a journey through seo
TRANSCRIPT
A Journey through SEO
What is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation
“ Is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP)”
It’s a digital art form of constant change. Its goal? - acquiring visitors and improving customer relationships.
In the beginning…….. Early 1990’s all search engines are edited by Humans
1994 Brian Pinkerton creates the first WebCrawler and
it creates a list of the top 25 websites
In the beginning…….. 1996 Excite grows to number one spot and buys Webcrawler
1997 Lycos Grows to 60 Million listings it is the largest Search Engine to date
1997 Larry Page and Sergey Brin launch Google Beta◦ First Crawler attempts “break the Internet” by acting like a DOS attack
1998 First ‘doodle’ launched
In the beginning…….. 1999 First SEO symposium launched by Danny Sullivan
1999 Search Engines run into issues with updates. The most popular Search Engine
at the time, Altavista, changes its algorithm and millions of listings disappear.. This was known in SEO circles as ‘Black Monday’
2000 Although existing on the fringes for some time Google launches its new Paid
Clicks CPM (model) and calls it “AdWords” SEM is truly born.
In the beginning…….. 2003 Google Bombing (link bombing) makes Google mad….. And ruins search for
everybody
2004 Search King launches a market place for Text Link Ads, Google penalizes SearchKing ad de-lists them… the age of google banning begins.
2004 Googles ‘Florida’ Update turns SEO on its head as 90’s SEO practices are banned and the NoFollow (to prevent Spam linking) tag is implemented by MSN and Yahoo as well - Google will now update its search Algorithms regularly
In the beginning…….. 2006 the SEO dark times… ‘SEO is Dead’ articles follow each Google update as SEO marketers have to start from scratch.
2006 Google bans BMW for “Cloaking” it lasts 6 months.
2006 Yahoo re-brands with a Google like look and launches ‘My Yahoo’ – the first hint of search sentiment is widely ignored
2008 The Big 3 battle for market share, SEM is now Channel marketing becoming a game of numbers. Previously unthinkable amounts of money are now spent on SEM and SEO
In the beginning…….. 2009-2010 Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves fade into the back ground
Google now has nearly 70% of the market
Microsoft launches Bing to replace MSN and Live Search
2012 Rumors of google encrypting search terms is proved to be true, in 3 months “Not Provided” listings grow to 40%
Bing Grows to the number 2 slot at nearly 20% out stripping Yahoo
So What’s It About
1990’s -2005 Keywords, Links, Anchors
2005 – 2012 Content Relevancy, Cool links, Popularity, Keyword Affinity, Social Media
2013- ……. Customer Affinity
A few words about SEO and SEM
SEO and SEM a partnership◦SEM = Search Engine Marking or Paid/Sponsored Links
◦ SEO and SEM go hand in hand bringing together both sides of Internet marketing
◦ Working these together can help show any overlap, as well as gaps, between your SEO and SEM campaigns and improve your overall marketing reach.
◦ Target Keywords accurately, improve the success of these campaigns by driving traffic to the right place!
SEO and SEM a partnership◦ SEO and SEM strategy can team up in terms of improving the quality score of a landing page,
and therefore decreasing the overall SEM cost
◦ Drive Customers to your Site with Quality SEO
◦ Convert Customers on your Site with Quality SEM
◦ SEO AND SEM make good soup!!
Making SEO better - Keywords Have you done your homework?
◦ Mine your keyword research sources◦ Word Tracker, Keyword Discovery, and yes Google Analytics
◦ Keyword Affinity, what goes best ‘Car Toyota’ or ‘Toyota Car’
◦ Is that Keyword relevant? Does it really match your site goals, or you customers intent?
◦ Who is your Competition? The internet is a noisy place.
But what about encrypted search?
But what about encrypted search? Nielsen 2015
Google 67%
Bing 18%
Yahoo 11%
Thank you notprovided.com
But what about encrypted search?
Google Webmaster Tools
Has Search Queries but it has limitations
Lack of Comparison metrics
Was limited to a 90 day history
Making SEO better – Relevant Content !!
"While secure searches may seem frustrating to many SEO marketers, this is actually a great move for our industry.
Great SEO today is great content with powerful digital endorsements from relevant and authoritative websites, which results in business results that transcend the keyword conversation.
Making SEO better – Relevant Content !!
Aaron Aders, Co-Founder, digitalrelevance:
"SEO marketers need to be focused on raising organic traffic as a whole, achieving business objectives like online sales and lead generation, growing branded communities, and earning brand mentions.
This move by Google will force SEO marketers to focus on business results rather than keywords -- which is where the focus should be anyway."
Making SEO better – Relevant Content !!
Content Quality: Providing a real reason for people to spend time reading your content
AKA “Link Bait”
Content Keywords: Do your research, match to your content and build around this
– think “answers”
Content Engagement: Bounce rates, stickiness (time on site), likes and popularity, engagement metrics
Content Freshness: MMMmmm tasty fresh content ……..
……… But seriously QDF is real “Query Deserved Freshness”
Making SEO better – Relevant Content !!
Don’t’ forget A+B Testing for your landing pages◦ or Multivariate
Trial content or new directions – be careful how you do it!
Making SEO better – Its not about CTR
Use the OOB metrics but develop specific goal based KPI’s for Search, look for depth of visit, look for conversion – trace it back to SEO aquistition
Think Conversion, not Visits
Think Site goals not Page Views
A 100% increase in CTR or Visitors is not going to help you if they are one hit visits
Lucas - mention O2
Be Kind to the Bots…..
Making SEO Better – Don’t forget the basics
◦ Submitting site maps, One for user one for bots◦ Using description tags and Good titles◦ Breadcrumbing◦ Robots.txt or NOINDEX?◦ NOFOLLOW and CAPTCHA◦ Tools like googles WebMaster Tools can help!◦ Try incognito browsing for your keywords
Ok…. What not to do Cloaking (Caching) Meta Keywords – be careful Link Markets Title Stacking Doorway Pages (Content spoofing)
Beware the SEO expert!https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769#quality_guidelines
Affinity
The ”Nirvana” of search and engagement
Affinity
Expressions of affinity:
Def#• A desire to find/connect with people or products• It’s a Catalog of your customers tastes and preferences.• Also Known as Sentiment Analysis
Keywords change quickly over time, usually each search. “Affinity” is usually static over time… I <sadly> like little model aero planes now… I’ll like them in 6 months time
Affinity Ok its not Really a new idea, Sentiment and Segmentation have been around for a while
But there is SOOOOOOOOOOOOO much data now!!
What is an SEO marketer to do
Combine ALL your data sources
Facebook Newsletters Google+
Sales
POS
Webdata Signups Brochures
Blogs walk-ups
I Like Big Data And I Cannot Lie
Your Puny tools are no matchGA even GA Premium gives you less than half the answer,..But it will check your results!
Tableau
SPLUNK> Kibana- “Elastic Search”
Look at your customers/audience holistically - understand them
Smarter Dynamic SEO Analysis
Smarter Dynamic SEO Analysis If you knew everything about your customer what would you do with this data?
Talk to them?
Thank you
I could use a beer