As we improve the features, fix bugs and generally develop inLinks, we’ll record launches here.

How to Audit your website’s Knowledge Graph

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Knowledge Graph audits can fix a major content audit problem

Topic Detail Chart
Entities used on SEMRush

Most content audits out there are so granular in their analysis, that they actually miss the main actionable point. What should you write about to fill in the holes? So we have created a website Knowledge Graph Audit based around an Excel spreadsheet that we think does the job a whole lot better. It will be interesting to know if the SEO community agrees.

A big problem with most content audits is that they operate at a keyword level. Why look at how many times a word is used without considering its synonyms? Consider analyzing how the word “stallion” is used without seeing how “horse” is used independently. These two words potentially mean the same thing in the context of a site. Then the phrase “Horse shoe” might also be used, which is an entirely different entity! Existing SEO Tool content analysis tools do not recognize the distinction. We know that Google does (or at least tries), because Paul Haahr of Google tells us so. He used the example “New York” as being neither “New” nor “York” (Google WMC, 2019).

Fortunately, an entity first approach gets around much of the synonym issue.

A secondary problem is that many content analysis tools work on a page level. We wanted an audit tool that could work on a site level.

Want the TLDR Version? Download the Excel Template HERE. It is pre-populated with dummy data. You will need to then update the data fields with exports from your own projects.

(but you’ll miss out on the “why” if you choose not to read first)

KG Auditing using Entities and Excel

Whilst the InLInks “Graph” tab gives an excellent visual overview of a website’s knowledge graph, you can now create elaborated Knowledge Graph audits, using our free Excel template and by exporting entity data directly into the Excel Workbook. Knowledge Graph audits allow you to find gaps in your site’s content by looking at entities that you are under exploiting, perhaps in relation to your competition, or by comparing the entities you use in your text to the entities you use in your page titles. The tool lets you dive into the heart of modern, entity SEO, without focussing on keywords.

Search engines, like Google, are heavily increasing their reliance on semantics to derive meaning from text. This means a significant increase in the use of synonyms in search query interpretation and in indexing. Websites do not necessarily need the same keywords that the searcher has used to rank well – they need to instead be about the same THINGS as the user is searching for. In the 2020s, the information behind the words is often more important than the words themselves. Inlinks uses data from the Wikidata foundation as a dictionary of these ideas – or entities. It has built out one of the largest independent knowledge graphs on the planet. Entity SEO is the future.

Technology has taken to learning patterns in snippets of text at an enormous scale to try to establish what entities are semantically close to each other and in what context. To exploit this, SEOs moving forward can now analyse what entities are missing in a website and use this to enhance the website’s OWN Knowledge graph to better reflect its areas of expertise.

Ready to see an awe-inspiring Excel workbook and – more importantly – how to do an entity audit? Then let’s jump right in!

Knowledge Graph Vs Knowledge Panel Vs Semantic Web

A knowledge Graph is not a Knowledge Panel… although there are similarities. The “Knowledge Panel” is a visual representation of the data surrounding an entity, as displayed in the SERPs. A Knowledge Graph is a database of all the underlying topics (Entities) being used within the text of a page, site or corpus of text. It could be a book or a white paper, but for the knowledge graph audits, we are looking at the content within a website. A knowledge graph Audit is a website entity audit. This means that whilst you cannot easily change a Knowledge panel in Google unless you have claimed it, you CAN affect your own site’s knowledge graph and in doing so, you will affect changes in Google’s overall Knowledge graph of all topics and entities it sees on the Internet.

It makes sense that the more you demonstrate expertise in a narrow vertical of knowledge, the more the entities seen in your text-align to those that Google sees need to be covered in any content used to answer a searcher’s query. The Semantic web is something different – but is again related and important. Most of us would simply semantic web “schema”, but it is markup used to help machines understand the text more easily. Entities are important in this endeavour, as we can use schema (a form of semantic markup) to tell Google that this content is about THIS entity and use a Wikipedia URL (for example) to reference the entity definition. Wikipedia itself is the very definition of structure. Almost every page defines an entity.

Your Website is a mirror of your business

There is little room for artistic license in modern AI systems. Whilst you can train an AI to appear creative, Google’s AI – at least in its core search algorithms, is made up of pattern matching algorithms. which start with a Natural Language Processing of the content. The content is then split into constituent meaningful snippets… entities where possible… and then stitched back when the user queries based on semantic relationships – vectors between entities and words help Google to see which words are closely related to a concept and which are not. If you use hyperbole or metaphor in your web content, you may not rank well. But if you cover the right concepts, you can rank just fine.

How to Create your Website Knowledge Base Audit

1: You first need to create your project in InLinks. It is likely you have already done this if you have a free InLinks account. However, free users are limited to 20 pages. It is really likely that you need to analyze more of the site’s content if you want to see what entities have been missed or underplayed. The number of pages you will need depends on the size of the site, but in general, you do not need every URL variation of your content – but make sure all of your informative content is included.

2: Consider setting up a project for a competitor. You may not know which URLs they consider are most important, but by using the “Add Pages” Tab you can bring in the pages most visible in the SERPs. 

3: Export the knowledge graph of both projects into local files on your computer. The Knowledge Graph Export button is on the Graph tab of each project.

4: If you have not done it already you need to download the Excel Template. 

5: The Excel template has many sheets. You need to paste the data from the main site you are auditing into the “Data” sheet and the competitor into the “Comp. Data” sheet. I did a video to make sure…

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How to insert Knowledge Graph exports into the template

This is all you need to to to create all the charts and graphs for the knowledge graph audit. although you would be wise to save a backup of this right now because I can bet you’ll start tinkering with the spreadsheet, which is full of pivot tables and charts based on that table. Here at InLinks, we use OneDrive to keep version control, but this is one of those times were not clicking “save” could cost you time!

Explanation of the raw data provided

The raw data provided by the InLinks graph export are made of 14 colums summarizing for each entity / topic:

  • the Topic name, corresponding to a Wikipedia identifier
  • Topic ID (internal to InLinks)
  • Topic Type (Person, Organization, Place, Event, Thing, …)
  • general Topic Category
  • related Topic Sector, especially useful for B2B
  • a status indicating if the Topic has been selected as a target topic
  • a Topic Search Volume (US market)
  • Topic frequency
  • Nb of occurrences of this topic in the analysed pages
  • Nb of potential internal links to this topic
  • Nb of InLinks-generated internal links
  • a Cannibalization factor indicating how much time the topic has been found in page titles
  • A status indicating whether or not the topic has been found in titles
  • A Search Engine Understanding factor (SEU)

Important reminder: each topic / entity acts as a cluster of keyword.

It means that synonyms keywords like “SEO”, “SEOs”, “searchability optimization”, or “Search optimization marketing” (among others) will be considered as referring to a single topic: “Search_Engine_Optimization”

Interpreting the Data

The data is now transformed into a series of hopefully actionable charts. The example here looks at the content on SEMRush.com and compares it to the content on Moz.com. You are welcome, SEMRush.

What is this site talking about at a macro level?

SEMRush’s content is mainly in the channel: “Marketing and Advertising”

The “Main Topics cats” tab has summarised all of the underlying entities into categories (or verticals). Not surprisingly, we see SEMRush entities point overwhelmingly to Marketing and Advertising and Technology. This makes sense. If you find a site that uses alliteration and metaphor, this is where the underlying meaning gets distorted out of the gate. Probably not something that most SEOs need telling, but occasionally the clients need to see it in a chart to see how their imaginative journey down metaphor mews meanders into SEO oblivion. (See? you CAN use metaphors… just don’t get carried away).

Most other charts below have drilled into the Marketing and advertising category. This cuts out background noise and focuses on the content most important to SEMRush’s business model.

What is the site talking about in detail?

Topical Detail: The biggest winner is SEO

The Most Used Topics tabs drill down into the content in more detail. Note that our system is using underscores for spaces. The radar chart helps to visually see the concepts which the site is REALLY about and what it is merely paying lip service to. We now see the em[pahsis that SEMRush content writers have placed on “Search Engine Optimisation (obviously) and “Google Search”. It also helps to see significant entities that may be underrepresented… perhaps more discussion on “blogging” or “Branding” might be helpful, although we could get more low-hanging fruit in this regard on the next chart.

What is the site almost missing?

Make sure no important topics are being missed

We thought this might be useful in some audits as a backstop for sites that pay lipservice to important things, but hardly talk about them at all. The radar chart looks at entities that are only mentioned (literally) once or twice. There no really important entities in this list for SEMRush, good job SEMRush, but you could probably look at talking more about how “URL redirection” or “language markup” are important for SEO. Other sites may have more glaring holes. We have all seen those marketing companies that can’t seem to call a spade a spade! Some of the are topics which… if you were Google… might appear to show gaps in the site’s understanding.

Are our important topics appearing in page Titles?

Most important Entities should also be in page titles

The “Entities used in page Titles” chart helps us make sure we are not going off point straight from the page title. Generally, entities appearing in titles are even more important top a site than ones appearing in the main text. At least – that’s what you would hope!

What are our best content opportunities by search volume?

The content Opp. the sheet looks really hopeful. Again displayed as a radar chart, we now have some quite clever data extraction. We have introduced search volume as a datapoint, then computed the chart by sifting through from topics mentioned in existing content, in the marketing category. (This is the main category for SEMRush), but not addressed with a specific page, That is to say, the entity does not appear in any page titles. I really like the information in this chart, as it is quantified and actionable. I think the action is also meaningful. For me, it screams “Write more about _____ or just change some page titles as the existing content may just need a stronger signpost for Google.”

Note: For this graph as for the others, the results will vary depending on the number of content pages taken into account in the graph (and therefore analyzed by InLinks). The higher the number of pages analyzed, the better the audit results will be.

Can I find better content opportunities by benchmarking a competitor?

What is your Competitor writing about that’s good?

The next tab shows the topics used by your competitor, but which have not been detected in your content.

By selecting the main topic categories you’re interested in (above is Marketing and Advertising, but it could be also Software or Technology), the graph helps you highlight gaps and quantifies their potential using search volumes.

So in the chart above we see a rich seam. Moz seems to be talking with purpose around the entity “Googke Webmaster Tools” but this is a blind spot in SEMRush’s content. “Google My Business” is another possible opportunity for more content.

Cannibalisation report

Topic Cannibalisation

Cannibalisation seems to be interpreted in different ways by different tools. I asked the community who does a cannibalisation report and got lots of answers. The actionable takeaway from these reports seems to vary quite a lot. Some reports look at duplicate content and rectify through canonicals. That’s great, but is duplicate content. Others look at page titles and suggest deleting content and redirecting. The problem here is that you WILL talk about important entities on more than one page! Obviously! Inlinks resolves the issue by internally linking entities within the text through to the most significant page on the topic. However, the reports work, knowing where and when you repeat concepts needs recording before you can fix it.

(We might go further into cannibalisation if asked by the community. We may have something rather special using links to fix cannibalisation.)

Find where internal links may reinforce content

InLinks are Internal links from other pages on the site. This is core to the InLinks tool, as it assesses where you have talked about concepts within the site and – where cornerstone content exists – injects a link over the semantically accurate anchor text.

Google’s Understanding of the Entities

Do the entities appear in Google NEU API?

InLinks runs regular (weekly) comparisons of Google’s understanding of Entities by industry using different examples every week in multiple countries. As of the summer of 2020, Google only identifies 20% or less of all the entities in their own public NLP API (Or Natural Language Understanding, as they sometimes prefer to describe it). We find Google to be good at identifying brands and proper nouns (one with capitalization) but still weak on concepts and ideas that are entities.

We can see in this graph that an essential entity such as Search Engine Optimization is only detected by Google in 18% of the cases, while the detection rate of this same entity reaches 67% for Moz! This is a significant difference and underlies the importance of Knowledge Graph audits.

Download the Template for Free

(Not got an InLInks account yet? Signup for free.)

What are your thoughts?

Thank you for reading all the way through! Does this approach to audits look different? Does it look sensible? Are there and particular charts that you think will fit into your own audit process? We would love your feedback in the comments.

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New & Improved Content Briefs and Content Audits

The content optimization module on Inlinks creates world-class Content Briefs and audits existing content in a totally unique way. You should already be using it for content optimization, but now the module has had an upgrade.

Why was the Inlinks Content Optimization Module so Unique?

Just in case you were still using those keyword-based optimization tools, the difference with InLinks is that it builds its entire recommendations around knowledge graphs. If you want to optimize content for “Wales Activities”, the first thing InLInks does is to build a knowledge graph of all the content on Google already ranking for the phrase “Wales activities”. It then compares the TOPICS your content uses with the TOPICS identified in the knowledge graph build from the best of breed content.

What’s New in the Content Audits?

This release is all about surfacing more recommendations and getting them closer to the online editor, to make it easier for your content writer to see what topics need adding the text. We even have a drag and drop feature as well, for the extremely lazy out there. That said, we have refrained from overly supplying snippets and text already found on the web. Your content will still be unique.

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A video showing the new content audit features

A New Content Editor approach

Let’s dive into the editor itself and see how easy it is to add topics and ideas.

The New Content Optimization Editor

1: New Audit Metrics

The tool has tow new metrics:

2: Collapsible Header

By collapsing the “summary” section of the brief, the content writer has more space to use for the actual editing of the content.

3: Topics Breakdown

The editor starts by importing all of your existing body text if you already have an article that you are trying to optimize. It did this before, but after the article, we start providing lots of hints for the copywriter. This starts with the “Topic” breakdown. In this diagram, we see that we should be talking about “golf” because 3 competitors talk about golf on average three times each in their (ranking) content.

4: Drag and Drop Topics!

We now make it easy to see what topics might need adding, without the writer’s workflow being interrupted. The writer can click on the topic here and get a Wikipedia overview and a myriad of exciting questions that they might like to answer for the users. Alternatively, the writer can simply “Drag and Drop” the topic into the editor, to act as a place holder whilst they construct that perfect sentence. Very easy. Very powerful.

5: Want FAQ Schema automated?

This section says whether any question was found during the initial analysis of the content.

6: Easily Add Rich Content and Question Ideas

This section gets enriched as you go. As you look over the rest of the audit, you will regularly start seeing “Add” buttons all over the brief. Here are some examples:

Add Topics directly from the Topic Analysis
Or add the whol;e Wikipedia Snippet
Or add from a rich list of questions
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Switch Links and Schema on and off with one click

You can now temporarily (or permanently) suspend one section of the InLinks system whilst it is under review. This was a feature request that we have had from more than one customer. We understand that for some website owners, the thought of javascript injecting links and schema directly into a live site needs some internal discussion. Office politics aside, it is also a good safety net if you suddenly find that the system is behaving unexpectedly.

How To Switch off the internal link building globally

On the project dashboard, click on “links” in the top-right menu. This lists all of the links created by InLinks. There is a global “Links On” button which you can simply slide to off. This will switch all the internal links we have generated off immediately. It is reversible, so you can switch them back on at any time.

Review and change the links one at a time

When the button is off, you can still modify the links on the system individually. This allows you to pause the entire system, manually or automatically modify the links and then restart the link injection.

How to switch off the About and FAQ Schema Globally

In exactly the same manner, click on the “schema” option on the top-right menu of a project and simply toggle the global schema on and off.

Modify the schema page by page

If you wish to be a little less brutal than a global cull, you can also edit the schema page by page. This functionality has existed for a while and is probably much more sensible if internal politics is not preventing you from doing so.

Do your own about schema and internal link case studies easily

One side effect of this feature is the ability to easily carry out your own case studies. Simply take two sites that are generating reasonable organic traffic and make sure that both have been added to InLinks and topics have been associated with the main pages. Now, on a specific time, switch off one of the global settings on one website (leaving the other as a control). See if you can see a marked change in the rankings over the next weeks and then see if the rankings recover after switching the setting back on again.

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Find More Questions by Topic

Today we have launched an enhancement to our Market Trends Tool which helps you rapidly find the questions that are being asked around any given topic. Whilst InLinks already did show questions by topic, this new launch shows promising results. We did some very unscientific benchmarking against another product which is twice the price and we seem to be beating them. So let’s dive in.

Introduction / Synopsis

By being able to surface the questions people are asking around any topic, SEOs can efficiently design content which answers the searcher’s question. This will mean that search engines like Google, Baidu and others can leverage your content. Not only do you have a great chance of being shown in the search results for the question asked, but you may also be seen in a featured snippet (Especially if you are using the InLinks.net system which automatically creates FAQ schema!)

There are many suites that have built into significant businesses simply trying to ask… then answer… the very questions users are searching for. So now, Inlinks lets you see popular questions as soon as you see the trend for any given topic.

How the InLinks Question Finder works

Our Question Finder

Our Market Trends tool tracks worldwide interest in any given topic, continuously. With simple research, it allows you to explore a niche or product category to find what is gaining or losing traction. This is an efficient approach to choosing the right topics to write about for SEO because it is a data-driven approach based on trends and volumes, but we thought it would be even better to know what people want answers to. Therefore, as well as showing the trend data and related topics, we now have added a dynamic question surfacing element to the page, which is able to find questions and present the on the page, loading more as you scroll. You could say we created a lazy-loading question finder.

Research

Research is one a part of a systemic and p[rocess driven approach to SEO. In particular, research makes you find better content ideas. Knowing what people are asking is key. The Question finder essentially provides research for Search. Other question research tools exist. Quora and answer.com, for example. In the premium category, we wanted to see is we stacked up against other tools, so we checked out a few topics on a popular service, “Answer The Public“. They suggest “Chocolate” on their home page, so we started there. 

Answer The Public found 86 questions around the topic of Chocolate, Whilst Inlinks found 133.

Date of check: 4th June 2020

That’s a pretty good start. 54% more questions. But maybe that was a fluke? Let’s go for a big term. “Casino”? Unfortunately, I hit my limit for searches for the day on Answer The Public. An upgrade would cost me $99 a month. Since the whole of inlinks starts at only $39 a month and includes the question finder in a fuller suite of tools, I decided to pass. Perhaps someone could test a few phrases for us and compare in the comments?

Topic Library

The library of topics that inlinks is tracking is developing over time. Currently, we are displaying trend data and can create lists of questions for around 40,000 unique topics, divided into 15 separate categories. The number of questions generated for each topic will vary over time.

Topic enrichment: We also Added a Newsfeed

As well as being able to create a content brief, users can also click into a news search

The main reason for enhancing the question finder was to make it easier to write content around any given topic. However, this is the trends tool and we thought it would also be helpful to have a shortcut to any news that might be surrounding any given topic. It’s not always going to be obvious what makes a topic trend, but on topics with significant volumes, strange spikes are often a result of something in the news.

Follow the daily trend @Trendspanel

If you are a Twitter junkie, every day we pick out something trending of interest and post it over on out @TrendsPanel handle. Just follow the handle and we’ll try and give you a daily nugget of wisdom.

Just try Question Finder for yourself!

Inlinks currently has a number of free for life areas… but sign up quickly for a free account, before we have to stop offering these. The Question Finder comes into its own on the paid versions from $39 a month.

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Singapore Market Added to InLinks

When you set up a project, you can now select “Singapore” as the default market is you so wish.


Singapore is now selectable as a target market

The difference between target markets

This choice dictates what Google API is called when looking up search results. For some industries and keywords, the results may not vary at all, but for others, they could be wildly different by region.

Can I Change my Target Market on an existing Project?

If you created a project initially using a different target market and would rather go for the Singapore channel, there are two options.

  • The first is simply to ask us in support (using the blue icon floating on the bottom right of your page) and we can change this. However – this will only change things moving forward. It will not retrospectively change the existing schema or content brief analyses. I would recommend this for most people.
  • The second would be to start a brand new project. This would generate a new .js file, so you can switch out the .js code when the new project is ready to take over.
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Find a trending topic

Our Market Trends tool now lets you find a trending topic through a new search functionality.

Look for a topic and seein if it is trending

How to find a Trending Topic

1: If you don’t have an Inlinks account yet, register for a free one here.

2: Head over to Inlinks Market Trends.

3: Either filter down to a category by selecting one of them or…

3: Start typing a topic straight from then main page to search all categories.

How to track trends over time

Inlinks Market Trends tracks topics over a month, andf updates daily. However, paid users can click on the star icon next to the topic to store the topic in a handy dashboard.

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New from inLinks: Market Trend Reports

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What is the Market Trend Reports feature?

InLinks’ new Market Trend Reports feature allows you to constantly discover, analyse and compare trending topics of all different market genres. This includes Home and garden; Health; Marketing; Food and agriculture; Automotive; Finance; Software and finally Technology (with more being added!) With this information, you will be able to see what your potential customers are interested in and be fully in tune with which topics are trending in your market. The tool offers weekly and monthly insights into the way topics are being approached by your potential customers, in turn allowing you to better predict what people will be engaging with in the future as well as knowing extensively what people are engaging with right now.

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How to start using inLinks’ Market Trend Reports right now!

Visit https://youtu.be/9ecajxlH_Gc to see how to start using inLinks’ Market Trend Reports right now!

Why and how are Market Trend Reports useful?

Inlinks’ Market Trend Reports give you all the information on how people are engaging with the things that matter to you and your business all in one place. It allows for an easy and quick overview of topics that are growing, stable and falling with relevant numerical data all on the same page. This means that you may be introduced to new concepts within your market that you may not have previously considered to be highly weighted, or you are now able to keep an eye on those topics which may be unexpectedly falling rapidly. 4 examples of the different ways you might use inlinks’ new feature can be found at the end of this post!

Screenshot of the ‘Automotive’ market genre from InLinks’ new Market Trends feature

As well as trends, you may access a general Monthly Interest Volume for your market as a whole. For example, during this pandemic (unsurprisingly) the interest volume for concepts and topics relating to Home & Garden have increased by 15.5% as of Wednesday 15th April, 2020.

Screenshot from the overview Market Trends page on Wednesday 15th April showing a +15.5% increase on monthly search volume

We can delve further into exactly which topics have caused this rise….

Screenshot from the ‘growing’ column of InLinks’ Market Trend of the Home & Garden market genre

and see the overwhelming interest in searches relating to office chairs, Murphy beds and a ‘Big Green Egg’ (a brand of barbecue cooker!).

Why use this instead of Google Trends?

Google Trends is a service where you may search specific words through knowledge it believes you already have. It is useful for comparing specific terms but can prove messy if you are looking for an overview of your specific market. InLinks provides a list of all the information available within a market genre and gives you side by side comparisons of the way people are engaging with the topics relevant to your market. Where Google Trends will treat the searches ‘Tap’, ‘Faucet’ and ‘Bathroom Tap’ as different entities, for example, InLinks recognises the concept of a ‘Tap’ and includes data from everything in a tap’s schematic make up to provide and forecast data. InLinks also recognises that a word can, and often does, have very different meanings in different contexts. The term ‘Columbia’ could refer to the country; an American district, or a city in Missouri. In links will be able to recognise and categorise the different semantic senses of this keyword, meaning that you will only receive the information relevant to you and your market.

Who can use this tool?

The market genre ‘Marketing’ within InLinks’ Market Trend Reports will be a free and usable feature for anyone regardless of if you have an account. To access the remaining market trends (Health, Home & garden etc…) you will have to sign up free to inlinks. Full members of inLinks will be able to find and pin the topics that they want, across market genres to have immediate and constant access to the areas of the market most relevant. This feature can be fully customisable to suit each business’ personal needs. Full members will also have access to the information on Brands and Organisations, meaning you can see how many people are searching for you or your big competitors!

4 ways InLinks’ Market Trend Report can be used!

Can I use inlinks Trends to inform my supply chain?

1- Imagine a supermarket about to restock its shelves with the knowledge of exactly what it’s target audience’s needs are for that week or even the coming month! This tool allows you to forecast and predict which supplies you may need more of before getting the information from the tills. (In the earlier case, I’d be likely to order a couple more ‘Big Green Eggs this week!).

Has Coronavirus Peaked?

2- During this pandemic, at what point has the engagements with certain things plateaued? As of today’s date you can see that searches relating to Coronavirus have actually fallen… but searches for Chloroquine have risen dramatically against what the news may be suggesting! This tool lets you see past the hysteria to what people are actually searching and what people are currently worried about. This is imperative for leaders, managers and key workers.

Can I use it for market research?

3- Your business may not offer a service which, in its market genre, is very consistently highly searched for or at least consistently in the ‘stable’ category. This is an extremely useful tool for market research as it offers a very wide overview of things that could expand your business!

How searchable am I?

4- By personalising your account (paid version only) you can have side by side comparisons of the aspects of your business that are trending, as well as the overall monthly search volume of everything you are interested in together! By compiling your topics, you can get a better sense of just how searchable you really are and the volumes of people you could potentially reach!

How do I Use Market Trends?

Market Trends tool from Inlinks is available in both free and premium versions over at https://inlinks.net/trends/home.

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FAQ Schema Generator

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InLinks has a built-in FAQ Schema Generator. Inlinks to scan your content looking for questions in your text that you answer succinctly and will then automate the generation of FAQ Schema and show an “accepted answer” using JSON-LD automatically. This means that FAQ schema can appear anywhere on your site, not simply on a dedicated support page.

How InLInks might markup this FAQ page on Moz

What does adding FAQ Schema do?

By adding FAQ Schema to your content, you tell a search engine what the accepted answer is for a specific question. A search engine may use this to generate a featured snippet in the SERPS (Search Results). Below is an example of how the FAQ Schema might show in the SERPS:

The FAQ page schema generator helps you to generate the required structured data for your content in order to be eligible for display as a rich result in Google search.

The FAQ schema differs from the “HowTo” schema, in that there is generally a simple, succinct answer, rather than a step-by-step response.

The accepted answer is then embedded in code that users do not see, but crawlers able to read JSON-LD (such as Googlebot) can. This makes the information explicitly define, giving search engines more confidence that this content might be suitable to answer a question by a searcher. By defining the answer explicitly in this way, the answer might be read out in a voice search response or appear prominently in a search result.

What are the benefits of using Structured Data?

As the organic search becomes ever more competitive, structured data is a great way to distinguish your content from the pack and provides you with the following benefits:

  • Better search engine visibility
  • Better click-through rate for your content
  • Displaying your content in the knowledge graph, featured snippets and voice searches

How do I automate FAQ Schema Markup?

You automate FAQ Schema by adding the InLinks.net javascript in the footer of your website. (or through a tool such as Google TagManager or a WordPress Plugin such as the “Header and Footer” plugin.) InLinks then can automatically find questions in H2 or H3 tags that are then answered succinctly in the next paragraph of text. This is then converted to Schema on the fly.

You can check the schema directly from the Inlinks.net dashboard. If you do not think the question is correctly answered, then the best approach is generally to improve the wording of your response. On your live page, improve the wording in the text in the paragraph immediately after the H2 or H3 header.

Alternatively, on the InLinks dashboard. you can click the “break link” icon to the left of the answer, you will remove the schema instantly from being seen when bots crawl your website.

We do not allow you to edit the schema text on the dashboard itself, because this would create a disconnect between the content you give users and the content you give Google. This is not recommended by Google.

Please also note that InLinks only starts to generate FAQ Schema if it finds two or more questions in the content.

Can FAQ Schema be coded on the fly?

Web Pages contain content that increasingly needs to be coded in a way that search engines can use to inform their Knowledge Graphs. Schema Markup is the new SEO frontline. InLinks makes this task much easier for FAQ Schema and Webpage schema, by using a powerful Natural Language Processing algorithm to initially understand more topics than a search engine might otherwise find, then explicitly showing these topics appropriately in the schema code.

What is HTML Markup?

Markup code is code that is added to the main content to help machines understand more about the semantics surrounding the content. Think of it as a way to convert text and meaning into a more machine readable format and you won’t go far wrong. For this page, Google has created a risch snippet out of the FAQ code that was automatically generated:

FAQ Schema Autatically genertated viua InLinks

Why is the FAQ Schema bot showing on my page?

The FAQ schema is only created for new content added after this launch. To add FAQ schema to existing pages, you can remove the page and then add it again, which will re-optimise the content. You will then also need to re-associate the page with the same topics that you had before, to generate the internal links again.

Also, as a reminder, do not use “Viewsource” to look at our javascript. Instead go into developer tools in your beowser, to lookat the code in there.

Not much! It’s great value. You can sign up for a free InLinks account at https://inlinks.net which will give you 20 pages. After that, paid plans start from a modest £30/US$39/Euro36 per month.

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New way to measure how Google understands content in a verticle

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Inlinks has today started a series of ongoing reports for the Online Marketing Industry. Each report selects an industry sector with a keyword triggered market focus. The reports then compare the entities identified on the most relevant content for that market with the entities detected using Google’s Natural Language Processing API.

Go to the Industry Reports Page to see the most up to date reports

The results show at this stage that Google can still only positively identify (on average) less than 20% of all entities or topics discussed, although this average varies from sector to sector.

Free Market Reports

the InLinks reports will form a new plank in Inlinks’ thought leadership strategy and thus will be a free resource for the community. New reports may be generated by request as long as they are made publicly available to all. At this time, InLinks has not developed a custom or paid report building service.

A separate set of reports will be generated to tailor to French-speaking users.

it is interesting to note that Google may understand and derive concepts differently in different languages. inLinks is, therefore, aggregating the results of their reports by language. Other languages may follow in future.

Reports are Geographically focussed.

Each report also focuses on a geographical market, so an English report could focus on either the UK or US Markets. This natural differentiation stems from a parameter in Google’s own APIs that requires a call to the API to define which data set should be called to return the “most relevant” pages for any report’s keyword focus, although InLinks has the ability to override Google’s definitions of “most relevent” where a report might have a better defined set of “authority” pages for any given subject.

To be notified of new reports, follow @InLinksNet on Twitter, or bookmark the English or French report summary pages.

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New Stuff: Improved Javascript code and more

It has been a busy week. The most notable launch was Monday’s announcement that you can now start assigning content briefs to writers, as reported in our “Content Management system for SEOs” post.

There are also a few things that were fixed along the way that I never got around to documenting.

Adding “Defer” to the default Javascript code

A few people were suggesting that the .JS code was creating a small, but real, page load delay. We know how sensitive SEOs are to page-load, so the .js script now includes the “defer” parameter. You can keep your existing code or simply replace it with your version of the code from the “links” dashboard as below:

New .js code

The new code should reduce any TTFP delay.

Starting New Projects is more intuitive

Previously, when starting a new project (basically, when you add a new domain) we previously tried to send users through an onboarding system. It was clear that our good intentions simply confused more users than they helped. By bringing in the top 20 pages by default and making associations, we then felt we needed a “human-in-the-loop” brake, just in case users added the javascript without checking our associations. This meant that the user could not move forward fully until they understood this and found the “confirm and continue” button. Instead, we have reversed the default settings when you set up a new project. By default, we will set up a blank project when you fill in this screen:

The checkbox is different and off by default

The onboarding will ONLY start now if you tick the Retrieve first 20 pages button. This means that we can also take you straight into the project proper. As you add pages, the system will improve as before. Until you add the javascript or take our content changes back to your site, you are not physically changing your site without a chance to review your work.

Fixed New Project Creation Bug

A bug arose which suggested you could not create a dashboard because the crawler was blocked. This has now been fixed. Where we still cannot crawl the site, we have listed the IP address that you will need to whitelist to fix the crawl issue.

Fixed a refresh issue after searching within a project

When you want to look at a subset of your pages (maybe a directory or pages with a given title) we have a search function. Unfortunately, this was not refreshing the Page/topic/link totals when returning results. this is now addressed.

As always, please tell us about bugs using the chat icon. We are working on them as fast as we can.

Thanks for your continued support!

Dixon.

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Content Management for SEO Content Writers

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InLinks has launched the ability to assign content briefs to SEO Content writers, whilst retaining overall control of the content. This turns the Inlinks optimization module into an SEO Content management system. It gives the ability for SEOs who need to delegate content writing to freelancers or in-house teams.

Enterprise Collaboration Tool

InLinks builds content briefs around topics, rather than keywords. In order to scale the optimization of content for search engines, it is necessary to be able to assign the optimization of individual pages to other people, whilst retaining a grip on the overall topic associations and the website direction itself. Now InLinks lets SEO managers do this, from the project dashboard. The Account owner can set up writers on the fly and can assign pages to them, setting deadline dates and adding instructions as they go. As the writer adapts or creates the content, they can add comments and share a dialogue with the account manager, helping the content to become as strong as possible.

How to Assign an Article to a Writer

SEO Managers can assign page content to individual writers

On the project dashboard, there is a new column called “Assign”. This button only appears after you have given the content a target keyword and comes in three flavours:

Grey: Unassigned

A grey person means that the content has a target keyphrase, but is not yet assigned to anyone. If you do not use editors or third parties, probably all of your optimized content will be grey. If you then click on this, you are able to either assign the article to an existing editor or set up a new editor first and then assign the article. Setting up a new editor just needs you to supply their email address and name, but it will probably help them if you let them know first! They need to accept their involvement before being given content.

A person can be BOTH an editor AND an account owner if they want to be.

Green Assigned (Within Date)

When you assign content to a user, you also set a deadline. A default is offered for convenience. This sets up a common goal for the writer to work on the content and return it back when complete. Whilst it is green, both sides can add comments and the writer can use our online editor to either write content from scratch or modify existing content. The rewritten content is not published to the site, however, allowing a safe space for the content writer to try and improve the SEO score for the content.

Red (Overdue)

Eventually, someone will miss a deadline. When they do, the body turns red, so the SEO Manager can easily see overdue content.

What Can the Writer see?

The person to whom the content is assigned will get a special “Customers’ Projects” section on their account dashboard. They can be given briefs by multiple account holders, making it a great central point for writers to work with website owners.

When they go into the dashboard, they see the content briefs they have to work on, like this:

Then if they drill into a specific brief, they see the same content brief that the account owner sees. THEY CAN ALSO EDIT THIS CONTENT and update the analysis:


How to use SEO Content Management for Marketing Processes

Search Engines, like Google and Bing, display several types of content. Much of it is “paid for” directly by website owners, but other content is what modern SEOs describe as “earned” media. That is to say, the algorithms that Google and Bing use to surface relevant results show up for the user at the right time. If your content is in this are, you can generate free traffic. Sounds obvious, but the truth is that the context of each search result is very different and this may lead to much larger content generation strategies so that websites can offer quality content designed for very narrow circumstances. This is where the ability to assign content writing to others, whilst retaining a handle on the SEO elements is valuable in Internet Marketing.

You can start using InLinks for Free.

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Change your Competitor List

When trying to write better content than anyone else, our content optimization tool uses the top search results to build a content brief. At times, though, you know better than the search engines as to what is the BEST content out there, so we have given you the chance to change the competitor cohort list for any given keyphrase:

Don’t like Google’s results? Change the training set

Knowledge Graphs and Training Sets

When inLinks creates a content brief for your writers, it first creates a dedicated knowledge graph around the search term. This is a “training set”. By looking at a set of pages already seen as relevant or authoritative around a certain phrase, our NLP algorithm uses pattern matching and all sorts of jiggery-pokery to learn what topics are semantically close to the subject matter in this context.

That’s pretty cool, but the knowledge graph that is created is only as good as the training set the algorithm is given. So if the top results are not the best (and in my opinion, that is increasingly the case), then why not change the training set? Just switch out bad results and enter a URL that you feel we should crawl instead.

Beware of your own Bias

One thing I should say when using this feature… do not assume you are not being biased when you switch out a result. For example, I can absolutely imagine a brand like Nike thinking “I compete with Adidas and HiTec and Converse, so I would like URLs from these sites in my training set.” This would intuitively make sense for a marketing executive or SEO at Nike, who is fixated on beating these brands, not the market as a whole. The problem is that the “Best content” is brand agnostic and so making changes on this basis may well make your content brief worse. You might find yourself beating all the big brands, but actually NONE of the big brands is ranking on the search term you are optimizing for… or at least… not ranking due to better content.

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Change Competitors on Content Analysis Tool

When you create content briefs to write the perfect content for search, inLinks analyses the top 10 URLs that rank for that phrase in your market. Now we have given paid accounts the ability to change URLs in that competitor set.

This might be useful if:

  • The competitor page is uncrawlable
  • There is a better competitor that Google has not recognized
  • The key phrase is new and not yet an established search term.

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Manually Manage Internal Linking

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Managing Internal Links is a real challenge for SEOs and although inLinks has automated much of this process, sometimes you need to be a little more precise and perhaps would like to create your own.

The inLinks system now supports the ability to curate and create internal links directly from your inlinks.net dashboard, so now you will never again need to go back to your web team to ask them to add or change links between different content on your website. At the same time, inLinks has improved its automated internal linking so that you will now only see links automatically generated in paragraphs of text, not in bullet points or related article sections of your site.

Want to see how it all works and why it is important? Let’s dive in.

If you go through the content on (say) your WordPress blog, then you will be able to add links directly, but you cannot see the links in context and they are all spread out across each and every web page on your site. It is much easier to curate and add them from within an inLinks dashboard.

A Google friendly Internal Link Management system through a javascript based interface.

Simply click on the page you wish to edit. Then Drag over the item of text that you want to link from. you can either paste a URL straight into here, or you can start typing the title of a page on your site to see a dropdown list of possible matches.

Wherever you see the “Outlinks” count, you can click on the number and it will show you both the links that inLinks automatically creates in the page and now it also shows you the links you have manually added.

Click on “Outlinks” to drill down

From here you can delete the links if you need them.

You can also see the difference between the automated links and the ones you manually add in the text itself because we use a dotted underscore to signify the one inLinks automatically makes and a solid underscore for the others.

At the time of writing, we have limited this functionality to internal linking only. Customers are welcome to debate whether (and how) this might be extended to allow users to link to off-site using this link module, but it is likely that we will restrict this functionality unless and until we have multi-user controls. This is to protect customers from a rogue content writer suddenly inserting links to their favourite blog or testing site.

Linking in <li> sections

In this update, we have removed automated linking from text within Bullet points, because we were getting some pushback from customers that thought the link looked out of place. Instead, we now let you manually add links within bullet point text, but we will not automate these links moving forward.

Another small improvement on this release is in the link count estimates. Before this update, our system counted links that would have been automated but was removed in our algorithms because they were not in the body of the document. This meant that the link count was slightly inflated. This has now been corrected.

Why Internal Linking is so Important

Here are 15 very good reasons why you need to manage your internal linking.

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API Upgrade and More

Today we have upgraded the API for our NLP analysis algorithm so that it works significantly faster and picks up more topics. The API is the part of our system that integrates the web interface with our Knowledge Base. When you update your associations or topics, this creates a ripple in the space-time continuum (OK… not really… but it does change your link graph, which we need to recalculate). The most noticeable effect will be the little “working” timer on the top left of your dashboard, but there is a little more to this.

Improvements to our Understanding of Topics

Part of the upgrade has been a better understanding of topics in particular verticles. As our customers use the system, it creates flags for us that help us understand where we need to improve. Periodically, we can then update the system to better understand topics cited on web pages.

inLinks will generally always find more topics in content that Google’s NLP API. To be fair, that is partly because if you make a call and the Google API finds something we don’t, our algorithm learns, but in general, we almost always find significantly more relevant topics in a good item of content. In this comparison of the BBC’s News page, we found 147 topics compared to Google’s 60. This is a part of our secret sauce but shows just how important schema and inLinks will be in 2020 in helping Google better understand the content.

Occasionally this may mean we pick up topics that are not so relevant and in that case, we try to learn from this as well.

Dig into the Topics

Last week I also found I was unable to dig into Topics. If you go to the Graph tab, now, you can easily drill into all the topics that we have found.

The Knowledge Graph now has Topic Detail buttons

This is helpful, because it is not always clear what a topic is about just from its name.

Silo Creation Bug Fixed

Sometimes you have a group of pages, rather than a single page, about a given topic. In this case, you may wish to create a “silo”. You still need to decide on a headline page, but the system can then create a hierarchy for the content within the silo. Before Christmas, creating silos did not work, but this was also fixed recently. Silos are an advanced feature, so we will create a separate blog post about Siloing content in due course.

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Addressed a minor .js issue

One of our users noticed that when a page loaded which had our code on, but that page itself was not analyzed against our knowledge graph, the .js file called a non-existant JSON file, which created a 404 error in testing.

In truth, the “cost” was small, but we are SEOs and details matter, so we have now fixed this in .htaccess.

Javascript response times looking good

We appreciate that the load times of javascript files are one of SEO’s major worries. Because the javascript is on our server, that is even more of a concern for some. So I am happy to report that the javascript is executing in around 0.3 of a second. If your tests are producing any significant latency, please let us know, but we have made sure that we have plenty of bandwidth and an extremely small flat JSON file i the payload. We have not had any other problems reported.

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Create Content Briefs without setting a Project/Domain

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A couple more launches this week. The main one is that we have set up a special “project” available on everyone’s inlinks Dashboard (requires a login to see that link). The project is specifically for creating content without having a specific URL or website to link it to.

The dashboard of inLinks.net

You are also able to start your Content optimisation journey from the dashboard by hitting that green “Create Content Brief” button. Content briefs created here will default into the new “Content Briefs” project. You can compare your proposed content with the SERPs content as you go by cutting and pasting the content (or writing from scratch) in the brief’s online content editor.

Also…

After introducing a search button on the main dashboard for each project, we have now extended this to the Links tab. The function supports partial matching and is good for filtering the links to the ones you care about.

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Find, Filter and Search Pages


You can now use this search function WITHIN a project to filter pages

On the project dashboard, there were previously limited options for filtering the pages in your project. More problematic was an inability to display ALL the pages at once.

This issue has been resolved by adding a new “search” function, to the right of the “page” column in the main project dashboard.

The search looks up partial matches of both the URLs and their Titles. Thus you can use this to quickly find pages that might be the focus of a keyword or idea, but you can just as easily filter down to the URLs within a particular folder, or with a given parameter in the URL for example.

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New Accounts Dashboard

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iPhone screenshot of the new Account Usage dashboard

The usage details on the account dashboard were not at all clear. We hope this new detail gives much more clarity to your account usage.

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Improvements to Upgrading

We now will now account for unused time when you upgrade mid-billing cycle.

Previously, if you upgraded mid-cycle, we started a new subscription and then had to retrospectively refund any unused credit. This meant changing your billing date and relying on everyone to play nice. Now the system will keep the regular billing date but will generate an invoice for the extra usage in the current period.

This should prove a smoother upgrade process.

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