the latest advanced seo & link strategies

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategiesby Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

What I’m talking about• Making users love you• How great sites are winning the SEO race• How to make your site great• Being memorable• Content strategy• Getting social• Links

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

Do people love you?It’s unquantifiable, tough to explain to clients & impossible to make a business case for but love is slowly & steadily becoming part of the Google algorithm

Google can tell whether people love your website & is rewarding the most loved websites with higher rankings.

Panda downgraded sites that people didn’t love – why wouldn’t Google reward sites that people do love?

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

How can Google understand love?Hundreds of user engagement signals are analysed and fed into an artificial intelligence algorithm

The algorithm learns how to detect whether users love a site or not (probably with the help of seed sites)

Remember, Chrome has 33% market share & Analytics is in use on over 10m websites

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

How artificial intelligence shapes the algorithm

New algorithm• Based on what we know

about sites that are loved, do we think that people love your site?

Old Algorithm• Let’s score you on various

trust signals & see how you perform

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

Poor quality sites just don’t perform as wellHistorically a mediocre company with a below average site could implement an aggressive link strategy based on mediocre links and generate top rankings.

Now Google actively penalises for bad links rather than just devaluing them

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

Great sites are winning in 2012• Doing SEO for a great site is 10x easier than doing SEO for a mediocre site• For most companies this is the difference between success and failure in an SEO

campaign

Panda?

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

People love John Lewis

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

People love M&S

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

What can I do?• Want to know how Google sees your site? Just

ask your visitors.

• Every site should be permanently asking for feedback from different groups of people

• Adopt a mantra of continual improvement & use survey scores as a KPI

• http://qualaroo.com

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

Content StrategyOur Data Insights team analysed visits across one of the UK’s largest retail ecommerce websites and found that users who engaged with a piece of content such as an article, forum thread or video on the site before reaching a product or category page were 5 times more valuable than users who arrived directly on a product or category page.

Users who engage with quality content place more trust in the brand so convert at a higher rate, purchase more products and have a greater tendency to make repeat purchases

Increasing brand trust, improving conversion rates and encouraging larger sale values are all vital elements of any digital marketing campaign

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

Attribution modellingAdding attribution modelling into the mix demonstrates even further why a strong content strategy is so important – on average non-brand organic SEO is 40% more valuable than a traditional “last click wins” methodology would show. Content strategy increases assisted conversions

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

Content makes your site memorableOur research shows that 40% of ecommerce transactions are carried out 24 hours or more after users first visit the website

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

Being memorableOnly 40% of revenue is attributable to users who buy on the first visit – most of your customers will need to remember you and find you a second time

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

People are already doing this

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

Get social

Make something users will love

Encourage them to share

*This is the Twitter Analytics interface for verified users

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

Social SEO is not about fans & followersIt’s about engagement

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

Tweeting

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

Sharing

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

It’s not about growthLook at all the brands who have lost huge amounts of revenue due to Panda, Penguin and unnatural links.

SEO is no longer just about growth.

For some businesses SEO is just about forward thinking to protect market share and make sure the next major update doesn’t ruin your business.

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

Link strategyThe only way to future-proof your link strategy is to make links a natural by-product of your normal marketing strategy

As you might expect, this isn’t easy. How many links does your marketing strategy deliver every month at the moment?

If you sit back and wait for links to arrive you won’t get enough to rank

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link StrategiesB3

Patrick@branded3.comhttp://www.branded3.com/

Questions?