b3 seminar: the latest advanced seo & link strategies - patrick altoft

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The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies Advanced SEO by Patrick Altoft

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This session focuses on the new aspects of SEO which are either driving results now or are going to help future-proof your SEO strategy. Designed for both in-house and agency SEO teams, the session will uncover how sites are able to dominate sectors using innovative techniques.

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Page 1: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Advanced SEO by Patrick Altoft

Page 2: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

What I’m talking about • The importance of making your content strategy & content marketing integral to

your normal day to day business, PR and comms strategy

• Why you need to focus on your core pages first as part of a content strategy

• Who is doing this right

Page 3: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Doing Real Stuff Would you do this if it didn’t help with SEO?

When you release a new page or piece of content would your MD or PR department tweet about it?

If not then you probably shouldn’t be doing it

Page 4: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Real Company Stuff

http://b3.io/10ZXMjy

Page 5: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

What Google Wants The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfil their information needs.

Matt Cutts

Our strategy therefore is to create a better search result for our clients than their competitors.

This can be split into two simple to understand factors:

• Creating more authority & being a better/more reputable company

• Making better landing pages, specifically your primary pages

Page 6: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Achieving This

The tactics to achieve this are a mixture of links, content strategy, onsite optimisation & usability.

It’s important to remember that while the tactics might change the strategy has not changed in nearly 15 years.

As an SEO agency we focus on making our clients websites a better destination for searchers than their competitors.

If Google thinks that our clients site is more useful and will give a better experience for users then the site will probably rank higher.

Page 7: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Authority Google measures authority using offsite factors, for example:

• Links

• Press coverage

• Social media mentions

• Traffic

• Search volume

All things being equal a searcher prefers to visit a well known authority brand than an unknown website with the same content.

Turning yourself into an authority and building your brand by becoming an expert is the best possible way to improve SEO

Page 8: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Good News – Finance is Complicated It’s easy for an ecommerce site to be an authority on the products it sells & the barrier for entry is low

In the finance sector only a very small number of companies can be a true authority about their products

Whether it’s loans, mortgages, pensions, insurance, debt advice or anything else you need to take the initiative and become an authority

Page 9: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Content Marketing Every time we execute a strategy we have to ask ourselves whether it moves us towards our ultimate goal of being a better search result. If not then why are we doing it?

How many people have published an infographic or linkbait article recently?

Why would this make you a better destination search result for your visitors?

Page 10: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Infographics Does this make Confused.com a greater authority on insurance?

If not then why do it?

In the long term do you think Google will reward sites that built their SEO strategy around irrelevant infographics?

Page 11: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

http://www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing/

Page 12: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Data Visualisation Releasing useful and interesting data and integrating this with your core website is the key to driving long term rankings

If I was searching for “used cars” and the destination website had published an infographic showing lots of data on used cars and their likelihood of breaking down would they be a better search result?

How about if they had not done the infographic but included the data on their make/model landing pages instead?

Page 13: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

KBB.com Real awards, real stats

Integrated into landing pages

SEO is an afterthought, they’ve probably been doing this for years

Page 14: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Page 15: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Page 16: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Use Your Assets to Build Authority Moneysupermarket.com releases an annual Home Insurance Monitor report detailing which towns in the UK are most likely to be burgled, common accidents, premiums etc

With data from 3.3m quotes this could be amazing

It’s in a PDF – big missed opportunity

Page 17: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Use Your Assets There is a press release page talking about it

It looks like this

Page 18: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Page 19: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Rainfall Even the Daily Mail get this right

Page 20: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Guardian Data Blog Interactive salary data map

Page 21: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Bond Cars from Evans Halshaw

Brands should have fun too

Make sure it’s topical & you are passionate about the subject

Page 22: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Think About the Future Google has a history of devaluing every type of link that was created for SEO purposes

• Directory links

• Press release syndication

• Article syndication

• Blatant paid links

• Wordpress theme links

• And many more

Unless the links you build are part of your overall marketing & communications strategy they will only work for a limited amount of time

Page 23: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Authority Payday UK don’t have an SEO agency, don’t engage in link-building and still rank top 3 most days for “payday loans”

They built authority, in an industry where competitors have zero authority, by having an unwavering focus on the payday keyword which brands like Wonga are forced to shy away from.

Page 24: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Payday Loans It helped that the previous market leader has not performed well this year

Page 25: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Barclays Business Banking Authority

Lots of very useful information

Page 26: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Barclays Business Banking

Page 27: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Competitor Analysis Competitor analysis has become pretty much useless in the last 12 months.

Most of your competitors links probably look terrible

Maybe they disavowed them?

Never analyse links in the insurance sector

Page 28: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Competing If you don’t have a better site, don’t expect to rank higher. Build links people can’t replicate rather than just copying competitors

http://www.rosshudgens.com/authority-bloat/

Page 29: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Does The AA have a good SEO strategy? They have the best linkbait in the entire sector

Page 30: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

They certainly have a lot of links

Page 31: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Do they rank? The AA ranks well but nowhere near the position they could rank if they were to integrate their SEO strategy with the rest of the business

Page 32: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Integration Every aspect of SEO has to be totally integrated and aligned with your current and future business strategy.

Whether it’s links being integrated with your PR & communications strategy (which Tim will cover later) or your website and content strategy if you are not integrating you risk seeing your SEO strategy fall apart in years to come.

In 2012 Google has made it clear they are willing to penalise major brands who thought they could outsource SEO without integrating it

Page 33: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Content Marketing

Linkbait blog posts

Infographics

Data visualisations

All these things are great but they don’t always turn your site into a better destination for searchers unless you can use them to brand yourselves as the experts

Page 34: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Money.co.uk Content Strategy Huge gains recently due to aggressive content strategy – is this sustainable during future updates?

Page 35: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

It wasn’t always good

Page 36: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Money.co.uk User Generated Content

Page 37: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Money vs Moneysupermarket At current growth rates they could overtake Moneysupermarket for credit cards within months, purely due to content strategy

Page 38: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Money vs Moneysupermarket They are also catching in the loan sector

Page 39: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Money vs Moneysupermarket And are ahead already in savings

Page 40: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Mint.com vs Lovemoney.com Two very successful sites in the personal finance sector

Built almost entirely around useful tools as a marketing strategy

Page 41: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Mint.com Hugely successful in linkbaiting the tech and personal finance sector

Page 42: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Mint.com

Page 43: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Mint.com Build a travel budget planner tool, get links from travel blogs

Page 44: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Mint.com Personal finance tool, sold for $170m

Page 45: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Lovemoney.com Mint.com for the UK, with a strong content strategy

Page 46: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

Lovemoney.com Impressive recent growth as they have switched strategy to be a comparison site – definitely one to watch for 2013

Page 47: B3 Seminar: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

[email protected]

Questions?