Semantic Search has forever shifted how SEO should be approached. Today’s SEOs need to optimize their pages so that machines can grasp the meaning in the same way their readers can. While this sounds overwhelming, there are some amazing tools on the market that can help you streamline this process.
In this video, we will review WordLift, “An AI-powered SEO tool that does the heavy lifting for you.” We will share what it is and why you need this tool. We will also highlight some of the results we are already seeing and explain how WordLift works.
If you want to learn more about WordLift, check out: https://wordlift.io/
- Learn more about Schema.org & Structured Data: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
- How to Use Schema.org to Create and Add Structured Data to Your Website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQeRA…
- Where To Put Schema Markup On Your Website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq9Fj…
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Video Transcript:
One of the great things about artificial intelligence is that it makes our jobs easier. This isn’t something that’s supposed to replace who we are or what we do, but if we’re using it correctly, we’re enabling AI or machine learning or any of these other great new technologies to help us make better decisions and make our lives easier.
In today’s video, we’re going to be looking at WordLift. WordLift is an SEO tool that we can use to leverage the power of AI to make our SEO better than ever before.
Before we get into the content, I want to say thanks for watching this video. If you find it helpful, please hit subscribe. We create new content each and every week to help you get the most out of your digital marketing activities.
In this video, we’re going to be taking a look at WordLift and how it helps us leverage artificial intelligence to improve our SEO.
What Is WordLift?
WordLift was originally a WordPress plugin, but today it can be installed via a cloud application as well. It helps us to create and structure, as well as add better visual elements to our content, and also helps us create linked connections to linked open data using Tim Berners-Lee’s linked data principles.
Now, if you don’t know about Tim Berners-Lee, you should thank him, because he’s one of the main reasons we have the Internet as we know it today.
What Is Linked Data?
Linked data is a language that machines can use to read and understand content within its own context. It will index. It will fetch answers. It will begin to understand the concepts that we’re talking about. This is why structured data is so important, because it’s giving us the languages that we need in order to have that communication, and make sure that the content on our page is machine-readable and understandable by the machines.
Linked data technologies allow software agents and search crawlers to better find our content, share that and integrate it across all of their different resources.
Why Is This Important?
In the video that we did on semantic SEO, we get into this in a lot more detail, but in a nutshell, most of the content on our websites is human-readable only. It makes it difficult for search engines and databases and things like that to understand the context of what we’re talking about. This understanding of linked open data is a huge, huge step forward in closing that gap between what computers and humans can understand.
How Does WordLift Help in All of This?
It helps by helping us add structured data to our website. This will help us increase the visibility of our website and maximize the potential audiences that we can reach.
It understands the text you write. It does natural language processing, NLP, and then it structures it to help you create a better navigation flow within your content, create internal linkings. It also helps you structure that data so that it’s properly indexed by the search engines, so they can rank better.
It also helps us to enrich the content on our blog posts or web pages by adding links and images, and also creating relationships between the different pages and the different concepts of our sites, using both an internal vocabulary that it helps you build out, as well as linking it to these data sources like DBpedia and wiki data, which are these main sources that Google uses for both understanding and teaching its algorithm, the understanding of concepts, and it goes really deep into what the meanings of these entities are for your page, or what’s the main point of the different things that you’re talking about.
WordLift Simplifies This
WordLift helps you do this in a very simplified way. Instead of having to think about all these different connections and know where to find all these resources, WordLift is going to do that for you, leveraging artificial intelligence and natural language processing. It’s great because it’s creating this connection between both our content and the understanding of how both our users and the search engines understand it within the right context, and helps us create these more informative links and connections, and just a deeper understanding.
As you can see here, this is a thing attribute. This is one of the concepts that our homepage is about is a marketing strategy. We’ve injected it with structured data, which allows the search engines to know that this page, that we are a marketing company that helps with marketing strategies, and here are all the main databases that are supporting what marketing strategy is, to add further context for the crawlers so they understand that, “Hey, this is what we do. This is what we mean when we say marketing strategy.” We’re creating that linking connection, which is really powerful.
Our Results So Far
Looking at some of the results with WordLift so far, and we’ve been using it since about the beginning of August, and we’re using it across the board right now to help us further our markup, further our structured data, and really optimize our pages much deeper. For this engineering firm website, we’ve already seen an increase of traffic of 28%. The impressions have gone up 25%, and the clicks from search counts have gone up 31%.
We’re also seeing similar results on our client’s platform, where organic traffic’s increased by 24%, the impressions have increased by 7%, the clicks have increased by 11.5%. Now that website is a much larger website, so even small movements in impressions and clicks result in large gains in traffic.
The last is a brand new site. We’re trying to rank for some very niche terms in deep learning. We’ve already seen a 37% increase in the organic traffic, over 300% increase in impressions, and a 370% increase in clicks just in the short amount of time of increasing the contextual relevancy of these websites.
How Does WordLift Work?
I’m going to go in now and show you a little bit about how WordLift works, and why you might want to consider it on your website if you’re interested in marking up your site and creating a deeper meaning, leveraging structured data, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
This is the backend of one of our WordPress sites. Right now, we’re looking at one of the blogs. As you can see right now, we’ve got these highlights with underlines in this page here. These are links to entities that we’ve built using WordLift.
Up here at the top, we’ve got the documents and the block, in the new editing and layout format from Gutenberg. But if we go ahead and click the WordLift widget here, it’s going to start scanning the page.
What it’s doing is it’s leveraging natural language processing, and it’s going through the content, and it’s looking at the terms and the entities that are in our page that it can find, and that are available currently on the linked open web. It’s going to scan through the document and start making suggestions on terms that this content might be related to.
Right here, we’ve got all the different content classifications. We can even narrow it down to what, if there’s any location-based, when, who, like Google, we’re doing Google search, so we probably want to highlight that one. That’s all I have to do. I just click Google, and it’s injecting that into this piece of content. I can go back to All.
Now, it’s not going to be perfect. There’s nothing perfect in the world of natural language. You’re going to have to do a little bit of work in making sure that you click the right things here that marks up your page correctly, like a uniform resource locator. That’s a URL. I do want to have that.
You can also add in things, like for instance, featured snippets. This one here isn’t highlighted. But if I go ahead and highlight it, I can add it here. WordLift will allow me to now create featured snippet. This would be a thing.
Then I could go and find an article, or definition of a featured snippet, usually go right from Google, something like that. Featured snippet. Leverage this right here. The best thing to do, we want to make sure that it’s in line with Google, because that’s exactly what this entity is about. I’ll go ahead and create that entity. Now I’ll want to publish it to this page, and I’ll also have to publish it within my vocabulary, but now I’ve added this entity here.
Adding to the Metadata
It also allows me to add information in the article metadata. I can suggest images. Once I have enough data in here, it’ll pull images that we can drag and drop into our content. Once we have a lot of posts here, we can also pull in related content.
Right now, this site only has one article, so those features aren’t even available to us, but tagging this page with entities is going to make a huge difference.
If we scroll down to the bottom of this page, WordLift also has a widget right here. This is where we can mark up this page itself. This is an article that we’re working with, but we can also link entities right in here.
Let’s say I wanted to use that featured snippet, or if I wanted to add something about SEO in here, it’ll starting to look for entities in the linked open data cloud that I can leverage, and click into, and add to this page in particular.
What I’m doing is I’m injecting this page with structured data. I hit update and that’s it. I didn’t have to write any code. I didn’t have to know the structure of any of these things or how to write it. I’m able to click and add context to my page. It’s very easy to use.
Build Out Internal Vocabulary
It also allows us to build out our own internal vocabulary, which is what you’ll see here. Now, I added that featured snippet. As you can see, it’s in draft mode, so I need to go in and edit it. I’m going to want to add some more context to this entity.
Again, I’m adding a little bit more in-depth into this article. I can add synonyms. I can do featured snippets. I can do something like rich feature, anything that could be related to this featured snippet so that it starts to understand the context more when I locate it or add it to other pages.
This is a content classification, any metadata that we would need, making sure that everything’s set the way I want it to be. Now I can start linking it out to other web sources as well so I add more context. I can paste this in here. I can also go out to something like Wikidata and do some research as well. This is if you want to go a little bit deeper.
Right now Wikidata doesn’t even have anything on it, so obviously this is a relatively new thing in SEO. There’s probably not a lot in the databases about it, but I can start searching around a little bit. Maybe they’ll have something on SERP features. They don’t yet.
Adding to Linked Open Data
This is where I can start to add my context and add my content into the world of linked open data. Again, this is where WordLift is going to come in. As I start adding more content and more context to my site, I begin to build my vocabulary, marking it up in a way, adding the structured elements. This is going to get grafted into what the Internet understands about featured snippets. This is going to be part of linked open data.
How do we know that this is working? We can go back to that post that we have, and we can look at it here. Here’s the article on the site. If you go up, this is a really cool plugin. It’s just called Structured Data Testing. You can get it on Chrome. It will run the structured data testing tool on this site. You can see you’ve got a number of types of markup here. I can go ahead and look in the article markup, and we’ll start to see some cool things here.
Right here, I have main entity of the page, SME marketing vocabulary, simplified search vocabulary, featured snippets, alternative name, rich feature. Here’s the markup. Here’s the other one, structured data I’ve added, search engine technology I’ve added, rich user interaction, Google images.
We’ve added a ton of context right into this article by leveraging linked open data. And I did it with just a few clicks and leveraging WordLift. It’s been a really cool way to add more depth to my pages and to enable my team, who might not have as deep of an understanding of technical search, to actually begin to do some of these more technical things.
WordLift in the Cloud
Now, our main website doesn’t work on WordPress. It’s a HubSpot site. That’s how we have it built currently, but WordLift even works in the cloud version. With WordLift in the cloud version, I can go to one of our blogs or any one of the pages that we’re working with. Let’s do this one right here. We can look at this page, and I can fire the WordLift widget, which you will get with a cloud install, and go ahead and log in. Very similar to the WordPress tool that we saw before, I can annotate this page with the entities.
Now, this time I’ve got to click annotate, and click the text of the article or the text of the page that I want it to run and crawl. Then it’s going to start showing me the entities that it’s pulling out of this content. Just like we did with the WordPress plugin, we’re only going to have to click on each one of these elements. In doing so, it’s going to inject that code into the page, and I’m not going to have to go in and do it directly on the page or any other way. It’s going to do it right there for me using JavaScript.
It’s very easy to do. Again, it doesn’t take somebody to have a lot of technical knowledge and understanding to get this to work. As you can see, here are all the different entities that it’s been able to pull out of this piece of content. Now I just need to take a little bit of time, and go through them, and add all the ones that I want to this page.
A Powerful Tool
It’s a great tool. It’s a powerful tool. It allows us to add a deeper level of structured data and structured elements. It allows to connect our site to the linked open web, which allows us to have better context, better meaning. Then in the WordPress widget, it gives us a number of features that we can use to even make our articles more interactive. If you’re interested in checking this tool out, I highly recommend it. I will be providing a link above with the description.
If you’ve got any questions on WordLift, structured data, markup, entities, anything in the way of what Google’s doing to help improve the understanding of the web, please let us know. We’d love to continue that conversation with you. Until next time, Happy Marketing.
