digital futures: the latest advanced seo & link strategies - patrick altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategiesby Patrick Altoft


What I’m talking about• The importance of making your content strategy & content marketing integral

to your normal day to day business, PR and comms strategy• 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


Doing Real StuffWould you do this if it didn’t help with SEO?

When you release a new page or piece of content would your MD or PR department tweet about it?

If not then you probably shouldn’t be doing it


Real Company Stuff

http://b3.io/10ZXMjy

http://b3.io/10ZXMjy


What Google WantsThe goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfil their information needs.

Matt Cutts

Our strategy therefore is to create a better search result for our clients than their competitors.

This can be split into two simple to understand factors:• Creating more authority & being a better/more reputable company• Making better landing pages, specifically your primary pages


Achieving This

The tactics to achieve this are a mixture of links, content strategy, onsite optimisation & usability.

It’s important to remember that while the tactics might change the strategy has not changed in nearly 15 years.

As an SEO agency we focus on making our clients websites a better destination for searchers than their competitors.

If Google thinks that our clients site is more useful and will give a better experience for users then the site will probably rank higher.


AuthorityGoogle measures authority using offsite factors, for example:• Links• Press coverage• Social media mentions• Traffic• Search volume

All things being equal a searcher prefers to visit a well known authority brand than an unknown website with the same content.

Turning yourself into an authority and building your brand by becoming an expert is the best possible way to improve SEO


Competitor AnalysisCompetitor analysis has become pretty much useless in the last 12 months.

Most of your competitors links probably look terrible

Maybe they disavowed them?


CompetingIf you don’t have a better site, don’t expect to rank higher. Build links people can’t replicate rather than just copying competitors

http://www.rosshudgens.com/authority-bloat/


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?


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


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


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


Great sites are winning in 2012 & 2013• 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?


People love John Lewis


People love Very.co.uk


People love Currys*


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


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


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


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


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


Content Audit Document

•Typography•Readability•Spelling/grammar•Shareability•Keyword use•Copyscape report on stolen content

•Social media shares

Shareable Content

•Brainstorming•Competitor Analysis•Examples & screenshots from competitors

Informative Content

•Research Q&A on Yahoo Answers, Quora, Facebook, Twitter

•Search for questions in Analytics data & keyword tool data

•Gap Analysis of current content

•Examples & screenshots from competitors etc

User Generated Content

•Reviews – implementation, incentivisation etc

•Q&A section or Q&A on product pages etc

•Forums, blog comments, guest blog posts, in-depth content reviews

•Examples & screenshots from competitors etc

Site Structure

•Where does content need to go (blog or Q&A etc)

•How should the sections be structured

•Design & UI• Interlinking between sections

•Examples & screenshots from competitors

Content Roadmap Document

•Monthly or weekly content plan

•Special events & calendar

•Blog calendar•PR calendar

Content Strategy Framework


People are already doing this


ReviewsIf you don’t have a user review strategy – why not?


Questions & AnswersWhy wouldn’t you do this?


External Reviews• Build users trust• Improve conversion rates• Increase basket size• Improve Quality Score for PPC

Why wouldn’t you do this?


UsabilityHow many sites are hard to use on a mobile device or iPad?

What’s your conversion rate on Safari?

Our data for 30m UK users in August puts Safari at over 30% market share with most visits coming from iPad and iPhone use – Safari is the most popular browser on lots of ecommerce sites


Usability & Conversion Rates


This sounds hard, can we ignore SEO?For an established business the new rules of SEO are a tough sell because businesses need information about ROI to sign off projects and struggle to implement new ways of working

Maybe you can just ignore SEO?


The new rules of The InternetLook at it another way - Google is just mirroring real life and ranking sites that users want to see. If people don’t like your site this will impact everything you do online.

If you don’t focus on making users love you then how will you get traffic?

• PPC – Google will bring these factors into the Quality Score algorithm sooner or later

• Direct – if users don’t love you will they still visit your site directly?• Social media – unloved sites never succeed in social media• Affiliates – can you afford to pay commission for all your sales/leads?• Conversions – users convert better if they love the site


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.


This is your Kodak momentKodak invented the digital camera in 1975 and were well aware in 1981 that digital was the future

They just didn’t do anything about it


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


Merchant QualityWe have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants and whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results.

What happens if Google develops an artificial intelligence algorithm to rank the best sites at the top, regardless of how well SEO’ed they are?


Zappos

digital futures: the latest advanced seo & link strategies - patrick altoft

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