seo: same as it ever was

SEO: The Same As It Ever Was

Michael King (@iPullRank)

Founder, iPullRank

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http://bit.ly/same-old-seo

IPULLRANK.COM @ IPULLRANK

This is My Last Conference Before We Have a Baby

It’s a girl!

Next time you see me, I’m gonna be like…

Dan and I used to rap together. Then we got tired of being broke so he went to law school and I became a marketing guy.

I’ve been doing internet marketing consulting for 10 years and a lot of it feels like…


Other Times It Feels Like My Friend Ronnie

I’m not really sure what’s going on here, but I imagine he feels like a big kid in a candy store with a 20% off sale.

Oh, and they told me that I shouldn’t talk about technical SEO today. I should do a broader topic.

I think that’s indicative of the larger problem that we have as people trying to do SEO.

What I want to talk to you about today is…


Progressive Web Apps

Google has rolled out Progressive Web Apps which effectively make web apps act more like native apps; building upon the Singe Page App idea popularized with JS frameworks.


Firebase

Google acquired and improved Firebase which has become a suite of applications for making apps far more sophisticated and real-time.


Accelerated Mobile Pages

Google has rolled out Accelerated Mobile Pages to help content load in milliseconds instead of seconds.


Google’s Push for Machine Learning

What does that mean for the world in general, not just SEO?

Because Google is so far beyond brands, marketers and SEO software companies.

As a result, my consultant life is a lot like this…

Despite all the new technologies and cool features that Google gives us, not much about SEO has changed.


Clients Still Don’t Implement Recommendations


Clients Still Don’t Understand What it Takes to Do Good White Hat Link Building

A brand came to us looking to build links to their product page, so we built a content experience into the product page below the fold. We built it and got link commitments, but they shot it down.

Despite the huge shift to content marketing, clients are still hesitant to take big content swings.

In fact, clients generally won’t make real change until Google puts an algorithmic gun to their head.

And they wonder why they still get beat by…

On the other hand, SEO has to step it up too. As an industry, we spin our wheels and purport a lot of dumb shit.


We’re Still Arguing about 301 vs 302 in 2016?

Spoiler alert: That’s complete bullshit.


SEO Requires Almost No Technical Expertise?

Only marketers marketing to marketers about marketing say things like this.


SEO is Makeup?

Seriously @Clayburn?

To paraphrase @audette, “SEO should be invisible.” It ain’t makeup.

SEO suffers from four core problems.

SEO does not have one source of truth.

SEOs don’t measure the right things.

SEOs don’t develop effective business cases.

SEOs can’t keep up with Google’s technical advancements.

Today we’re going to solve three of them.

Measuring the Right Things


Most People are Looking at Traffic as a Success Metric!!!!


Then They Say It’s Hard to Prove ROI!!!!


Hey, So I Fixed the Chart

Organic Search is a channel, and just like every other marketing channel it should be measured based on its ability to meet business objectives.


Setup your KPIs by Need State and Content Type

“Multichannel custom publishing.”

Tie your content types and KPIs to need states to more effectively measure the impact of Organic Search on the user journey.


GA Content Groupings Supports User Journey Measurement

Read this: http://ipullrank.com/how-to-measure-the-user-journey-with-content-groupings-wordpress-gtm/

The only thing rankings measure is opportunity; your reporting needs to be about outcomes

So, You’re #1? Cool Story, Bro.

Where they at tho?

Building Effective Business Cases

$14,526,451,500

How Much It Would Cost to Buy the Links Pointing to 302s

$14,526,451,500

$221,052,152

Missed Ticket Sales from that Lost Organic Search traffic

$221,052,152


I Made the Case, we Got our 301s, they Got Their Money

The project was at an implementation stand still until I put those numbers in front of the client. Shortly thereafter, they made the push for 301s and traffic went up pretty dramatically despite seasonality.

August 27th301 redirects

11,039,18810,455,517

11,348,902

12,049,481

11,250,148

12,902,847

11,040,192

13,158,296

11,287,790 12,203,99812,508,164

13,158,296

14,041,313

15,609,390

0

2,000,000

4,000,000

6,000,000

8,000,000

10,000,000

12,000,000

14,000,000

16,000,000

18,000,000

April May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct

Organic Visits

2014 2015


Audience Insights Tell A More Compelling Story

Mapping keyword data back to the consumer insights


BUILD BETTER BUSINESS CASES

Your keyword research in context conversion data and search traffic through the lens of a specific persona yields a far better business case than “hey, I have this cool idea”

A better SEO business case means better keyword research


• Most keyword research is just a list of keywords and search volumes. That’s not strategic enough for any initiative let alone Organic Search or Content Marketing.


• Some keyword research is entirely metric driven, including conversion data and business value. This is better, but still not enough.


GOOD KWR ACCOUNTS FOR INTENT

• Good keyword research includes some determination of intent. The best you see in the wild is “transactional, informational and navigational” determinations of keywords.


Great Keyword Research Maps to Need States and Personas

• Mapping keywords to the phases of the consumer decision journey provides more granularity to the understanding of what users are actually looking to do with their search.

[flowers]

[when do roses bloom]

[what flowers for a first date]

[buying chrysanthemums]

[flower a month club]


(Not provided)? So what.

• Keywords are gone and Google provides more than enough data to determine what types of users are coming to your site. Use that in context of landing pages, internal search and channels


Build User Journeys to Map Keywords

• A well-designed User Journey is more than enough to determine where keywords fall. Determining the thoughts, questions and feelings of your target audience helps you understand where keywords will fall.


KEYWORD DATA SHEET

• The keyword portfolio includes a number of data points on each keyword that allows it to inform strategic planning, content strategy, content marketing, SEO and Paid Search.

This usually includes some combination of Word Count, Avg Monthly Search Volume, Historical Traffic, Share of Voice, Google Ranking, Cost Per Click, Quality Score, Target Persona, Need State, Keyword Segment, Conversions, Landing Page, Target Landing Page, Page Entities, Rank Zone, Ranking Difficulty.


CALCULATING WORD COUNT

• Calculate the word count of your keywords using this formula. This allow you to quickly filter for head terms, “chunky middle” and long tail keywords.

=IF(LEN(TRIM(A1))=0,0,LEN(TR

IM(A1))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"

",""))+1)


CALCULATING SHARE OF VOICE

• Share of voice is an indication of the amount of traffic a keyword could potentially drive vs. how much is being captured. A Share of Voice of over a 100% means that you’re capturing more traffic than expected.

Note: This is far less effective given (not provided), but Share of Voice is still a metric that the C-Suite understands.


ProTip: Search Analytics Gives You 5000 Keywords in the API

Persona and Need State classification must be done by hand.


VISUALIZE OPPORTUNITIES

• We visualize keyword data with regard to search volume, rankings and keyword category or persona and need state to clearly communicate the opportunity.


Build Your Own CTR Model

Stop just taking screenshots of Google tools and calling them a deliverable.


PRIORITIZE RECOMMENDATIONS

Give priority scores to your recommendations. People want to know what the impact will be so they can determine what to go after.


GIVE CONTEXT

Your recommendations will go across many people’s desk before it potentially gets implemented. Be sure to give business and technical context.

We’ve also got to improve our pitches. It’s one of the most important parts of our jobs.


FAIL #1: WEAK PRESENTATION

A marketer presents the creation of infographics via email and phone, but doesn’t succeed and ultimately the client sees them as “complicated” or “expensive” measures.


RESOLUTION #1: PRESENT A DECK IN-PERSON

Your presentation should not be an email or a phone call, it should be an in-person presentation with all the stakeholders.


FAIL #2: LEAVING OUT KEY STAKEHOLDERS

A marketer sells in an idea neglecting to invite key stakeholders only to have that content strategy fall apart once the miss stakeholders review it.


RESOLUTION #2: INVITE THEM ALL

Get all of the key stakeholders on board so you don’t have to repeat steps or risk the engagement falling apart after you believe you’re good to go.


FAIL #3: NOT SHOWING THE VALUE

A marketer explains the content strategy using the wrong KPIs and the stakeholders respond that content is “nice to have” not as beneficial as “bombarding people with 100k email communications.”


RESOLUTION #3: BETTER MEASUREMENT PLANNING

Build your measurement around the business objectives and things that actually show the positive affects of revenue.


FAIL #4: RELYING ON TOO MUCH DATA

A marketer relies heavily on data to make her case and lambasts the regarded accomplishments of the key stakeholders.


RESOLUTION #4: LET THE STORY DO THE WORK

Don’t use numbers as a weapon to insult your stakeholders, tell a compelling story using the data as an aside that drive the points of ineffectiveness.

Keeping Up with Technical Advancements

I’ve got to give the people what they came for!

Google moved from “strings to things” like four years ago. Do you have an entity strategy?


…because Google has an Entity Strategy

Entity discovery is the first part of matching content to a query.


ALCHEMY API

Using AlchemyAPI you can extract entities from pages and improve keyword research. http://www.alchemyapi.com


Get AlchemyAPI Data in a Spreadsheet

Run your landing pages through AlchemyAPI to extract their entities via a Google Doc or Excel sheet and better align them with your target keywords


How About TF*IDF?

Run your landing pages through AlchemyAPI to extract their entities via a Google Doc or Excel sheet and better align them with your target keywords


Moz’s New Tool Will Help

Moz has made the related keywords concept more accessible by adding it to Moz Pro. Searchmetrics also has a similar solution.


Onpage.Org’s TF-IDF Tool is Also Great

http://onpage.org also has a solution that that shows the weight of terms that should be featured on the page


Get AlchemyAPI Data in a Spreadsheet

Run your landing pages through AlchemyAPI to extract their entities and better align them with your target keywords

We need to stop saying ‘just do 301 redirects.’


Instead Do Optimal 301 Redirects

Pattern matching on the .htaccess level is always faster than a list of redirects and always better than doing it on the code/page level. Developers will respect that you understand what you’re talking about.

ReWriteRule url_pattern

file_reference [R=301, L]

redirect 301 /relative/path/to/file.php

http://www.yoursite.com/path/to/new/file.php





>




Google is becoming the presentation layer of the web. Help them do it.


Schema.org / JSON-LD

Schema.org is a lot more reasonable to implement now that they are allowing JSON-LD. Being in knowledge boxes and such yields a lot more traffic than it takes away.

A common thread across many of Google’s innovations is that they are all going to require more speed.


Progressive Web Apps

Progressive Web apps are about more than speed, but they do leverage Service Worker so that apps appear to work instantly.


Firebase

Firebase is more about building more robust apps and leveraging Google’s infrastructure to add more features to them. It has its own analytics and supports app indexing.


Google Expects Ludicrously Speedy

Google has an expectation that the above the fold content on the page will load within 1 second. You basically get 400 ms to make that happen.


The Critical Rendering Path


AMP is a Spec to Enforce the Critical Rendering Path

Sound familiar?

In other words, AMP exists because Google thinks people can’t code.


Responsive Sites are SLOOOOOOOW

One of the key things you can do, aside from optimizing for the critical rendering path, is conditional loading.


PreBrowsing Directives

• Browsers have preloading directives which allow the page to download elements in the background for later viewing or within the same session.


Rel-Preconnect

• Rel-preconnect will resolve the DNS, start the TCP handshake and negotiate the TLS tunnel beforehand, effectively shaving hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds in page load.


When to Use Rel-Preconnect

• When you see a long time for connections to happen or a lot of idle time, it’s a good idea to use rel-preconnect.


How Rel-Prerender Works

• It loads the page in an invisible tab to make the page appear instantly.


Not to Be Confused with Prerender.io


Google Uses It in the SERPs

This could potentially be a way to definitively identify navigational queries. h/t @yoast


As a Test I Sent Thousands of Headless Visits


Rel-Prerender’d Pages Generally Perform Better


Use it With the GA API

Get the pageviews of the ga:pagePath based on the ga:previousPagePath set to the current page that you’re on.

You’ll get a list of the pages your users are most likely to visit next. Set one of these as the rel-prerender.


Code.

Inject rel-prerender into the page programmatically.

You could also session the URLs the user is going to toensure you are always prerendering a new page.


It Improved Our Site Speed 68.35%

• One line of code did this magic.

Don’t use it on mobile.

Analytics packages aside from Google Analytics may show fake sessions.


Defer JS Load with Page Visibility API

…


Rel-Preload for Same Page Preloading

I haven’t played with it yet, but Ian says they’re using it on the Portent site. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/02/preload-what-is-it-good-for/

How We Can All Improve

SEO needs to step up its technical understanding in order to be more effective.


Understand the Document Object Model

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Object_Model/Introduction


Critical Rendering Path

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/critical-rendering-path/analyzing-crp?hl=en


Page Speed

https://www.portent.com/blog/design-dev/ultimate-site-speed-guide-what-impacts-site-speed.htm


Log File Analysis

https://builtvisible.com/log-file-analysis/


Understand SEO for JavaScript Frameworks

https://builtvisible.com/javascript-framework-seo/


Learn DevTools

http://ipullrank.com/6-things-you-should-know-about-in-chrome-devtools/


Accelerated Mobile & Instant Pages

Even if you’re not a publisher, I encourage you to watch these projects as I expect that Google and Facebook will grow the specsdramatically once they’re adopted.


Read Up On HTTP/2

https://moz.com/blog/http2-a-fast-secure-bedrock-for-the-future-of-seo


Get Back to Testing All The Things


If You Need Some Help, You Know Who to Call

THAT’S ALL I’VE GOT

THANK YOUMICHAEL KING

FOUNDER &

MANAGING DIRECTOR

IPULLRANK

[email protected]

http://Ipullrank.com