futureproofing your seo strategy

Future Proofing SEOby Patrick Altoft

What I’m talking about• Penalties• 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

PandaSites that Google thinks are low quality got wiped out• Duplicate content• Poor “return to search” metrics

(voucher sites & car classified sites)• Lots of low value pages• Thin content

PandaRather than having some huge change that happens on a given day.

You are more likely in the future to see Panda deployed gradually as we rebuild the index. So you are less likely to see these large scale sorts of changes.

Merchant update?

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 & content rather than just devaluing them

Does Google like your business model?

Unnatural LinksGoogle has manually penalised thousands of sites for having unnatural links

We run a penalty recovery service and have helped over 35 brands recover from their penalties in the past 6 months

Penguin

Artificial intelligence algorithm designed to identify sites that fit a pattern of manipulating the algorithm by building unnatural links to get rankings higher than the site deserves

Link Devaluation

A gradual drop in rankings since 22nd November could be due to link devaluation

(November 22nd was also a Panda update too)

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

Great sites are winning• 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 M&S

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.

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

Relationships

Client PR Strategy

Corporate Comms

Media Relations

Blog Outreach

Social MediaCrisis Comms

Internal Comms

Public Affairs

Agency SEO

Strategy

Linkbuilding

Keyword Research

Other SEO projects

Onsite Optimisation

Client does some great stuff over here

Most agency/client linkbuilding relationships work like this

Agency does some other stuff over there

It should work something like this

Marketing

Corporate Comms

Links

Media Relations

Links

Blog Outreach

Links

SEO

Keywords

Technical SEO

Social Media

Links

Crisis Comms

Links

Reputation Management

Internal Comms

SEO Training

Public Affairs

Links

Every marketing task can be performed by the client or the agency – usually an agile agency will fill the gaps where the client doesn’t have in-house resource

Recommended Reading

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

Questions?