James Dooley: Hi, today I'm joined with Luis Salifa Gerardo or Herado, sorry. Um, so today's topic is about query augmentation versus AI query fan out, what the differences are, whether it's the same thing, why there's so much of a buzz nowadays about query fan out and stuff like that. So, it's a pleasure to have you. Um, and can you explain to start with what query augmentation is?

Luis Salahar: First, uh, thank you for having me and, uh, I really admire your, uh, effort in trying to pronounce my name. Regarding the query augmentation for those who are seeing that uh they can expand more just uh searching on Google and they can visit the one of the first article that Billisloki wrote years ago about query recommentation. But in a nutshell is once Google relate to your brand or to your site a query and then they are trying to identify related terms to that query and when they trust you enough they give you more and more terms to rank related to that core term because they trust you. That's the a brief definition of quermentation. But to get more turn to rank for uh to rank in your site, you need to get that trust. Later we can expand on that. But let's say a brief definition is you rank for more terms related to a specific terms. That's that could be a brief definition.

James Dooley: Yeah. And then what about query fan out? Is that any different or is that the same thing?

Luis Salahar: It's the same thing. Just a fancy new term in the marketing, but the the core is the same. It's just you're ranking for a term and you want to rank for related terms. That's basically our you can listen in the marketing arena on the SEO uh podcast different terms which is qu network. That's it. query network query aumentation is the same or uh query fan out.

James Dooley: Yeah. So I want to kind of dive a bit deeper into it um with regards to the semantic side of query augmentation, query networks versus query fan out within artificial intelligence. You say that with query augmentation that um in time if you're trusted you can rank for more keywords and more key phrases that's relevant to the main keyword of what you've searched for. But how does that trust work one within Google but then also is that not the case for query fan out because query fan out I don't believe uses anything like page rank or trust. So how does how does that differentiate from query fan out to query augmentation with the trust factors is query fan out just doing it for every single query that happens versus query augmentation you need to build the trust and that's when it does what people call query fan out

Luis Salahar: yes let's assume that you have a brand first in first and then related to that brand there are related searches and then you augment or expand the terms you rank about that brand. Okay? If Google do do not trust you, if Google don't think you're a real brand, the algorithms are are not going to give you more traffic or more users or more clicks unless you have a track record which is historical data of user clicking on your site, searching from your brand, searching for a related term to your brand. For instance, we are right now launching a marketing strategy, let's say from an online jewelry company. It's going to be launch it's going to end up in two days and then we're going to launch a new uh strategy. So from uh both SE well let's say SEO perclick and email marketing and on top of that social media we have created a campaign. So potential customer are going to search brand plus the product we want them to search uh for them because uh a new set of product is going to be launched and an old set of product are going to be let's say uh are obsolete and they're going to we're going to get rid of them and we're going to try to sell them. So in the marketing campaign we are engaging user to search brand plus the product we want to sell the boost. So we are creating a brand search demand historical data and that data is going to be let's say stored or recorded by Google for instance if it is a online jewelry company it's going to be brand plus earrings brand plus ring brand plus bracelet but then we can expand brand plus uh bracelet for woman brand plus bracelet uh uh whatever else that is where augmentation.

James Dooley: Yeah. So, I've got a question on that. So, when you're doing brand and then let's say earrings or um bracelet or necklace and stuff like that, would you ever do it the other way around as well where you're trying to do necklace plus brand or bracelet plus brand instead of brand earrings, you do it the other way around, earrings brand as well and doing it that way to append because what I'm in an ideal world if you could get the brand appended on auto suggests to someone searching for earrings there wasn't even searching for your brand and your brand now is showing up as opposed to doing brand first. You do it both ways.

Luis Salahar: Yes, absolutely. That's is tokenization which means you put the brand in the middle and before and after use related terms. As I mentioned previously, we can trigger queries by paperclick, SEO, email marketing or social media. And in each vertical we trigger different queries with different interns in order to maximize the probabilities to get the first term then the click and then again query augmentation because one thing is what you have in your head and what you're trying to trigger in the searches but a different thing is how the user search and if you get the both of them combined is a superpower.

James Dooley: Yeah. So then obviously on there then obviously once you then start to build that trust, build the the amount of branded kind of searches, then it will then expand with query augmentation for that same article to rank for a lot more variations and longer tail of keywords. Is that correct?

Luis Salahar: That's exactly right. And in order to expand a little bit more for that brand, we have between 700 and a,000 uh clicks a day only on brand terms. So query augmentation would be how can we expand brand plus uh the term we want to rank for for a different products for a different collection of a different category in the uh jewelry business. Let's say we're going to launch a new product. So we got new terms that are going to augment the back of keywords or the back of terms you rank for related to that brand.

James Dooley: Yeah. And then so within within that so let's say someone like myself who's nowhere near as advanced as you guys with semantic SEO um and core race framework and stuff like that how do I try to augment and get the query fan out or query augmentation to try and cover all different attributes predicates and facets to what the page is about. How can you try and expand on that? Does this does the content still need to be there on the page with H2s and H3s to be able to expand upon the main query?

Luis Salahar: Yes, absolutely. And then we we're going to introduce or we're going to mention two terms two technical terms in semantic SEO which is a statistical linguistic and distributional semantics which in a nutshell means imagine you want to rank for a new term but your site is 100 pages but the term you want to rank for is only in one page. by by pure mathematical terms is one page out of a 100 is a very limited number and you're gonna you're not going to have or you're not going to be strong enough to rank for that terms because the content you have for that turn is so tiny compared with the whole site. However, let's say you have 20 contents or 20 piece of content about a different terms in that site of 100 URLs. you have 20% of the whole site about that term. So if you by pure again by pure mathematical probability is more likely you run for the term you have 20 pieces of content rather than one. This is um a statistical linguistic and then distributional semantics means the amount of attributes and predicates you have around the entity you want to rank for. Let's say you have only one piece of content and you have a specific information about that content, but the information is not distribute and related across the site. It's only in one page. So unless you trigger or target a very specific marketing campaign, a very specific terms with low competition, it's very unlikely you run because you're going to be just one drop of water in an ocean and information. So you're not going to stand out from the crowd. Why Google we will why Google would trust your site if as a brand you have a tiny amount of content for a term you want to rank for? It doesn't make sense.

James Dooley: Yeah. What on on that though does that matter on the percentages? So if there's 20 pages out of 100, you're saying there's 20 pieces of content. That's 20% of the site that's talking about one specific topic. What happens if I add 500 pages and I only add 20 pages of that and now it's a much lower percentage? Does that matter? Does that like then start to say you like topic dilution is what some people say?

Luis Salahar: Yes. Uh you mentioned uh the the the answer in the in the comment you did which was you are diluting the power of the overall value of the site about a topic. So you demote automatically the overall value of the site about to rank for that term. So you have to find the right balance about the topic and then subtopics because if not it's going to be really hard to to rank. I mean in the old system query uh excuse me keyword to document just put the keyword in the in the URL or in the page you want to rank for and it was pretty easily decades ago and step by step it's becoming harder and harder but now just putting the keyword in the URL the title heading H1 so forth is not going to move the needle as easily as in the past because uh SEO have changed

James Dooley: Yeah, you need to massively expand upon now what I mean for me the old school methodology used to be easier for people like me and now I'm having to geek out and try to understand more of expanding upon all the different topics of what should be being I mean it's the right way in my opinion of how Google are moving towards it just means there's more work involved but moving on to query fan out right so artificial intelligence everyone it's a big buzzword word artificial intelligence query find out like is this new then or is it just is there anything different with what the LLMs are doing to query augmentation or is it is is it just query networks and it's been around for a long time and just people just never understood it

Luis Salahar: yes is the core principles are the same the only difference is that Google showed their results in a different interface in this case either AI overview But the the the how to how they organize the information is pretty much is pretty much the same. So the only thing is you have to feed data. You have to feed a different bot. That's it. And you have to communicate with a different in a different layer of information with a with a bot. I'm going to give you an example. We're working in a project and we tested uh changing the image four times until we get that image in the AI overview and then in the same uh let's say tests we change only tiny section of the site in order to see how the ex uh extract of the information or the summary of the information change. Again, at the end of the day, you're only trying to feed a bot to answer a question. The the key is just look at the SERs, look how the data is uh extracted and summarize and then try to structure the content that way either with table listicles or any other uh structured way to fit that bot.

James Dooley: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. So with regard to then the content briefs of expanding upon the content of what you're on about there and changing the images to try and get it to show up in the LLMs to try and make certain that people that are writing content semantically they are trying to cover everything of what needs to be on to get all query augmentation and query fan out. How can if someone doesn't know how to do that? What would you say are the next steps for them? like could they reach out to yourself and you could do some sort of audit or should they literally be if they are if they're not an SEO but they want to obviously improve the ranking should they do core kind of training it just seems to be quite a long- winded it's a difficult course to try and go into could they reach out to you for expanding on query augmentation is that something that you offer as a service

Luis Salahar: yes absolutely preferably I to make it easier for the customer. In this case, if they already have a brand with a decent amount of searches, at least I I would say to get a number at least 200 to 300 searches per month is a good number, but the the bigger the the demand, the better because that brand is going to be more consolidated. Then after we get that general evaluation of what the project needs is to get uh audit about how strong is the brand, what is the brand search demand and then what do they want to rank for. Coming back to the comments we have a few minutes ago is what the percentage of content already in the site or in the brand because if the percentage is very tiny it's going to be really hard to rank for those terms. We have to balance the content in proportion to the run and then define the right entities we want to run for and then investigate very heavily about the attributes about those entities and then uh create the semantic content network accordingly in order to run for those terms.

James Dooley: So with regards to the semantic content network, obviously that's like a a topical map, but trying to define all the content briefs, where the internal linking is going to be, like fully mapping out. I always call it's like being an architect. Before you build a house, you need that architect to design exactly where the windows and the doors are going to go strategically. You don't just go and get a builder to start building a house. You need the architect to design exactly how it's going to be built. And I think for somebody like myself, I just rush in and start building a wall and I'm like, I could be building it in the wrong place, the wrong dimensions, and that semantic content network becomes key, especially now where we're talking about query augmentation, query fan out, semantically trying to cover everything. If someone's watching this and they want to reach out to somebody like yourself or you've got like a newsletter and stuff like that, how can someone contact you with certain questions about query augmentation and query find out?

Luis Salahar: They can find me in seo techchnical.com which is the official site. I also have a newsletter. I write daily about semantic SEO. Then the domain is dailyo.com. they can contact me, subscribe first and then they can contact me or even they can find me on LinkedIn. Just search for my name Luis Salahar and then they can check the profile.

James Dooley: So anyone who's watching this, I hope you like the video discussing query augmentation and query fan out. Query fan out is certainly a buzzword at present that's being used quite a lot within artificial intelligence groups. But actually, and what was bizarre for myself, I didn't even realize myself that query augmentation and query networks. This has been around for many years. Um, if you want to reach out to Louis's absolute legend in the semantic SEO kind of networks and community, we hope you like the video. If there's anything that you feel we've missed, leave a comment in the comment section. Is there anything we could expand on or you want me to talk about um with Luis um with regards to query augmentation and query fan out? bye bye