attracting visitors through seo - converge 2015

PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL

brought to you by...

Rob OusbeyAttracting Visitors Through SEO

Converge 2015

@RobOusbey www.distilled.net

I’ve added these boxes to the presentation, to elaborate on the sides, and make some of the points I discussed when presenting this deck.

https://www.twitter.com/RobOusbey

http://www.distilled.net/


@RobOusbey

[email protected]

PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL@RobOusbey www.distilled.net

Since everyone else got to mention their institution, here’s mine. The University of Cambridge just celebrated its 800th anniversary; it’s weird to see my bedroom (circled) in countless tourist photos.




The Distilled team – spread across London, New York & Seattle – delivers strategy & execution for SEO, content marketing, paid media, digital PR and much more.

We’ve just celebrated our 10th anniversary; we’re small but make a big impact. We blog at www.distilled.net/blog/, about cutting-edge digital marketing trends.

http://www.distilled.net/blog/


Where Does Search Fit?

Converge invited me to come and geek out about SEO with you, and share what’s important now & what’s trending in this space.

There are really important sessions at this conference about persona development, marketing strategy & analytics. These things are important groundwork to think about before SEO strategy can be determined.


Small


This data comes from research by Google. Exploring it helps us understand and appreciate the variety of available channels, and where organic search sits.



https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/tools/customer-journey-to-online-purchase.html


Medium





Large





The FastestGuide To SEO,

Ever


When a website publishes content:


Google discovers the webpage was published – perhaps because the website told them. Googlebot analyses the page and stores it in their gigantic database.




When a user performs a web search:

business economics salary statistics

URL PageRank

http://study.com/articles/Sal... 3.5

http://business.ku.edu/emp... 3.8

http://www.allbusinessscho... 5.3

http://www.theglobeandmai... 4.8

http://naceweb.org/salary-re... 1.6

http://www.indeed.com/q-... 9.4


Google finds pages from their database that are relevant to the query, then selects which to present to the user & in what order. The ‘algorithm’ they use to do this is their secret sauce.




Ranking FactorsFor many years, SEO people have been really focused on what factors go into that algorithm.


Relevancyvia: page content analysis + external

factors

Authorityvia: external signals


Authority of a webpage or a website was typically measured by the number of unique sites that linked to it.

The relevancy of a page to a particular term can be assessed by the content on a page, as well as what people say about the page/site elsewhere.




Trend:Contemporary Ranking

Factors


Historically, Google’s Search Quality Team would debate & test the weight of different ranking factors in order to keep the search results improving towards Google’s goal…..



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5RZOU6vK4Q


Google’s Goal:

Portal to the Internet… of giving people a fantastic internet experience. For example: if you follow a search result link to a site that gives your computer a virus, you’ll be particularly mad at Google for sending you to the site. For this reason, sites that host malware/viruses will immediately be removed from search results, until the site is cleaned up.


Bad User Experiences

• Malware & viruses• Paywall / registration-wall on landing

page• Out of stock products• Out of date information• Pages that make it hard to find

information• Pages that are full of advertising


All of these things would constitute a ‘bad user experience’ – and Google would rather not have sites with these features ranking highly.




SERP Quality Assessment

So how do Google assess whether a search result page deliver a good experience for users?

SERP = ‘search engine result page’.IE: the results for a particular keyword.


Quality Rater Surveys


One of Google’s tactics is to use contactors to review websites. They don’t use these reviews to explicitly raise or lower the rankings of that site – but they want to make sure that their algorithm tends to give good rankings to well-rated sites, and less to the poorly-rated ones.

The guides that Quality Raters use do get leaked from time to time. Reading these guides gives you a great insight into what Google values in a page/site..

Consider reviewing (or have someone review) your site using these criteria, and then work to improve in any areas you score poorly on.



http://www.thesempost.com/google-rewrites-quality-rating-guide-seos-need-know/


In-Result Surveys


Those reviews are very manual though, so Google looks for more scalable ways to assess whether a SERP gave a satisfying result.

One thing they do is directly survey the users.




User Behavior Tracking


But here’s the big, scalable tactic that Google have:watching what the users are doing on search result pages.




Results Success Score – CTR


For example: Google knows what the expected number of clicks is for each position in the search results.




Results Success Score – CTR


If one page is getting a higher-than-expected CTR (maybe because it has a very appealing title, description or brand) then this is a data point of insight for Google.




Results Success Score – Bounce Rate


If users are visiting pages from the results, but keep hitting the ‘back button’, that’s interesting data for Google




Results Success Score – Refinement


If searches on a particular search term regularly refine their query to a new term, and find more satisfaction there…. it’s another data point for Google.




Results Success Score – Data Sources


Beyond just watching the interactions with search results, Google could have access to all the browsing habit data from Chome & Android, and from the Google+ tags which sit on many (most?) webpages.




Results Success Score – Data Sources


Google have aspirations to be an ISP, a wireless operater, a home wifi provider & an international balloon=powered internet provider.

They could, potentially, get a whole new scale of data from these projects.



https://fiber.google.com/about/

https://fi.google.com/about/

https://fi.google.com/about/

https://on.google.com/hub/



https://www.google.com/loon/

https://www.google.com/loon/


Results Success Score

Score: 640


I’m stepping well into the territory of speculation here, but all of these data points would essentially allow Google to give a rating to every single search query, based on whether they provided a good experience and satisfying set of results.






Taking all those scores is likely to look like a bell curve: some results will deliver a fantastic experience & others will need improvement.




Machine LearningAt that point, Google’s then able to use machine learning to improve those numbers.


Algo Generation

Ranking factor 1

Ranking factor 2

Ranking factor ...Ranking factor n

Algorithm A

Algorithm B

Algorithm C

Algorithm D


All the thousands of factors that Google knows about a webpage can be combined and weighted in different ways, to create different alternate algorithms. They answer roughly a million searches every 10 seconds, which lets them run tests really quickly to see how well an alternate algorithm scores.






So the existing ‘score curve’….






… can be compared to potential alternate algorithms …






.. and a winner selected. This can be a constant, iterative process of improvement.This process leads to a situation where no-one actually knows the algorithm. Instead, the results are simply a reflection of things that users love, and things that correlate with what they love.




What do People Like?What Correlates?

So, what do people like? What correlates with what people like?


People prefer pages without too many ads.This is a screenshot of MovieMistakes.com, which I would assume has a higher bounce rate because of the adverts.




This Searchmetrics report shows the declining search visibility for MovieMistakes over the last two years. From an SEO perspective, the first test I’d run would be to try removing all those above-the-fold ads on landing pages.



http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research?acc=143833&url=moviemistakes.com


People like easy to use websites that are easy to use. The University of Advancing Technology has an animated navigation, making user interaction more difficult…



http://www.uat.edu/


… and once you manage to click through, the content looks very dry.




Users don’t explicitly prefer sites that have lots of links, though the sites that people like also seem to attract links,

When it comes to ‘linkbuilding’, my focus these days is to build links that will drive real, relevant traffic to a site. This helps you drive the right behavior, and also tends to be well rewarded by Google.




Let’s Play


There’s one more factor that people (and Google) respond very well to; we can play a quick game to demonstrate this.




What site would you expect to see when you search for

this?

world news


Have a think about some of the sites you’d expect to see in this result……..




?

?

world news

How many of these did you get? The audience got most.



this?

new orleans best restaurants


Round 2…




?

?

new orleans best restaurants

?It’s interesting to see that there are no restaurants listed here. All the results are lists of restaurants, mostly from sites you know.



this?

mba


Here’s a higher-ed example…




?

mba

?In this case, a lot of schools rank well. (The search was done in New Orleans – one audience member guessed that a local school would rank, and Presidio is there at #5.)


These examples demonstrate just how well brands rank in search Google have been explicit about this for years, but it’s having a bigger impact than ever right now.

What is a brand? Firstly, they are the names that people guess when playing that game. Google can identify brands by looking at what we are searching for, who we are talking about & who we’re sharing/linking to.

Rand Fishkin, who introduced me to playing this game, pointed out that “If you want the best way to rank in 2018, find a way to be the first name on everyone’s mind.”



http://www.wired.com/2008/10/google-ceo-call/

https://moz.com/rand/

https://moz.com/rand/


Trend:SERP

Enhancements

I’ve been talking so far as if the search results are just a list of ‘ten blue links’. But there is constant change in the presentation of results. I’ll begin with where we’re at right now.


Local search results appear in a variety of different ways. In this example, we see Google interpreting the query as one that needs a local pack.


More local integration.


Even more local integration.


Video thumbnails are still a fantastic benefit to sites, since they attract clicks away from other pages.


Image search results have been pulled into the web search results for a long time.


News results are also bubbled up into web search when Google think it’s appropriate.


In-depth articles were a subtle addition to the results.


More recently, custom integrations take specific data sets, such as team schedules & scores.


Some integrations dominate the space above-the-fold.


Many position Google as a new competitor to well established sites.


Some integrations pull in real-time data


Many provide a richer, more interactive experience than other sites deliver.


Trending


Here are some enhancements we’ve seen trending upwards recently.




The new Twitter integrations are a great way to have people interact with your content more directly, and own more of the search result page for your brand.

This integration is likely to get deeper & richer as Twitter & Google get closer, especially when Google complete their acquisition of Twitter ;-)


Google is constantly tinkering with how G+ posts and pages appear in SERPs.


Event listings are an interesting opportunity for higher-ed, given the number of events & important dates at every school.


Further Questions


Google are pushing searchers down the long tail, with auto-complete, related searches and these new ‘further questions’ boxes. This is a huge opportunity for any site – investing in creating content that answers these queries will drive an increasing amount of traffic.




Next


What enhancements do we think will be the next ones to trend upward?




Google has created ways to take actions directly from the search result, such as booking a hotel room.


For example, Google now allows you to make appointments with certain businesses, through integration with booking partners such as Intuit.

Maybe soon people could schedule a tour of a college, request a brochure or subscribe to a mailing list without leaving the search results.

http://searchengineland.com/book-an-appointment-right-from-the-search-results-with-googles-latest-test-228404


These medical sidebars are deliberately created by Google. The content is either written or manually curated from elsewhere.


This may hint that Google is more open to manual curation of content on the results page.


Knowledge GraphGoogle doesn’t just have a big database full of information about webpages. They also understand the relationships between the different entities that people have written about.

PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIALWell Known, Factual Answers

For some queries, there’s a clear answer. Google doesn’t even list a citation for the answer.

PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIALSpecific Sourced Answers

Often, Google find a clear answer from a particular page, and they cite the page as the source of information.


Unspecific AnswersSometimes, there’s not even a specific answer, but Google will still add an answer box here.

This is a huge opportunity for sites that are answering questions clearly. In this example, web-japan.org ranks at #3, but gets to appear at the top of the page in an answer box.


No Right Answer

No ‘Correct’ Answer

Even if there’s no single right answer, a knowledge graph carousel might be appropriate.


Future of the SERPs

What else is happening to the search results?


App Indexing


iPhone / Android apps are appearing in search results




App Indexing


Deep indexing of apps allows Google to send people to exactly the right view inside an app.




Voice Search

Voice search is already happening inside Google, Google Now, Siri, Cortana (Windows 10), Alexa (Amazon Echo), Hound and many more.

There’s a lot of innovation in this area!



http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-what-is-cortana

http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-SK705DI-Echo/dp/B00X4WHP5E

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hound.android.app&hl=en


Chained & Conversational Search


People search in very different ways in voice-search scenarios. In this case, three chained queries progressively modify and refine the search.




Queriless Search


Google Now will bring up cards that it thinks will be relevant to you, based on lots of contextual clues, combined with the personal data they’ve developed about you.

All sorts of things may eventually be possible. Right now, you could already add cards to Google Now for people who’ve reserved visits to a campus, etc.



https://developers.google.com/schemas/now/cards

https://developers.google.com/schemas/now/cards


Accelerated Mobile Pages


The Accelerated Mobile Pages project is an open source initiative allowing publishers to create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere.



https://www.ampproject.org/


Trend:Ad Blocking


We’re Rediscovering It





SEO Process - 2015

I’m going to change direction a little now, to talk about the technical process of SEO, broken down into four main areas that you should know how to focus on.

A lot more of the nitty-gritty detail of technical SEO implementation will be covered in the session by Zac Vineyard & Jay Kelley.


Avoid Serious Issues&

Be Discoverable by Google

1





Serious Issues

Blocked sites

Broken redirects

Unreadable content

Unlinked content


We still see all of these happening on a regular basis.

You either have some of these issues, or you haven’t checked for them yet.




Serious Issues - Quick Actions

Webmaster ToolsFree

View Google’s crawl data & errors found on your site

google.com/webmasters/

Screaming FrogFree - $12/mo

Crawl your site as if you were a search engine

screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Moz$100 - $500/mo

Dozens of tools, including a site crawler & campaign managermoz.com


All of these tools will highlight technical & crawl errors on your website.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

https://moz.com/




Keyword Selection

2


This is the process of determining which keywords you are going to try to rank for. This must happen after you’ve developed your broader marketing strategy, identified personas, and determined at what stage of the funnel you would like to target them with search.




Keyword DimensionsKeyword Type Relative Volume Customer Mode

Informationcollege admission

rates

Actionapply for student loan

NavigationUW careers office

Headstudent loan

Mid-tailcompare loans 2015

Long-tailbest student loan for

a 31 year old in Seattle

Awarenesshow to get from to MSY

Considerationuber vs taxis

Purchasecreate uber account


There are a variety of frameworks for structuring your keyword research.




Keyword ResearchHere’s the process in five rough steps.


Most Common Pitfall

A site can only rank for a term, if it has a page targeting that term.


This sounds really basic, but we run into a lot of situations where sites simply lack pages relevant to the term they want to rank for.




Fairly Common Pitfall

Just haveone keyword / one concept

per page.


It’s a bad idea to make a page work too hard, but trying to have it rank for too many different terms, I’ll often ask “what concept should this page rank for?” If the answer is a list of five different terms, then five different pages might be more appropriate.




Keyword Research1/ create & expand a list of potential keywords2/ review the volumes & intent3/ do you have the metrics to be there?4/ do you deserve to be there?5/ do you have the content to be there?

Google AdWords Keyword Planner will help you do this for free (because they want you to invest in PPC.)adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

Beginning with some relevant terms, user tools such as Keyword Planner to expand the list to multiple additional terms.

https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner


Keyword Research1/ create & expand a list of potential keywords

2/ review the volumes & intent3/ do you have the metrics to be there?4/ do you deserve to be there?5/ do you have the content to be there?

Google AdWords Keyword Planner will help you do this for free (because they want you to invest in PPC.)adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

Review these terms to find those which are appropriate to your site, and have high volume.

https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner


Keyword Research1/ create & expand a list of potential keywords2/ review the volumes & intent

3/ do you have the metrics to be there?4/ do you deserve to be there?5/ do you have the content to be there?

Moz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool is a quick way to compare the authority of the pages & domains that rank for any particular keyword.moz.com/researchtools/keyword-difficultyWhen I find terms that look like they have potential,

I’ll run then through Moz’s keyword difficulty tool. This allows us to compare the domain & page authority from our site to that of the pages that already rank for the term.

https://moz.com/researchtools/keyword-difficulty


Keyword Research1/ create & expand a list of potential keywords2/ review the volumes & intent3/ do you have the metrics to be there?

4/ do you deserve to be there?5/ do you have the content to be there?

Honest introspection is the most necessary tool at this stage.

If you need a tool, FiveSecondTest is one way to get some feedback on a page or brand.usabilityhub.comDo you?

https://usabilityhub.com/


Keyword Research1/ create & expand a list of potential keywords2/ review the volumes & intent3/ do you have the metrics to be there?4/ do you deserve to be there?

5/ do you have the content to be there?

And so begins a process of identifying & improving existing content, or scheduling new pages for creation.


For each term you want to target, you’ll either be creating a new page or optimizing an existing one.




Keyword Targeting

3


What does it take to optimize a page for a particular keyword?




At the very least, aim to get the keyword in the page title, URL, heading and body copy.




If you ever need convincing, take a look at the pages ranking for any term. The more competitive the term, the better targeted the pages are likely to be.


Internal Competition

4


Various types of duplicate content can often be the downfall of an otherwise well-optimized website.




Most Common Pitfall

Just haveone page per keyword.


If multiple pages target the same keyword then users may spread their links/likes/shares more thinly between the different pages. Meanwhile, Google may struggle to understand which page from your site it should rank for this term – and may not rank any of them.




Accidental Duplicate Contenthttp://abc.edu/courses/

http://abc.edu/courses/?order_by=name

http://abc.edu/courses.html

http://www. abc.edu/courses/

https://abc.edu/courses/


When exactly the same page is available at multiple URLs, we refer to this as ‘duplicate content’. There are a number of technical solutions to this; use of the canonical tag is often the right answer.



https://www.distilled.net/u/technical/#technical-duplicate-content


Intentional Competing Contenthttp://abc.edu/courses/

http://abc.edu/other_department/course_list

http://abc.edu/blog/check-out-our-courses

http://courses.abc.edu


In other cases, multiple similar pages target the same term.

There’s no simple technical solution in these cases; rather you need consider how to differentiate the pages, or how to consolidate them.




Common Pitfall

Make sure someone has the responsibility/accountability to check in to Webmaster

Tools


A regular visit to Webmaster Tools will keep you up-to-date on any new duplicate content (or other errors) that Google have found.




SEO & AnalyticsThere are a bunch of activities that are not strictly SEO-only, but not doing some of these things can invalidate all your efforts. Getting on top of your site’s analytics is one of these tasks.

You’re driving traffic through loads of sources. Do you know where it’s all coming from, or how much is coming from SEO? Which channels are delivering engaged users or conversions? How are the different marketing channels working together? For starters,. someone in your SEO/marketing team must be comfortable with working inside your analytics.

Once your analytics are well set up and delivering useful insights, you can give thought to conversion rate optimization (CRO) – a practice that benefits all channels, though is still often overlooked..And what’s easier: adding another 20% traffic from all channels, or moving conversion rate from 5% to 6%? If you’ve never invested in CRO, there may be great opportunity for quick wins.


Krista Seiden is delivering a session about Google Analytics on day two of Converge 2015.


SEO & Content

Two particular reasons that content is so relevant & important for SEO: pages will rank for a keyword, or attract the likes/links/shares that raise your site’s authority. Ideally, great content will do both, and often more besides.

A lot of other people talking in more depth about content at this conference.


Don’t miss Matt Brown’s session to get an insight on how the team at Moz think about ‘10x content’.


SEO & Links

Links are still a crucial ranking factor, not least for the reasons addressed earlier. Again, you can’t lose if you’re investing effort in creating links that send real traffic from engaged visitors – you get all the benefit of traffic through another channel, and the extra bump that Google will give you because of them.

Link building is a huge – and interesting topic – that I’ll share a few observations on.


Promoting your content to the people who may link is a strategy that still works very well. There’s absolutely no shame in putting your best content in front of influencers, bloggers & journalists.

One trend we’ve seen is that more bloggers are becoming professionals, and their blog is their business. This makes them extra protective of their audience (so less likely to share sub-par content/stories on their site) and very aware of the commercial side (so more likely to ask for payment in return for coverage.)

At the same time, journalists are busier than ever – and can be extremely open to covering content or a story where you have done a lot of the hardest work for them. Journos still need content that is well researched, credible and has a very timely aspect to it. If you’ve researched their beat & the articles they write (to make sure you fit) and given them everything they need to get an article up without so much effort on their part, then you have a much greater chance of getting covered.

Of all the advice I can share about the process, I’d recommend this: tackle it with a long term attitude. Primarily, aim to build a relationship with each influencer you target. Beyond that, try to get coverage or a mention for your brand. Finally, try to get a link to your site. By not putting ‘get a link’ first, you can instead focus on growing your black book of warm contacts – and keep them happier for the long term.

Link Acquisition





SEO & BrandI mentioned this earlier on as a ranking factor, but you will only change what you measure.

If you want prompted/unprompted brand awareness, brand affinity or brand associations to be improving for your organization, begin measuring these things! Advocate for one of those metrics to be a marketing objective, or make sure that the numbers are reported publicly internally – you’ll suddenly get a lot more people caring about them.

And again: what if I’m wrong, and Google doesn’t recognize ‘brand’ as a ranking factor? Then you’ll have built a strong brand that people share, talk about and search for…. all for nothing!


SEO & Everything ElseMy common thread here is: if someone is responsible for increases in organic traffic, there are a great many things they’re invested in beyond some technical best practice.

They have to be interested in brand strength, but are often not empowered to move that needle. They’re interested in how many people are talking about the site on Twitter & sharing it on Facebook – but there’s a social media team responsible for improving those numbers. They want journalists to link to interesting articles and papers from your institution, but that steps on PR people’s toes. The same goes for so many other marketing activities and advertising channels.

None of this works in isolation. SEO people can’t be sat in a corner doing SEO tasks. If UX is a thing Google is judging you on, your SEO person needs to be face-to-face with your UX people, regularly. If social shares & brand are a signal, then SEO/social/PR people all need to be close. Or on the same team.


THANK YOU@RobOusbey


I’m grateful to the team at Converge & the audience at the 2015 conference for giving me the chance to speak to you all. Keep in touch!




A number of images came from the Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO – a fantastic resource for people trying to learn more about the space – as well as their Google Glossary.

Image of Google’s team meeting via the video: How Google makes improvements to its search algorithm

Network graph image is CC by-sa licensed on Wikimedia

Brand bubbles image via open-xchange.

Family watching TV image is public domain,

Image Credits


https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

https://moz.com/blog/google-glossary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5RZOU6vK4Q

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Social_Network_Analysis_Visualization.png

http://brand.open-xchange.com/brand_identity/

http://brand.open-xchange.com/brand_identity/

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Family_watching_television_1958.jpg



attracting visitors through seo - converge 2015

Marketing