SEO A to Z - part 3 - "Cached Page to Commercial Intent"

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywords. People usecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome to the latest episode of SEO. It's me, ed, here, as usual, and today we are going to carry on with our SEO A to Z, and that is part three, and we're going to start with cached page you want to see. So we'll start with the cached page and we're going to see how far we get, because C is quite a long list, so we might not get through all the C's today, so we'll just see how long I waffle on about each one. So we'll start with cached page Now.

Speaker 1: 0:52

A cached page is a page that's been downloaded and stored by Google on its own servers prior to indexing it. Now, google used to show you the cached version of a page as a search feature in the about this result section, so you could see the version current rankings are based on, but they removed that link in early 2024. You can still find what page google has got cached and by going using the cache search operates. So if you go to the google search and just type in cache, which is c-a-c-h-e and then a colon, and then put in the full url including the https of the page that you're interested in seeing the cache version of, and Google will then display you the version of the page that's currently got cache that's based it's indexing on. Now. This is useful if you're trying to see, if you'd like, say, for example, if you've made changes to a web page and you want to see if Google's actually crawled and indexed and capped it, or to see if you can see what other sites the same thing is a current version of a page's ranking is it the current page that's actually live and see if it's gone through. So it's useful for that. They have said they're going to remove that cache operator workaround at some point, so that may stop working at some point in the future, but I don't know when.

Speaker 1: 2:06

Next we've got call to action or CTA. So a call to action CTA is a term that describes any content on a web page that's designed to encourage a visitor to respond to it immediately. So examples include buy now, request a demo, click here buttons, that kind of thing. And calls to action are important if you've built a page with the purpose of someone taking action based on the contents of that page. So it's really important. On e-commerce by product pages, if you're trying to get someone to download a lead magnet, all this kind of thing needs strong calls to action. Because we've got the canonical tag and canonical URL. I'm going to strong calls to action. Next, we've got the canonical tag and canonical URL. I'm going to group these two together. So canonical, let's discuss what a canonical is first.

Speaker 1: 2:51

So a canonical URL is the definitive original version of a web page, where a page might be available on a number of pages. Now, this is because sometimes, depending on how your website is set up or what CMS you're using, you might find that this exact same page is available on a multiple number of URLs. Now this can happen, particularly where you've got a navigation on a page where you can sort things. So, for example, if you've got products, you might be able to sort it by price, by quantity, by a whole number of different attributes, and those might create new URLs over time so you can actually have the page by just give someone a link to the page and it sorts automatically by price, or then another link that takes the same page and automatically sorts it by quantity. This means that Google can find the exact same content on multiple URLs and Google always will decide. If it sees this situation where it's seeing the same content on multiple URLs, it will decide which one of those URLs is the version it considers to be the definitive canonical version. It won't index all the different versions. Now you might not want the version of the URL that Google has chosen to be the canonical one, including search results as as the result, you want to be considered the canonical version. So this is where the canonical tag comes in. This is a tag called the rel="canonicaltag" and this is where you can add it to a web page in the code of the web page to define the URL of the web page that you consider to be the definitive version of the page. So this is really important to do if you are in the situation where you have a page that might be available on a number of different URLs and you want to say to Google this is the one. I want you to consider the canonical, definitive version. Ignore all the other pages in terms of indexing, ranking, all those kind of things. Just concentrate on this page. It also helps with your crawl budget, but we'll come to crawl budget in a little bit.

Speaker 1: 4:54

Chatgpt unless you've been living under a rock, you probably have heard of chat gpt. It's an ai chatbot based on a large language model developed by open ai. And, yeah, chat gpt allows users to interact with it a conversational style to request it, to form actions, to produce output. Now chat gpt has become super popular in the se community for research, summarization and content production. However, google started to crack down on AI-produced content as of the March core updates and even before that. It was taking sort of preemptive action against big AI sites that have been created with lots of AI content. Also, you've got to be careful when you use ChatGPT for doing things like keyword research, creating topical maps, all that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 5:35

Chat, chat, gpt have a cracking guess at some of these things, but chat gpt doesn't have access to the link graph, it doesn't have access to click stream data, doesn't have access to how real people search, doesn't even you know, know what all the different pages on the internet are. It is a summarizer, you know it. It it guesses things. It just is working out what's the most likely word to come next, but it's not necessarily the correct word to come next. The kind of hallucinations. And yeah, if you're basing all your seo research just on outputs of chat gpt prompts, then I'm afraid you're going to be missing out. So it's useful for lots of things, but just don't take it too far.

Speaker 1: 6:14

Next, we've got churn and burn. Now churn and burn is a black cat strategy where site owners are not looking to build a long-term website, but they're. Instead they're trying to. You know they're looking to rank as quickly as possible, using black cat techniques and the expectation of trying to rank and monetize a site for a short period of time before it gets caught, banned and removed from the google index. So it's just, it's a tactic. So if you hear someone talking about churn and burn, this is just literally people they're not building for the for the long term. They will just keep churning out sites, knowing they're going to get burned, and just trying to get them up, ranking quickly as possible, monetize quickly as they can and then, when they get burnt, just move on to the next one.

Speaker 1: 6:51

Next, we've got citation. So a citation is important for local seo and any reference to your business name, address and telephone number, whether it includes a backlink or not, on any other third-party website and this is can be very important for google local seo, where google is trying to work out if you're an actual, genuine business and they look out for these citations. So that's where it can be good to get yourself mentioned in local directories, places like that, even if they don't include a backlink to your website. For this local seo cloaking up next. So yeah, cloaking this is a another black cat thing today. It's a black cat technique where your web server will serve different content to googlebot than it does to normal users, and the version that Googlebot sees is designed to rank the page. It may be designed to rank well but avoid, say, monetization, for example, and the version that users normal users see when they land on the page may be much more spammy and over-monetized. That may be the sort of content that Google doesn't want to rank so well.

Speaker 1: 7:50

And cloaking is possible because when Googlebot comes to a web server and says, give me the page, it sends across a parameter called a user agent, and that user agent is Googlebot. So if you have programmed your web server software to look out for request an user agent in Googlebot, you can say right, if it's Googlebot, give it different content to if it's somebody coming along from a Chrome browser, from another browser, whatever. So it's quite easy to do and flip the different content based on the user agent that is requested. But if you get caught doing it and obviously, um, it's quite easy to get caught doing it because if you send, if google decides to send it with a different do a test and not send google bot as the requester, then they can pick it up when it's easy to pick up manually as well. So, um, just watch out that people do that. Sometimes you can fall a site. If you think a site is doing cloaking, you can, um, download a little um app that goes within a plugin that goes within chrome um, where you can set the user agent that you send when you make requests from your chrome browser. So you can make your chrome browser send googlebot as the user agent and see if a site gives you a different version of content than if you go with your user agent set as chrome.

Speaker 1: 9:09

Next we've got cluster. Now cluster can mean two things. Couple of things really. First of all, cluster. First definition of cluster is a collection of related keywords that are defined as serving the same or very closely related intent and have been brought together by a keyword clustering process. We've talked lots about keyword clustering in other podcasts. If you are more interested in more on keyword clustering, go and have a look at the back catalogue and we have a keyword clustering tool as part of keywords people use. So the first one here is the cluster of keywords.

Speaker 1: 9:42

You can also have a cluster of pages and that's where you group a whole bunch of pages on your website that are about a similar topic around a hub or a pillar page. So that's like a cluster page. That's yeah, so a page on a website that covers the keywords that have been clustered together when you did a keyword clustering process. And if you've got a cluster of these pages, you can then base them around a hub page in the center link between them all to sort of improve your kind of sort of relevance around a particular sort of related topic on a page. It's very common what we did on brawlbycouk if you want to go and see an example of those kind of cluster pages. So, for example, on broadbandcouk, we've got clusters around home broadband. We've got clusters around mobile broadband, clusters around broadband speed. So go and have a look at that if you want to see how it works in practice.

Speaker 1: 10:37

Next we've got cms. So cms is short for Content Management System. So CMS is just software for managing and building up pages and content on a website. So the most common CMS in use is WordPress. There's others like Joomla. There's a whole bunch of different CMSs, but the one that most people have heard of is WordPress.

Speaker 1: 10:53

Next up, we've got commercial intent. Okay, commercial intent. So every search query that people use with Google can be considered to have an intent. So the intent is what, the end goal, purpose of what the purpose is searching. The person searching for is trying to achieve.

Speaker 1: 11:08

Someone with commercial intent is someone who is looking to potentially make a product. They're trying to find sorry, a product or service that will solve a problem or need they have. Now, with commercial intent, the user is probably not yet at the point of making a transaction, but they're heading in that direction. So essentially, these are people who have found out what their problem is. They're looking for the solution to purchase the solution that is going to solve that problem. So these people with a commercial intent trying to solve the issue, so examples might be. You know, for example, you've worked out going to solve that problem. So these people with a commercial intent trying to solve the issue, so examples might be.

Speaker 1: 11:44

You know, for example, you've worked out you need to get the lawn cut. You need, you know you need to buy a lawnmower, but you're not yet decided exactly what make model type of lawnmower you are going to buy. You're just researching lawnmowers in general, because there's electric lawnmowers, there's electric battery lawnmowers, there's petrol lawnmowers, there's even hand push lawnmowers. You know, um, there's ride on lawnmowers. There's all sorts of different lawnmowers. So you're at that point where you know you need a lawnmower, but you're still trying to work at exactly what kind.

Speaker 1: 12:14

So you have a commercial intent around purchasing a lawnmower, but you're not at the decision point yet. So this is the kind of way you've been producing the kind of content that is still quite educational and informational, but it's started to push more commercial ideas. You started to push brands potentially and push different types of lawnmower so that someone can go then to the next kind of intent around that, which would be the transactional intent which follows commercial intent, but yeah so commercial intent, but yeah so commercial intent is a real key one for anyone who's trying to sell a product or affiliate content. Because you're trying to capture and help people who haven't yet decided exactly what they want to buy and you can help steer them towards the right product for them and hopefully, one that you can help them monetize with. You know, just selling them a lawnmower or selling to the right product for them and hopefully, one that you can help them monetize with. You know, just selling them a lawnmower or selling to the right place to buy a lawnmower and getting your affiliate commission from that. So that's taken us up to commercial intent and we're probably about halfway through c.

Speaker 1: 13:13

So I'm going to stop there for today and we'll carry on with c in the next seo episode. Um, get in touch if you've got any um things that you think I've missed so far. From a to halfway through. See that we are um and yeah, I hope you find it useful and, yeah, look forward to seeing you next time. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that keywords people use, that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

Speaker 1: 14:06

Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywords people usecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.