How Apartments.com Automated Contextual Linking

I had the pleasure of speaking at Perficient Digital’s Next10X Digital Marketing Conference in Boston, MA on May 2nd. My talk was part of a spotlight session, “Case Studies and Practical Insights from Experience,” with thought leaders and subject matter experts Grant Davies (Perficient Digital), Shawn Tyler (BOLD), and Susan Wenograd (Aimclear). Thank you Eric Enge for inviting me — it was great to be in my hometown and be a part of this conference.

Presentation

Contextual links placed inside content are one of the best ways to drive traffic gains for large marketplaces. At Apartments.com, we publish thousands of local guides across the country and found a better way to place and update contextual links both helping renters and search engines.

In this spotlight session from Next10X Boston 2019, we dove into how we identified known entities in existing content, connected them to the right related content, and developed a refresh cycle to ensure links always stay up to date on our site.

We explored a variety of techniques including natural language processing (NLP), an application of AI and machine learning, to hone our internal linking strategy, and we learned a few tricks along the way to scale internal linking that can help your organization too.

Check out a video of my presentation:

Check out presentation slides on SlideShare: