40 Tips & Tricks with Conductor Pro Services at C3 2018 with: Kenyon Adei-Manu, Amazon Stephan Bajaio, Conductor Bill Sebald, Greenlane Search Marketing

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WINNING TACTICS
#C3NY
40 TIPS & TRICKS
Stephan Bajaio
VP Professional Services,
Co-Founder, Conductor
Kenyon Adei-manu
Product Manager, Amazon
Bill Sebald
Owner, Greenlane Marketing

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Always Take A Good Fat Guy Photo
There is no point in showing the outcomes if you
can’t show the before photo.
Strive to contextualize your data to the past.
Tip #1

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Remember – SEO Is An Ongoing Experiment
Every SEO has an opinion. Not all opinions are correct
for each website. Google uses different signals for
different industries, verticals, and websites in
general.
Create your own opinion by experimenting.
Tip #2

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Venture beyond elements and device view and use
the network tab to optimize page load.
Chrome Dev Tools
Tip #3

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SEO Done Well Is A Culture, Not A Tactic
Unless you control everything happening on the site,
including but not limited to, product naming
conventions, marketing message etc., the odds are
you will depend on others in order to make SEO
successful. If it’s a tactic no one but you will care.
If it’s a culture we all take some ownership.
Tip #4

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Log Files. Analyze them.
Important pages are visited often by search bots.
These logs can tell you if what you think is important
jives with search engines’ opinions.
Tip #5

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Understand elements that are critical to the initial
page load.
Audit Render Blocks
Tip #6

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Know Your Peers KPI’s & Help Them Meet Them
If you can inform or help other meet their goals you
will never have to plead for help in search ever again.
Tip #7

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Analyze The SERP For Intent Before You Rush In
Google ranks with consideration to query intent.
Consider going with the grain instead of against it.
Example: If you want to rank a mid-funnel term,
make sure Google isn’t ranking “informational” top of
funnel terms.
Tip #8

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Create a process for monitoring pixels and old code.
Pick Up Your Pixels
Tip #9

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Give Them All The Credit
If you can get others to take part in search initiatives
give them all the credit. Do it publicly and make sure
execs are in the loop.
At the end of the day it all comes back to your work
and your KPIs so share the glory it will build the
capital you need for later.
Tip #10

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SEO Is Now CRO
SEOs shouldn’t just want rankings. We should want
conversions.
Google doesn’t just want links and content. They
want a good user experience.
Enter CRO. Add Conversion Rate Optimization to all
on-page SEO work.
Tip #11

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Know your customers, your competitors, and your
opportunities.
What Keyword Segments Have You Missed?
Tip #12

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Same Budget Doesn’t Guarantee Same Results
Can I get a hallelujah!!!!? Search isn’t always
compounding and results can depend on what the
competition is doing. After all it’s a zero sum game.
Tip #13

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If You Have An Old Site, Don’t Leave Those Old
Links Hanging…
The older the site, the more replatforms it has probably
endured. In the old days, SEOs were not always considered.
Look at historic link data or the Wayback Machine to find old
links that point to 404’s, and redirect them.
If you can’t redirect, alert the owner of the broken link with an
update.
Tip #14

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Automate your and elevate your reporting – You
should be the first to know if know and prompt action
if your bounce rate or 404s increase significantly.
Scale Yourself
Tip #15

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Your #1 Organic Competitor Is You
You are you usually your #1 competitor check for
ranking cannibalization holding you back.
Extra credit: use cannibalization reporting to help
better internal linking.
Tip #16

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Use PPC Ad Conversion Data To Influence Title
Tags & Meta Descriptions
PPC ads are made to convert. Use the common
keywords/CTAs that have high conversion rates to
improve CTRs for top organic listings.
Tip #17

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Listen and empower your customers to be a part of
your site.
User Generated Content
Tip #18

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And You Give Yourself Away, And You Give
Yourself Away. I can’t Rank With Or Without You
Share keyword research insights with anyone who
will care and give them access to Audience Intent
Explorer (it doesn’t cost you a dime more).
Tip #19

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Focus On Index Bloat
Search Console tells us how many pages are indexed, but is bad
at telling us what pages are indexed.
On large sites, duplicate pages exist sometimes without
knowledge. But Google finds them and wastes bandwidth on
them.
Tip: https://www.greenlanemarketing.com/tools/google-
indexation-tester/
Tip #20

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Don’t expect success if your not providing value for
your customers.
Provide Value For Your Customers
Tip #21

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If Your URLs Look Like A Ransom Note You Are
Doing Something Wrong
Check for camel casing URLs & always defer to
lowercase.
Tip #22

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Title Tag Wash En Masse
While many tags have lost degrees of influence, the
title tag is still potent.
If your site is large, concentrating on a large title tag
rewash still shows great results.
Tip #23

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Automate page speed reports and share them.
Keep Tabs On Your Page Speed
Tip #24

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Dr. Site Colon Says It’s Time For A .PDF Checkup
Use google site operators to find pesky .pdf’s on your
site and convert them into html pages.
Tip #25

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Don’t Try To Measure Everything
Some things are imperceptible, but matter in
aggregate. Don’t let the lack of blatant ROI visibility
discourage you from performing SEO.
Tip #26

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Ensure you have fluid experiences and your tracking
is correct.
Double Check Your App Indexing
Tip #27

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You Are Your Own Mini Search Engine
Mine your internal search data for insights (it will
teach you where your navigation may be failing and
strips your brand out of the equation).
Tip #28

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Look Forward – Experiment With New
Technologies
The job of the SEO is changing. Sometimes it’s not about the
ranking or the click, but the brand exposure.
Voice search is growing.
VR/AR is growing.
Progressive Web Apps are growing.
The web is noisy. If you want to cut through, be cutting edge.
Tip #29

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Investigate new libraries and technology that allow
for flexible server-side rendering.
React, Angular 2 & Node.JS
Tip #30

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Folks Will Ask Google About You, What Will She
Answer?
Customer service / FAQ’s matter more than you
know. LTV are metrics that matter to your company
but not often spoken about in search.
If you have a call center or feedback channels mine
that for important terms.
Build out robust answers and target answer boxes.
Tip #31

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Invest In Each & Every Signal, Especially Earning A
10 Where Your Competitors Don’t Have A 10
Many companies only invest in a small percent of SEO signals.
This is your opportunity to overcome by scoring higher in each
signal.
Even the smallest signals add up in the long run. This is what
SEO is about – not silver bullets.
A competitive technical audit can help set the stage for
prioritization.
Tip #32

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View your pages as a robot or use fetch and render to
see how bots and humans see your pages.
Use Robots View
Tip #33

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SPI is your ticket to the executive table
Search Presence Intelligence will make search data
exponentially valuable to your organization.
Think less about you rank and more about who rank
and what influence opportunity that is for your
business.
Tip #34

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Boring Industry? Link Build Off Your Mission
“Link building is hard in boring industries,” says
everyone.
True – but if your company has a mission, build links
from that. Relevancy can still persist. Tip #35

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Optimize the order in which you make your requests.
Critical Path Optimization
Tip #36

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Image optimization is a file renaming
opportunity
Reduce the size of bloated images that are most
frequently called to on your site.
Take the opportunity to rename them using relevant
terms since you are resaving them anyway. Tip #37

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Assess Your Text “Readability Score”.
If Google has a 7th grade reading level, use tools to
make sure you’re at that level.
https://readable.io/ or
http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
Clarity isn’t only key for search engines, but your
visitors as well.
Tip #38

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Execute JS with Screaming Frog and also QA with
Chrome Dev Tools.
Test In Mobile
Tip #39

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Google can’t escape Google so thoroughly
understand rankings to use that to your
advantage
Understand how google is interpreting a pages
meaning by looking at the boundaries of what it
ranks well for and not so well for.
This will unearth opportunities to make your content
more relevant or create new content
Tip #40

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