When I first read the article, I thought: oh good, if I write something and optimize it with the emotional techniques, it would be a good post. However, after I made some researches, it looks like not the way I would like to do. Don’t get me wrong, the emotional techniques are still helpful anyway.
What are the entities and why to optimize for that?
Basically, an entity can be anything, which is defined by a web page (we are talking to websites, is that correct?), with unique distinguishing properties.
Google definition: [A]n entity is a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable. For example, an entity may be a person, place, item, idea, abstract concept, concrete element, other suitable things, or any combination thereof.
While we still need to use “a language” to describe entity properties, because an entity can be anything, optimizing for entities can also be independent of languages. With that in mind, I start to optimize a fresh post about an Aikido seminar.
Preparing tasks
- The keyword: minoru kanetsuka aikido
- The entities: Minoru Kanetsuka sensei, Aikido
- The writing technique mostly is BLUF – bottom line up front, the military standard.
- Schema: event. Optimized with Rank Math.
I will not list every step here, but it took me almost one day for preparing content and put them together. After getting confirmation from the site owners and the seminar instructors, I published the page. Posted the link to the Facebook event, and aikido.no website. The traffic started to come.
Results
In the next day, I sent the link to one of the seminar instructors and asked him to share it online. In addition, I posted on the Facebook Aikido seminars group. It really boosted the traffic, as you can see in the below graph.
- Before boosting: normally, there were 5-6 visitors to the site every day.
- On January 16th, at the top, there were 101 visitors to the site, and you can imagine most of them surfed the seminar page. It’s 20 times more.
- After boosting, the traffic went down, but there are still around 20 visitors to the site every day, which is four times more than before.
Within two days, when searching on Google about minoru kanetsuka british aikido federation, the post appeared in the featured snippet (see how featured snippet works here). I didn’t expect that. Surprised! Even though, you can see that I didn’t intend to optimize for the entity “British aikido federation”!
However, my happiness was not long. The next day, traffic to the page started to go down. And the page disappeared from the Google featured snippet. It leads to a question: is the organic traffic relating to the featured snippet?
Later on, I found out that Google just finished updating its core. Following different sources, the update was big and it really affects the SERPs. Now, I will need to find out what Google changes in its core and which affects my post in the featured snippet position.
Anyway, even the page is new, it got immediately the second or the third position on the first page of SERP, with the planned keywords. Not bad. But you can see it would need a lot of continuous work if we want to keep the page in the top positions.
Take away
As noted above, there are several questions appearing during the last days:
- The relation between traffic and Google featured snippet.
- What Google updated in this version to kick the page out of the featured snippet position.
Besides, through optimizing for this fresh post, I can see a clear effection of influencer marketing. Since the instructor shared the link on his Facebook, many of his friends visited the page, brought higher organic traffic. That makes me think about a combination of influencer marketing and optimizing for entities. It would be a very good solution for the next posts.