Samuel Edwards

As a search engine optimization (SEO) agency, you want to provide your clients with the best possible services. You want to help them rank for their target keywords. You want to help them dominate the competition. And of course, you want to make good money doing it. But there are some major obstacles in your way. SEO campaigns can take a long time to get up and running. Economic slowdowns force companies of all shapes and sizes to cut their marketing budget (which, of course, affects their SEO spending). And on top of that, it’s often difficult to package your SEO services in a way that’s both sensible and cost-effective for your clients. Today, we have a singular solution to all of these problems: SEO sprints. The SEO Timeline Problem One of the biggest problems faced by top SEO agencies and SEO clients alike is the overall SEO timeline. Historically, it’s taken a considerable amount of time and effort to see any meaningful SEO results – and it’s because of threats on multiple fronts. Forming a marketing strategy required at least a week or two. Google updated its index slowly and (at times) inconsistently. Developing and publishing content could take weeks. And if you faced significant competition, it could be months before you could emerge as a realistic contender. All in all, that meant it could take months before you’d even appear in relevant SERPs for your brand – let alone reach the top of them. This has always been a hard sell for SEO agencies. How do you convince a skeptical client that they should pay you, consistently, for months at a time, with no immediate proof that your efforts are really working? This problem is even bigger during times of economic hardship. Today, businesses are facing threats like inflation, supply chain issues, labor shortages, and lower consumer spending due to market downturns. Marketing and advertising budgets all over the country are getting the axe – and the slowest, least immediately effective marketing strategies are getting cut first. SEO sprints offer a solution. What Is an SEO Sprint? SEO sprints take inspiration from development sprints. In the agile development world, a “sprint” is a short period of time in which a team commits to finishing a meaningful chunk of work, usually completing an important building block or reaching a noteworthy milestone. It’s a useful way to compartmentalize the entire project – while simultaneously boosting productivity. Like with ambulatory sprinting, the work is intense and done in a relatively short burst. In SEO, the “chunk” of work to be completed is usually ranking near the top of the SERP for a valuable, yet attainable keyword/phrase. Instead of gradually churning out new blog posts links over the course of months and across 10-20 keywords, you’ll concentrate all your efforts on a single keyword or phrase for a shorter period of time (usually a couple of weeks). But just because indexing happens fast, it doesn’t mean that ranking will. Those are two very different phenomena. This is possible in part because of Google’s faster and more responsive updates. A decade ago, it might have taken months for your hard work to pay off – but these days, you can sometimes see SERP updates (and greater organic traffic) in a matter of hours. The strategy has also recently become popular because increased competition in the SEO space (along with reduced payoffs for ranking highly, in some instances) is forcing SEO agencies and search optimization professionals to get more creative and strategic. SERPs are no longer a “blue ocean” opportunity, so we must be more precise and focused on the work we’re doing. Why SEO Agencies Should Focus on Sprints Why does this benefit your digital marketing agency? What makes sprints a more compelling SEO offer than, say, a traditional retainer structure or a la carte service offerings? There are many benefits to keep in mind: Appeal to budget-conscious clients. Some businesses are interested in getting more organic traffic, but they don’t have $10,000 a month to spend on a suite of SEO services and related marketing campaigns. They may be interested in paying a few hundred or a few thousand dollars for a one-and-done push – much like what they could get in a limited-run PPC advertising campaign. Obviously, budget-conscious clients aren’t the most lucrative ones, but it’s worth trying to appeal to them, especially if these limited runs produce a high return on investment (ROI). Over time, you’ll earn a better reputation and you’ll be in a much better position to upsell your clients. Appeal to time-sensitive clients. Freshly launched startups, small businesses, and event marketers are just a few examples of clients who have time-sensitive marketing and advertising needs. These people want to make a massive push, as soon as possible, and see results in a matter of days, rather than months. Ordinarily, these types of clients would never consider SEO; it requires too much of a time investment. But with SEO sprints, it suddenly becomes viable. Easier product packaging. Some SEO agencies love the idea of service offered as a product because it makes for easier product packaging. Instead of putting together vague service packages and monthly programs, you can make a clear, straightforward offer that’s tied to measurable results. You can sell each stage for a fixed fee, or offer various tiers of SEO sprint service, with variable SEO pricing based on the competitive environment and the amount of work you have to provide to get results. Options for recurring revenue. One of the strengths of an marketing sprint is that it can serve as a standalone product, but it can also provide you with an opportunity for recurring revenue. In this structure, you can put together a plan like 3 sprints per month; once your clients discover just how powerful sprints are, they’ll probably be interested in using them more frequently and with regularity. Cleaner strategic focus. In our experience, SEO agencies sometimes struggle with strategic focus.

Are you trying to rank your website in the search engines, but you have yet to see results? Perhaps you’ve noticed that plenty of your web pages have been indexed by Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, but you’re not sure why your pages aren’t turning up in search results? Shouldn’t indexed pages come up in Google search results? Yes and no. While web pages must be indexed to come up in search results, indexing doesn’t determine a web page’s ranking. Getting your web pages indexed simply means a search engine knows your pages exist. If you want your indexed pages to be delivered in search results, your individual pages need to be selected by the search engine algorithms. To get search engines to select your pages, each page needs to be given a high ranking. To get that high ranking you need a search engine optimization strategy. If you’re getting indexed, but not ranked, you’re not alone. Whether you’re just starting to rank a new site or you’re trying to improve an existing site, getting indexed is just the first step. How do search engine indexing and ranking differ? In a nutshell, search engine indexing is like creating a catalog of options. Search engine rankings is prioritizing and categorizing all available options in the catalog to ensure the best options show up in a search. A brief overview of how search engines work Search engines function on three basic actions: crawling, indexing, and ranking. All three of these actions work together to deliver results to users who search for keywords and phrases. 1. Crawling. Search engines use robots called “crawlers” or “spiders” to search the internet for new content in the form of web pages or files. Google’s crawler happens to be named Googlebot. Search engine crawlers can read code. In fact, you can place commands in your robots.txt file and webpages to give directions to search engine spiders. For example, you can ask search engines not to index certain pieces of content or directories. 2. Indexing. Once a web crawler search engines discover a web page, it’s filed away to be delivered later during a search that the search engine considers relevant to the content of the page. 3. Ranking. Complex, proprietary search engine algorithms look at each indexed web page and evaluate the value based on hundreds of search ranking factors that include on-page and off-page factors. Pages considered to hold more value get ranked higher and thus come up higher in search results. In addition to crawling indexing and ranking web pages, search engines also administer penalties to individual pages and entire domain names under a select set of circumstances. Search engines have terms of use and if any page or domain violates those terms they can (and often are) removed from the search engine index or given penalties that suppress them from showing up in the search engines. Why is search engine indexing important? Simply put, without being indexed, a web page won’t show up in search results. Indexing is the foundation for search engine optimization. Why is search engine rankings important? Search engine rankings is what determines where and how often your web pages show up in search results. The higher your ranking, the more chance you have at getting your pages on the first page of results. Granted, search personalization ensures that each person will get a different set of results for the same search terms, so your pages may not rank for everyone. However, your pages will generally be delivered when a search engine’s algorithm believes that your content is highly relevant to a user’s search. Ranking is important for several reasons: Ranking can get you traffic Traffic can get you sales, leads, and brand visibility Ranking can help you dominate the search engines for certain keywords and phrases, which increases traffic even more An overly simplified explanation is that when your site shows up in search results, you’ll get traffic. When your site ranks in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for certain keywords and phrases, you’ll drive targeted traffic to your website from users who click on your links. Once those users visit your website they might sign up for your email newsletter, buy a product or service, read your blog, or bookmark your site to return. Having pages that rank higher in the results pages will increase your flow of organic traffic. The more search terms you can rank for, the more traffic you can get. All in all, your online business relies on search engine rankings for success. You can certainly generate traffic from content marketing, but you won’t get anywhere near as much traffic as you can generate by ranking high in the SERPs. Although, content marketing, when used for link building, is actually part of ranking high in the SERPs. It’s all interconnected. Ranking and indexing aren’t guaranteed Just because your web pages exist doesn’t mean they’ll be indexed. Likewise, just because your web pages are indexed doesn’t mean they’ll rank. While you can submit your site to get indexed quickly, it takes a strong SEO strategies over time to get your pages to rank. Rankings come and go. They are always in a state of flux, especially for new websites. That’s one of the reasons it can take so long to rank in Google. Some aspects of ranking pages are out of your control There are countless factors that affect indexing and ranking and only a handful are in your control. For example, redirects can prevent Google from indexing your pages. If Googlebot has to traverse through multiple redirects it’s considered a “redirect chain.” You can’t change the way Googlebot views redirect chains. Redirect chains are often created unintentionally. For example, you might redirect yoursite.com/1.html to yoursite.com/2.html. A year later, you might decide to redirect yoursite.com/2.html to yoursite.com/3.html. This creates two redirects where one is unnecessary; the best solution is to cut out the middle redirect. 4 common issues with search engine indexing Although search engine

In a phrase, any business can use local SEO, but it’s more effective if a business has a definitive physical location. There are also certain types of businesses that benefit the most from SEO. However, if you get most of your business from local clients or customers, local SEO might also be a good idea for you as well. Local restaurants, retail stores, law firms, doctor’s offices, dentists and so forth all benefit from using some type of local optimized marketing strategy. If you expect foot traffic from your website, you probably want to be the first to use local SEO. Local SEO vs. Traditional SEO Traditional or national SEO will target broad scope keywords. These keywords aren’t attaching a regional identity. For example, if you’re the marketing team behind Wal-Mart’s new national campaign for cheap tires, then your keywords will likely direct towards all markets and focus on “cheap tires,” “tire discounts” or “tire deals.” However, if you are a local auto tire company, you want to focus your keywords around location such as “cheap tires Orlando” or “tire discounts Orlando FL.” Creating a great local SEO strategy is about more than keywords but understanding this difference allows you to do accurate local keyword research, which is part of the whole marketing concept behind being local. Local Profiles on Google Creating profiles in Google is the first thing that any business wanting local traffic must do. Why’s that? Most people are using Google to do keyword research or product/service research, and when they type in something like “new tires Orlando,” a list of businesses that have profiles on Google Places will pop up at the top of the results page for the Orlando, Florida location. This means that businesses must add their complete location and details to Google Places. The profile must contain as much information as possible including a thoughtful description, pictures, contact details, store hours, and hopefully reviews. You also want to set up profiles on other social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. These sites will undoubtedly come up whenever anyone searches your store’s name or products to learn more information, and you should be the one to control that information. Be Consistent with Every Listing When you start to create profiles and even build a website, you should make sure that your address is consistent on any page that has your name, address and phone number. They should also feature the same main photo and additional images that are consistent with the rest of your profiles. It may seem trivial, but you should never abbreviate one address and not another. Using On-Site Optimization Techniques There are four things to know about local on-site optimization. For one, name, address and phone number must be on every page of your site, such as at the bottom or top. In addition, city and state names should be in the title tags, meta descriptions and content of your site. Schema local markup can also help search engines find your local content better and identify your location for users. Lastly, you can use a KML or keyhole markup language file to further your on-site optimization. The Most Important Factors to Boost Local SEO Rank Reviews, positive feedback and number of profiles is important. Reviews should be on every page that it is possible to have reviews, but Google Places reviews are seen the most, which means they contribute the most to a local business ranking in search results. Businesses often ask customers to leave reviews or add hints to review when a customer is obviously having a great experience. It’s important that you don’t pay for reviews, but businesses have had some success by offering a free gift if a customer leaves a review. Central Location Matters While having all of the above will definitely boost your ranking, your business may still not be in the lead if you are from the city’s center. That’s because when someone searches for “tires Orlando FL,” Google uses “centroid bias,” which means that the search will look for locations closest to the city center of Orlando. Basic Tips to Boost Local SEO Today This is a rundown of the steps a business owner can take to improve local SEO immediately. 1. Claim a local listing in Google Places Complete the listing until the profile is 100 percent finished. Images, videos, descriptions, contact information, links and posts are all important to finishing your listing. You do not want to use any keywords or location names in the business title unless it’s critical. For instance, if you own “Cheap Orlando Tires Inc” then it’s acceptable, but if your business is “Tires Plus Orlando,” then you wouldn’t write “Cheap Tires Plus Orlando FL.” 2. Spread information through Yext Yext is a service that allows you to spread your business information to other local platforms in the same format as you did with Google Places. Each of these becomes a “citation,” which is very valuable in terms of local SEO. 3. Set up other important social profiles Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are obviously important for local SEO, but if your business is more visual, you may want to set up a profile on Pinterest; if there is a local directory website that lists all of the local tire places, your business should be on there as well. 4. Use local keywords in your content Some of your content on your site can use local SEO keywords such as “Tires in Orlando” or “Orlando tires.” The links, title tags, anchor text, in-text keywords and meta descriptions should offer city and state keywords that relate to any of the service areas that are within your physical location’s reach. Link building is important to gaining traffic, so you should be linking to authoritative pages with PageRank 3 or above that relate to your site’s articles and blogs while also linking to a page on your site that is related to the content with a keyword as well. For example,

Backlinks break on the internet all the time. For any number of reasons, a broken link will typically direct the user to a 404 error page that says something to the effect of, Oops! We can’t seem to find the page you were looking for! Internally, broken links can have a negative impact on your site visitors’ collective experience. Scammers can also use them for negative SEO tactics. If you have broken links on your website, they need to be cleaned up, replaced, and/or revitalized. But broken links can also occur offsite. And the right type of broken links can actually serve as a huge white-hat link building opportunity for expanding your SEO efforts through a strategic broken link building campaign. Why Links Break By definition, a broken link – or a dead link, as some may call it – is a hyperlink on an internet web page that no longer works or functions as intended. Some of the reasons why build links no longer work include: A webpage was moved without a redirect being added The webpage was deleted The website is no longer available The website has crashed and needs attention The URL structure of the website has changed You’ll know a broken link/dead link when you encounter one. While the hyperlink will look the same, clicking on the broken link will take you to a 404 Page Error or broken page Not Found message. Some websites have even gotten clever with their 404 messages, saying things like: Something’s wrong. Oops! We made a mistake. You’re in the wrong place. Well, this is awkward! Source: Pixar But as much as websites might make fun of their broken URLs, they can actually be quite problematic. Link rot – which is the tendency for links to eventually break down – is a significant issue in the industry. According to one analysis, you can expect to lose roughly 25 percent of all links every seven years. Search engines see links as votes of confidence. They speak volumes about a website’s quality and the value it provides to visitors. Because of this, it’s considered a good practice to clean up your broken and dead links to ensure all URLs are functional and intact. For bloggers and businesses with hundreds or thousands of website pages, this isn’t as easy as it seems. Trying to track down and replace broken links in articles, blog post, and web resources requires a lot of time and manual effort. Yet, it’s becoming increasingly important. Broken links can cause a website to lose visitors and, ultimately, paying customers. They frustrate the end user, create unnecessary friction, and negatively impact conversion rates. A visitor might excuse one broken link every now and then, but a string of broken links erodes trust in the brand and turns people away. It can also damage search rankings and put a squeeze on organic inbound traffic. An Effective Broken Link Building Process Implementing a broken link building campaign sounds great in theory, but how do you actually get started? Here’s our step-by-step process for broken link building: 1. Find Broken Links (The Premium Method) We call this the Premium Method, simply because it requires access to the Ahrefs SEO tool, which can be a little pricey for some small SEO budgets. (But if you want to use Ahrefs to test the waters, they’re currently offering a seven-day trial for $7.) You can’t do anything without an arsenal of broken links to work with. And unlike most areas of marketing and business, quantity is more important than quality. In order for broken link building opportunities to be effective, they must be scaled. And in order for it to be scaled, you have to pursue a ton of different leads. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll get roughly 5 to 10 links for every 100 emails you send. That means you have to find somewhere between 10 and 20 broken links just to capitalize on one! This means you’ll need to find hundreds – potentially thousands – of broken links that are somewhat relevant to your website, industry, or subject matter. There are a few tools that can help with this. Ahrefs’ Broken Link Checker is definitely considered one of the better options out there. Not only does it have a powerful engine inside of it – more than 2 trillion external backlinks in the database – but it’s also very intuitive. Start by making a list of the top competing websites in your niche. If you run a content marketing blog for small businesses, competing sites may include Convince and Convert, TopRank Blog, Copyblogger, etc. Armed with a list of 5 to 10 competing websites, you’ll want to enter them into the Broken Link Checkers and filter for 404 error codes. You can do this by clicking: Site explorer > Pages > Best by Links > Filter for HTTP 404 Errors This will give you a snapshot overview of every broken link on the website and how many referring domains each has. This latter number tells you how many other websites are linking to the broken page. Each one of these links could check my broken external link be an broken link opportunity for you to come in and replace the broken URL with your own functional URL. That’s one broken link building technique for finding broken backlinks you can snipe for your own website. Another broken link building technique involves looking for relevant expired domains that have backlinks. You can do this by using a platform like ExpiredDomains.net and running a search related to your niche or target keywords. This will give you a massive list of domains that you can filter by backlink volume. The next step is to copy these domains to your clipboard and paste them into the Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis tool. Bam! You have tons of expired domains with broken backlinks. From here, you simply have to filter out the junk to find any valuable opportunities. Another favorite

If you’re developing a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, you’ve likely learned one of the hardest aspects of making a campaign successful: dealing with the competition. That’s where an appropriate search engines optimization (SEO) competitor analysis comes in. In its simplest form, a competitor analysis will help you: Understand the winners and losers in your industry and what separates the two Understand your weaknesses, compared to direct competitors Capitalize on the company’s strength of your competition by replicating their strategies Prioritize your own internal SEO process for maximizing ROI While the analysis itself is only the beginning (you may have a great deal of catching up to do with your direct local SEOcompetitors), the journey of a 1,000 miles begins with a single step. What Is an SEO Competitor Analysis? An SEO competitor analysis can take a few different forms, but the basic idea is the same. You’ll identify and study the companies and individuals most likely to compete with your business in search engine results pages (SERPs), learning not only how they’re performing, but which tactics they’re currently using. Why Perform an SEO Competitor Analysis? What’s the point? It’s not just to satisfy your curiosity. Analyzing your competition will help your SEO campaign in several ways: A better understanding of your competition. First, you’ll have a better general understanding of competing websites. How big of a threat are they? Which demographics are they targeting? What seem to be their greatest strengths and weaknesses as a business owner? You can use this information in your brand marketing strategy, product development, and when developing long-term strategic goals. Keyword strengths. Looking closer at SEO, an SEO analysis of your competition can help you identify the keywords or search queries strongly targeted by your top competitors. In other words, which keywords and phrases seem to be dominated by your direct competitors? In many cases, you’ll want to avoid these, but if you see a promising opportunity for these search queries or search intent, you may be able to usurp their position & have search traffic. Keyword weaknesses. More interestingly, you’ll be able to see highly relevant keywords and phrases for which your competitors aren’t ranking, an opportunity for keyword rankings. These are perfect opportunities for you to swoop in and rank quickly, without expending many resources in the process. Link profile strengths. Similarly, you’re going to learn the company’s strength and weaknesses of your competitors’ backlink profiles. Link building is an important element of SEO, and having a diversity of strong, unique links can make you practically unstoppable. So where are your competitors getting their best links? There’s a good chance you can capitalize on the same resources and linking opportunities. Link profile weaknesses. You can also see where your competitors’ backlink strategies are failing in dept. Which types of sources haven’t they used? Which links or link building mistakes seem to be weighing them down? You’ll bring all these pieces of information together to choose new strategic targets, and tweak your execution. Step One: Identify Your Competitors Before you can analyze your competitors, you need to know who your competitors are. In this phase, you’ll create a definitive list of your top competitors. Make sure you identify at least one or two; if you’re looking for something more exhaustive, you may look at five or more competitors in depth. You can start this step with some simple brainstorming. What are some of the most prominent companies that operate in the same space as you? Who do you initially consider to be your biggest competition? What is their business strategy? From there, you can conduct a handful of searches for keywords related to your business. For example, you might search for something like “cloud storage services” or “law firms in Kentucky.” When you search for multiple related terms, which brands and websites seem to appear most frequently? You can also add new competitors to your analysis in the future; for now, jot down the competitors who present the biggest threat to your online visibility. Step Two: Analyze Competitor Keywords This step and the next several steps can be completed in any order, realistically. But for our purposes, we’re going to look at keywords next. For each competitor, you’re going to break down the current keywords they’re targeting for their target audience, the keywords and phrases for which they’re currently ranking, in search engine rankings and more. You can try to do this manually, but it’s much easier to use a keyword research tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs (or the complete list we’ve outlined below). Most SEO tools, including these, allow you to gain access to a limited amount of information for free; you may have to sign up for a free account and begin a free trial. After that, you’ll need to pay for their services. If you’re doing a preliminary competitor analysis, or making a one-time research effort, the free option should be sufficient. Most platforms work similarly, but we’ll look at SEMRush as an example for how to conduct a competitive keyword analysis. You’ll start by entering your competitor’s domain, or a specific page you want to know more about. From there, you’ll be able to open the “Organic Research” tab on the left, and click on Positions. There, you’ll be able to see a breakdown of which keywords and keyword phrases this domain is currently ranking for. You’ll also be able to see specific metrics, like their exact current position, the typical search volume or search traffic for the term, and the cost per click (CPC) associated with the term. Additionally, you’ll want to look at “Position Changes.” Here, you’ll be able to see major changes in your competitors’ strategies; for example, if you see fast ranking growth within a specific family of keywords, there’s a good chance they’re targeting those keywords in their latest push. If their rankings for a different family of keywords seems to be falling, they may be moving away from them. Take note of

The Google Knowledge Graph is a feature was originally implemented in 2012. As a feature, Google’s Knowledge Graph improves: Information access without user click-throughs Speed of information access Improved matching of user search intent A richer user experience with images and graphics included in SERPs The Knowledge Graph is great for users, but can be bad for SEO, including clicks, particularly if you don’t know how to properly leverage it. Google Knowledge Graph looks like this: In this post, we will discuss what the Google Knowledge Graph is, why it exists and how to optimize for SEO. Let’s dive in! What is the Google Knowledge Graph / Knowledge Panel? When a user sends a search query for a specific entity, Google will scour the web to pull and analyze properly formatted information about that entity, and display it in an organized fashion on the right side of the screen. For example, if a user searches for “Barack Obama,” the Knowledge Graph will display important biographical information, such as his birthday, full name, and of course, the fact that he’s the 44th president of the United States. Google gathers this information by dissecting and interpreting information found on external authoritative sites. This information is efficiently readable if it is entered in a specific microformatting template, like those found at Schema.org for various categories. Currently, the Knowledge Panels only covers a handful of categories of information, but as it expands, it could offer more information on more topics. The Google Knowledge Graph is an impressive and relatively new feature, but it has many search marketers fearing for the long-term relevance of their jobs. In case you weren’t aware, the Knowledge Panels refers to a collection of information that Google uses to display concise answers to users with specific queries. For example, if a user searches for a specific movie, like the Wizard of Oz, Google will display a prominent box of information off to the right of its typical link-based Google search results. This box will display significant information (typically in the form of structured data) about the user’s query, in this case including the year of initial release, the director, and main actors associated with the movie. The Knowledge Graph isn’t limited to just movies, however, and it’s gradually expanding to consume more and more types of information. While this growth is both useful from a user perspective and fascinating from a human perspective, the ramifications it has for SEO are somewhat troubling. Fortunately, there are a handful of strategies you can start implementing to avoid losing out to Knowledge Graph traffic in the long run. How the Knowledge Graph Is Changing Search The traditional method of search is what drives the value of an SEO campaign. Search results merely listed a series of links to relevant pages, and almost inevitably, a user would click on at least one of those links. If you could get your link to the top, you would receive the greatest number of those clicks. The Knowledge Graph is changing search because it’s reducing on critical variable in that equation: the number of people clicking on search links. Let’s say a user searched for the Wizard of Oz in the old format of searching, looking for basic information on the movie. That user would be forced to click on a link to find that information. Today, with the Knowledge Graph, that information is immediately available, eliminating the need to do any clicking. How Google Knowledge Graph Could Change SEO Forever The entire motivation behind the Knowledge Graph’s release is an indication of the future role of online search. Rather than being a tool to find online sites, it’s becoming a tool to find direct information, and as a result, the scope of SEO and online business marketing is bound to change. The Latest Developments As you might imagine, since it is a Google product, Knowledge Graphs is not some stagnant, one-time development. It is a living, growing mechanic that continues to become more advanced on an almost daily basis. Even in the short history of 2015, the Knowledge Graph has been subject to updates and advancements. 2015 Oscar Nominations In an unpredicted move, Google began showing information on the 2015 Oscar Nominations in the Knowledge Graph, shortly after they were announced. Any search for “Oscar nominee” or “Oscar nominations” will lead to a list of the eight films nominated for the award for Best Picture. In addition, Google is offering detailed information about the Academy Awards in general, as well as the ceremony date for 2015. It’s a sign of Google’s commitment to providing quick-reference information accurately, but also in a timely manner. Social Profiles Back in November of 2014, Google stepped out of its Google+ shell and started openly providing links to other social media profiles in its Knowledge Graph box. However, these links were restricted for use by major personalities, such as politicians, actors, and musicians. Starting in January of 2015, Google is providing links to social profiles of major brands. There’s even a specific markup Google released so you can accurately provide the details to your corporate social profiles to the search engine. Increasing Frequency Partly due to an increasing breadth of topics covered by the Knowledge Graph and partly due to an increasing number of companies using proper markup formats on their sites, the Knowledge Graph is showing up for an ever-increasing number of queries. According to a recent post by Steven Levy, the Google team estimates that current total number of queries to be 25 percent. One out of every four queries now leads to a Knowledge Graph box, and that number is likely to grow. In addition,the Knowledge Graph Search API is making it easier to connect properly to the data, giving Google users and developers the tools they need to succeed. How to Prepare for the Knowledge Graph’s Expansion Already, the Knowledge Graph is making waves in Google search world. But as most search engine marketers have learned