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Data driven SEO
David Sottimano
Searchlove 2014
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Can a post rank solely by having keywords
in the URL?
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What does meta NOINDEX do?
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Removes a page from the index..
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But it can lower Googlebot crawl rate too.
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Are meta keywords actually useful?
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Data driven SEO Using data to win arguments
David Sottimano
Searchlove 2014
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Do this.
Because. {Insert Matt Cutts video link}
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Caveat, caveat, caveat….
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Meaningful, conclusive data is hard to come by.
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Algorithms can be specific to queries.
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http://searchengineland.com/google-pay-day-loan-algorithm-google-search-algorithm-update-to-target-spammy-queries-162941
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Data we need is out of reach.
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Actual click
through rates?
Actual bounces
back to search
results?
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Our “good” isn’t Google’s “good”
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Clues are scarce, and often vague.
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Source: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com.es/2012/04/search-quality-highlights-50-changes.html
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Would you trust the information presented
in this article?
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
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Presence of author
Presence of author information
Presence of author image
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Presence of logo
Presence of contact information
Presence of social proof
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This is why we need a data driven approach.
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Because “best practice” isn’t a good
enough answer.
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Throwing stuff against the wall doesn’t
make us any wiser!
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Be curious!
Question everything!
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More input, less valuable output
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Sometimes, simple is best.
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How’s this idea guys?
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It’s pretty shit.
*not actually what they said
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How I completely failed* to win arguments before.
*pretty much all the time
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This could have been avoided.
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If I had done this…
Keyword If you move off page 1 Money you will lose
Keyword 1
-3,000 visits
-$10,000
Keyword 2
-2,000 visits
-$7,500
-5,000 visits per month
-$17,500 per month
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“We’re going International, what do we do with hreflang?”
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Get the right people to the right pages in search &
Don’t screw up rankings / traffic
Hreflang, canonical or both?
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> 2 Analytics
WMT
Rank tracking
Logs
Testing configuration
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Did you know Distilled had an Australian office?
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Think about all the variants you want to test first
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Ask for testing methodology feedback.
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Wait.
How will I know if it worked or not?
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1) Rankings
2) Organic traffic
3) The right pages display in the right countries
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Fancy shmancy segmentation
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mmm custom dashboards
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Share it with clients to follow along.
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Set it and move on. Remind yourself!
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So, what happened with the hreflang project?
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No conclusive ranking improvements Display issues completely corrected
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Scenario1: I forgot to track the data.
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Historical search results
http://www.semrush.com/info/gmail+download+all+attachments+(source)?domain=davidsottimano.com&position=4&ts=1413494980
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Historical screenshots
http://www.screenshots.com/ https://archive.org/web/
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Historical rankings (specific keywords)
http://www.spyfu.com/Ranking
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Scenario 2: How do I find examples around the web?
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Brilliant source code search, by Nerdydata.com
http://nerdydata.com/
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Peek by Linkrisk. Search by SEO metrics.
http://linkrisk.com/peek/
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Scenario 3: I can’t open the entire CSV in
Excel.
No, I don’t know how to code.
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Use one of these.
http://delimitware.com/
*windows 7 >
http://recsveditor.sourceforge.net/c
sv02.htm *independent
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Scenario 4: I need to gather data from
webpages.
I don’t know how to code.
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Scraping is fun, really fun.
https://import.io/ http://scrapinghub.com/scrapy-cloud
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The (highly experimental) future
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Search is becoming too complex.
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Why are we trying to analyse vast amounts of
machine data?
Why not fight fire with fire?
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I had goals…
Reverse engineer why Distilled blog posts do well in search.
And predict how successful new blog posts would
be (organic traffic)
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I foolishly expected...
and failed.
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URL Majestic Status URL Majestic CitationFlow URL Majestic TrustFlow URL Majestic Ext Back Links URL Majestic Ref Domains URL Mozscape Domain Authority URL Mozscape Page Authority URL Mozscape External Equity Links URL Mozscape MozRank URL Mozscape MozTrust URL Mozscape Subdomain External Links URL Mozscape RootDomain External Links URL Mozscape Juice Passing Links URL Mozscape Subdomains Linking URL Mozscape Root Domains Linking URL Mozscape Links URL Mozscape Subdomain Subdomains Linking URL Mozscape Root Domain Root Domains Linking URL Mozscape Subdomain MozRank URL Mozscape RootDomain MozRank URL Mozscape Subdomain MozTrust URL Mozscape Root Domain MozTrust URL Mozscape External MozRank URL Mozscape Subdomain External Domain Linking Juice URL Mozscape Root Domain External Domain Juice
Reading Time Sentiment Sentiment Score Dale-Chall Score Flesch Kincaid Grade Level Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease Score Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease Gunning Fog Score Smog Index Images Images with Alt Images without Alt Videos External Link Count Internal Link Count Total Link Count Author Author URL Robots File Allowed Robots Meta Robots HTTP Header Canonical HTTP Header Canonical Head Date published Year published Alchemy Sentiment score Alchemy top concept Alchemy top keywords
HTTP Status Redirected Original HTTP Status Code Original HTTP Status Content Type Content Length URL Google Indexed Hash HTML Length Text Length Text to HTML Ratio Title Title Length Description Description Length Word Count Sentence Count Header Count Paragraph Count Last cached date # likes # shares # tweets # retweets # g+ Theme (custom) Type (custom) Alchemy entity Sessions Bounce rate
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I used organic sessions as my objective field, to
classify what was good/bad.
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Mean
Good
Bad
0
~16,000
~110
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< 20%
90% >
80 70 60 50 40 30
Not so
interesting
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So, longer posts = profit?
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I fed garbage in, and got garbage out.
Tip! Don’t use metrics that are well correlated with rankings.
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There’s so much opportunity here.
So what can you do about it?
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Get better at defining “great content”.
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If it gets links, shares, converts, we usually
class it as “good”.
But what made it “good” ?
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Tutorial
Technical > contains code
Controversial
Breaking news
Funny
Serious
Off topic
Controversial
List post > top 5,10, checklist
Tool review
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Try it. A free version is available.
http://goo.gl/NKtXOl
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Two little things I want you to remember.
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Build a better practice by binning best practice
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Prove it.
Data or it didn’t happen
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Thanks
@dsottimano