SERP Features Course: How Ranking Works (How Rich Elements Get Onto Your Brand SERP)
Script from the lesson The SERP Features Course
Jason Barnard speaking: How ranking works. The situation: when you’re doing SEO, it’s really, really important to understand the mechanisms behind Google’s ranking system. I call it Darwinism in Search and you’ll see why. This is something that Gary Illyes from Google told me in May 2019 and it makes so much sense.
Jason Barnard speaking: At Bing, the ranking works in very much the same way. Frederic Dubut, the team lead for the blue link algorithm at Bing explained much the same system to me in November 2019. Understanding this system for ranking both the blue links and the Rich Elements change the way I approach SEO. It revolutionized my thinking about Brand SERPs. I have over 20 years of experience working on SEO, and I have been working specifically on Brand SERPs since 2014.
Jason Barnard speaking: But it was this explanation from Gary and Frederic that brought the final pieces to the puzzle for this course. We’ll start with this very boring Brand SERP. 10 blue links. Just a few years ago, this was what we got from Google. These days, the 10 blue links hardly ever exist. And when we do get a SERP with just the 10 blue links, it seems somehow incomplete.
Jason Barnard speaking: For a Brand SERP, the effect is to make the brand look bad, at best boring, at worst not credible. I’ve been working on my personal Brand SERP for five years and I’ve managed to get a really nice SERP. On the right, we have the Knowledge Panel. Then I have the Twitter Boxes, the Image Boxes, and the Video Boxes.
Jason Barnard speaking: Any item in a SERP that is not a blue link is called a Rich Element. Question, how does Google decide which SERPs contain Rich Elements, which Rich Elements appear, and how many Rich Elements? Google wants to return multimedia SERPs like this one. Often, the content that brings most value to its users is multimedia. It’s quick and easy to consume. It’s engaging, which is what many people are looking for. It’s less and less the case that the blue link really helps the user quickly and efficiently. One problem it has is that the multimedia content that’s out there is not sufficiently good. It doesn’t bring sufficient value to Google’s users.
Jason Barnard speaking: On Brand SERPs, this is particularly true. The user already knows something about the brand since they’re searching for its name. If they’re navigating to your site, then just the top of the page is enough for them. But if they’re researching your brand as a potential client, maybe a journalist or an investor, the 10 blue links doesn’t really satisfy the needs very well.
Jason Barnard speaking: Clicking on a blue link, looking at the content, clicking back, clicking on another blue link, reading that content, clicking back, and then worse, clicking on a clickbait meta title, looking at that content, being disappointed, clicking back. The user is wasting time getting frustrated and Google doesn’t look good.
Jason Barnard speaking: Multimedia elements on a SERP give both more information about the brand, but also more clues as to what the user will find when they do click on the link. So multimedia Brand SERPs are better for everyone. Let’s have a quick look at this SERP, my personal Brand SERP that I’ve worked on and shaped since 2014. Let’s have a closer look.
Jason Barnard speaking: The Twitter Boxes, I’ve got them. That’s nice. How did I get those? I spent a year tweeting every single day and getting relevant people to engage with my tweets. Look here. I can get something new onto my personal Brand SERP in 51 seconds. In fact, it can be as fast as 15 seconds. How cool is that? Then I’ve got the videos.
Jason Barnard speaking: What did I do for that? I published at least one video a month over a year. Here, engagement seems to have been less important than for the Twitter Boxes, but it’s still necessary. The reason Google is putting this right up here is because it feels that those videos and those Twitter Boxes have value for its users when they’re searching for my name. Then, we have the Knowledge Panel. That’s a lot of information about me, very clear, easy to digest, and right there at the top of the SERP. On this Brand SERP, the user has understood a lot about me with a quick read of the SERP. And then there are a lot of visual and textual clues to help that person decide which piece of content is likely to be most relevant and valuable to them.
Jason Barnard speaking: That’s a good user experience. So the big question I’m going to answer now is how does Google decide on where and when to put the Rich Elements and indeed which Rich Elements to put on a SERP? To get some context, we need to come back to those blue links. How does the ranking system for those work? By the way, all the numbers in the following presentation are completely fictional. The score starts near zero, but could go up to millions or just thousands, or maybe even just hundreds.
Jason Barnard speaking: The numbers are just to demonstrate how this functions and I kept them low and simple to keep things manageable. Here we have the aspects that affect ranking. You might call them ranking factors. Each one contains multiple signals. We have topicality, quality, speed, entities, RankBrain, structured data, freshness.
Jason Barnard speaking: There are others, but these are the ones that Gary Illyes confirmed. Each of these factors contains multiple signals. For example, quality will include accuracy inbound links. Structured data would include HTML tables, lists and schema.org markup.
Jason Barnard speaking: Each group of signals, you can still call them ranking factors if you really want to provide a score. The algorithm takes these scores and multiplies them together to get a total score. Why have I written bid if I’m saying score? Because Google uses the term bid and it’s not bid in a monetary sense, it’s not bid in the sense of how much is somebody paying or is even willing to pay.
Jason Barnard speaking: It’s a bid in the terms of the value it can bring to Google’s users in the context in which that user finds themselves. So every blue link is bidding for that top spot with its value. And its bid is a multiplication of the score in the different groups of signals. Now, if a piece of content has a score that is less than one in any of the groups of signals, the bid will tank.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you’re good at math, you’ll know that in multiplication, when any of the numbers is less than one, the total goes down drastically. That means it’s vital to have content that doesn’t fail drastically on any of the groups of signals. Here’s a school analogy: much better to be a straight C student and get three A’s and an F. And a quick handy tip, it is an improvement in your weakest area that will have the most effect on boosting your rankings. If you want to improve your rankings for any search query, identify where you’re weakest and improve that. If you’ve got a hundred thousand links, one extra link will make very little difference. If you’ve got one link, one extra link makes a lot of difference.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you have text, but no structured data on your page, then adding some structured data will make more difference than writing more text.
Jason Barnard speaking: And here we have the final bids that until 2014 or so filled the whole SERP. And we have these incredibly boring 10 blue links. This is Kalicube in mid 2019. This is my company, so I’m not criticizing anybody who has a Brand SERP that is as boring and unconvincing as this. Kalicube had 10 blue links because it hadn’t yet posted videos for a year or tweeted for a year or gotten the knowledge graph.
Jason Barnard speaking: And the boringness of that SERP was a big red flag to me. And that got me to rethink my content strategy and my knowledge graph strategy. So, how has Google expanded out to be able to include Rich Elements that disrupt this SERP without messing with the core algorithm? If you think about it, they can’t drastically change that core algorithm, both because it’s too big and complex, but also because it’s the foundation on which their entire business model is built.
Jason Barnard speaking: If they get that core algorithm majorly wrong, their business will collapse. Google wants to push Rich Elements such as news, images, video, features and a bit Twitter Boxes and so on without messing with the core algorithm. It does that by using the same algorithm on each, but with bespoke weighting applied to the signals and for some Rich Elements, they add additional signals just for that element.
Jason Barnard speaking: Alt tags for images would be a good example of a factor that is unique to them. Rich Elements are organizing groups by type. Each type provides a ranked result and submits a bid to try to gain a place on the SERP, they are candidates for a place on that SERP, so we call these Candidate Sets. Now, a quick word on how Google organizes the people behind the algorithm.
Jason Barnard speaking: There’s a team for the blue link algorithm, with a team lead driving the direction these results are taking, including their visual presentation and features such as sitelinks, dates, and review stars. There’s a team for the Video Candidate Set with a team lead driving the direction those results are taking, including the weightings of the signals in the calculation of the bids for videos, but also the presentation of the results.
Jason Barnard speaking: There’s also a team for the News Candidate Set and so on and so forth. So, how does the ranking in Candidate Sets function? Each piece of content in a Candidate Set submits a bid by multiplying across the scores for those groups of signals, remember, signals that have different weightings for each Rich Element type.
Jason Barnard speaking: The Candidate Set then has a ranked results set limited only to that type of Rich Element. Each Candidate Set has its champion its best bit of value to the user and the context of the user, the context of the user being geo location, device intent, time of day and so on and so forth. It submits its bids to the core algorithm, which has its list of 10 blue links.
Jason Barnard speaking: If the top result of a Candidate Set provides a bid that is higher than the top blue link, that means it brings more value to the user for the question they have asked or the problem they need to solve in the context the user find themselves in. It’s therefore given a place on the SERP. That’s how you drive those Rich Elements, leapfrogging blue links with Rich Elements to bring more value.
Jason Barnard speaking: I would say it’s Darwinistic. If you are stronger, you bring more value to the user in that current context, you get a place. Replacing a blue link, in fact you kill a blue link because when you get that place with a Rich Element, a blue link disappears off the bottom of the SERP. It dies. In some cases you killed two blue links.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you get the Video Boxes, we can see immediately it takes two places. Two blue links drop off the bottom of the page onto page two. For related searches, things can go even further. Related Searches on Russell Brand’s personal Brand SERP have killed three blue links. So when we now say the blue links are slowly disappearing, they’re disappearing because of this.
Jason Barnard speaking: Will the blue links die out? Probably one day in the distant future. That’s Darwinism, survival of the fittest. A quick word about a rather special team here. There’s a whole page team that works on what the whole page will look like. I don’t have confirmation from Google or Bing about exactly how that team intervenes, but an educated guess is that it has an algorithm that shapes the SERP according to intent, the placement of the elements, the exact presentation format, and certainly other aspects. So, Google’s Darwinism has a little bit of bias and that leads us to the idea that you can shape the anatomy of SERPs. That idea can be usefully applied to any SERP, but shaping the anatomy of the SERP should be an obsession for your Brand SERPs.
Jason Barnard speaking: Luckily, Brand SERPs have natural tendency to be multimedia and a tendency to display Rich Elements containing content produced by the brand. So with time and work, you will be able to shape the anatomy of your Brand SERP and that obsession will not be frustrating for very long. Here’s an example of a brand that’s doing a good job shaping the SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: They’ve got the nice Video Boxes, the Image Boxes, the Twitter Boxes. They also have the Knowledge Panel. They’ve been shaping the anatomy of their Brand SERP by creating rich content that is valuable to their audience and that their audience engages with. To get the video boxes, they’ve created lots of video content.
Jason Barnard speaking: They appear on webinars. They’re creating a reason for Google to put this content in the SERP because it knows that when a user searches for that brand, they are interested in learning what they have to say. And video is a great platform for that. Your aim is to fill your Brand SERPs with Rich Elements that bring joy and wonder and glorious beauty.
Jason Barnard speaking: Your brand will look better to your audience. You look more credible, you look trustworthy, you look authoritative, and you look expert. You’ll notice I just mentioned expertise, authority, and trust, otherwise referred to as E-A-T by Google.
Jason Barnard speaking: Your Brand SERP is a reflection of Google’s view of your E-A-T. Once Google is showing content in your Brand SERP, especially rich content that communicates your credibility to your audience, it also means that Google thinks you are expert, authoritative, and trustworthy. You are winning the E-A-T game. Understanding the mechanism behind Google’s ranking system and understanding that it is integrated Rich Elements alongside its core algorithm in a manner that allows them to leapfrog the blue links and kill them off is crucial to working more effectively on actively shaping the anatomy of your Brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thank you.
