ALAN BUSH

The Most Important SEO Initiatives to Plan for in

2016

Alan Bush• Director of SEO Strategy –

Ignite Visibility

• One of the top SEO, social media and pay per click companies in the nation.

• Instructor of SEO Marketing at UCSD

• Co-host of 2 internationally known internet marketing podcasts (WinTheWeb & OwningYourOwn)

• Worked on over 400 digital marketing campaigns, including companies such as G4TV, No Fear, Nixon Watches, Links of London, Musician’s Institute, Walking On A Cloud and many more.

What we are covering today

• Why SEO

• SEO History in 2015

• My 5 Most Important SEO items in 2016

Why SEO?

• 93% of online research begins with a search engine

• Google owns abut 70% of market share

• 70% of the links users click on are organic

• 75% of users never scroll past the first page

- Optimization on single web pages

- Site architecture

- Fresh content

- Links to your site

- Social media shares

- Reviews of your website (local search)

SEO Rankings

Onsite Optimization (about 50%)

Offsite Optimization (about 50%)

Getting Warmed Up

What happenedin 2015?

Mobile Update AKA "Mobilegeddon" — April 22, 2015 Made it so you needed a mobile version of your site to rank in mobile searchSites without a mobile version lost almost all mobile traffic

The Quality Update — May 3, 2015 Known as the Phantom updateUpdate to the overall algorithm. Benefited sites with powerful linksMajor brands won

Panda 4.2 (#28) — July 17, 2015 Helped sites hit by last panda updateLooks at quality content, see here:http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

3 major Google algorithm updates

Hints from Google

Google says move to httpshttps gets ranking boost in Google

Warnings in chrome and firefox

Structure data as a ranking factorGoogle says will be more

important

ApplicationSEO gets more important

Apps get a ranking boost when app indexing is done correctly and apps get another ranking boost when they use

the app indexing API.

Example app listed in search

RankBrain

• Google releases RankBrian• Announced in late October• Machine learning system• Matches content to searches• 3rd biggest ranking factor

Industry Survey

First, Get your Technical Ducks in a Row

Go Secure, https:// (you have no choice!

• Action Item: Switch your website to https, you will rank better!

• Update all internal linking to point to https

• Update all external links to point at https version of your site

• Make sure images and fonts are secure

• Put in 301 redirects and set up a new Google search console

HTTPS Video

https://youtu.be/cBhZ6S0PFCY

Go Mobile, you have no choice• Action Item: Go mobile, responsive

design if possible

• Test with mobile usability toolhttps://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

• Shoot for mobile page speed scores of 65 or above

• Have a mobile ready website that is optimized for Google (responsive design, vary http header or subdomain)

• Map your mobile application URLs to the corresponding web page and set up a Google search console account

Watch your Ajax and Javascript • Action Item: No more escape fragment optimization, make

sure you optimize around your Ajax and Javascript

• Google is now indexing Ajax and Javascript (no more escape fragment optimization)

• Make sure you have an HTML and Ajax or Javascript strategy

• It will always important to have core HTML elements such as URLs, titles, h1, copy, etc.

Schema.orgAction Item: Create a schema.org strategy for each page

of your site.

• This will be important for rankings, click

through rates and users.

• Some of my favorite schema is…

• Logo schema

• Product Schema

• Reviews Schema

• Video Schema

• Breadcrumb Schema

• Local Schema

• Article Schema

• Event schema

Schema.org Video

Reviewshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0SF6PLCx4I

Sitemaps: Don't leave indexing to chance

•Action Item: Make sure you have all the sitemaps in green.

•XML

•HTML

•Video

•Image

•News

•RSS

Make sure you have all of these sitemaps.

Have a news sitemap, if you are news site and an RSS if you need

content indexed fast.

Second, Go Local Like a Pro

Have a location specific strategy.

• Action item: Create Location based pages on your site.

• Add local schema.org to your site

• Create the following local profiles

• Google +

• Bing

• Yelp

• And use Yext or Moz Local

Fix Auto Example• We do the franchise and corporate marketing for this client• Started at zero, now getting thousands of visitors • Started with almost 0 keywords ranking, now over 3,000• Working together one year

Example Irvine URL, now ranking for 43 keywords.

Third, Go Multilingual and Enter All New Markets

Pick a new language and generate more revenue or leads

• Action Item: Translate your site into a new language or target a new country

• Read more here in the ultimate guide

• http://searchengineland.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-multilingual-and-multiregional-seo-157838

• You have already done the work in English, translate your website into Spanish, French, Russian

• Use hreflang tags and X default to be technically correct

Ecwid Example• We pushed this client into over 25 countries and • Languages.• 8,542% increase in new users • 5,284% increase in goal completions• Man, that make me feel good to help a client that way

https://youtu.be/8ce9jv91beQ?t=2m38s2:38 to 3:50

Before you make the jump

Fourth, Build out Hubs of Content

Action Item: Create Hubs of Content

Motorcycle gear ex H1 and h2CopyOptimized imageArticlesGuidesSubcategories ProductsVideosInfographicsMore!

Fifth, Build an External Linking Strategy and Brand

Around Expertise

Have an influencer or subject matter expert

Action Item: Have One or Two People be the Face of the Company Online

• Align with one, or create one. Creating one take a lot longer.

• Write for top publications

• Give everything away in your blog

• Social media

• Build out personal profiles

• Run ads

• Make them the center of inbound

• Email marketing

• Reverse engineer with SEM Rush, Majestic SEO and BuzzSumo

Sixth, Use the Right Tools

Use BuzzSumo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNy8U3tlFYs

Some of my Favorite SEO Tools

1. Hootsuite: Schedule social posts, feed your blog

2. BuzzSumo: Influencers, popular social content

3. Screaming Frog: Crawl an entire site

4. SpyFu: Competitive analysis

5. Soovle: Keyword suggestions from various search engines

6. Opensite Explorer Broken Link Checker: Fix broken links

7. Ahrefs & Majestic SEO: View backlinks to any website

8. KnowEM: Secure 300 social media profiles

9. Link Detox: Clean up work your bad SEO company did

10. Google Search Console: A MUST HAVE!

11. SEM Rush – Internet Marketing tracking tool

12. Browser Plugins – Foxy SEO, SEOBook, etc.

@ALANHBUSH

@IGNITEV

IGNITEVISIBILITY.COM/BLOG

Thank You