Everyone knows what search engine optimization (SEO) is, and many companies take great efforts to ensure they show up near the top of organic search results and benefit from the resulting traffic which comes at no unit cost. Traditional organic search results are slowly being replaced, however, with a lot of the focus being shifted to what Google calls a search generative experience (SGE; note that this is synonymous with AI Overview on Google Search, and the SGE is titled AI Overview on the search results page). It is widely accepted that as SGE becomes more prevalent, traffic to websites from legacy organic search results will decrease. This is due to two factors:
- Fewer people will click on organic search links – or any links – when SGE is present.
- The webpage links referenced in an SGE answer have lower clickthrough than standard organic search links.
In other words, some searchers will see the answer provided by the AI overview, accept it as accurate and sufficient, and take no further action. These searchers who would have clicked through to something else in the past may simply not click on anything. The bounce rate of SERPs likely increases markedly when SGE is present. SGE also contains its own reference links, which will inevitably cannibalize some legacy organic search traffic. Data from FirstPageSage shows that the result is not dramatic (yet), but just the first link in the AI overview is already garnering 9.4% of clicks. While this compares to 39.8% for a top search position result or 42.9% for a rich snippet result when SGE results are not present, it still has to come from somewhere, and the FirstPageSage data shows SGE is now appearing on 31% of SERPs.
In this post, we’ll address what life science marketers can do, and should be doing, to address the new search paradigm of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
How Generative Engine Optimization and Search Engine Optimization Overlap
Luckily for search marketers, GEO and SEO have a lot of overlap. If you are doing well at optimizing for search, you are probably doing a fair job at optimizing for generative engines. A number of key SEO principles apply to GEO:
- Perform keyword research to ensure you are addressing popular user queries and develop content targeting those keywords.
- The content you create should be helpful, reliable content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (what Google calls E-E-A-T).
- Ensure you are signaling the relevance of your content through optimization of on-site and on-page factors (copy, metadata, schema, etc.) for targeted keywords.
- Further signal the relevance of your website and content through off-site link building.
- Ensure all your content is getting indexed.
Increasing the quantity of content, using clear language, and using technical language when appropriate also improve performance in both generative and organic search results. Other practices to improve the authority of a page or domain such as backlinking almost certainly play a role in GEO as well, as search AIs pick up on these signals (if not directly, then through their own understanding of organic search ranks).
There is further overlap if your goal in creating content is to get it seen by the maximum number of people instead of solely driving traffic to your website. In that case, disseminate your content as much as possible. While AI Overviews are not citing Reddit and other discussion forums as much as they once did, the more places your content lives, the more of a chance you’ll have that the AI will cite one of them, especially if your website itself is not well-optimized.
How GEO and SEO Differ in Practice
Optimizing for GEO is akin to specifically optimizing for rich snippets: there is additional emphasis on the content itself vs. ancillary factors. You need to pay more attention to how you provide information.
A seminal preprint paper by Pranjal Aggarwal et al uploaded to arXiv in late 2023 which coined the term generative engine optimization investigated a number of factors which they believe might help optimize for inclusion in SGE. Note that this paper has yet to pass peer review and was subject to a lot of scrutiny by SEO professionals, most intricately by Tylor Hermanson of Sandbox SEO who gave a number of compelling reasons to believe the data may be overstated, but having read the paper and a number of critiques I still think the paper contains meaningful and actionable lessons. There are two figures in this paper which I believe summarize the most interesting and useful information:
Table 1 shows how different tactics affected results. They used a metric called position-adjusted word count to measure the performance of websites in SGE before and after various GEO methods. I am more interested in this because it is an objective determination as opposed to the subjective impression metric, which basically involves feeding results into GPT-3.5 and seeing what it thinks. We can see from the results that specific types of content addition – adding quotations, statistics, or citations – have a notable impact on the position-adjusted word count for those websites. I point those out specifically not only because they have the greatest impact (along with fluency optimization), but they are not things which would necessarily be considered important if the only consideration for content creation was SEO. All the others which they tested and found to be useful – speaking clearly, fluently, technically, and authoritatively – are things which good SEO copy already needs to do. The inclusion of quotations, statistics, and citations are simply additional content.
The other interesting lesson from this paper is that the most impactful GEO methods differ based on the topic of the content.
While I would like to see this data presented the other way around – what methods are the highest performing for each category – it still makes the point. It also suggests that scientific content may receive disproportionate benefit from fluency optimization and authoritativeness. Again, those are already things which you should be factoring into your copy.
Practical Steps Life Science Marketers Should Take for GEO
If you are looking to optimize for generative engines, first ensure you are doing everything required for good SEO, as outlined above in the section of how GEO and SEO overlap. That is 80% of the job. To reiterate:
- Perform thorough keyword research to address popular and relevant queries
- Write in a way which demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT)
- Optimize of on-site and on-page factors (copy, metadata, schema, etc.) for targeted keywords to demonstrate relevance
- Further demonstrate relevance through off-site link building
- Stay on top of Google Search Console and ensure your content is getting indexed
- Write more / longer content
- Write clearly and use appropriate technical language considering the subject matter
To specifically optimize for generative search beyond normal SEO, make a note to cite your sources and include statistics and / or quotations when possible. That is the lowest-hanging fruit and where most life science marketers will be fine stopping. If you really want to deep dive into generative engine optimization, however, you can use a tool such as Market Brew’s AI Overviews Visualizer to investigate how search engines’ semantic analysis algorithms perform cluster analysis with your website content and see how content is grouped and related.
Since AI overviews decrease overall clickthrough rates, another consideration for some marketers may be getting their content into the AI overviews independent of whether the content is hosted on your website or not. In these situations, you should try to disseminate your content widely across high-reputation sources, particularly Reddit. While it is not cited in SGE as much as it used to be, having your content in multiple places still increases the probability your content will be used.
Product Companies: Don’t Forget Merchant Center Feeds
While our anecdotal data shows that shopping results aren’t yet being included much in the life sciences, they are occasionally included in other industries and it would not be surprising to see them included more frequently in the life sciences in the future. When shown, these shopping results are very prominent, so ensure your Merchant Center feeds are functioning, include as much of your product portfolio as possible, and are well optimized. (Product feed optimization is a topic for another day.)
Summary
If you want to improve the likelihood that your content will appear in AI overviews and those overviews will contain links to your website, start with SEO best practices. That will get you far in both legacy organic search, which still receives most clickthroughs, as well as in SGE. From there, ensure your content which is the target of optimization efforts cites sources and includes statistics and quotations. If you sell products, ensure you are making optimal use of product data feeds.
GEO is neither difficult nor rocket science. By taking a few relatively simple steps, you’ll improve the likelihood of being included in AI overviews.
As this is a complex and novel topic, we’ve included an FAQ below.
What are you waiting for? Work with BioBM and improve your demand generation."
FAQ
Is employing current SEO best practices sufficient for good ranking in generative search?
Helpful? Yes. Sufficient? It depends.
If your products and services are relatively niche, and the questions you seek to answer with your content are likewise niche, then current SEO best practices may be sufficient. If there is a lot of competition in your field, then you may need to incorporate GEO-specific best practices into your content creation.
You can think of this similarly to how you think about SEO. If you are optimizing for niche or longer-tail terms, you might not need to do as much as you will if competing for more major, high-traffic terms. The more competition, the more you’ll likely need to do to achieve the best results. If your terms are sufficiently competitive that you are not ranking well in organic search, you should definitely not presume that whatever you are doing for SEO will reliably land you in AI overviews.
If my website has high organic search ranks, will it perform well in SGE?
I’m not sure anyone has a clear answer to this, especially since the answer still seems to be changing rapidly. Many of the studies which exist on the topic are almost a year old (an eternity in AI time).
Taking things chronologically:
- A January 2024 study by Authoritas using 1,000 terms found that “93.8% of generative links (in this dataset at least) came from sources outside the top-ranking organic domains. With only 4.5% of generative URLs directly matching a page 1 organic URL and only 1.6% showing a different URL from the same organic ranking domain.”
- A January 2024 study from seoClarity looked at the top 3 websites suggested by SGE and compared them to just the top 3 organic results on the basis of domain only. In contrast with the Authoritas study, they found that only 31% of SGE results had no domains in common with the top 3 organic results, 44% of SGE results had 1 domain in common, 24% had two domains in common, and 1% had all three domains in common. This suggests much more overlap between generative and legacy organic results, but it should be noted that it was a much smaller study of only 66 keywords.
- A January 2024 study from Varn Media, using a similar but less informative metric to Authoritas, they found 55% of SGE results had at least one link which was the same as a top-10 organic result on a given SERP. One result in the top 10 is a low bar. They did not publish the size of their study.
- A February 2024 study from SE Ranking which looked at 100,000 keywords found that SGE included at least one link from the top 10 organic search results 85.5% of the time. I don’t like this very low-bar metric, but it’s how they measured.
- A slightly more recent Authoritas study from March 2024 using 2,900 branded keywords showed that “62% of generative links […] came from sources outside the top 10 ranking organic domains. With only 20.1% of generative URLs directly matching a page 1 organic URL and only 17.9% showing a different URL from the same organic ranking domain.” Obviously branded terms are a very different beast, and it should be no surprise that SGE still references the brand / product in question when using branded terms.
- SE Ranking repeated their 100k keyword study in June 2024 and found similar results to their February study: 84.72% of AI overviews included at least one link from the top 10 organic search results. Again, I don’t love this metric, but the fact that it was virtually unchanged five months after the original study is informative.
- Another seoClarity study published in August 2024 found far more overlap between legacy organic results and SGE results. Their analysis of 36,000 keywords found that one or more of the top 10 organic web results appeared in the AI Overview 99.5% of the time and 77% of AI overviews referenced links exclusively from the top 10 organic web results. Furthermore, they found that “80% of the AI Overview results contain a link to one or more of the top 3 ranking results. And when looking at just the top 1 position, the AI Overview contained a link to it almost 50% of the time.”
The most recent seoClarity study, suggesting a much greater deal of overlap between organic web results and SGE links, tracks with my recent experiences. While I would ordinarily discount my personal experiences as anecdotal, in the face of wildly different and rapidly evolving data I find them to be a useful basis of reference.
How much could my organic search traffic be impacted by SGE?
No one has any reliable metrics for that yet. Right now, I would trust FirstPageSage when they say the impact of SGE is not yet substantial, although I view their classification of it being “minimal” with some skepticism.
A lot of people like to point to a “study” posted in Search Engine Land which found a decline in organic search traffic between 18% and 64%, but it should be noted that this is not a study at all. It is simply a model based almost entirely on assumptions, and therefore should be taken with a huge grain of salt. (Also, 18-64% is a not a narrow enough range to be particularly informative regardless.)
Is SEO still worth doing?
Absolutely, hands down, SEO is still worthwhile. Legacy organic search results still receive the majority of clickthroughs on SERPs. However, as AI continues to improve, you should expect diminishing returns, as more people get their answer from AI and take no further action. It is therefore important that whatever you need to get across is being fetched by AI and displayed in SGE – regardless of whether it leads to a click or not.
I heard there is a hack to get your products cited by generative AI more often. What’s up with that?
A paper by a pair of Harvard researchers originally posted to arXiv in April 2024 titled “Manipulating Large Language Models to Increase Product Visibility” generated a lot of interest by both AI researchers and marketers looking for a cheat code to easily generate demand without any unit cost for that demand. As the paper suggests, they did find that LLMs can be manipulated to inserting specific products when the LLM is providing product recommendations. It is unrealistic that this is going to be applicable by life science marketers, however. It is a trial-and-error method involving high-volume testing of random, nonsensical text sequences added to your product’s metadata. This means that it would be nearly impossible to test on anything other than an open-source LLM which you are running an instance of yourself (and therefore able to force the re-indexing of your own content with extremely high frequency).
Another paper submitted to arXiv in June 2024 by a team of researchers from ETH Zurich titled “Adversarial Search Engine Optimization for Large Language Models” found that LLMs are vulnerable to preference manipulation through:
- Prompt injection (literally telling the LLM what to do within the content)
- Discreditation (i.e. badmouthing the competition)
- Plugin optimization (similar to the above, but guiding the LLMs to connect to a desired API from which it will then obtain information)
While preference manipulation is simpler and feasible to implement, the problem with any overtly black-hat optimization technique remains: by the time the method is found and published, LLM developers are well on their way to fixing it, making it a game of whack-a-mole which could potentially end up in your website finding itself on a blacklist. Remember when Google took action against unnatural link building and had marketers disavow links to their sites? That was not fun for many black-hat search marketers out there. BioBM never recommends black-hat tactics for both their impermanence, likelihood of backfiring, and ethical reasons. There’s plenty of good things you can focus on to enhance your search optimization (and generative engine optimization) while providing a better experience for all internet users.
Do Scientists Use AI / LLMs for Product Discovery?
Carlton Hoyt
There has been a lot of talk about AI optimization in the marketing world, much of which was spurred by the release of a preprint article published to arXiv (pdf) in September which demonstrated that LLMs could be manipulated to increase product visibility. There is even a term for optimizing for search engines: Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO. Of course, we are immediately interested in whether any of this is meaningful to marketers in the life sciences.
Our friends at Laboratory Supply Network recently beat us to the punch and asked Reddit’s Labrats community if they use LLMs to help them find scientific products. Good question! Apparently it is also one with a clear answer.
This is a relatively small poll, but the results are so skewed that it is likely that the result is telling. In this poll, 80% of scientists responded that they never use AI for product discovery: literally zero percent of the time! Another 14% barely ever use it. Only two respondents said they use it roughly 10% of the time or more, with one saying they use it more than half the time.
Some of the comments indicate that scientists simply don’t see any relative value in AI for scientific product discovery, or see much better value from other means of product discovery.
Comment
byu/LabSupNet from discussion
inlabrats
Comment
byu/LabSupNet from discussion
inlabrats
Another indicated that AI simply might not be helpful specifically within the scientific context.
Comment
byu/LabSupNet from discussion
inlabrats
Here is the full conversation in r/labrats:
Do you use LLMs / AI to get recommendations on lab products?
byu/LabSupNet inlabrats
Maybe there will be a day where scientists adopt AI for product discovery in meaningful numbers, but it seems we aren’t there yet.
Don’t Stress About “Nofollow” Backlinks
Carlton Hoyt
TL;DR Summary
- Sites can use the HTML tag rel=ânofollowâ to instruct search engines not to credit a link with any importance for the purposes of SEO
- These instructions don’t carry authority: they are merely suggestions
- Search engines, including Google, choose whether to listen to the nofollow suggestion or not
- They generally do not listen to the suggestion
- If you can generate contextually relevant backlinks from sites which use nofollow tags, go for it! You’ll likely get value from them regardless. Just don’t be spammy.
The History of HTML Link Relationship Tags
As the name implies, a link relationship tag provides context to search engines and other automated crawlers on the nature of the relationship between the source page and the destination page. Some very common ones which marketers may run into are rel=”sponsored”, which denotes links in sponsored content, rel=”ugc” which denotes links in user-generated content, and rel=”nofollow”, which is supposed to tell search engines to completely ignore a link. There are over 100 link relations recognized by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, however, most of which are somewhat arcane and not used by search engines in any way which would be meaningful to marketers.
Link relationship tags, AKA rel tags, came into being in 2005, largely in response to the need for a nofollow tag to combat the excessive blog, comment, and forum spam which was extremely prevalent through the 2000s. Nofollow was proposed by Google’s Matt Cutts and Blogger’s Jason Shellen. For a long time, because they didn’t have a better option, Google and other search engines treated nofollow tags as law. Not only would they give no SEO benefit to nofollow links, but for a long time Google wouldn’t even index them.
The Evolution of Nofollow
As blog and comment spam became less of an issue, and as search engines became much more powerful and able to understand context, nofollow and similar relationship tags became less important to the search engines. Google effectively said as much in an announcement on their Search Central Blog on September 10, 2019:
When nofollow was introduced, Google would not count any link marked this way as a signal to use within our search algorithms. This has now changed. All the link attributesâsponsored, ugc, and nofollowâare treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search. We’ll use these hintsâalong with other signalsâas a way to better understand how to appropriately analyze and use links within our systems.
Why not completely ignore such links, as had been the case with nofollow? Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe content they point at. Looking at all the links we encounter can also help us better understand unnatural linking patterns. By shifting to a hint model, we no longer lose this important information, while still allowing site owners to indicate that some links shouldn’t be given the weight of a first-party endorsement.
As stated in the post, as of March 1, 2020 Google changed the role of link relationship tags, making them suggestions (or, in Google’s words, “hints”) rather than rules.
Context Is Key
As search engines continue to become more intelligent and human-like in their understanding of context within content, life science SEO professionals need to pay greater attention to context. A nofollow backlink with just one or two sentences in a comment on a relevant Reddit post may be worth more than an entire guest post on a site with little other content relevant to your field. Focus on doing all the things which you should be doing anyway, regardless of whether the link is nofollow or not:
- Post links only in relevant places
- Contribute meaningfully to the conversation
- Don’t be spammy
- Keep your use of links to a minimum
- Write naturally and use links naturally. Don’t force it.
Case: Laboratory Supply Network
Laboratory Supply Network started a backlinking campaign with BioBM in August 2023 which relied almost entirely on backlinks in comments from highly reputable websites (including Reddit, ResearchGate, and Quora), all of which use nofollow tags on their links. At the start of the campaign, their key rank statistics were:
- Average rank: 26.08
- Median rank: 14
- % of terms in the top 10: 45.00% (63 out of 140)
- % of terms in the top 3: 21.43% (30 out of 140)
Less than 8 months later, in March 2024, we had improve their search rank statistics massively:
- Average rank: 17.54
- Median rank: 7
- % of terms in the top 10: 61.11% (88 out of 144)
- % of terms in the top 3: 39.58% (57 out of 144)
Backlinking was not the only thing that Laboratory Supply Network was doing to improve its SEO – it has a longstanding and relatively consistent content generation program, for instance – but the big difference before and after was the backlink campaign (which, again, relied almost entirely on nofollow backlinks!) In the previous year, LSN’s search statistics didn’t improve nearly as much.
Conclusions
Backlinking has long been a key component of a holistic SEO strategy, and it remains just as important as ever. Links are an important signal telling Google and other search engines what content is relevant and important with regards to any particular topic. While many highly reputable sites use rel=”nofollow” to try to discourage link spam, most link spam is more effectively dealt with in other ways, such as manual, automated, or community-driven moderation. Google knows these other moderation tools have become more effective, and therefore allows itself to treat the nofollow tag as more of a hint than a rule. If you are performing SEO for your life science company, don’t avoid sites just because they use nofollow. You can achieve good results in spite of it.
Don’t Optimize for Quality Score in Google Ads
Carlton Hoyt
Sometimes you just have to let Google be Google.
Large, complex algorithms which pump out high volumes of decisions based in part on non-quantifiable inputs are almost inherently going to get things wrong sometimes. We see this as users of Google Search all the time: even when you provide detailed search queries, the top result might not be the best and not all of the top results might be highly relevant. It happens. We move on. That doesn’t mean the system is bad; it’s just imperfect.
Quality score in Google Ads has similar problems. It’s constantly making an incredibly high volume of decisions, and somewhere in the secret sauce of its algos it makes some questionable decisions.
Yes, Google Ads decided that a CTR of almost 50% was “below average”. This is not surprising.
If your quality score is low, there may be things you can do about it. Perhaps your ads aren’t as relevant to the search terms as they could be. Check the search terms that your ads are showing for. Does you ad copy closely align with those terms? Perhaps your landing page isn’t providing the experience Google wants. Is it quick to load? Mobile friendly? Relevant? Check PageSpeed Insights to see if there are things you can do to improve your landing page. Maybe your CTR actually isn’t all that high. Are you making good use of all the ad extensions?
But sometimes, as we see above, Google just thinks something is wrong when to our subjective, albeit professional, human experience everything seems just fine. That’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Ultimately, you shouldn’t be optimizing for quality score. It is a metric, not a KPI. You should be optimizing for things like conversions, cost per action (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS), all of which you should be able to optimize effectively even if your quality score seems sub-optimal.
Google Ads Auto-Applied Recommendations Are Terrible
Carlton Hoyt
Unfortunately, Google has attempted to make them ubiquitous.
Google Ads has been rapidly expanding their use of auto-applied recommendations recently, to the point where it briefly became my least favorite thing until I turned almost all auto-apply recommendations off for all the Google Ads accounts which we manage.
Google Ads has a long history of thinking it’s smarter than you and failing. Left unchecked, its “optimization” strategies have the potential to drain your advertising budgets and destroy your advertising ROI. Many users of Google Ads’ product ads should be familiar with this. Product ads don’t allow you to set targeting, and instead Google chooses the targeting based on the content on the product page. That, by itself, is fine. The problem is when Google tries to maximize its ROI and looks to expand the targeting contextually. To give a practical example of this, we were managing an account advertising rotary evaporators. Rotary evaporators are very commonly used in the cannabis industry, so sometimes people would search for rotary evaporator related terms along with cannabis terms. Google “learned” that cannabis-related terms were relevant to rotary evaporators: a downward spiral which eventually led to Google showing this account’s product ads for searches such as “expensive bongs.” Most people looking for expensive bongs probably saw a rotary evaporator, didn’t know what it was but did see it was expensive, and clicked on it out of curiosity. Google took that cue as rotary evaporators being relevant for searches for “expensive bongs” and then continued to expand outwards from there. The end result was us having to continuously play negative keyword whack-a-mole to try to exclude all the increasingly irrelevant terms that Google thought were relevant to rotary evaporators because the ads were still getting clicks. Over time, this devolved into Google expanding the rotary evaporator product ads to searches for – and this is not a joke – “crack pipes”.
The moral of that story, which is not about auto-applied recommendations, is that Google does not understand complex products and services such as those in the life sciences. It likewise does not understand the complexities and nuances of individual life science businesses. It paints in broad strokes, because broad strokes are easier to code, the managers don’t care because their changes make Google money, and considering Google has something of a monopoly it has very little incentive to improve its services because almost no one is going to pull their advertising dollars from the company which has about 90% of search volume excluding China. Having had some time to see the changes which Google’s auto-apply recommendations make, you can see the implicit assumptions which got built in. Google either thinks you are selling something like pizza or legal services and largely have no clue what you’re doing, or that you have a highly developed marketing program with holistic, integrated analytics.
As an example of the damage that Google’s auto-applied recommendations can do, take a CRO we are working with. Like many CROs, they offer services across a number of different indications. They have different ad groups for different indications. After Google had auto-applied some recommendations, some of which were bidding-related, we ended up with ad groups which had over 100x difference in cost per click. In an ad group with highly specific and targeted keywords, there is no reasonable argument for how Google could possibly optimize in a way which, in the process of optimizing for conversions, it decided one ad group should have a CPC more than 100x that of another. The optimizations did not lead to more conversions, either.
Google’s “AI” ad account optimizer further decided to optimize a display ad campaign for the same client by changing bidding from manual CPC to optimizing for conversions. The campaign went from getting about 1800 clicks / week at a cost of about $30, to getting 96 clicks per week at a cost of $46. CPC went from $0.02 to $0.48! No wonder they wanted to change the bidding; they showed the ads 70x less (CTR was not materially different before / after Google’s auto-applied recommendations) and charged 24x more. Note that the targeting did not change. What Google was optimizing for was their own revenue per impression! It’s the same thing they’re doing when they decide to show rotary evaporator product ads on searches for crack pipes.
Furthermore, Google’s optimizations to the ads themselves amount to horribly generic guesswork. A common optimization is to simply include the name of the ad group or terms from pieces of the destination URL in ad copy. GPT-3 would be horrified at the illiteracy of Google Ads’ optimization “AI”.
A Select Few Auto-Apply Recommendations Are Worth Leaving On
Google has a total of 23 recommendation types. Of those, I always leave on:
- Use optimized ad rotation. There is very little opportunity for this to cause harm, and it addresses a point difficult to determine on your own: what ads will work best at what time. Just let Google figure this out. There isn’t any potential for misaligned incentives here.
- Expand your reach with Google search partners. I always have this on anyway. It’s just more traffic. Unless you’re particularly concerned about the quality of traffic from sites which aren’t google.com, there’s no reason to turn this off.
- Upgrade your conversion tracking. This allows for more nuanced conversion attribution, and is generally a good idea.
A whole 3/24. Some others are situationally useful, however:
- Add responsive search ads can be useful if you’re having problems with quality score and your ad relevance is stated as being “below average”. This will, generally, allow Google to generate new ad copy that it thinks is relevant. Be warned, Google is very bad at generating ad copy. It will frequently keyword spam without regard to context, but at least you’ll see what it wants to you to do to generate more “relevant” ads. Note that I suggest this over “improve your responsive search ads” such that Google doesn’t destroy the existing ad copy which you may have spent time and effort creating.
- Remove redundant keywords / remove non-serving keywords. Google says that these options will make your account easier to manage, and that is generally true. I usually have these off because if I have a redundant keyword it is usually for a good reason and non-serving keywords may become serving keywords occasionally if volume improves for a period of time, but if your goal is simplicity over deeper data and capturing every possible impression, then leave these on.
That’s all. I would recommend leaving the other 18 off at all times. Unless you are truly desperate and at a complete loss for ways to grow your traffic, you should never allow Google to expand your targeting. That lesson has been repeatedly learned with Product Ads over the past decade plus. Furthermore, do not let Google change your bidding. Your bidding methodology is likely a very intentional decision based on the nature of your sales cycle and your marketing and analytics infrastructure. This is not a situation where best practices are broadly applicable, but best practices are exactly what Google will try to enforce.
If you really don’t want to be bothered at all, just turn them all off. You won’t be missing much, and you’re probably saving yourself some headaches down the line. From our experience thus far, it seems that the ability of Google Ads’ optimization AI to help optimize Google Ads campaigns for life sciences companies is far lesser than its ability to create mayhem.
Why not leverage our understanding to your benefit? Contact Us."
FAQs: Content and SEO’s Low-Hanging Fruit
Carlton Hoyt
Creating content in support of your products and services is hard. Finding something to say which is both unique and valuable to the audience is a non-trivial endeavor, however it remains critical for persuading your audience that your product or service is right for them … and persuading search engines that your website is important.
That said, it’s incredible how many brands overlook this one simple, effective, easy-to-create content tool: the FAQ.
You don’t even have to do the thinking for an FAQ. Your customers do it for you. In your day-to-day sales and support operations, customers are asking questions all the time. All you need to do is document them and their answers, put it on your website, and bingo! – You now have an FAQ.
FAQ Best Practices
It’s absolutely possible to make a terrible FAQ, but really easy not to. If you follow these guidelines when creating your FAQ, you’ll be set:
- Talk to your sales and / or support teams about the questions that they are getting from customers. If you’re creating an FAQ, you want to be sure it’s answering questions that your customers actually have.
- The best FAQ questions are broadly relevant and / or address an important question. If you have a question from a person with a niche application which would only be relevant to a small subset of the audience who is also using your product for that application, it’s probably not worthy of adding to the FAQ. If you have too much clutter, people won’t use it.
- It’s really easy to end up with oceans of FAQ content. Your don’t want your FAQ content to fluster your audience because there is too much of it. In addition to being selective with what content makes the grade for your FAQ section, use design tools such as accordions to help minimize the content overload and help ensure that customers are only presented with the FAQ content which is most relevant to them.
- Keep FAQ content on the page of the product / service it pertains to whenever possible. Forcing people to navigate away to FAQ content is usually neither a good navigational experience nor the best for SEO.
- If you have a long FAQ section, try to keep the most important and / or broadly relevant information towards the top, where it will be more likely to be seen.
To give you a better idea of how you may be able to leverage FAQ content, let’s take a look at a few examples.
FAQ Critiques
Agilent’s website makes ample use of FAQ content, which is great. To give an example, I’ll look at the page for their 280FS AA Atomic Absorption Spectrometer. They have a lot of stuff on this page, but they use a left-hand navigation menu with anchor links to help users find the information they need. In the “Support” section there is an FAQ, along with other categories of content, each of which has an accordion feature.
Agilent’s FAQ has a good amount of content in it, and they make it more manageable by only showing the questions. You have to click the question to see the answer. Unfortunately, when you click the question, you are directed to a page that has only that one question and answer on it, meaning the page is of relatively low value and has taken the user away from the bulk of the information they are seeking, leading to a sub-optimal user experience (you need to wait for the page to load, then click back to get back to where you were). Additionally, having many pages with “thin” content is far less beneficial from an SEO standpoint than having one page with lots of content. If, for instance, they instead had a nested accordion in which the answer dropped down when it was clicked, this would circumvent the need for individual pages for each answer while still showing a relatively manageable amount of information to each user.
Laboratory Supply Network also makes frequent use of FAQs. FAQs are perhaps of even greater value for distributors and resellers since these companies are often starved of unique content. FAQs, product reviews, and other mechanisms for generating unique content can both improve their SEO and differentiate them from competition who may be selling similar (or the same) products. As an example, we’ll use their Q500 FAQ on Homogenizers.net. Laboratory Supply Network puts their FAQs in a separate tab from other information on the product page, helping to prevent clutter. They also have all the FAQ information directly on the product page, which maximizes the SEO benefit. However, within the FAQ tab, there are no aids to help users find the information which may be of value to them. The only way to see which questions are answered is to scroll through them all – and through their answers. This is non-ideal, especially if there are a lot of questions and / or the questions have long answers. While users will scroll, too much scrolling decreases the likelihood that content near the bottom will be seen.
In Conclusion
FAQs add value for your customer and improve the SEO of your website. As with just about any content generation effort, your primary question should be: “can we do this in a manner which is valuable for our audience?” If you have a complex product or service or there is any common uncertainties that customers have about your business, it’s likely that you can both deliver and receive value through an FAQ. Ensure that you’re following best practices, and you’ll maximize its value.
We Just Got Skyscrapered
Carlton Hoyt
Just yesterday, we got skyscrapered. No, we didn’t get an office in a giant building or fly an ad from one or anything like that, nor is that some weird pop-culture thing that teenagers are putting on YouTube. We were the target of an attempt at “skyscraper marketing” … and I’m talking about it, so I guess it worked in a sense.
I’ll talk more about this particular instance in a moment, but first I wanted to give an intro to skyscraper marketing for anyone who isn’t familiar with it.
The “What” and “Why” of Skyscraper Marketing
Skyscraper marketing was one method which was popularized after Google’s 2013 Hummingbird algorithm update. To summarize the implications of that in brief: there was once a time when you could “trick” Google into thinking that your website was more important than it was by posting links around the internet pointing to your website. Hummingbird was the Google update that put an end to that once and for all and penalized websites that did not comply. From then on, if you wanted to prove your website’s importance (and thereby improve your search ranks), you needed to earn your backlinks organically.
That’s about the time when content marketing became more important. From that point, not only was it the validation that showed prospects you knew what you were talking about, but it was the primary tool at your disposal to influence your search rankings (beyond the basic on-site optimization, such as optimized URLs and title tags, that everyone does and therefore isn’t a real source of competitive advantage). The more shareable the content, the more backlinks it would likely get, and therefore the better it was for SEO.
Thus, Skyscraper Marketing was devised. At its most basic, I can break it down into a three step process:
- Find successful content.
- Improve upon it.*
- Share it with people who would be interested in it and, in turn, share it themselves.
*The necessity for improvement is debatable, but you do have to do something to it. More on that in a moment…
The “How” of Skyscraper Marketing
Skyscraper marketing is, essentially, a type of influencer marketing in that the important part is the last step – getting people with engaged audiences to share it. That being the case, there are two primary approaches (and you don’t have to choose between them – you can do both at the same time).
The first approach is the incremental improvement approach. You find some good content which you have something to add to / make better / pose a counterpoint to / etc., then distribute it to a bunch of people who would find it relevant and potentially want to share it. In this approach, you’re adding something to the general body of knowledge in the hope that your contributed insight is enough to make it a worthwhile share – especially from people who have large audiences themselves. Again, the goal is to get as many backlinks and as many eyeballs as possible (those goals do overlap) so the more people you reach out to the better.
The second approach is the “stroking one’s ego” approach. In this approach, your goal isn’t necessarily to improve upon good pieces of content, but rather to act as an aggregator. You take really good tidbits from the thinking of a number of different influencers, and repackage them into a single, easily digestible, and readily shareable piece of content, being sure to reference and link to the authors / posts whose thinking you aggregated. You then reach back out to those people and let them know that you published something which referenced them. People, being generally inclined towards things that make themselves seem important, will share your article which highlights their own thinking.
BioBM’s Skyscraper Marketing Tips
As with influencer marketing, you want to take care to do it correctly. If you don’t, you’ll not only waste your time and effort, but you’ll also get a reputation among the influencers in your market as a peddler of junk content. If that happens, skyscraper marketing or other forms of influencer marketing will be more difficult for you in the future. Just as poor quality content can reflect badly upon your brand, asking people to share poor quality content will erode your relationships with those influencers.
To not be “that guy,” here are some useful tips:
- Don’t spam your network. Only send out good content and only send it to people who would find it genuinely relevant.
- Don’t plagiarize copy … or ideas. If people realize they’ve heard it all before elsewhere, they probably won’t share it.
- Note that “improved content” does not mean “longer content.” A lot of people have a habit of focusing on expanding upon an idea rather than improving upon it. Improvement is far more important than expansion. If you make something better or take a novel perspective on an idea, that’s far more worthy of sharing than simply adding more of the same.
- “Improved content” also doesn’t mean that you need to improve on the idea itself. Communicating it more effectively – for instance, using illustration to more clearly demonstrate a complex point – can be just as valuable.
- Always remember: your content behaves like a product and must be differentiated!
- If you’re going to take an ego-driven approach, be sure you show that you have taken the time to fully understand and eloquently explain the idea, and give some praise to the original author without coming of as a flatterer.
So to finish the story…
Upon checking our social media dashboards this morning, I saw this tweet:
Including a great piece of advice on how to create loyalty from Carlton Hoyt ( @BioBM ) https://t.co/rW4YeY6sjn
â Joe Whittaker (@DiagnosticsJoe) January 29, 2017
I’ve been published more than the average person, but that’s still enough to get my attention so I gave it a quick read through. I ended up not sharing it on our @BioBM twitter account (and I don’t use my personal @CHoytPhD twitter anymore) for a few reasons. Primarily, we have very high standards for what BioBM publishes through our channels. We generally require there to be some element of newness, and we didn’t find there to be any particularly fresh thinking. (Sorry, Joe! No offense intended.) Secondarily, it was a really obvious skyscraper attempt, especially since our idea which was shared wasn’t strongly relevant to the body of the article and was simply one of many listed in bullet point format towards the end. On the other hand, Joe did well not to plagiarize the ideas which he referenced, but rather offered a tidbit of them with a link to the source. That was nice of him. (Thanks, Joe!)
That said, it did engage a discussion on twitter and his post did end up being linked to on our blog, so I suppose Joe can claim victory after all. He’s also welcome to follow this shameless promotion for our “Marketing of Life Science Tools & Services” LinkedIn group and post it there as well. 2262 members and counting!
Just for fun, and because who doesn’t love architecture, here’s a few more images of skyscrapers. All images are courtesy of Unsplash, which in an amazing feat of generosity allows their beautiful, high-resolution images to be used for any purpose and without attribution. I find that so awesome that I’m giving them attribution anyway.
What Google RankBrain Means for SEO
Carlton Hoyt
There’s been a ton of buzz in SEO circles about Google’s new RankBrain algorithm. This is very understandable for two reasons. First, it’s a nerd’s dream. It’s an artificial intelligence-based algorithm, and anything with AI in it is buzzy and awesome. Secondly, and more importantly, Google has stated that RankBrain is already the third most important ranking factor behind content and links.
To really understand what RankBrain means for life science SEOers, let’s zoom out a bit and understand what RankBrain is and what it does.
What Is RankBrain?
Put simply, Google RankBrain is a machine learning artificial intelligence system designed to help process search results in order to provide more relevant results to searchers. Specifically, RankBrain is intended to help Google return more relevant results for terms and phrases it’s never heard before. This was particularly important as the internet ever increasingly quickly spews forth new vocabulary and people speak in a stream-of-consciousness type manner into their phones.
Put somewhat more technically, RankBrain converts all language into vectors, with any given vector’s position and direction representing its conceptual meaning. Semantically related terms have vectors which are positioned close to each other and, similarly, groups of related terms (vectors) are positioned closely to other groups of vectors which have close semantic meaning. Through some crazy mathematics and / or magic which I’m sure would be beyond me even if I did have access to the details of it, this ever-changing map of vectors enables Google to make a best guess with regards to terms or phrases it does not know. However, it also [presumably] allows it to better map known concepts to each other as well.
How to Optimize for RankBrain
If this isn’t the first article you’ve read on how – specifically – you should optimize for RankBrain, then let me apologize on behalf of whatever other advice you may have received. The correct answer is: you do nothing. Continue to be a person, and do the rest of your job like a person. The “like a person” part is important.
Since the beginning of search engines, people have been trying to game the system. It’s been a decades-long battle between website owners, who want to convince search engines that their websites are important, and the search engines themselves who want to return the most relevant results to searchers. Initially, search engines were fairly rudimentary and it was easy to convince them your website was more important than it actually was. As time went on, search engines took away more and more tricks. By and large, search engines have won – it’s now extremely difficult to game the system. However, that doesn’t mean that the ranking systems were perfect. RankBrain is simply a response to allow it to better adapt to the actual people doing the searching. In other words, it’s attempting to make Google’s search algorithm a little bit more human. It’s becoming less important to obsess about every word you use since Google is starting to place less importance on the term itself and more importance on the meaning. After all, that’s what people are really looking for. They don’t want results that just have the words they used. They want results that will provide the meaning they seek.
This doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. It’s not. All this means is that you shouldn’t be trying to fool anyone. The best way to increase your website’s value to search engines is, by and large, to increase your website’s value to your target audience. Have great content that makes people want to share it? That’ll be good for SEO. Have a well laid out and easily navigable site? That’ll be good for SEO. Is your website highly relevant to the people you’re looking to target? That’ll be good for SEO as well. Of course there’s always some technical factors that people still manage to overlook – for instance, ensuring your title attribute is relevant and meaningful and that your page load times are decent – but at the end of the day if you’re making a site that’s great for your target audience, it’ll probably end up having fairly good SEO as well.
Don’t Forget to Use Words
I personally find this to be the most amusing piece of advice that I find myself giving over and over again: don’t forget to use words. Seriously, you can have the flashiest website, all the video content in the world, giant shiny infographics, and a totally cool podcast, and all those things are great. You know what none of them have? Words – the text kind. Think of it this way:
- What do people type / speak into search engines? Words.
- What do search engines’ web crawlers read? Words.
- What form the bulk of the results that search engines return? Words.
While the above is admittedly an oversimplification, it’s still 90% true. Words are still very important. It still comes down to the content.
SEO Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Changed
Carlton Hoyt
It’s no secret that the SEO world has changed. Ever since Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm changes, and the subsequent updates to them, prior best practices fell apart. There’s no doubt about that. Things that were once highly effective tools of SEO, like link wheels, are no longer relevant. Because of the ever-decreasing ways in which a marketer can manipulate search engine ranks, there has been an increasing chorus of people proclaiming the “death” of SEO.
Some Self-Serving Claims
It’s been a long-running trend to proclaim the death of SEO. Here’s a nice little article from 2007 which lists other, older articles proclaiming the death of SEO. The claim that SEO is dead is not a new one.
These claims tend to come from two kinds of people: SEO-ers who’ve jumped ship and are trying to get people to follow them, or from people who work on elements of marketing that could be considered strategic alternatives to SEO. Once upon a time, a lot of these voices were from people doing search advertising. Now they’re mostly from content marketers.
Is content marketing important for SEO? Sure it is. Is it more important for SEO than it used to be? In most cases, yes. Is it a replacement for SEO? Not a chance.
The New Age of SEO
Let’s be clear on something: SEO is not dead. SEO will quite possibly never be dead so long as search engines as we know them remain widely used tools.
SEO has been an ever-changing field since the beginning. Remember “keyword jamming”? Remember those websites that were padded with “invisible” text at the bottom of the pages back in the 90s? Remember the link farms of the 2000s? … The most effective tactics have always changed as Google and other search engines have evolved, and I would be very surprised if that fact doesn’t remain true for a long time to come. The only thing about SEO that is infallibly true is the value of those highly coveted top organic search ranks.
The job of the SEOer has not changed. The SEOer is not suddenly a content marketer. The SEOer’s toolbox, however, has changed.
Many technical factors surrounding SEO are still important. Site performance is still very important and something that can be directly controlled. Clickthrough is still very important and is something which is readily influenced. Ensure that any page that you would want to use as a landing page has the appropriate metadata such that your site’s appearance in search results attracts searchers. Making use of Google Authorship and tagging content accordingly can have a profound effect, especially for companies which generate a lot of high-quality content. Additionally, SEOers need to ensure the website’s entry points should be controlled.
Keyword research is still important. The results of this keyword research are then fed to content development teams to help guide the content focus towards things that people are looking for. SEOers then need to ensure that the content is appropriately optimized, or that the content development teams know enough about SEO to create well-optimized content themselves.
Content marketing is very important for most organizations, but it’s still just one piece of SEO. Having an SEO strategy which focuses solely on content will put you at a strategic disadvantage versus those companies with a more holistic approach.
Content First, SEO Second
Carlton Hoyt
By now, any decent SEO-er knows that the old way of performing SEO – basically, manipulating ranks through inorganic backlinks – is worthless. Google caught on and killed it. As of Panda 4.0, there are extremely limited ways in which someone can fool the rankings system, and doing so will only hurt you in the long run. That being the case, more SEO experts are turning to content development to improve SEO. In a sense, this is good – content development is a legitimate way of trying to improve rankings. However, as SEO-ers start to think about content, we need to remember that the content itself needs to be prioritized above SEO at all times. In other words, life science marketers cannot let the quality of their content slip due to the desire to focus on SEO.
Remember that the purpose of using content for SEO is to have your content seen by your target audience. Your audience, when consuming that content, is going to judge you by its quality. If you’re churning out low-quality content for SEO purposes you may get a lot of eyeballs, but you’re going to be turning off your audience due to the low value of the content which they’re landing on. This can be especially damaging if the audience doesn’t have prior experience with your company. Instead of trying to develop content strictly for SEO, take the high-quality content that’s being developed as part of your content marketing strategy and optimize it!
There are a number of things that you can do to improve the SEO of your high-quality content. For example:
- Think about how your audience would ask questions related to the topic at hand. Is there any particular phrasing that they would use? If so, try to incorporate that phrasing into your content to improve the match for relevant “long-tail” search terms.
- Make appropriate use of heading tags.
- Ensure your page titles and URLs are optimized and relevant. Some content management systems default to generic nomenclature for URLs and titles, using things like an arbitrary numbering system or the date instead of a rich description. Ensure your settings use the title of your content (or at least part of it) in the page title and URL.
- Improve the clickthrough rate of digital content by using a descriptive meta description tag
- Improve the CTR of your digital content even more by using Google Authorship and ensuring you have a good headshot in your linked Google+ account. This can have a huge impact – I’ve seen various case studies claiming that pages with authorship attribution and a headshot displayed in the search results see between 20% and 150% increases in clickthrough. Eye-tracking data is just as compelling: searchers will pay more attention to author-attributed pages than higher-ranking videos with larger images.
If necessity dictates that you need to create content strictly for SEO purposes, especially if it would fall outside the bounds of your content strategy, ask yourself the following questions to ensure that you don’t churn out junk content:
- Does our target audience have a need to know about this topic?
- Can we create content which would genuinely fill that knowledge gap?
- Would our target audience expect us to provide this type of content? If not, would they find it odd that we are? … I think of this as the realtor / lawnmower conundrum. Your realtor, knowing that you just bought a house, would be in a great position to sell you a lawnmower. They even know what kind of lawn you have. However, you would likely be put off if your realtor tried to sell you a lawnmower.
While the tools at one’s disposal to positively affect search engine ranks are more limited than they used to be, SEO is still important. As SEO tactics take a more content-centric approach, it’s important you don’t churn out low-value content. Your content strategy should be focused on the content. Working SEO into your content strategy will have a far more positive long-term effect than trying to take to shape content around an SEO strategy.