Koray Tuğberk: Rank #1 with Semantic SEO & Topical Authority!

quite a good work how are you? I'm good and you? Yeah, good thanks. You just showed me this case study if you take in a single page from 0 to 8000 clicks a day, right? That is true. A single page, exactly, I'm sure. This is amazing. And you're focusing on visual semantics. Yes. How does that work? Yeah. So, technically, I believe it was three years ago, Martin Shipplet from Google, he accidentally confessed something. He said that actually, Google is using what they call centerpiece annotation. And he told that centerpiece annotation wasn't a text. It was a visual element that they are trying to see on the page to decide whether we should rank it or not. Then, Google's DOG-LIG files came out. And in the DOG-LIG files, we also have seen examples of centerpiece annotations. It was also explaining how Google internally was evaluating the above the fault area of a page. And then also in the API leak, the content where has API leak of Google, there was and there were, and still there is, the annotations of the or semantic label annotations on the page. There was something like two or two different annotations there. And that domain, it's audioTookText.com. It's an exact mesh domain. And people can find from my YouTube channel or if you're a little later, I can also share my screen show it live from the search console. But in any case, we've actually used a giant upload button by adding the morph signup annotations. Because when I check the AI and Svers or agentic and Svers of Google or the large language models, being free, being no signup, there were two of them really important attributes that they are looking for to classify the size. And I, instead of putting them to a button, like upload now or something like that, I have put a giant element there that shows that actually can direct the drug and drop your audio or your video. Secondly, I also have put the notification of no signup. And then I have written very little amount of text. I have written very little amount of text because if you write too much text, it's going to be diluting the importance of every token on the page. In the first two percent of the tokens on the page, I have put all the important angrams and entities like file extensions or like audio to text or video to text or all these from x to z combinations. And then we started to get the first clicks. The rest was actually just click test of Google. Technically, the moment that I was able to get less than 50 clicks a day, and 8000 clicks a day, there is zero content change. There is zero visual change on the page too. I just waited until Google understands it and every core update and major update, it keeps increasing the sign. I can also in the graph show that sometimes we even lose 50% of the clicks, but we don't change anything there because we know that Google needs time to be confident to rank the site permanently. Now it's ranking with 11 laps and with IO and many global companies basically. We can tell. This is amazing. So literally you created this page, you didn't touch it. Every update it goes up. And it's just, it's not even about like, for example, how much content you've put on the page, it's more about how you organize it. That's true. How visually you organize it and how visually you annotate some certain attributes because agentic retrival is not only about the text on the page. It's also about what they see on the page. If the page needs to be an e-commerce design, you should be putting it like that, even if you are just an affiliate site. Still, you should be doing it in that way because you can imitate e-commerce design for product pages or category pages, and you can rank for it. In actually Indonesia, for eye gaming industry, it's frequently performed. You can imitate a product page, but when people click to the buy, they just go to the money side to log into the casino. So Google is actually buying these visual representations by trusting that nobody would be imitating an e-commerce site or something like that. Technically it says free, free, audito text tool there is mostly free, that is true, but not entirely. But Google can see behind what happens the moment that actually upload a video because they don't upload anything to test the tool. They just believe they click engagement and they see engagement and they get confident to rank for it. The way that you approach SEO is so different to anyone outside of the home. Thank you. Which is a good thing. Yeah, of course. Of course. Where do you get these ideas from? You must have that idea a month ago, or you've known about that for years, and then you've tested it and run that experiment for months. Where did these ideas from? The ideas to be honest is only coming from actual Google engineers because this idea first actually came out from Michael Bandersky and Martin Nyork. Both of them are great Google engineers and they patented something that they called "Durkument a Weir, Layout Ranking". Technically it means that actually, or I can also call it like this, "Layout a Weir, Document Ranking". Meaning that actually they were trying to create a design to see your layout and design and then they were ranking you according to that. And Nyork and Bandersky, they're really important engineers in Google. And if they patent something, it's going to be implemented. It was the first moment for me to start to care about the design. And then I followed some other researchers on Google with some tests. It was working. And so it has to work because right now anybody can create expert level text. Text doesn't directly show originality anymore. It says still a risky asset to trust with. But layout and the design is still requiring human effort and it can be used as an originality sign. That's why I believe even if you use AI to design something, adding basically some human signals or human effort signals of the page will be important. And that audio text that comes, the design actually is again coming from AI, but I change all the HTML hierarchy or the class names or the CSS and everything there. So I cleaned all the AI signatures there because many lovable sites for instance, they just use the same class name same div hierarchies. These signatures that you leave there will be important as in the text, as in the source code or as in the visual elements. That's it. She recommend like if you're using for example, Claude or any sort of AI tool to create a website, clean out the CSS, clean out the HTML. I go. Yes, because they are definitely leaving lots of signatures in the content. And if I would be Google and I know that they did in the past, many WordPress and generate press sites, especially they got penalties because they were classified as AI generated so easily. Because all the content scalers in the early times, everybody was using generate press. It was an easy signal for Google to consider you as a possible content scaler. And this scale content abuse, they get more sensitive on it. I did also an audit for a company browser stack. You can also check it. Browser stack has to run the 3000 referring domain 300,000 monthly brand search demands and they are the biggest company on their field. Still, they lost 70% of their traffic in eight months because they published 2000 documents with AI in a single day. So I believe the scaled content decision trees of Google is crushing every other decision. If they see that you are scaling too fast, they just classify you as let's say full automated and they it doesn't matter whether you are a really strong brand or whether you have really strong referring domain network behind you. You can check that domain. It was also kinds of valve moments for me too because I always considered for the last five and a half years. If you are a brand, if you have brand search demand, if you have really strong link graph, I mean, Google will tolerate you normally. Today it's so becoming more different, apparently. How fast is too fast when you create content? Because I mean, I've never, I mean, I have created hundreds of articles more than I've never done 2000. I mean, that's pretty wild. Yeah, it's really. On that area, most of the time rather than or let me explain like this, for instance, right now I'm creating a subfolder for a company for justice, the trains in the CBD industry. I believe rather than directly understanding the friction, so you should first understand age of the subfolder or age of the site. If you created a new subfolder and it suddenly becomes 1000 URL in seven days, it's not that good. But if you age it for three or four months and then you start publishing, let's say, 50, 60, 70 type of an increasing frequency, they will tolerate it better because there is click data that is approving you as a satisfying source in that part. Usually I try to complete my entire network of content around seven to eight months. If I have to publish 5,000 pages at the end of the day, I need to calculate basically if I go slow in three months in the rest of the four months, how many a day I should be publishing and I just actually divide it to the number of the days and then I randomize the numbers. Sometimes I publish two, but next day it becomes 27 and then let's say seven and eight, but eventually it is ending in seven to eight months to complete entire network. Many companies, they suddenly publish too many high numbers and since it's a very fresh subfolder without any URL click signals, it is actually risking the health of entire sites. I can tell, it so that depends on basically your entire topic, "Institurains" is normal to publish too many because there are like overall 6,400 Citroen types. If you are creating a car directory, car model directory, there are thousands of models for every year and if you publish like three a day, it will take years to finish it and you don't have that time. So you need to find optimum balance there between risking it and between also going hell to weight for fast. So I believe matureing the subfolder for three months is the most important thing. Once you get the maturity then you are safer to scale it. The same also goes for reddit too. If you make a subreddit leave for three months, it is tolerated better to scale the content under that subreddit for instance. That's why we open lots of exact match subreddits with the names like Cruz or like I said, ECM etc. And we make it leave for three months then we start to post. It is actually becoming more less vulnerable to the reddit's internal detection space. Yeah, that makes so it's the same probably with the main account as well right the address. use a profile. That's true and if you use adspawware or any type of tool to create lots of proxies and accounts on reddit and other places, uh, maturing these accounts in a semi-active way without publishing too many URLs or comments and etc, that would better. Sometimes just log in and scroll and there are in adspawware there are automations to do these things. We also use them and after three months we try to activate it for our use basically. It's a kind of, I believe, warm up threshold to trust a account or separate it or sometimes a subfolder. When it comes to actual, so I mean, you've covered a lot there. So for example, like figuring out okay, here's how many pages we need to create to achieve top walk on the, dividing that by the number of days in eight months, seven to eight months and then randomizing it. It's a Sunday, so you publish more, some days you don't. When it comes to actual top call map itself, how do you come up with that? Do you automate that now? I semi-automatic that is true. Still semi-automating it becomes every year, the methodology gets new things, especially with visual sections because now in the content briefs, we have a column that we call component, which explains how these readings will be looked or visible on the page and how they are going to be engaging. But when it comes to the beyond the briefs, when it comes to the topical maps itself, it's like 65, 70% automated, but we created another SOAP that we call query. Desserts a page, query deserves a heating or query deserves a section. So it tries to understand whether we should make a page, heating or adjust a sentence. According to the query understanding or the mapping, we basically are able to, let's say, semi-automated, but still I need a human to go over these topics, while creating content briefs, give the final decision to make it a page or to make it a heating or just an internal link connection to the another segment as well. It's possible to semi-automate the most low automates actually and when it comes to computing entire topical map, based on the principles to be honest, it can go even forever because all the queries are connected to each other. You can always go deeper, you can always go wider, but usually you don't need to do that. According to your clone, the tiers, if you're able to cover overall, to run to 5 or 30% more topic and also in a deeper way, you are safe actually. You don't need to cover three times higher topic in a shorter amount of time from them. If you put like 20% coverage difference, it's usually good to be considered as a replacement candidate during a core update, to replace them directly. So just take all of your, let's say, eight main competitors, create their site maps, then see what they are covering first and then create something unified in a better organization to cover 20% higher than all of them. Then you'll be safe actually per minute. That's interesting. So you can buy all you competitors and then you'll have a let's cover 20% more. That's usually slightly making things harder because business models are not same. Let's say you're a logistics company for cargo. One of your competitors, let's say they are actually just working for motorcycle cargo, but you might be also doing item to island shipfrites as well, which actually makes your topics and business models also different to, but you need to also in a way cover that area as well. So sometimes if you can't cover something commercially, you need to find a way of covering it as informational. That type of organization is actually where we do manually. Other sections with AI mostly can be automated, especially if you secret and crawl their site map content. That will be accelerating process in a very good way for you. Actually, just talking about automation as well. I'm interested to know, I mean, for us personally, our team is kind of shrunk at the agency quite a lot with AI automation. Has your team grown with AI or is it that smaller? I actually, it's grown. I always try to keep people instead of replacing them with the machines, but besides that, right now every employee is capable of doing more work. And since everybody is capable of doing it, I believe AI, yeah, it makes things easier, but also it increases expectations from an employee as well. So it doesn't make that much of a human workforce need difference on our end, because in the old times, I was telling a graphic designer to give me just eight images a day. Now, I am asking him to use this cloud skill and complete entire site. And once he completes it, it's a normal thing for me. Then I give him another site, which actually didn't decrease the number of hours that they need to work. It just made output numbers very much astronomically higher in that case. So since the team is also growing too, we still grow the team, but every team made became like a superhuman, beyond human capability we can tell. Yeah, so you can basically 10X or output. Yeah, of course. And we are expectations from everybody increased here, because for example, right now a content writer can be a developer too. And if they like designing, we just tell that, okay, take this mail, log into cloud or codex of open AI and start doing what you want to do. And they are capable of doing these things also by following just the SOAP. So number of designers and developers, that's why it is increasing. Number of writers are slightly decreasing. So slightly switching to the other angles and areas we can tell. Yeah, it makes sense. I know you mentioned before as well, like it's so easy to create expert level text now. Yeah. How do you see that changing things in the future? There are two things there. I know a bit concerned about the legal side of these things. And probably still we will be safe, but right now for instance, when you write a book with the AI, there is a chance that you might be losing copyright claims or copyright ownership. If you use AI for insight university, they basically don't accept your PhD anymore. And in the search demand too, it can be seen. AI writer or AI content writer search demand is decreasing into the trends, but AI human eyes and human eyes are AI is increasing instead of that. So it looks like the demand changed towards the humanization and originality signs of the content, but mathematically it looks like humanizing a content or recognizing the AI content will be becoming easier and easier every year. So I'm expecting a level of basically legal regulations on this field because the scientists are complaining, novelists are complaining and I believe, for example, if you made a movie or television series like the France, still do you get money, right? When it is aired on the TV, you get the money. But when you write a book and if an AI company is using it for training on that, you get nothing. And legally, this is a big problem and I believe they will regulate this globally on the planet. I feel like in that may at least it's like probably there will be an analytics tool to track when your book or your data has been used by the AI to answer something and there might be a kind of monetization model based on it. And I believe there is a demand for this already. But from a zero point of view, I believe whoever is using AI in the most possible creative way, still you'll be safe in that area. If you created blacklisted words, blacklisted sentence, the structures, blacklisted word combinations, punctuations, even if you use the AI, mathematically, they won't be able to recognize that it's actually coming from AI. And usually AI detection in my opinion, it works like Turkish police because Turkish police people or men, they don't have to prove that you are the guilty. They just look at you and they think if they think that you are guilty, they just handcuff and take you in. And you have to prove that you are innocent. And I believe AI detection systems, they work in that way too. If it is over a certain threshold, they assume that you are possibly AI, but they can't be certain, mathematic, there is no way of proving it. And in the early days of the AI detection, I was putting Bible to an AI detection system. It was saying that it's coming from AI, but it's not. It's Bible. I mean, God, I hope possibly has written it. And when it comes to this process, do I believe using AI for content creation, the require a level of mastery, which by sensing also AI detection systems at the same time. And that's why recently I'm also working on the visualization techniques because if I use fewer number of the verbs, every word will be contributing for relevance better. And if you have the fewer number of tokens on the page, it's harder to tell it is AI or not. AI detection works better precision if the content is long, but if your content is short, there is not that much field to make mathematical calculations to see is AI or not. But if I design the page in a proper way, visual with visual annotations and place my little amount of content there with small amount of verbalization, I will be safer from both ends. There's a lot of text that come to it doesn't use that much text. And if you run any AI detection tool there, it's invalid detection actually because it's just three or four sentences. It's not going to be proving any point there. So that's why I'm trying to also decrease number of tokens on the pages to stay under the radar. As well. Yeah, that's a smart strategy for sure. Everything I was thinking was like, if you're looking at the way Serps are going and the way, for example, Google AI overviews gives you an answer, something like that website before the audio to text one is like, that's not going to be replaced by AI anytime soon, maybe in future, but I think it's probably one of the last formats. Sure, there's my every click that we lose from informational sign. We try to add it to back to the three tools. Even if you're a lawyer, you can still have lots of three tools there, like three AI evidence evaluation are three, let's say case compensation calculator or three, let's say the accident photo shot evaluation. You can upload your accident photos and for three, that tool can actually tell you who is in the fold possibly and also put a CTA call up and get a free human case evaluation as well. In every industry, you can create three tools today and you can actually transform your click engagements to the tools instead of informational section. I didn't run a system yet, but I believe people should do this to search console, start to give you AI overview impression data. I believe people should start also compare their regular web impressions to the AI impressions along with also their crawl data too. And from there, they can also understand what type of content gets higher. percentage of impressions from AI and how frequently they are being crawled by what type of Google user agents. Asmering this also might show them some strategic insights to shape their topical maps or to change their content style, to get better approvals for informational content as well. It can be also tested because in some projects we also see that they choose certain subfolders or certain sentence beginnings too. I believe that data can provide good insights as well. Yeah, that makes sense. I think if you combine that, it'd be quite easy to collect that data and then plug it through something like Claude, get it to analyze it for you. One-hour person, if you get AI impression data per page and regular impression data per page, and if you just get your Claude data per page with user agent data, throw it to the cloud and just ask some questions. I'm sure it will show a lot of graphics, designs and correlations as well. Yeah. How are you seeing link building play into all of this as well? But very much more than before. That's why we are very deep in the link building as well. And we started to call it, actually James Tully, call it like external topical map. Because as we create a topical map for internal content publication, we do a second one for external publications. And there are two for us. Important thing is actually getting some attribute assignments. For instance, for audio detects.com, I mentioned that no sign up tool and free tool. These are two important attributes. If I'm a low year and if I want to get attributes like the highest compensation or highest success rate, biggest compensations or biggest law firm in Texas, if I want this type of attribute assignments to my entity, I need mentions and declarations. So from a link publication, I can get actual three things. I can get Patreon. I can get a mention and I can get a claim. The claim meaning that you can mention your brand with a claim like biggest law firm in Texas, the founder of the brand says so. I keep mentioning myself with certain co-occurrences and certain assignments to myself, which helps us to get also rankings in AI. If somebody searches for, let's say, who is the most successful lawyer in Texas for brain traumatic injuries, for instance, since I am having lots of mentions of myself with these ways, the link publications also help me to get rankings and citations with my brand name as well. So when we do the link graph building with these external publications, it's mainly for manipulating AI and Swords by creating a consensus, it's also getting for Patreon. And we try to choose the topics according to the domain that we are going to use. Let's say we use a domain like SeqilsUnit.com, then I can link a website something like Skills to Be a Lawyer. And I can mention myself in that article by telling that, let's say, the founder of X Company in Atlanta, Georgia says that to be a lawyer or to be a successful accident lawyer. I can create this type of annotation text to mention myself on that topic. If I'm talking about, let's say, truckcalender.com, I can actually go for truck accident subject to link myself and my service. So we always use the domain name and domain ranking power to get a link from that subject with certain annotations as well. And I believe link building is at the center of everything here, because especially for consensus, you need external sources to mention you, rather than your internal sources, we can say. Yeah, I've seen a lot of people using gas blocks on other websites. We've listicles and that kind of builds number one recognition that you're the top expert. Number two, those pages actually rank inside GUAR as well. True. It definitely works. We sometimes create also a secondary domains to with exact match domain terms. Let's say best lobbyers for Filipinos or let's say, E-SIM for Africa, et cetera. And when we create this type of domains, we put content there. It also affects AI again. So thanks to its exact match domain terms. Sometimes we also create subdomains under mid-fly or under docuService notion, another platform. And we use these subdomains to fit the AI with our content directly as well. And sometimes we also turn our blog posts into the Reddit posts, into the video content, and we distribute these videos into the many places on the internet for socials. So it's the kind of content pumping or content seeding strategy. You always reformat the content as audio, text and video. And you'd syndicate it to the everywhere else on the web so that you increase the surface of your content. So actually all these LLMs and crawlers, they can see it with higher frequency. And they can listen to what you say instead of the competitor. It's the kind of echo. That's certainly something that's worked well for us as I would get the video. And then we'll just move last year across like 30 different platforms in different formats. I'm personally. Yes. Especially IMDB for instance, every video, long video that we have, we also turn it into a podcast. And as a show, we added to the IMDB and IMDB we are getting a professional profile for the person, which we can write there biography. And it affects the LLM in a great way. And we also, in terms of that, we also turn our podcasts into an entity. And that podcast can have multiple episodes that you can distribute to the Spotify, Apple Podcasts and many other platforms. Then you can turn podcasts into an ebook and you can submit it to the good treats and you can submit it to the Google Scholar and Amazon as a free book, which also again makes you a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, like a showrunner and author which actually impacts AI one more time. Because you always use this creative and also authoritative platforms to tell what you want to tell. And it's a kind of good marketing strategy too actually because every do this for AI but also sometimes people when they search your name, if they see the books, podcasts and all these knowledge panel things too, it's a good representation as well. So it helps for a brain goal. And also how many you can bet it's just going to be bothered to do all of that. And that many, many people need a professional support to do these things properly, definitely. Because we also open sometimes separate exact match domains and book names also become exact match to let's say a truck accident, a, love your Texas. It's the name of the book at the same time and it ranks actually on Google as a book sign it as well because when you have a different type of site, Google also gives it a chance and you can hope you can turn every chapter of the book as a sub page as well, which again feeds element one more time as well. So it's a kind of work, but it definitely works in the mid and the long term in a good way as well. And then what sort of techniques you use to make sure when you're creating content, it follows that semantic structure that you prefer. There are four criteria there. One of them is factual content and open United content. According to the query, sometimes I need to use open United sentences like very casual language, I think or you think or this is the best, like more sentimental, review language. If the query requires me to be very expert level and factual, then I go, I never include any open United sentence there. The second group is about the structure of the content or the structure or unsaturacute content. Some queries requires me to have listicles and tables and some of them just requires me to have a simple paragraph basically. And for every one of these combinations, we have different set of sentence structures and different set of sentence or their strip. If it's factual, I always start with an E's A sentence. The second sentence becomes with a predicate, the third sentence goes with an attribute. Let's give an example. We can tell that the negligence is xxx, we can give definition, then negligence means. So second sentence goes with a predicate, third sentence goes with an E's A definition. The third one goes with an attribute. It can be something like the importance of negligence or the compensation of negligence. We always use x of y group in that area. These are some rules for factual content. When it comes to opinionated one, the rule is actually going to be coming chaotic because in open United sentence, you don't have to follow an order at all. It has to be very natural. That's the rule actually there. Writing some open United sections. For instance, if you go to the Eharmonic senior dating page and if you go to the most button part, you are going to see that we repeat some of the questions in the factual section at the most button part, like a forum, like what's the best place to meet with, like say, 10 years over 60 years old. We ask it. And then there is an act relationship expert stare, inspiring the question, "How very cares you white based on her expertise?" The purpose there is actually combining factual and user generated content together on the page. Sometimes they wait, you see, sometimes they wait factual content. And we try to have both of them on the same page with proper structure, data and visual segmenting, so we can get our chance from both angles at the same time. This is also existing in their AI overview patent as well. They secure both of the language modalities and they give a combined aggregated score at the end. That's why we are trying to have all of them. And there are many other rules to structure them as well. I believe we explain some of them in our course, but the others also are scattered to our case studies or examples, science as well. Awesome. Thanks for the question. Thank you so much. I hope it's helpful. Definitely. Lots of interesting ideas that I've never thought about before. Happy to hear that. It's always a pleasure to see you as well, by the way. You are doing also a great work in many places. I always follow you. But I guess you close your Instagram. I was also following you there. Did you close it or is it private? You got a lot. Yes. Instagrams, we've now got four different Instagram profiles because for some reason they just take an account down from our reason and then it's okay. Well, just. I guess there's filtering algorithms might not be that smart. It looks like 100%. Yeah, it's very temperamental. But it's actually one thing that's been surprising this year is we grew an Instagram account from like zero to over 30,000 followers. - Wow, about three months, so you like that? - Wow, that's great actually. Do you have a video or tutorial for that? - I should create one, but it was literally like, create three reels a day. Three second hook that's like, you might be, you just got to grab attention, so it'll be like, okay, orange hat, shout-china, or something like that in the first sentence. And you go from there, like, you've got to get people's attention quick and dumb it down as much as you can. - This sounds interesting. I would check that I can't definitely, because we need something like that. It'll be a very good practical example for us. - Yeah, yeah, for sure. I know a ViBuff as well. He's ViBuff Shada, he's doing pretty well with Instagram as well. But yeah, that's it. And then so it's like hook first three seconds. And then actually it's quite easy to monetize Instagram because you can grab people's attention and then you can be like, okay, guys. And if you want this full system for top-core authority or visual semantics, comment, semantics, and I'll send you the guide. And then you just send them to your funnel. And it's very easy to get traffic. If you look at school.com, the number one source of traffic, to pretty much everyone's about pages is Instagram. - And then you tube an Instagram or write up there. - I will definitely check that. 'Cause I'm not that active on socials, not in this way, but I need to learn better for that. I'll be checking it definitely. - Definitely. I'll send you a link. - It's so loud for me. (laughing) - No, it's good catching up, mate. It's anything we can link to inside the description. I believe our course will be good and also our LinkedIn account or Gmail. And they can reach out. And I believe if they search my name, they can find us in everywhere. Select, Discord, Telegram, Facebook. We are mostly everywhere, but I am not able to keep it active. So I will learn that part from you. - Oh, so, well, I know you've just released that video as well, with the case study on YouTube about going from zero, I'd say. - Yeah, in our YouTube channel. - Yeah, we'll link to that. - Mass with you currently, but after Saturday and Monday, it will be behind that. But they can search it like one page exact match domain case study and they can find it. - That's it. - All right, thank you. - Thank you so much, you're there. - See you very soon.