Improving salience - an ultra powerful, yet little-known SEO strategy

Hello!

This is the very first issue of SERP Scoop. Hope you enjoy!

Improving salience - an ultra powerful, yet little-known SEO strategy

Let’s face it - Google can’t understand text the same way us humans can.

Instead, Google relies on machine learning to identify entities within text, which helps it understand what’s being discussed.

The higher the salience score of an entity, the more likely that entity is the subject (or one of the main subjects) of the text.

This matters a lot for on-page SEO.

Your content could be terrible or flat-out make no sense but if you have the right entities in the right locations, you can rank - even on the first page. Kyle Roof proved it when he ranked first for a competitive term with Latin “lorem ipsum” text.

Moving around words in your content to increase the salience of the keyword you’re targeting can make a huge difference in your ranking position.

How do you improve the salience of your target keyword?

The best way is to move your keyword toward the beginning of a sentence or paragraph. It should be very clear that you are talking specifically about that subject.

You can do this manually, or with ChatGPT.

If you use ChatGPT, here’s a simple prompt that works great:

“Rewrite the following passage to improve the salience score of [your keyword]. Keep the same meaning and information.

[your passage]"

You can even paste an entire article in as your passage and it should still work.

How to check salience scores

To verify that the salience score for your keyword improved, go to Google’s Natural Language API demo.

Scroll down to the “Try the API” box.

Paste in the first version of your text (before improving the salience score of your target keyword). Note the salience scores for the entities within your text.

Here’s an example of what it’ll look like:

Next, paste in the text with the improved salience. The score for your keyword (or at least the main entity within your keyword) should be higher, like in the example below.

The improved passage of text should rank higher in Google for your target keyword, all else being equal.

Shoutout to Tony Hill for sharing this strategy in his Niche Pursuits interview.

SEO News

• Very High SERP Volatility Today - Semrush shows SERP volatility is at 8.9/10 today.

  

• Google Fixes Google News Indexing Bug - Google has resolved an indexing issue in Google News that lasted for three weeks and led to significant traffic declines for publishers, with normal traffic levels expected to be restored by mid-July (that’s now!)

• Google on Fixing “Discovered - Currently Not Indexed” - Google's John Mueller advises that improving overall website quality and server capacity, along with optimizing individual pages, is key to addressing the issue of “discovered - currently not indexed” pages.

• AI vs Human-Written Content Experiment - Results of this SEO experiment showed that human-written content outperformed AI content, with statistically significant differences found in the majority of tests.

• What Working as a Google Search Quality Rater Revealed - Cyrus Shepard became a Google Quality Rater, uncovering insights about what search quality raters look for, the significance of user intent, page quality, and more.

Something I LOVE (You Might Too)

I do TONS of keyword research for myself and for my Curated Keywords clients.

I’ve tried a bunch of keyword research tools, and have to say my favorite one for finding low-competition keywords is lowfruits.

Lowfruits is great at surfacing low-competition keywords even in high-competition niches.

For example, say you had a website about SEO and wanted to target some low competition keywords relating to “Ahrefs”. Enter that it lowfruits, adjust the filters, and boom!

Look at this treasure trove:

Lowfruits shows you a bunch of useful metrics for each keyword, like low-Domain Authority sites ranking, whether Quora, Reddit, or forums rank, and more.

It saves a ton of time and is affordably-priced too. Check out lowfruits here!

I’m an affiliate for lowfruits, but I also use it all the time and it honestly is my favorite keyword research tool.

That’s it for the first issue of SERP Scoop! Hope you enjoyed. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, I’d love to hear from you!

Have a great rest of your weekend,

Ian