Gerry White says “The main insight that I've got for 2023 is a continuation of what we've been talking about for the past couple of years. There's so much shiny and exciting stuff around, but I think one of the things that we need to really focus on is some of the basics. What I mean by that, is that the one thing that kind of we've been looking at for a long time, but we've been talking about it for a long time, but it seems to get escaped in the kind of the focus of a lot of organizations at the moment, and that's basically entities. It doesn't matter if you're working on eCommerce, it doesn't matter if you're working on content, it doesn't matter what type of site you're working on, focusing on the entities and how everything works together, and being more topical than ever before is definitely something that I think a lot of companies fail to focus on. When you're kind of talking about internal linking, when you're talking about how everything gets set up, when you're talking about how your entire site is put together, it feels like this is the one area that is so critical, and yet so often overlooked across all different sort of factors.”

Why do you describe entities as the most critical thing, because I would imagine that most SEOs would probably not pick entities as the most critical thing?

“The reason that I say this is the fact that it's one of those key basics. The way in which Google's been working for a long time, and the way in which Google's been evolving, is very much if you do a search for something, we don't get 10 blue links anymore. What we get is a representation of what Google interprets your query to be. It understands far more about objects and how everything's linked together than ever before, and that's actually the way in which the search results look. If you look at the way in which search results were evolving, nowadays we're getting more different drill downs. A good example is something that I was looking at a couple of days ago, where when you do a search for something as simple as a lasagna, it actually suggests at the top, do you want to look at a vegetable lasagna? Do you want to look at high protein, do you want to look at quick cook, and it starts understand that you're looking at lasagna, and these are all the different ways that you can look at lasagna. I've been working on a recipe website for the past year, and as much as anything, it's an eCommerce website. But a key part of it has been recipes and trying to understand the fact that it's not just the recipes, but it's the way in which the recipes are made up of ingredients, and these ingredients then link through to the product pages, which is what we want people to start to go through. Everything linking together means that Google has this incredible understanding, not just of your site, but of the products within the site. Then if somebody says what they're looking for is the availability of particular product, is it available to be delivered, Google knows that you're a store that delivers this particular product, that it's in stock, and it's available to be delivered. We've been marking up our pages for a long time with things like JSON, which allows us to say this is a product, and this is in stock, and this is the price. But Google's learning a lot about this kind of thing, and is knowing that these 20 different websites have this product. If you can prove that you're one of those 20 that sells online, and somebody wants to buy something online, then that's exactly why you will rank much better. Again, Google's learning all the information and relationships about things. So it's understanding not just what a product is, but also the alternatives to it. If you're looking for a particular Advent Calendar, Google knows that there are two or three other advent calendars if the particular advent calendar you're looking for is out of stock, which comes to mind because a couple of the advent calendars that have been driving a lot of search traffic this year, apparently, amazingly, are no longer produced by the companies, and so we're trying to persuade people to buy the other one.”

It's funny you mentioning lasagna there as well, because I remember about 10 years ago actually delivering some SEO one-on-one training where I asked everyone the question, 'how would you spell lasagna?' Some people would spell lasagna with an 'a', some people spelled it with an 'e', and so everyone was telling me, 'no, it's spelt with an a' or ' no it's spelt with an e', and the correct answer is, 'it depends on how much keyword search volume there is for the version or the version'. However, that was 10 years ago or so, and spelling really doesn't matter as much now.

“You say that, however, I was actually cooking for a couple of friends on Christmas, and one of things I was looking for was a big pot, and it turns out the big pots I'm looking for is a 'stock pot'. What's interesting, is on the Argos website, if you have a space between 'stock pot' and not a space, 'stockpot', then it actually has quite different results. Another example is the fact that gray can be spelt with an E or an A in different occasions, and many websites actually will have different results according to how you spell certain words, even when they can be commonly known. So the stock pot on the Argos website is a great example of why you need to have not just consistency, but you have to have consistency and something which goes, "Okay, we know you're looking for this, but this is also the same kind of search results". Google doesn't worry about spellings too much. If you type in stockpot, it kind of gives you totally the same results, no matter whether you have user space or not a space. A lot of the time, for a lot of keywords, Google kind of goes, this and this are exactly the same search results, so whilst it doesn't matter for Google and doesn't really matter for SEO, it does matter for an on-site search as much as anything. So yeah, it's a great example.”

It's certainly a wormhole that many SEO was can go down. But you also talk about targeting your strategy to entities and things rather than pages. So what does that mean in practice? So when it comes to publishing your pages in your site, and how do those new pages relate to your entity?

“Yeah, so a good example there is the fact that we've been integrating a CMS, and one of the things that I wanted us to do is very much focus the CMS around, not looking at the web pages, but basically looking at what the thematic was. The reason for this is to make sure that we had things like hierarchies and other bits and pieces, for example, is it a seasonal page? One of my 'pet hates' in terms of publishing to a website, is this kind of concept that every Christmas, we have another set of 10 web pages that we totally ignore in a year's time, we don't kind of go revisit them and revise them. So this kind of evergreen approach is often left by a lots of big eCommerce organizations. If you look on many, many different big websites, you'll often find they've got 20 versions of the Black Friday sale, they'll often have like a "YEAR IDENTIFIER" in it. And this just is terrible. Basically, if you're talking about the Black Friday sale, you have one page, you have one place, for it one URL, so you kind of start to kind of go, Okay, this is the Black Friday sale page, and all of the products that kind of live within it. Make sure that they stay in the same place, they don't move into that Black Friday sale, and then move out again - it's understanding the relationships as much as anything else. It's not moving things around, because suddenly it's in a sale. We had one website that I was working on when I was at Rise at Seven, and every time something went onto a sale page, suddenly, the canonical of it moved over and it became a sale product for two or three months. It was just such a weird thing to find that pages were moving around all the time. The internal linking was a weird situation aswell. Yes, they did have 301s everywhere, and everything else was correct, but the value that was lost by not understanding the fact that entities and pages should basically have a very fixed relationship, rather than everything moving around all the time. I think that understanding what a webpage is about is so critical to Google, and not necessarily worrying as much about what the actual URL is, because Google cares about what the page actually is, and the internal linking and the structure and everything else is so much more important, as long as you have a good URL strategy that's consistent and doesn't change all the time.”

You mentioned internal linking and you say that an entity can be fully enhanced with multimedia and internal linking. So multimedia, for example, how does that actually impact the understanding of your entity?

“Well video in itself can be a separate entity, for instance, within a page about, say a clock radio, that has a video on it, that in itself is a media thing attached to it. So when you're talking about the newer, better CMSs where you go, okay, this particular video is attached to this page, which is about this product. Then you can start to build out those sort of relationships within it. One of the things that I've sat down with a lot of the team with is talking to them about the fact that we want to look at subjects, and then we want to make sure that multimedia is attached to those subjects. So we understand this from a back-end point of view, and when we're building up the page, we know this image is attached to this product, and so on and so forth. It's hard to describe but basically I've got a massive whiteboard in an office somewhere explaining all of these kinds of principles where we talk about the fact that we don't want any video to be lost within the system. We want to make sure all the videos are there and associated with the right thing. A great example of that is the fact that one of the products that we don't really talk about at the supermarket I've been working for the past year, with the actual box that it gets delivered in, we wanted to make sure that we actually had videos on how you can reuse the box, how it's folded, how it's made, how is everything, because it became such a functional part of it, the sustainability part of the website that I was working on, that this simple thing like a box, we made sure that we had the videos and everything. So as soon as you searched for the supermarket Oda, and the box the products came in, you'd get the videos, you'd get the pages, you'd get this carousel at the top, because it became such an entity within itself. This was something that was already in existence, but we've made sure that it worked effectively, much better. And we've got a lot of projects going on, where they're growing into both Finland and Germany to make sure that this kind of this project continues in the same way that it has done.”

How do you optimize the use of internal linking to give a search engine greater confidence in what your entity is?

“It's very much around consistent linking. There was a fantastic article by the Mail Online, but it wasn't by the Mail Online, but it was an SEO article talking about how the Mail Online use this Hub and Spoke approach. It used this approach to say actually, whenever we talk about a football team, we always link to this particular page, whenever we're talking about particular topic, we always link through to this particular page. That's consistent internal linking both up and down. For instance, I worked on a political website at one point, and we made sure that whenever we talked about the budget, this was the page we always linked to, we never linked through to the 2020 version of the budget, we always link through to the canonical budget page, and that one was always updated with the latest articles and other bits and pieces. This gave you an understanding of the fact that we'd have one place where everything would link up to, and that page would link down to everything, this kind of Hub and Spoke thing works incredibly well. There's nothing wrong with crosslinking as well, and that works really effectively. But it was kind of making sure that links were consistent to the best possible page for the best possible user experience. There's other people out there saying you almost have to ignore the search engines, but you don't, you have to understand that search engines want to understand where the right pages for the right things are, and this will work really effectively for them. The more you use this kind of Hub and Spoke approach to understand the way in which an entity links and works with the rest of the site, the more Google will kind of go 'this website is about this, these particular pages about that'. All the pages that are linked to will kind of get a boost from this. We've seen this time and time again, where Google goes, yep, this is actually the best example of information about this topic, and these pages off it that are related to it. You'll see almost Google treating sites within sites being a key thing. A good example of that is the BBC, for instance, it treats iPlayer, it treats BBC News, it treats the sport, it treats all of these pages, as a kind of web sites within a site itself, and I think that's always absolutely critical.”

Automation can be a fairly powerful tool for the building of internal links. But done badly it can obviously be giving Google bad information. So what's an example of good automation for internal linking?

“Anything which goes, okay, these are the entities within the page, this is how it should link across. The biggest problem that I've seen with a lot of this kind of automation isn't so much the fact that it works very effectively, it's making sure that Google can see it. Often it's injected using JavaScript in a way that Google struggles to read. So it's making sure it's done right. The other side of it is I've seen it where it's almost designed for, we've seen related products related links, and all sorts of other bits of pieces where that the internal linking has been generated in such a way that it's not going through to a canonical link, and it's often putting on parameters, it's putting on all sorts of interesting bits and pieces, because whoever built the tool to provide the internal linking, isn't the same person that worked with the SEO team. Frequently, the tools that we have to crawl sites ourselves, don't execute or don't read the JavaScript in the same way that Google would, so we often find that there are missing links that when we manually go back and check the pages, they're there, but they're pulled in using tools. Tools are so, so good, and you want to make sure that all the links are done in such a way that Google can always read it. Now. we know Google can read JavaScript incredibly well most of the time. But we often do find that when we look at this from Google, we often find the Google hasn't actually read the JavaScript or has misread the JavaScript because of the way in which it's been put in after the page has been loaded. I'm a massive fan of automation, massive fan of scaling, but the one thing that needs every single time is testing. So every time you do it, make sure it's tested and do not have things like UTM parameters on it because that actually breaks analytics, and it breaks user journeys, and it confuses Google. So anytime that there's a parameter that doesn't need to be there, remove it, especially for search engines.” 

So you've shared what SEOs should be doing in 2023. Now, let's talk about what you shouldn't be doing. So what's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“I love playing around. I'm the first person to go and experiment with something. I've got one of those Oculus quests and I spend a lot of time in VR and doing all sorts of bits and pieces. But I do find that a lot of the time, people will go 'ooo look, this is a very shiny new thing to do', and without the resources, without the dedication, they skip out on the basics. Do not skip out on the basics. I go to so many conferences where people are talking about something shiny, new and exciting, and I go home, and I play and do everything. But honestly, I spend probably 40 to 50% of my time working on key basics, making sure things like XML Sitemaps are actually correct, making sure that the hreflang is properly going to valid pages. I think the biggest attraction right now is things like, can I scale up AI? Can I do something like that. And then they skip out on kind of not doing some of the core basics, which is internal linking, and all of those bits and pieces that we've been covering so far. I'm a massive fan of making sure that those core basics, the low hanging fruit, are all completely in place before I do anything exciting. Although that said, sometimes I think we don't consider the fact that the ROI on the 'Brilliant Basics' isn't there. So for instance, I've seen people so obsessed with XML sitemaps, that they skip out on something that's really important. So it's having a commercial understanding of what is absolutely required to make sure that the website is in the best possible place, and will absolutely perform.”

Gerry White has over 20 years of experience in the SEO industry working at brands and agencies, including the BBC, Just Eat and Rise at Seven, and you can find him by searching Gerry White on LinkedIn.