasks leave out the affects on social development and the risks of cognitive deficiencies that come with the territory when humans seldom use or stop using a certain function of our brains like empathy and critical thinking that help balance decision making skills.

What does a future look like when everyone is so used to using AI assistants to take care of daily tasks and there's a glitch, or a computer crash, and now everyone is helpless to do basic routine task-management because we're so used to outsourcing daily scheduling to a machine?

Will this take away jobs from personal assistants? Or on the other hand, will this help reduce stress for service workers because they won't get yelled at on the phone if a reservation had to be re-scheduled or canceled?

As always, the bigger picture of how we develop successful interdependent relationships with each other, our friends and family, and the world remains left out of the narrative of bright new shiny technology but still worth pondering as we move forward into a bigger future.

What are your thoughts on machines taking over more of the tasks humans do? Would you use Google Duplex?

. . .

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Huge Potential of Extended Reality XR

Augmented Reality (AR) is the next big thing in new tech and there's a reason for it: new developments are happening at rapid fire pace that is creating an amazing experience.

AR adds layers of virtual objects to the real environment. In contrast to Virtual Reality (VR), AR is an interactive experience of a real world environment where the objects in the real world are enhanced by computer generated perceptual information.

AR combines the real and virtual world, a real time interaction and accurate 3D registration of real and virtual objects across multiple senses.

The overlaid sensory info can be destructive where the natural environment can be masked to show virtual items, constructive or additive to the natural environment.

VR on the other hand replaces reality completely with a virtual reality.
The 1st AR technology was developed in 1968 in Harvard when computer scientist Ivan Sutherland created an AR head mounted system but it didn’t really take off until 2016 when Pokemon Go launched.

In addition to video games that allow you to fight epic battles in your living room, with systems like Lenovo Mirage (smartphone powered AR) there are applications for space exploration as well.
Here's Seismic Games debut teaser trailer for Blade Runner: Revelations, on the Lenovo Mirage Solo Google Daydream headset:

Nasa has stated they plan on using AR to keep track of astronaut’s health while they are in space.
Using a customized, 3D virtual reality (VR) simulation that animated the speed and direction of 4 million stars in the local Milky Way neighborhood, astronomer Marc Kuchner & researcher Susan Higashio obtained a new perspective on the stars’ motions, improving our understanding of star groupings.

Nasa scientists, using VR animated star clusters, found stars that may have been classified into the wrong groups as well as star groups that could belong to larger groupings.

Google is using AR to translate street signs and books in real time from one language to the user’s native language:

Medical training, education, manufacturing, military, are all industries that are planning on using AR for virtual floating touch screen objects that hang in mid air.

Some really cool camera-based AR apps out right now include on the simplest level, iPhone’s free measure app that lets you measure the size of someone’s height in real time or tables length and width.

Ikea created an app called Ikea Place that lets you virtually place true to scale 3D models of Ikea furniture in your living room.

You’ll select an item from their digital catalogue, then using your smartphone camera you take a picture of your place. Then you can put the furniture anywhere in your house to see how it would look in real life.

The fashion industry isn’t getting left out of the loop for AR either. Many clothing brands let you try on clothes virtually so you can see what you’d look like in new threads without physically having to be there.

One of the the neatest AR apps out there that’s free is called Jig Space. This app lets you explore 3D objects in space, history, inside the planet Earth, how-to, machines and more.

One of the biggest issues with AR is that data has to be real time rendered right as an end user makes a decision without images and info lagging. 5G phones may help with this.
Real time content and AR content sometimes aren’t able to respond to each other fast enough to create a smooth experience.
MR or mixed reality hopes to fix this issue by using occlusion to remove the boundaries between real and virtual interactions.

MR merges real and virtual worlds together to create new environments and visualizations. Where physical and digital items coexist and interact with each other in real time.
MR doesn’t take place in exclusively the physical or virtual world, but is a hybrid reality where both come together.

While MR is similar to Augmented Reality one of the main distinctions between the two is that Mixed Reality allows a virtual overlay of graphics to interact with the real world. If you're dealing with Zoom fatigue you'll have a lot more options now,

Last year in February (2019) Microsoft came out with a new product called Hololens 2. These are Mixed Reality Smart Glasses. Their product demo was pretty impressive, using an application created with the unreal engine.

A few months later, the Hololens 2 Emulator was released to developers to allow them to create applications for the Hololens 2.

The Hololens 2 features include:

A diagonal field of view of 52 degrees, a resolution of 47 pixels per degree, accelerated work loads such as eye tracking, spacial audio, fully articulated hand tracking, semantic labeling and more.

The price tag is a bit heft at $3500 dollars.

AR, VR and MR is at the forefront of new business ventures predicted to create windfalls for both investors and creators, especially given current occupation limits, social distancing and stay at home orders which are intense in countries like Australia.

With everyone at home so often these days, Augmented Reality shows promise of sky rocketing in demand and sales as does VR and MR.

AR, Virtual Reality (VR), and MR are under the umbrella of XR or Extended Reality.

We’ve gone from hunters and gatherers to 3D printing hamburger patties grown from stem cells without harming animals or cutting down rain forests for cattle grazing lands.

While much of this new tech that can solve resource deficits has yet to be deployed at a level prevalent enough to have a global impact - we have the tools now to solve major issues like world hunger and starvation at a lower cost.

I hope this is something that becomes sponsored as a world-wide initiative to help end the nutrition issues in developing countries, food deserts in the United States of America and problematic issues for starving military families that are denied benefits.

But that’s more on the 3D printing and stem cell grown food topic, going back to AR, VR and MR, you’d think there would be once device that harnesses all three in XR.

And there is.

May 2020 Qualcomm who makes the chip for the Oculus Quest VR headset announced they are colloborating with 15 world operators to create XR viewers.

These operators are planning on making XR part of their 5G offerings for both businesses and consumers, debuting next year in 2021.

These XR viewers will be a pair of light weight glasses with 8K 360 degree video capabilities.
They’ll connect to a smartphone powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 or 865 mobile platform. These will be tethered via UBC cable to the 5G smartphones for an immersive XR experience with high bandwidth and low latency.

This will allow everyday experiences like doing planks for your morning workouts can become Augmented Reality experiences right before your eyes.

In the business world, these XR glasses can facilitate workplace meetings with holographic telepresence using virtual collaboration platforms.

It’s predicted that XR Viewers will become wireless and 5G tethered glasses will become available.

NVIDIA is another tech company vying for a place in XR tech wave maker history. Nvidia is known for designing GPUs. Their Cloud XR is their foundation platform for streaming Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality content from any open VR or XR application on a remote server.

Another contender is Nreal light glasses, which look pretty badass and are priced at around $586).

Nreal previously shipped a $1,199 developer kit that included a controller and a dedicated mini-computer.
The Nreal Light is a light sunglasses-style headset that tethers to a separate computing device — in this case, the Galaxy Note 20. It uses spatial tracking & projected images to overlay apps onto the real world, and Nreal sells it as a more spacious alternative to a smartphone for watching videos, playing games, or reading websites.

Sensors track the eyes' movements as well as 3D-mapping the view in front of them, so that digital characters and objects can be seen to interact with the environment.

Microphones and speakers are also built into the frames. And users control objects in view via what looks like a curved laser pointer.

It’s promising to support Chrome, Facebook, and Instagram, among other apps, at launch.
That’s a huge advancement as a way to enhance viewing YouTube videos right?

Personally, I'm not a big VR person, after watching the Matrix so many times I'd rather not get sucked into an addiction to a non-real environment - although clearly there are benefits like Nasa's applications to astronomy and more.

But AR? Please, I want my Nreal glasses today! It makes what was once fantasy for tactile overlays you see in movies about the future, actually a reality.

I can see so much potential for designing tech, new clothes, innovative solutions to issues facing the world, I can't wait until economies of scale make AR tech part of everyday life.

What about you? What's your favorite thing discussed in today's blog on AR, VR and XR?

Comment below!

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How to Use SEO to Drive More Sales

One of the pain points small to medium sized businesses have (& even Fortune 500s in some industries) is not understanding what SEO is, and feeling it’s too technical.

Search Engine Optimization is in essence, how to get your website to rank on google searches when your prospects are searching for your product or service.

BUT there are even more benefits to keyword research that will be revealed below.

Keyword Optimization in a Nutshell

Let’s first get clear on the specifics of what SEO is:

Search Engine Optimization discovers which specific terms potential customers search google with to find a service or product.

How money is made through search terms is by including these same search terms on your website. This gets your website ranking higher on Google search results.

But – you need to know the exact phrases as well as words, and that’s just the beginning.

Beyond SEO

Finding those keyword terms is absolutely necessary to get your website content to rank higher on search engine ranking pages (SERPs). Also, you’ll want to be on page 1 of Google for search term search results because people rarely look beyond page one.

Yet, there is a level deeper you’ll want to go for maximum benefits:

Customer intentions when googling. When you know why your prospects are searching for things as part of the customer experience you expand your opportunity for upsells & downsells as well as where and how to build out new products and services.

For more info on how to improve your business by understanding the customer experience read this metrics blog here.

Making keyword research a regular habit you do for your business helps understand how your audience views the world, which enables your messaging to be more on point with better customization and personalization. This generates better trust in your business too!

Have you ever made a content map? I linked a nice Hubspot article to the words ‘content map’ to peep, it’s great to map out your blog content & social media posts ahead of time.

Integrating SEO into how you map out your content calendar will boost your business presence online and up your game by a whole bunch, as more of your audience will read your blog and consume your content when it is already planned with SEO in mind.

Bullet Point Your Search Terms

Step One: Brainstorm Likely Terms Your Audience Searches For
Just start thinking up the type of terms your audience may search for when looking to hire your type of service or buy your type of products, when Google searching.

It can be helpful to role play what you would do if you were a customer, or what you already do personally, when googling for a product. Write down those search terms. If you have a team, get their thoughts too. Think of how your customers may phrase things.

Step 2: Validate Search Terms With Reality
Go on Quora, google your keyword term plus forum or blog or articles and you’ll find where online conversations are happening about your topic. This will get you the exact words your customers are using.

For example, if you run a podcast or marketing firm search “podcast+board” or “marketing+forum” or vice versa, and you’ll find forums and bulletin boards where folks go to find more info. It’s a great place to get your finger on the pulse of current trends.

Pro-tip: Look at Wikipedia, enter your search terms, and look at the table of contents on articles that pull up. This will get you some new search terms that be even more clutch.

Step 3: Google Autofill Hack
This is a nice little hack even millionaires I work with in eCommerce didn’t know about until I taught them! Go to Google.com and enter in the first word of a keyterm — don’t type in the full phrase though let Google autofill the rest.

This is the genius of it, Google will suggest the most popular search term combos that people search for. This will advance your search term list with real results you aren’t guessing on but have in specifics.

Bonus: Google Search Console
Stroll over to the Google Search Console to see the keywords your website already ranks for. Google will also give you the heads up if you have broken pages and/or links on your site, or anything that prevents them from properly indexing your webpage on search engines.

The Genius of Long-tail Search Terms

At this point, if you’re following the steps outlined in today’s blog, you’ll have quite a few search terms written down from:

√ Your brainstorming
√ Role playing as the customer
√ Your teams ideas on search terms
√ What you find on forums and boards in your industry and
√Google auto fill suggestions

To be effective you’ll want to have four to six baseline key phrases.

Ex: Marketing, marketing strategy, marketing plan and eight to twelve long-tail phrases.

Ex: Marketing plan template, Marketing help for small businesses, Marketing ideas during covid.

Baseline search term phrases are just that, your baseline. Start with these, put them on your landing pages, even in About pages if you can.

Use one phrase for your home page and the other phrases should have landing pages or whole sections of your website dedicated to these terms.

This empowers you to earn rankings on search results on Google. But make sure when choosing baseline key words to include relational search phrases in addition to the main one.

What I mean is this, remember when we talked about intention and the customer experience? The plain picture search term of say “marketing” will have higher competition than a less-than-obvious search term that denotes the experience your customer has on the customer journey.

An example of a key word phrase that reflects intent would be “get leads for my business” instead of just “marketing.” It’s a more specific intention which separates the people who may also be marketers from your customer base, that you actually want to reach.

As you may have noticed, the second phrase is a long-tail search term.

The long-tail search terms are fantastic on clarifying the customer’s intention, like the “getting leads for my business” above. You can even make certain weeks in the month themed for specific long-tail search terms you want to split test for SEO generated traffic on your site.

Sounds pretty dang useful right?

There are a few tools SEO experts recommend using I’ll mention as well.

SEO Tools Experts Use

√ Google Keyword Planner

Try and use your twelve to fifteen search terms in the planner’s keyword suggestion tool, and peep the ad groups Google suggests to piece out and label what you see.

You can find terms related to the ad groups, and view the estimated search volume for each term and the suggested bid — keep in mind it’s an AdWords tool made mainly to sell more ads.

Keep your perspective balanced here, as search volume is just one metric. Search terms with a lot of traffic don’t always help, but when you marry this to the bid price, you’ll notice high bid price means higher conversion values.

It isn’t a hard fast rule, but you’ll begin to see that bid price fluctuations are a vital sign when diving in to the research. Ideally, you want to mark and edit your search phrase with a combo of search volume and bid price. Try to find the mid point.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed right now – it’s understandable. You can stick with all the advice given before the Tools section here and still come out on top, better than before.

Here are a couple of other tools SEO experts recommend:

Yoast Suggest
Google Trends

TLDR Cliff Notes Version: Yoast is a free WordPress plugin (with advanced options on the paid plan), it alphabetically lists related search terms from Google, and Google Trends is gold for seeing a timeline of the popularity of a search term.

Google Trends is key if you plan on running Amazon or Shopify eCommerce businesses, as you can see spikes, dips and plateaus for search terms ( = buying habits) of a product you’re evaluating for adding to your shop.

What are your favorite key takeaways from today’s blog on SEO? Comment below, thanks.

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