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TRANSCRIPT
The Ever-Changing Art of SEO
Webinar Information
• This is being recorded, and the video will be uploaded to our website afterwards.
• This is an interactive webinar, so it is OK to ask questions during the presentation.
• At the end of the webinar, we will have 10-15 minutes of Q&A, so any questions you ask will be answered then.
• Launched in April 2002• Seattle’s largest independent
search marketing firm• SEM, SEO, Web Design/Dev,
Marketing Automation• $30m in managed media/yr• Servicing clients across all
verticals and revenue models
About Point It
An SEO is more or less an interpreter; they modify websites and build web signals to better communicate with Google and other search engines.
What is SEO?
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A lot of people think SEOs are somewhere between sorcerers and charlatans, and that mindset is totally off the mark. For all intents and purposes, an SEO functions as sort of an aid or interpreter between websites and Google. If you think of yourself as the website, picture Google as a blind and hearing impaired person who only learns via Braille. How do you, the website, effectively communicate with Google? An SEO, at the very core, helps to structure websites and the various signals that Google can gather that pertain to those websites in a way that effectively communicates to Google both the topical relevancy and the authority of that site for various search queries.
Data from Forrester’s Interactive Marketing 2012 ReportImages from a presentation by Rand Fishkin of Moz
Why is SEO So Valuable?
Organic Results
Paid Results
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When people go to a search engine and perform a search, 18% of clicks will be on paid ads, while a whopping 82% will end up clicking on an organic listing. Organic search traffic, labeled as SEO in this graph, is typically the single largest slice of a website’s potential traffic pie. Beyond that, the tactics that impact organic traffic often contribute to an increase in other non-paid traffic sources as well, from direct traffic to referring traffic. In most cases, organic search traffic also converts at a higher rate, and tends to have a higher average order value, than traffic from most other sources.
Data from Forrester’s Interactive Marketing 2012 ReportImages from a presentation by Rand Fishkin of Moz
Online Marketing Spend Distribution
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As you can see, things are a bit…off. Roughly 90% of online marketing budgets go towards paid search (that 18% slice of the traffic pie), while roughly 10% goes toward inbound marketing channels (which includes SEO, that 82% slice of the traffic pie). This distribution, while totally nuts from a numbers perspective, makes perfect sense when you look at it from the perspective of neuroscience. We humans are really, really bad at working towards long-term goals. We’re wired for short term satisfaction, dopamine triggers. At the same time, we’re also inherently risk averse, and so we tend to put money into things that will probably deliver acceptable short term wins, rather than putting money into long-term moon shots even if the outcome could be 10x greater.
SEO is a Long-Term Investment
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I love Warren Buffet, because he takes a long-term approach to investing. This is critical to understand. You cannot approach SEO as if it were paid search, or any other form of marketing that is expected to have a short-term ROI. If you need to put your marketing budget into short-term ROI activities, then SEO is not for you. If, however, you’re willing to play the long-game, willing to take risks now so that you can potentially completely dominate your competition down the road…then perhaps SEO is right for you.
2013 Google Ranking Factors, According to Moz.com SurveyNumbers in parentheses are percentages
Understanding “The Algorithm”
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We talked a bit earlier about how SEOs are functionally interpreters, helping websites to effectively communicate with search engines. Well, a core part of an SEO’s job is understanding the language that search engines use, and that language is embodied in the search algorithm. Search engines gather data through crawlers, bits of code that crawl the web link to link and gather data. That data is stored and analyzed in massive server farms, and then processed with an algorithm that is designed for one thing: To provide searchers with the best possible search results whenever they search. To do this, Google analyzes thousands of data points, across trillions of web pages (TRILLIONS), and then queries that information and delivers you a search result in a fraction of a second, billions of times every month. And so, SEOs set about testing and tweaking and observing websites and rankings and traffic, in an effort to determine exactly which factors Google’s algorithm takes into account. I sat down once and attempted to create a list of every factor that I believed search engines considered as part of the ranking algorithm…I got to 223 factors before I went brain dead, and this was years ago…it’s safe to say there are likely many hundreds if not thousands of weighted signals that Google considers when determining which website should rank for what keyword, and this list changes all the time…
Death, Taxes, and Google Updates
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If you ever wonder why SEO is expensive, this is your answer. Google changes things, constantly. Every day, millions of little micro-tests are taking place on search result pages on Google. The order of results for a certain keyword change. The SERP features for a given keyword change. Etc, Etc, ad infinitum. Google is a staunch believer in testing, and they literally run tests constantly in an effort to improve their search results. Now, out of all the tests Google runs, only a portion of those lead to actual changes to the algorithm (maybe 500-1,000 per year, give or take), and of those changes, only a small number have a major impact on the workings of SEO (perhaps a dozen or so, depending on the year). Any SEO worth their salt spends a good chunk of each day just reading and researching so they can stay up on the latest changes that Google is making. In some ways, you could think of an SEO like a doctor or a lawyer, each of which work in fields where constant changes due to research, innovation and court decisions/case law require ongoing study just to stay up-to-date on the right way to do things. If you’re not constantly studying and learning what’s changed, you’ll quickly fall behind, and that can have serious consequences.
Panda, Penguin, PMD/EMD, Brand Emphasis
The Last 3 Years in SEO
BuyShoesOnline.com
KitchenIslandsOnline.com
PhoenixBassBoats.com
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That said, the pace of changes to the algorithm targeting SEO related elements has vastly increased over the last 3 years. While many hundreds if not thousands of changes have been made in that time period, there are three main “algorithm updates” and one dialed up ranking factor that have had the most significant impact on the efficacy of SEO.
Webinar - http://bit.ly/15wjHi3
Panda
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February 23, 2011 I actually did an entire webinar on the subject of Google’s Panda update. This update was aimed primarily at thin and duplicate content, though it also had elements that impacted sites that were deemed a poor user experience. You see, Google wants to show not only the best possible results for a search query, but a variety of different results. Google was faced with a number of queries that returned results that were all virtually the same, due primarily to duplicate content (manufacturer product descriptions, scraped content, etc.) At the same time, pages that were providing a poor user experience were ranking well on the back of link building alone, without sufficient matching content on the page. Google no likey, so Google released an update. Now, if your site has duplicate content, too many ads or affiliate links on the page, thin or poorly written content (or if you have a lot of links coming from sites that meet these criteria), then you’ve almost certainly been negatively impacted by Panda.
Penguin
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April 24, 2012
Data from Moz.com: http://moz.com/blog/are-exact-match-domains-in-decline
PMD/EMD
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No specific named update, but there were major algo changes that impacted this in April and June of 2013. Once upon a time, having a keyword rich domain name was one of the best ways to rank well for a competitive keyword. In fact, this factor led to some crazy, crazy expensive sales of keyword rich domain names (SEO.com is a famous one, as they traded the majority of their company to acquire the domain name). PMD (Partial Match Domains), are domains where part of the domain name is a target keyword (BestGolfLessons.com). EMD (Exact Match Domains), are domains where the entire domain is a keyword (Golf.com) If you have an existing, quality brand on a PMD or EMD, you’re probably OK…but if you have a low to average quality site on one of these domains, or if you’re considering launching on one of these domains, you might want to think twice. They aren’t inherently bad by any means, they just no longer have as significant an impact on rank-ability.
Screenshot from NotProvidedCount.com
Not Provided
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Have I mentioned lately that Google really has it out for SEOs? 714 days ago, just shy of 2 years, Google implemented “not provided”, for what they claimed were privacy reasons. They also claimed it wouldn’t impact more than 10% of queries. Right. Well, as of a few days ago, Not Provided is pushing 80%, and is expected to reach 100% in the not too distant future. What does this mean? It means you can no longer provide conversion attribution or behavior at the organic keyword level. You can no longer say “keyword X” drove 45 visits and 6 conversions from Google. That data is gone, and you can’t get it back by any means. Some people have attempted workarounds, but the sad fact is that the data is lost unless Google chooses to return it. Not likely.
Google’s War on SEO
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Google doesn’t like being manipulated, particularly when that manipulation decreases the quality of their search results. A few years back, Google realized that the overall quality of their search results was decreasing, thanks in large part to SEOs. SERPs were full of crap ad sense sites, affiliate sites, sites loaded with ads, and overall just a generally low quality of site. Google no likey. Now, inherently, Google likes White Hat SEOs, because White Hat SEOs endeavor to make the web a better place. They’re all about quality, and making websites worthy of ranking. Unfortunately, White Hat SEO is time consuming and expensive, and far too many website owners are impatient. This, the majority of SEOs out there fall into the Gray and Black hat categories. The issue is, Gray and Black hat tactics are more likely to get your site penalized.
Well, probably not…
These Are Not The SEOs You’re Looking For
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The thing is, both gray and black hat SEO have their place. There are certain niches (Pills, Porn, Poker), where the only way to rank well in a reasonable timeframe is to cheat. And in these spaces, a top ranking can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars PER DAY. When you’re talking about returns like that, and you’re not interested in long-term tactics, then by all means, do what it takes within the bounds of legality. But for a business that hopes to stand the test of time, who doesn’t want to change domain names constantly, who wants to build a real brand…stick with the white hat stuff.
SEO Was Once a Silo
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Once upon a time, SEO was a nice little silo, insulated from most other facets of marketing. As an SEO at that time, as long as I had direct access to edit a website, I could get any site ranking for just about any keyword, without having to involve people in other departments. No longer. The various marketing elements that can directly impact SEO are so many and varied that you just can’t do SEO in a silo any longer.
Just one piece of a much larger puzzle. No more silo.
What Is SEO Now?
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There are people out there who have advocated for moving away from SEO, and calling it something else. Inbound marketing, digital strategy…I mean, a recent example would be Moz.com, formerly SEOmoz, who felt that calling themselves SEOmoz was actually a limiting factor in terms of long-term growth. There are also quite a few people who claim that SEO is dead. Personally, I think SEO is and will for the foreseeable future remain a thing. As long as there are search engines, there will need to be people who understand and optimize websites and brands for those search engines. It’s not going anywhere. But again, it’s also no longer a silo.
But only if you’re willing to build a brand.
SEO is More Valuable Than Ever…
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If it’s done correctly. Done incorrectly, it can cost you your organic search presence. I’ve literally seen businesses fold from bad SEO…but only because they were over-dependent on a single channel. SEO is not a panacea, and you should NEVER put all your eggs in one basket. If a large slice of your revenue is generated by organic search traffic, that puts your business in an unstable condition, because Google can make changes at any time that could negatively impact your bottom line. Personally, I don’t think any company should get more than 5-10% of their revenue from any single channel, particularly channels that aren’t entirely in your control. SEO is still incredibly valuable, but it’s a more risky, longer-term, channel. If you’re willing to invest in it, it can provide absolutely massive returns…but there are big risks that go with those big rewards, and so it’s important to understand SEO, where it is today and where it’s going, before you dive in.
Brand or Die
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Now, brand doesn’t have to mean Coke, or Apple, or Starbucks. We’re not talking corporate behemoth here. A “brand”, in the eyes of a search engine, is an entity composed of a certain set of “brand” signals: Do you advertise, online and off? In a variety of places? Are people searching for your brand by name? Is the volume of people searching for your brand by name increasing over time? Are you active on social media? Do your customers and fans interact with you? Do you have a well built, usable website? Is it sufficiently optimized for your target keywords and your target market? Is your brand presence consistent across various sites and platforms? Do you get press/media attention? Is your site linked from or mentioned on trusted domains? From Google’s perspective, if you walk like a brand, and quack like a brand, you’re a brand…and that’s what you need to become if you want a slice of the organic traffic in your space going forward. Traditional SEO, just trying to “rank better” without integrating your SEO efforts into numerous other online marketing channels and tactics, actually is dead.
Becoming a Brand on a Budget
Sold just 25 bottles in the first year
Built ~200 units of their first computer
Took 5 years to come up with Mickey
Angry Birds was their 52nd game
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All of these companies started out small, with small budgets, and small reach. It took AGES for most major brands to become household names. You start small, but you send all the right signals on a small scale. However, as technology has improved, the barrier to entry to becoming a brand has fallen dramatically. Thanks to online marketing, it’s possible to reach an enormous, worldwide audience instantly through video and social media. You can earn it, or you can buy it. Need an example? This is Psy, of Gangnam Style fame. His YouTube video has been viewed almost 2 billion times, more than any other video, and launched a little-known pop star to global fame. Psy is now a global brand, making tens of millions of dollars, and he became one on the back of online marketing. (Oh, and by the way…Gangnam Style was his 18th song) ANY COMPANY CAN DO THIS Branding isn’t inherently expensive…in fact, it can be quite cheap…but it IS risky. As is starting a business. As is marketing. As far as I’m concerned, the only real risk is in not trying.
People Prefer Brands (So Does Google)
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As they should. Brands carry an inherent promise and familiarity that people trust. Google has changed the rules regarding who ranks for what, and they’ll keep changing the rules…but regardless of what changes, Google has one clear goal: To provide the best damn search results possible. And for many searches, the best result is a brand. People trust them, people give them their money, in larger quantities, more frequently. Loyal fans, brand advocates, recurring revenue, increased company value…being a brand is awesome. Be a brand, or at least set your sites on becoming a brand, and you’ll be that much closer to dominating the SERPS.
BestFood.com – Old site on the left, New site on the right
Make It, Don’t Fake It
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A big part of becoming a brand is looking and acting like a brand, even when you’re small. As an SEO, whenever I’m analyzing a potential new client, I start by looking at their website, and asking myself a simple question: If I was a potential customer searching for what this site offers, and I landed on this website…would I be happy that I landed here? Or would I click the back button and look elsewhere? If I’d click the back button and leave, then this site doesn’t deserve to rank, and I won’t help that site to rank well unless they agree to make themselves worthy of ranking better. On the flip-side, I consider it an absolute privilege to help sites that deserve to rank better, rank better. I feel like I’m doing their potential customers a service by making this great company more visible. I love the web, I spend a huge chunk of my life on it, and I like making it a better place. I’ve always kind of liked the phrase “Don’t shit in your nest”. And Google shares this sentiment. They want the best possible search results for any given query to rank in the #1 position, so if you make your site the best, most relevant result, you win….make it, don’t fake it, you can get that #1 spot.
The Days of Tricking Google are Ending
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Honestly, from the earliest days of SEO until a few years ago, it was pretty dang easy to rank for just about anything. I had people on page one for car insurance, real estate, dish network, all kinds of crazy competitive terms. It just wasn’t that hard… This is a great example of how easy it was to manipulate Google, with something called a Google Bomb. In this case, thanks to a ton of keyword rich links from a ton of sites, when you searched for the phrase Miserable Failure, George W. Bush’s presidential biography showed up :) Things have changed. It’s much, much more difficult to rank well today. Sure, there are still ways to trick your way to the top, but they’re more risky than ever.
Is SEO (Still) Right For Your Business?
MAYBE
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Big maybe. It depends enormously on your business, on the competitive landscape, on your internal resources, your budget, your timeframe, your tolerance for risk, your level of patience, and a dozen other factors beyond that. SEO is not some cure all, some panacea for all your online marketing woes. It’s not the right channel for everyone, and at Point It we turn down potential clients fairly regularly if we don’t believe SEO is the right channel for their business. If you’re interested in tackling SEO, I’d recommend sitting down with someone who really knows SEO, and who isn’t going to just tell you what they think you want to hear to make a buck. Find out from an unbiased 3rd party if SEO is right or wrong for your business, and go from there.
SEO – Good for Some, Bad for Others
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There are niches, many of them, where SEO is an utter waste of time and money…and I find it ironic that those spaces tend to be the most crowded and aggressively SEO’d. For example, dentists. In Seattle, there are something like 1,500+ dentists. All of them are relevant for a keyword like Seattle Dentist, but guess what…only 10 or so get to rank on the first page. On the flip-side, only 590 people each month search for the exact phrase Seattle Dentist, out of a population of over 600k people. Like, 1/10th of 1 %. And at best, a #1 position would get like 1/3rd of those (so, 200 people), and out of those, maybe 5-10% would actually convert (so, 10-20 people). Factoring in costs and overhead, maybe, maybe a #1 spot for that keyword makes sense, but it’s not exactly the best bang for your buck. The irony is, most people don’t discover their dentist from search results anyway! They see who their insurance covers, who is close to their home or work, who their friends or family recommend, who has good reviews on Yelp…they’re not going to Google, searching for a dentist, and signing up with the #1 ranking dentist. They hunt around, and consider a lot of other factors. And yet, tons and tons of dentists are paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars every month in the Seattle area alone to try and rank well for Seattle Dentist. What a waste.
Setting Expectations
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SEO is not fast. If you’re expecting amazing results tomorrow, or in a week, or a month, or even a few months, then SEO is probably not for you. In some spaces, you can see reasonable SEO success in 3-6 months, but there are numerous factors to take into account: The website being optimized (it’s age, it’s link profile and authority, it’s existing rankings, etc.) The ranking competition (who ranks better, who do you need to beat?) The budget The resources available Etc. Etc. For a new player entering a competitive space, it could take many years to rank well for a single keyword phrase. It’s all relative, and you need to have this conversation with your SEO right at the onset. If your expectations and the reality of the situation don’t mesh, then SEO probably isn’t for you.
The image above is a GeckoBoard dashboard
Know Your KPIs
Conversion RateAvg Order ValueLifetime ValueRetention RateProfit MarginsEtc.
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Every business has KPIs, key performance indicators. Whatever yours happen to be, you need to know them well, and to understand how they connect to and are impacted by SEO efforts. If, for example, you know that your typical conversion rate from non-branded organic traffic is 6%, and that your average order value from the same channel is $204, and that 25% of your customers return and purchase again an average of 2.3x, and that your profit margin is 30%...you can take this awesome data and figure out if SEO makes financial sense (and with numbers like these, it probably makes a ton of sense).
The Value of Analytics
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When it comes to SEO, and online marketing in general, what you don’t know can destroy your business and waste a shit ton of money in the process. Accurate Data = More Accurate Decisions. No data, or bad data = bad decisions. One of the greatest frustrations I face as an SEO is not having access to accurate data on which to base decisions. In fact, I’d say with high confidence that 90% or more of all clients I’ve ever worked with have had problems with their analytics data in some way shape or form. Whether that’s not having the code on every page on the site, or not having a conversion funnel configured, or having a means of conversion that isn’t tracked and tied back to analytics data (such as phone calls or offline conversions). Bad data = bad decisions. Example, call tracking with paid or organic search. Huge data hole.
Last Click Attribution Is Crap
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If you think the last touch-point prior to a conversion was the source of that conversion, you’re almost certainly misattributing conversion data. Sometimes the path to conversion is that straightforward, but usually it involves multiple touch-points across different channels and over a period of time. Why is this an issue? Because it probably means you’re spending money on the wrong channels, or too much on one instead of on another. If you don’t understand the full conversion funnel, you’re missing valuable pieces of data, and you can’t make informed decisions.
Multi-Channel Conversion Funnels
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While it does happen, people don’t always just go search on Google, find your site, and then buy something. There are typically many steps in that process. Perhaps they see a post from you on social media. Then, a few days later, they’re searching for a product you offer, and see your paid search ad, and click on it. They make a note of the price, and then go back to Google and search some more to get a few comparison prices. After they gather that data, they noodle on it for a few days, perhaps re-visiting a few sites directly in the process. Then, finally, decision made, they Google your brand name and the product, click on the product page, and buy. Which channel should that conversion be attributed to? If you’re using last click attribution, you’d think organic search. If you’re using first-touch, you’d say social. The reality is that each step in the process played a part, and deserves a bit of the credit. Beyond that, you need to understand how these various touch points combine into various conversion funnels, to better understand which combination of channels is the most lucrative and most effective.
Make an Educated Decision
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If you have data, then you can test things. If your multi-channel analysis indicates that social media is the most important step in your conversion funnel, you can dial up your social activity and measure for a correlation in increased conversions that involve that touchpoint. In business, and life, there’s a tendency to make seat-of-the-pants decisions, to go with your gut. While this isn’t inherently bad, you should still test your hypothesis before betting the farm. With good data, and good testing, you can find statistically accurate correlations that can make your business more money. SEO is just one such area. While it typically takes time, you can run some short-term tests. You could identify your most lucrative long-tail keywords, and run a short 3 month SEO campaign targeting just that one keyword. You can then measure if an increased ranking for that keyword led to an increase in conversions, and then work it backwards to see if the increased conversions justified the cost of the SEO campaign. Test everything.
How Much Will It Cost?
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SEO, can cost whatever you’re willing to invest in it, and it depends on 2 factors: What does your competitive landscape look like for the keywords you’re going after? How quickly do you need to rank? These 2 elements play off each other. If you’re space isn’t too competitive, and you’re willing to wait a while for rankings, SEO could cost less. But if you’re in a competitive space, and you want to rank as quickly as possible, SEO is going to cost way more. To be fair, asking how much does SEO cost is like asking how much does a car cost?
You Get What You Pay For
$20k+ $100k+ $400k + $1.9m+
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A car costs whatever you want to spend on the car. A Mini Cooper is a different car from a Mercedes S Class, which is a different car from a Lamborghini Aventador, which is again a different car from a Bugatti Veyron. SEO is not the channel to be cheap. Because it requires a long-term investment, trying to do SEO on the cheap will almost always get you in trouble, in one of two ways. Either A, it won’t be enough money to be competitive in your space, and you’ll waste the money trying. Or B, your SEO agency, in an effort to show results on a paltry budget, will turn to less than savory tactics to get results, which could hurt your business in the long run. So seriously, if you’re planning to invest in SEO, give it the budget it deserves.
What is Success Worth to You?
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This is where the value of data really comes into play. Some keyword phrases you might think of as awesome, are actually a total waste of effort, because the amount of cash needed to rank for them far exceeds the revenue or profit generated from said rankings. When we tackle SEO for a client, we run an estimated keyword profitability analysis, to attempt to determine, roughly, if going after a set of keywords will be worth it. However, this sort of analysis is totally impossible without access to good data. But, if you have good data, you can determine with somewhat reasonable accuracy if it’s worth investing in or not.
Value > Time
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Have you ever heard the story of the $300 million dollar button? Ecommerce site hired a company, tell the story. Now, what do you think fixing that problem was worth? If it were your company, would you have paid someone $1 million dollars to make you an extra $300 million? That change to the checkout process, the recommendation, could just as easily come from an SEO. We’re very cross-disciplined, and I personally make conversion optimization recommendations like that all the time, and it doesn’t cost any extra. With a good SEO, not only will you get more traffic, but you’ll probably end up getting more of that traffic to convert.
$EO Makes $ense…Now What?
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So we’ve established what SEO was, and what it is now. We’ve addressed how to determine if it’s right for your business or not. If, after all of this, you feel that it’s the right way to go…now what?
Start With an SEO Audit
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Before you dive into an ongoing SEO campaign, you should start with an SEO audit, particularly if you’ve done SEO in the past (or if someone has done it for you). A good audit will tell you exactly what is currently wrong from an SEO perspective, what if anything has been done in the past, what needs to be fixed and how to fix it, the state of the competitive landscape, and whether or not SEO makes sense as an investment for your business. Without an audit, you’re flying blind. Even if you currently have an SEO team, either an agency or an internal team, an audit is still a good investment to make sure they’re doing what they should be doing. I’ve literally seen businesses fold from bad SEO, when they thought they were doing the right things, so it’s important to get an unbiased 3rd party to take a look a things and give you a real no shitter.
Analyze the Competitive Landscape
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In the realm of SEO, everything is relative. You’re not optimizing your site in a vacuum. In order to determine what it will take to rank well for a given set of keywords, you need to know who’s currently ranking ahead of you, and why they’re ranking ahead of you. What does their backlink profile look like? What does their historical link growth look like? How’s their on-site SEO? Do they have a blog? Are they active on social media? Are they creating great content? What types of content? Do people engage with that content? Do people search for their brand? Are they doing other forms of marketing? There are tons of questions you need to ask and understand to determine if you even have a shot at top rankings in a segment. For example, if you’re building a new site, and you expect to rank well for a keyword where the current top ranking websites are Amazon, Wal-Mart, Zappos, etc., you might want to re-think your strategy. You’re unlikely to outrank sites like that…it’s not impossible, but it’s going to be expensive, take time, and the outcome of the effort will be extremely uncertain.
Craft a Strategy
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SEO isn’t simple, and it now has a number of dependencies across various departments. For SEO to be effective, it’s going to need to be a conscious part of a number of different marketing, branding, PR and development initiatives. An effective strategy will consider the entire organic search funnel, and all of the various elements that impact that funnel, from social media and design to paid search, conversion rate optimization, copywriting and content creation. A great strategy is the make or break factor in SEO. If you only focus on tactics, you’ll end up being bitten by an algorithm update at some point.
Integrate
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Get buy-in within the company. You’re going to need buy-in from the top, and cooperation from and integration with multiple departments. If you’re the only person in the company who understands the value of SEO, and you have dependencies in other departments, you’re effort is doomed from the start. Before you pull in help with SEO, you need to sell it internally and get buy-in. At the very least, you’re going to need one advocate at the top, and one in each department that you’re going to need help from.
Lay the Foundation
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While roughly 2/3rds of Google’s ranking algorithm involves off-site signals like links and social, the first place to start is with your website. Your website is your digital hub, the foundation and end goal of all your online marketing endeavors. Because it is entirely in your control, Google has every expectation of perfection for your site. You need to get your on-site SEO, usability elements and indexation related issues sorted out before you do anything else. There are a lot of clients who think this is too much work, and don’t want to put forth the effort…if that’s how you feel, do something other than SEO. The importance of on-site elements are rapidly increasing, and if Google detects dissonance between on-site and off-site signals (for example, lots of great links pointing to a less than optimal page), that can result in penalties. Get your house in order before anything else.
Launch
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Now, with an audit and strategy sorted, buy-in taken care of, and a rock-solid foundation in place, you’re ready to start the ongoing portion of your SEO endeavor. This effort will involve different departments coordinating their efforts, working together closely and without animosity, to succeed.
Social
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While Google’s algorithmic foundation is built on links, they don’t particularly like links because they’re just so easy to manipulate. Enter social signals. Links were never the end goal, but an approximation of trust and value, endorsements so to speak. Now, social signals are proving to be potentially better signals of endorsement than links, and Google has taken notice. There have been numerous tests, and at present Google+ shares and +1s correlate the highest with increased rankings. After that, Twitter shares, Facebook likes and Facebook shares have all been shown to have a positive ranking impact. That said, there are numerous signals above and beyond shares and likes. The number of fans almost certainly plays a role, and engagement levels and overall social sentiment also probably play a role. And while social has SEO value, it’s important that you don’t engage in social purely for SEO reasons. Social is there for you to build and engage with your audience, your community, your fans and customers. It gives them a say, a voice, and allows them to feel closer and more connected to your brand. And that’s the key here, brand. A real brand has social signals, when social is where their audience is.
PR
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PR is not dead. Far from it. In fact, the digital signals that a good PR strategy sends are some of the best brand signals you’ll get from Google’s perspective. Not only does it provide brand signals, but if your company is linked to from an article on an authoritative site, or even better, featured in an article, that sends a lot of trust and authority to your site, which has a positive impact from an SEO perspective. Beyond that, being mentioned or featured on an authoritative site gives you a nice trust element to add to your own website (as seen on X site, Featured on sites X, Y and Z). These trust signals can help to decrease bounce rates and increase conversion rates, and that has a ton of value.
Design
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Great design is no longer optional. It’s a massive competitive advantage, and pretty much expected by users at this point. A lot of people have tried to understand why Apple has done so well in relation to other tablet and phone makers, and it comes down largely to design. And not just physical design, but functional design as well. All things have either form, function, or both. The products that do best have both form and function. How your website and overall brand image looks, the consistency of it, and how easy to use and helpful your website is are all elements of design.
Development
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The code of your site is as important as the design of your site. Search engines are primarily text-based crawlers, and they crawl the code of your site. A browser translates and executes code, presenting it in a user friendly fashion. Google, while capable of executing some code elements, is primarily combing through your code in a textual way. Google dislikes poor code, coding errors, heavy code, and low text-to-code ratios. It is absolutely critical to take search engines into account when coding a website. If Google can’t effectively read and analyze your code, then they aren’t going to be able to understand and consequently rank your site. Bad code = poor or no rankings. Beyond the cleanliness and accuracy of your code, there are a wide variety of code elements that are either necessary for SEO, or that can harm SEO, and understanding what is and isn’t needed, or what will or won’t cause problems, is a critical component of website development. Bottom line, if you’re building a website, or re-building one, an SEO should be involved right from the start, and should have the final yay or nay over what gets rolled out.
Paid Search
• StumbleUpon Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Display Networks
• Google AdWords
• Bing Ads
• Twitter Ads
• Retargeting
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These are just a few of the paid search platforms out there, and believe it or not paid search has a direct and measurable impact on SEO in a variety of ways. For one, when both a paid search ad and an organic listing for a website show together on a search result page, there is a clear increase in CTRs for both elements. Beyond that, paid search can be used to spread content that you’ve created, which can drive social mentions, links to your content, and more. In fact, most “viral” content has some sort of paid search push behind it. Virality isn’t accidental.
Copywriting & Content Creation
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Great copy can make or break your site. It can also make or break your SEO. Google loves, LOVES, great, unique content. The more the merrier. Long pages are especially well favored by Google, and pages over 2,000 words are statistically much more likely to rank well than shorter pages. They are also more likely to be shared and linked to as well. Creating regular, awesome content, and using clear copy to convey what you do, and why a visitor is in the right place, will go a long way towards not just improving your rankings, but improving your business.
Offline Marketing
• Pamphlets/Flyers
• Billboards
• Print Advertising
• Radio
• Direct Mail
• Sponsorships
• Trade Shows
• Scholarships
• TV
• Events
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Offline marketing isn’t dead. Far from it. In fact, offline advertising (TV in particular) still has a tremendous impact on purchasing decisions. At the same time, offline marketing also has a significant impact on search. Using keywords or phrases in your offline advertising that people will remember and search for later can impact your rankings. You can use geo-targeted paid search campaigns to target an area surrounding an event you’re sponsoring or attending, which can tie back to an SEO optimized landing page on your website. You could build out a cool puzzle, challenge or contest on your website, and then use a billboard to encourage people to solve the puzzle or participate in the contest (doing this can build a ton of links) If you understand how offline and online intersect and influence people, you can leverage both to further your online goals. That said, depending on your demographic, offline advertising should probably play a supporting role in your marketing budget. For many companies, it’s still their primary channel, and from a cost per acquisition standpoint that’s probably not the best way to break things out.
The Future of SEO
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Brands are going to dominate more and more of the search results for competitive keywords. Awesome content will continue to win views, likes, shares and links. Google is going to keep changing the algorithm, adding more black and white animals to the mix.
