Timothy Carter

When it comes to link building for SEO, measuring results can be nebulous. But boy is it frustrating when you have been actively doing quality outreach and your link building campaign still doesn’t seem to be yielding the results you want (or need). In my experience link building campaigns typically fail for one or more of the following reasons: Your links are from low quality sources (e.g., low quality link directories) Your links are not diverse, relevant or natural Your links are over-optimized for specific anchor text Your content doesn’t fit search intent (it’s either too long OR too short OR doesn’t answer the users’ query) Your content is poor in quality or cannibalizes itself with other content on your site Your niche and corresponding keywords are super competitive Some of what follows should be able to uncover at least a few of the issues plaguing your link building campaign. So why aren’t your link building campaigns working? Let’s find out. How Link Building Should “Work” First, let’s talk about how link building is supposed to “work” in the first place, and the various ways that link building can go wrong. You likely understand the goal is to establish or earn links pointing back to your domain to reap the benefits of increased authority and traffic—so how can you tell if your strategy is working or not? Link permanence. Nothing on the internet is truly permanent—at least, that we know of—but for the most part, the links you build should seem that way. One of the biggest advantages of link building is its capacity for accumulation; since all your links remain in place indefinitely, they’ll continue paying dividends of traffic and building on each other’s authority to improve your campaign further and further over time. If your links are getting removed, or if they’re otherwise unable to fulfill that duty, your link building campaign can’t possibly work. If you’re links aren’t sticking or you’re finding your linkgraph is plagued with broken links, then you’ll likely need to fix broken links by engaging in a broken link building campaign to get them back online. Increasing referral traffic. Link building should also increase your referral traffic; each new link you build serves as another portal to your site, and if that portal is relevant to your audience, at least a portion of your readers should be inclined to click through. As you build more links on higher-authority sources and continue reaping value from your old links, your total referral traffic should be on a trend of constant incline.If your growth slows to a negligible crawl, or worse, if your traffic starts to actively decline, you have a problem on your hands. Increasing domain authority and organic traffic. Similarly, as you progress in your link building efforts, you should see both increasing domain authority and organic traffic growth. Domain authority growth is an indication that you’re building positive momentum with the number and diversity of links you build to your site, and you can calculate that figure using Moz’s Open Site Explorer or a similar tool. If your domain authority becomes stagnant or starts to decline, it’s a sign that your campaign is in jeopardy. If your domain authority is rising, your organic traffic should also start to rise, since your overall search rankings will rise; if it doesn’t, something isn’t working correctly. New opportunities and reputation growth. Throughout your link building campaign, you should be met with a steady stream of new opportunities and the growth of your reputation. That means, you should gradually work your way up to bigger and higher-authority publishers; if you find yourself trapped in the same handful of publishers you started with, you’re doing something wrong. Though reputation is linked to this upward momentum, it’s a distinct concept that’s much harder to measure; if you feel you aren’t establishing your brand as an authority in the industry, it could be a sign your link building isn’t working as well. These general problems all indicate that something is probably wrong with your campaign. Even if you’re earning value in some areas, a disruption of growth in any other area is enough to warrant closer inspection; detecting and correcting the issues within your campaign can always make it stronger. That said, there are many different possible issues to address, so I’m splitting them into two main groups: high-level and ground-level issues. High-Level Issues First up are high-level issues; these are general problems with your approach, your overarching strategy, and your means of execution. They aren’t specific to any one aspect of your campaign but can affect almost all aspects of your campaign when they exist. Publisher Inaccessibility One of the most effective ways to build links is creating guest content to be featured on off-site publications; this provides context for your link, gives you a good excuse to be featured on high-authority sites, and gives you a recurring platform for development. However, if you can’t find your way onto a publisher’s site, which is usually the case, then this option is closed for you. I wrote an in-depth guide on how to become a contributor at major media publications, called The Ultimate, Step-by-Step Guide to Building Your Business by Guest Blogging. But bear in mind that guest blogging services should be filtered with extreme caution. Rejection is to be expected with this strategy; no matter how authoritative you are or how strong your pitches are, some publishers just won’t be interested in what you have to offer. But if you find yourself rejected consistently, and unable to land your first guest spot or advance to another publisher, you won’t be able to progress. There are a few possible influencing factors here: Status and reputation. First, your status and/or reputation may not be sufficient to land you a guest spot. Publisher standards vary from highly restrictive to universally open, but if you don’t have a portfolio of content to demonstrate your abilities, or a sufficient online presence to prove your

Content marketing is always changing to reflect the latest technologies and the latest trends in consumption. Content is a broad term, referring to anything from simple social media comments to extensively detailed whitepapers, and everything in between. Using each content medium to its maximum potential is the best way to be successful with your inbound online marketing campaign, but if you stay consistent with only a handful of content types, you run the risk of a stagnant or uninteresting campaign. New Mediums For Content Marketing Content marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating content in a way that is valuable to them. Its goal is not to sell but to build trust and brand awareness while nurturing leads through the sales funnel. When done right, content marketing can benefit both consumers and businesses. For businesses, content marketing can be an extremely cost-effective way to reach new customers and generate leads without resorting to paid advertising. And for consumers, well-crafted content can be a valuable source of information and assistance during the purchase process. But before content marketing can be effective, businesses must first understand what their audience wants and needs. Only then can they create content that resonates with that audience. If you’re looking to stay up to date in the content marketing world, or if you’re just looking to inject your strategy with a handful of new mediums, try using one of these content types: Podcasting Podcasts are a series of audio or video episodes that are free to create and syndicate throughout the web. Many leading online brands have their podcast series, each with a unique angle or subject matter that’s explored regularly. Some podcasts focus on industry developments. Some focus on interviews and news. Still, others have more audience engagement factor, bringing in questions and answers or tackling subjects from reader requests. Since podcasts are usually based on a subscription model, they function as a social media platform as much as they do an independent content marketing strategy. Knowing that you can tailor your podcasting strategy to fit your audience appropriately, covering topics and speaking in a way that’s more fluid than straightforward blogging yet more structured than social media interactions. Like with interviews, it’s wise to include written transcriptions of each episode on your website and social media. Do note that podcasts take commitment. Unlike journal articles, which can be used once to great effect, podcasts need to be rolled out regularly before they start generating results. Online Interviews Interviews are a great content medium, especially for busy content marketers. The content takes the form of an organic discussion. You’ll have to spend some time finding and vetting candidates, but once you’ve found a potential interviewee, the remainder of the content piece practically takes care of itself. You can post your interviews as a video or audio file but ensure to include a transcript on your site. The written words are powerful for SEO and are more scannable for readers looking only to get the highlights of the piece. Interviews are valuable because they share information and enhance authority. In addition to providing some great material and positive experiences for your growing content audience, it is a sophisticated form of relationship building and generally works as a mutually beneficial relationship. One thing, If a brand and a leading voice in the industry are both involved in the interview, both of them get a share of credit from the other’s existing audience. First-Party Source Research & Journalistic Articles The term “journalistic articles” is used somewhat loosely here. In order to be accepted into a real academic journal, you usually have to be a strong authority in the field, backed with years of experience, deep knowledge, and a full team of supporting researchers and reviewers. But you don’t necessarily need to be published in a major peer-reviewed academic journal in order to reap the benefits of the “journalistic article” medium. Like whitepapers, journalistic articles are essentially in-depth, detailed pieces of written content that focus on a given concept. The differentiating factor with journal articles is the research factor; whitepapers usually offer secondary research (and occasionally some primary research) in order to support a main point, but journal articles revolve around a bout of original research. Rather than making a point and using data to support it, instead you’ll be presenting data and drawing a conclusion from it. Chances are, you won’t draw people in with humor or entertainment in your journal articles. Instead, these are scientific, logic-driven pieces that will heighten your status as an authority and provide source material for others to use in their content marketing programs. Memes Strictly defined, a meme is an idea or a behavior that spreads rapidly from individual to individual within a given culture. Originally used as a descriptor of evolutionary principles, the term “meme” itself has evolved to refer to bits of online content that have captured attention and gone viral. Some Internet users and online marketers have since begun to refer to any amusing picture as a “meme,” though this isn’t always the case. It’s technically impossible to start a meme, since a meme does not exist until it begins to spread, but you can implement pieces of content that could become a meme in a given context. Hashtags are an accessible example. By introducing a trend, action, or conversation topic using a given hashtag, companies hope to inspire a viral movement collected under that term. Of course, hashtags aren’t a necessary component of meme creation; if you can start a trend simply by making a request or doing something bold, by all means, do it. The key here is to present a piece of content in an easily digestible format that can spread easily from one person to another, preferably in

Content syndication is one of the best methods for scaling your backlinks in for SEO & content marketing. Writing and publishing the original article (or infographic, or video, or any piece of material, really) is only the first step. Even if you create something informative, entertaining, valuable, and shareable, it won’t mean much unless there are actual people around to read and consume it. Syndication attempts to solve that problem by making your created content available to a wider audience. In this guide, we discuss what free content syndication is, why it matters to SEO companies, and how you can execute in order to rank your content for years into the future. If you’re ready to dive in, we’ll get started! What is Content Syndication? Content syndication is a term used to describe the re-publishing of content by third-party websites. Any type of digital content can be syndicated. This includes traditional blog posts and news articles, videos, images, infographics, and press releases. The type of content being syndicated in today’s online world might look a little different than it did 25 years ago, but syndication has been around for as long as there’s been mass media. Prior to the World Wide Web, newspapers and magazines often syndicate your content from freelance writers, local publications, and smaller papers with fractional readership. The purpose of content syndication, both then and now, is to provide a mutually beneficial outcome for both parties: The individual/company who offers up the valuable content for syndication gains access to a much wider target audience. The publication that publishes the syndicated content gets access to free and/or on-demand content without having to invest internal resources. Benefits and Perks of Content Syndication In this guide, we’re focusing primarily on content syndication from the perspective of the business providing the content to the syndicated partner. In other words, we want to explore how syndicating your content can impact your website and brand. With this in mind, here are some of the top benefits (other than higher visibility): 1. Referral Traffic The first benefit is direct referral traffic. Whenever you have a post syndicated, there’s usually some sort of referral link back to your site. And they’re generally pretty prominent. At the top and/or bottom of the post, you’ll typically see something like: “This post originally appeared on…” or This content was first published on…” with a hyperlink back to your website. A percentage of people will click the link and become a visitor on your site. 2. SEO As you may know, backlinks play a prominent role in search engine optimization and are one of the top few ranking factors for Google and other search engines. Getting a link from a syndicated content partner provides an authoritative backlink and visible inroad into your site. Check your backlinks now with our free tool!  3. Subscribers Depending on how your own content is syndicated and the type of call-to-action or link that you use back to your site, you may be able to pick up email subscribers and leads. Entrepreneur Sara Peterson recently published one of her articles on EliteDaily. At the end of the post, she got permission from the editors to include a bio that read: Sarah Peterson is the author of Unsettle.org, where she encourages people to never settle for careers they don’t love. Sign up for her free course to find the perfect idea for a lifestyle business so you can gain flexibility and freedom and do work you live. This simple link to download a lead magnet allowed Sarah to accumulate 1,000 new subscribers within a matter of days. She’s since gone on to show people how you can repeat the process. 4. Branding From a branding perspective, getting more visibility and exposure for your company is a great thing. Every time you syndicate a post, you can/should include your logo and brand name as a way of building trust with readers. (Even if they never click the original link or visit your own website, there’s still some exposure there that could spark trust in a future exchange.) 5. Resource Maximization Finally, content syndication is a sustainable method of content creation. It helps you maximize the more resources that you have on hand and prevents the need to constantly publish new content over and over again. Repurposing vs. Guest Blogging vs. Syndication There are a lot of different phrases and terms people use when discussing content. Let’s explore three of the top terms and explain how they’re similar yet different. Repurposing. When you take an existing piece of content and then change it up to fit a different medium or format, you’re repurposing the content. A classic example of content repurposing is when you take a podcast episode and turn it into a own blog post (or vice versa). Guest Blogging. When you publish a guest blog posts, you’re actually writing a brand new post that’s never been published anywhere else and then publishing a guest post on a third-party website with your own bio and a backlink to your domain. Content Syndication. Finally, there’s content syndication (which is what this article is about). This is when you take an existing piece of content and syndicate to another platform. Syndicated content is typically done on a word-for-word basis, though there may be some changes to the title, formatting, and/or basic structure in order to fit the publisher’s unique editorial requirements. As you can see, these three concepts are pretty closely related. However, the execution and application is slightly different. Understanding this will allow you to make smart and intentional decisions about your content strategy. The 3 Tiers of Content Syndication There are plenty of different ways to think about content syndication. But one way is to look at it in a series of three “tiers,” which dictate both an order and a degree of importance for the overall campaign success. Within each tier, there are a number of different options for individual brands to choose. But

When you think of ‘digital marketing,’ what comes to mind? Is it splashy ads, viral social media content, online marketing and immersive website experiences? Do you imagine billion-dollar businesses like Coca-Cola, Nike, and Apple flexing their creative muscles and spending millions of dollars on clever campaigns? While high-rollers like these certainly have the advantage of a massive digital marketing budget, the reality is that you don’t need a six- or seven-figure pot of gold to generate results. Because if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves, work creatively, and focus on the right investments, small marketing budgets can generate pretty impressive returns. In this guide, we’re neutralizing the mythical correlation between digital marketing success and dollars spent. Instead, we’re going to explore some of the top tips, strategies, and frameworks that are helping brands with limited digital marketing budgets reach customers and engage them in high-level ways. If you’re ready to learn how we can get started! Cultivate The Right Mindset It might sound odd to begin a discussion of marketing strategies with mindset, but this is a very important concept. And once it’s grasped, you’ll discover much more freedom to invest your resources into the right channels and initiatives. The problem most smaller brands have with digital marketing channels is that they see it as a one-off project. At first, this might not seem like an issue. But it has negative ramifications – especially for brands that don’t have a large marketing budget. The correct way to view marketing activities is as an ongoing investment. Yes, each campaign and initiative has its own life, but you’re always feeding a long-term vision. It’s best to think of your marketing campaign as a framework or foundation. It’s something that you’re going to continue to build on for years to come. And as is the case with any foundation in a building project, it needs to be sturdy if it’s going to serve its purpose. Any brand can build a sturdy marketing foundation. The digital marketing budget is irrelevant. And just because you have a shallow budget today, doesn’t mean you won’t have more financial resources to invest in marketing in the future. If you’re viewing marketing as a one-off investment today, you’ll end up constructing a cheap and flimsy foundation that won’t hold up under the weight of a more intensive marketing campaign down the road. However, if you cultivate the right mindset and see the importance of creating a strong and scalable foundation that grows with you over time, you’ll be able to generate results regardless of the size of your marketing budget. To put it even more clearly: Build a strategy that won’t be obsolete when you have a six- or seven-figure online marketing budget in tote. This doesn’t mean your marketing strategy will look the same – it just means it’s grounded with a strong foundation that can scale up and evolve with ease. Develop a 12 Week Plan Before we dig into the very specific strategies you can use to generate results on a small marketing budget – including tips related to the content, social media, email, etc. – it’s important to touch on one more key element in relation to strategizing. For years, annual plans and goals have been the measuring stick and framework within which businesses plan campaigns. But we’re going to encourage you not to use a one-year plan and to instead begin with a 12-week plan. Planning in blocks of 12 weeks is a concept that bestselling author Brian Moran has popularized. It’s a goal-setting approach that’s rooted in the fundamentals of periodization (which is the process of focus, concentration, and overload in an athletic training environment). The idea is that, by moving the goalposts in from 12 months to 12 weeks, you increase intensity and urgency. This simultaneously improves your chances of reaching the goals you set. Annualized planning has been around for years, but it should no longer be a best practice (particularly within the context of digital marketing). When the annual plan was first introduced more than a century ago, businesses were able to look out three to five years into the distance and feel confident that nothing major would change. But as you know, we don’t operate in an environment like this any longer. In the digital marketing space, trends and best practices are changing on a weekly basis. So why create a marketing plan that’s focused on one year out? A 12-week period of time is enough to help you generate results without eroding that much-needed sense of intensity and focus. There’s nothing wrong with having an annual vision – or even a three-year vision – but it should always come back to a shorter time frame. And it just so happens that 12 weeks – or roughly a quarter of the year – provides the perfect structure. 6 Tips for Marketing on a Small Budget – 6 Steps For Allocating Your Digital Marketing Budget Now that we’ve discussed the importance of developing a strong and scalable foundation, as well as the need for campaigns and goals that have the right blend of intensity and focus, it’s time to get into the good stuff. While it might be easier to be successful with marketing if you have a large online marketing budget, the constraints of a smaller budget can force you to emphasize the right principles. It basically takes away all of your crutches and forces you to get to work. And with that being said, here are a few specific tips you can use to generate more with less: 1. Create High-Value Content While much has changed in the digital marketing space over the past decade – and much will continue to change in the near future – one thing remains true: Content will always be the king of marketing. And if there’s something that we’ve continued to learn about content, it’s that quality reigns supreme. One of the biggest problems we see in our space is

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great marketing strategy. It’s accessible. It’s inexpensive. And it can scale to yield an unbelievable return on investment (ROI). But there’s a big problem that might stand in your way: competition. Having a formidable competitor at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) means you’ll have to work twice as hard to earn a spot in the top few ranks. It also means you could lose a lot of traffic to another site just because you’re a rank away from the top.   It’s possible to mitigate the threat of competition with strategies like targeting a different audience, optimizing for long-tail keywords, and focusing on a unique niche. But what if you could use the power of your local SEO competition against them? That’s the idea behind brand jacking – a novel SEO (and PPC) strategy that can help you get better results, no matter what kind of competition you face. What Is Brand Jacking? “Brand jacking” or “brandjacking” is a combination of the terms “brand” and “hijacking.” But we’re not literally hijacking someone else’s brand. Instead, we’re attempting to use the power of their brand against them. In a traditional advertising context, brand jacking has been used to criticize, undermine, or otherwise attack popular luxury brands. For example, in 2013, charitable organization Oxfam created an ad called “The Bitter Taste of Sugar” that parodied an ad for Coca-Cola Zero in an attempt to criticize Coca-Cola’s unsustainable business practices. But we’re more interested in using brand jacking in the digital marketing world. Here’s the idea. Your competitors have established a lot of visibility and brand equity with their brand name. When someone searches for “CompetiTrix” (your top competitor), they inevitably see several pages of the CompetiTrix website. So what if you could leech some of the traffic they’re getting here? You’d hit them right where it hurts. Let’s say you write an article on your site (or hire our blog writing service to do it) titled, “The Top X Alternatives to CompetiTrix,” and you optimize it for terms related to “CompetiTrix.” Eventually, you could organically reach the second position in search engines (landing the number one spot may be impossible). Now, people who search for this competing brand name will have the option to look at alternatives instead. If successful, you’ll take traffic away from your competitor. You’ll capitalize on the existing power of their brand name. And you’ll get a chance to persuade your target market not to go with this competitor. It’s multiple advantages in one. Brand Jacking With PPC Ads You can also brand jack with the help of pay per click (PPC) ads. The idea here is to pay for ads with keywords related to your competitor’s brand name. It tends to be faster and more reliable, but also more expensive. There are two big problems you might run into:         Brand jacking defense. Digital marketing-savvy companies typically prepare defenses against the possibility of external brand jacking. It’s common these days to buy ads for your own brand name, to discourage people from targeting your brand for brand jacking and drive up the prices (just in case someone goes for it).         Google action. Google doesn’t want advertisers to abuse this system. If you throw trademarked keywords into an ad without a good reason, your ad could be removed due to misleading content or poor quality. Sound sketchy? Here’s a quote clarifying Google’s position on the matter: Advertisers may use a trademark term in ad text if they are a reseller of, offer compatible components or parts for, or provide information about the goods and services related to the trademarked term. In other words, as long as you have something relevant to say about your competitor, you’ll be in the clear. How to Choose a Brand Jacking Target One of the secrets to brand jacking success is choosing the right brand jacking target. There are no right or wrong answers here, but you should consider:         Competitors. Your direct competitors are the low-hanging fruit of brand jacking. If a company sells similar products and services as yours, and if it’s targeting the same demographics, it’s ripe for brand jacking. Getting higher visibility in a search for this type of brand will not only directly benefit your brand – it will also hinder your competition.         Complementary brands. Complementary brands are also good targets for brand jacking. For example, let’s say you sell boat insurance. You might optimize content to rank for major brand names in the boating world; this way, boat buyers will discover your insurance brand when they research possible purchases.         Audience synergy. Consider targeting brands who share your audience in a favorable way. As a simple example, let’s say you run a grape jelly company and you know there’s a dominant company in your area that sells peanut butter. You know people want to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, so you might optimize content on your site to rank for the peanut butter company’s brand name. If this is the case, you can turn the relationship into a more synergistic one; for example, you can collaborate together on content for mutual benefit.         Third party website rankings. Before you move forward with a brand jacking target, spend some time evaluating the SERPs for branded keyword terms. Does it seem like there are lots of third-party websites ranking for branded terms? If so, there’s probably room for you to move in. If the SERPs are totally dominated by the brand’s own content? If so, it may not be worth the effort to try and displace them. What Every Brand Jacking Strategy Needs to Succeed Brand jacking won’t be successful automatically. If you want a chance to succeed, you need the following ingredients, on top of the right competitive target (via competitive analysis of course):      

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) is a way that search engines understand whether your content is really on-topic and in-depth or just spam. The search engines understand this by looking at the words in an article and deciding how relevant they are to each other. Source: https://www.clickworker.com/content-marketing-glossary/semantic-search/ The right voice often means understanding the underlying factors that make up Semantic Search, including: Natural Language Processing Entity Recognition Query Stream Context User Context If you can fit within the context of this framework, you will be able to continue to find topics people want to read. For instance, for an article about computers, the search engines know that the following words are closely related to “computers” and will probably appear in any good article about computers: hard drive, CPU, RAM, monitor, motherboard, ghz, mhz, Intel, Nvidia, etc… These are known as LSI terms. What is Semantic Search & Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) So, here’s what happens when the search engines finds your article: 1. It reads the article 2. It determines “keyword density” of each word or phrase in the article. This means that it looks at the entire number of words in the article and finds how many times particular words or phrases are repeated in the article. Words and phrases that are repeated more often have higher keyword density. This is how the search engines knows what your article is about. So for an article about “desktop PC cases,” that phrase might appear 4 times in your 700-word article. That would give it a density of about 1.7%. (12/700 = 1.7%). We use 12 because “desktop PC cases” is comprised of 3 words, so 3 words X 4 appearances = 12. You can help the search engines figure out what your article is about by including the keyword in the title, first paragraph, and last paragraph of your article, as the search engines know to put extra emphasis on these areas of the article. 3. It picks out the words and phrases with the highest keyword density and uses those to determine what the article is about (in essence, the article is assigned a “relevancy score”). So for our “desktop PC cases” example, if it finds a high keyword density of “desktop PC cases” then it knows to expect high densities of other related terms (LSI terms), like: ATX, cooling, power supply, motherboard, gaming case, custom case, etc… Source: https://moz.com/blog/what-is-semantic-search The search engines know what related terms to expect for any given keyword; they have gotten pretty smart. So if they expect to see certain related keywords in the article but they don’t find those keywords, they assign it a lower relevancy score. This directly impacts where that article will rank in the search engine results page(SERP) when someone searches for your target keyword. LSI is a key concept in SEO (search engine optimization). Other search engines are always improving, and right now they are rewarding content that has a good balance of LSI terms with the main keyword of the article. So if your plan is to use & creating content that you write to build a Website, optimize that Website for SEO, and monetize the traffic that comes to the Website, it’s important that your articles have a good mix of LSI terms. So when I read articles, I read them from two different perspectives: 1. Human (Does it read well?) 2. SEO Specialist/search engine spider (Is there a good keyword density? Are there lots of LSI terms?) So for future article marketing efforts, try to incorporate LSI terms. Just think about what terms are unique to the niche you’re writing for. Often, these terms will occur organically as you write. But for best results, you should be conscious of how the search engines spiders are going to read your content. Take this blog post, for example. The main topic of this post is LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), but I’ve sprinkled a bunch of LSI terms into this post: SEO content relevant keyword keyword density search engine search engine optimization Website article marketing rank monetize All these terms are related to LSI and the broader category of SEO, which the search engines will recognize when their spiders crawl this post. And the result? This blog post will be assigned a higher relevancy score for those categories. And that means it’ll rank higher in the search engine’s results pages (SERPs). Simple as that. Now, don’t get me wrong; LSI isn’t the only determining factor of how your content ranks in the SERPs. In fact, it’s only one of hundreds, if not thousands of factors. That said, it’s gaining importance in the search engine’s algorithms so it’s worth thinking about when you are creating content /writing SEO-optimized content. Search trends are dependent on a number of closely interacting technologies, and you need to be aware of how they’re changing if you want to stay ahead of the competition, especially as rates of change accelerate across the board. There are device technologies, which have given us mobile devices and more sophisticated forms of local search, web technologies, which have made it possible for more companies to make more creative websites, and raw search technologies, which make search faster, easier, and more relevant for user satisfaction (among other classes of search technology). Of the search technologies, one of the most fascinating—and the fastest changing—is semantic search, the ability for search engines to recognize and interpret the natural language of its user intent/queries. semantic search works & is evolving in some astounding ways, and the sooner you start adapting to them, the better. Hummingbird (2013) In the early 2000s, there was no such thing as “semantic search,” and natural language recognition seemed like a distant dream for AI. Search engines functioned using a keyword-based mapping system; they would identify certain keywords and keyword phrases in your search query words, then generate a list of the places on the web where those terms were used most frequently and most prominently. Over the years,