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Hey Brett, Those Content Suggestions are there to show you how other sites are linking (and what anchor text they're using) to rank well. The anchor text is the phrase that site used to link to themselves, so we're suggesting you optimize your content for similar keywords in order to compete in the rankings with those terms. Check out this great link for more information: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-content-marketing/content-ideation Let me know if you have any other questions and I'll be more than happy to help! Eli

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Hey Dave, thanks for the response! I should have updated my question earlier today, but I was able to find a better way to do this type of research using Moz Pro's page optimization tab. The section in there that was previously labeled "related topics" was renamed "content suggestions", but it worked great. I was able to double content length and put in some genuinely useful information (I hope) that should help it rank better (I hope). It's a darn sight faster than what I was doing before, which was manually copy/pasting all body copy from the top ten sites for high volume keywords into an ngram analyzer and looking for patterns. The results were actually pretty similar, but good gravy, was it boring.

Thank you, I have advised my coworkers and our client that we will not be implementing this solution as it stands on the website. I normally bring a lot of hard data with me when I need to fight back against something like this, but was a bit short this time around. I just may frame your description for assessing risk and hang it up over my desk. Cheers!

Thanks Lisa.  I took the survey as well.  One feature request: Keyword volume over time is hard to get.  It does not seem to be well covered in the market.  Many of us need this to account for seasonality and time sensitive data like release cycles for media like news, movies, books, music, etc.  Google updates their keyword volume on a very delayed basis, so it's not very useful for time sensitive areas. Just a suggestion. Thanks.

Hi Brett! I've actually been wondering this same thing for awhile now. From what I've found, there isn't a way to specifically manipulate anything on your website with anything (i.e. schema, etc.) that will help get you in this position of the knowledge graph. At the moment, it seems like it is mostly pulling companies that are ranking prominently in the area. That being said, I would focus on getting your website to be one of the most authoritative in the area to improve your chances.

I'm glad it's on your radar at least! I don't imagine that migrating all your content into a mobile friendly format is going to be simple, but definitely worthwhile.

Bingo. Thank you gentlemen, I have a date with a new view in analytics.

Hey Brett! Thanks so much for updating this thread. I like the answer you received, but I wish very much that it was coming directly from a Google staffer. I don't in any way doubt that what the volunteer is saying is true ... I'd just have preferred it if he mentioned he took the issue to staff to get an official answer. Hmm ... this is not an easy one!

I have a final update for everyone! We discovered the cause of the mysterious increase in crawling. One of our partners tested out a second version of the content on the website (yes, we have two complete sets of content for every page) by swapping out the first set with the second set. The second set caused Google to reevaluate the entire website, crawl it repeatedly thousands of times for two weeks, then stop. The result of this refresh was a jump in the rankings. We were ranking on page one for about 15% of our targeted keywords and after the new content was inputted it jumped to 71%. Only time will tell if those new rankings will stick, but for now it looks pretty good.