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Similar to Drago's Presentation for Raleigh SEO Meetup January 2022
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Drago's Presentation for Raleigh SEO Meetup January 2022
- 1. Welcome To Today’s Topic - The Past, Present and Future of SEO Raleigh SEO Meetup
- 2. Drago has authored numerous articles on digital technology and marketing, and has been a tech workshop presenter, guest lecturer and conference speaker. He began building websites in 1999, and entered the field full time after graduating from North Carolina State University. He founded Oak City Technology in 2009, selecting that name because Raleigh, with its tree-lined streets, is often called the “City of Oaks.” Later, he founded Purple Comma as an homage to his mother - his first creative spark. Did you know? Oak City Tech has been voted a top 3 marketing and web design company in Durham, NC since 2017!
- 3. Power your goals with proven technologies for increasing traffic, leads and sales.
- 4. What happened in 2021? Should it matter to you? Did SEO die AGAIN?
- 5. Core Web Vitals? No. Page loading speed, interactivity and visual stability should have been on your checklist since 2015.
- 6. Cumulative Layout Shift? No. It was only a matter of time before layout shifting became a ranking factor. It was incorporated into Core Web Vitals in mid 2021.
- 7. Google Business Profile? Yes. Not just a rename. The importance of local maps and your business profile has only increased throughout the past year.
- 8. Images? Yes. In February 2021, Google provided documentation on image SEO best practices. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/google-images
- 9. Duplicate Content? Yes. Google confirmed duplicate content is not a negative ranking factor or signal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsrL6l2Fxvo&t=260s
- 10. What should we focus on? What are the basics?
- 11. 1) Optimize Website For Mobile Experience compress images and give them a descriptive name and alt text (no css) cut down on extra code/plugins so your website loads in less than 3 seconds practice internal linking, breadcrumbs and have a sitemap so all your pages can be found https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/seo-starter-guide
- 12. 1) Optimize Website For Mobile Experience install an SSL certificate (https://) make your URLs short and descriptive practice good website architecture and navigation use descriptive title tags and meta descriptions https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/seo-starter-guide
- 13. 2) Keyword Research Keyword research is the process of finding what your customers are searching for, how much traffic those terms can send your way, and how difficult it might be to rank for them.
- 14. 3) Content Marketing Once you know what your target demographic is searching for you need to create content that appeals to them.
- 16. 4) Get Crawled Setup a Google Search Console account and manually make sure each page is indexed.
- 17. 5) Link Building Start posting the content you made to social media for others to find and repost. Email webmasters and offer them a unique piece of content aka guest blogging. Contact reporters
- 18. What about the future? What is coming next?
- 19. Voice Search It’s coming… but not anytime soon.
- 20. Artificial Intelligence It’s already integrated somewhat with Google planning even more integration.
- 21. Accessibility (Two Fold) A) It is estimated that almost 73% of Internet users will access the Internet only through mobile devices by 2025.
- 22. Accessibility (Two Fold) B) Accessibility for the impaired will be more important than ever before.
- 23. YouTube YouTube, seeking to assist creators with their reach, added video chapter previews and auto-translate captions in 2021.
- 24. and by extension…video Google indexes videos from millions of different sites to serve to users. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/video
- 25. My #1 Tip - Focus On The User Experience Focusing on the user experience has never steered me wrong and is a great guiding light for all your activities. Just ask yourself one question… Is this action going to benefit my end user or help Google connect them to my content?
- 26. That’s all folks! Let’s chat! You can find me at oakcity.tech or purplecommapodcasting.com
- 27. Bonus - How exactly do I create quality content? 1) create a profile of your ideal client, which will allow you to understand the type of content that your clients value. 2) conduct search intent research to help you map out the consumer journey. 3) use this information to create content that conforms to the format your users prefer.
Editor's Notes
- Loading performance is measured by Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - essentially how quickly the biggest item entirely loads. Interactivity is measured by First Input Delay (FID) - the first signs of life from your website - ideally below 100 milliseconds Visual Stability measured by Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - the shifting of elements on your website - more on the next slide Core web vitals were added to other factors such as mobile friendliness and safety of browsing, under the umbrella of Page Experience ranking factors.
- It’s quite annoying from the user’s perspective to see something on the website shifting unexpectedly, let alone disappearing. It may also cause serious errors for businesses where a customer needs to make a decision but can click on the wrong button due to a shift in elements..In short, you don’t want your website shifting around and moving elements while it is rendering.
- We saw a deeper integration between maps and local business profiles across the board. Besides the name change, Google says it is now easier to claim and verify your profile. Furthermore, As of late 2021, businesses have been able to reply to messages directly from the Google Maps mobile app in the “Updates” tab.
- The advice was focused primarily on ranking well in Google Images, but marketers can apply many of the suggestions to image ranking in general.
- Finally, we have confirmation from John Mueller himself. He clarified to say that if they find exactly the same information on multiple pages on the web, and someone searches specifically for that piece of information, then they’ll try to find the best matching page - that’s it. This is especially true for generic product descriptions for e-commerce.
- This is by no means an exhaustive list
- About #2 - if you have the skills you should also prioritize loading of certain assets over others and make use of CDNs. About #4 - you should still absolutely do these even though Google rewrites them at their description. The point is to give Google everything it needs to classify your website. Google knows no one will visit a slow/sloppy website so you are taking out of the running if your website isn’t up to a base set of usability standards.
- About #2 - if you have the skills you should also prioritize loading of certain assets over others and make use of CDNs. About #4 - you should still absolutely do these even though Google rewrites them at their description. The point is to give Google everything it needs to classify your website. Google knows no one will visit a slow/sloppy website so you are taking out of the running if your website isn’t up to a base set of usability standards.
- How do you expect to get traffic if you don’t know what your target demographic is searching for? This isn’t a field of dreams, build it and they will come situation. You got to put in the work and find what folks are looking for pertaining to your specific industry.
- Remember, Google Search’s only job is to match user questions with answers, not to give you free traffic.
- People forget about this one alot
- It is however important to note that Google has been architecting its search results pages to accommodate shorter answers, mainly in the form of Featured Snippets and Answer Boxes. It’s done so with the help of AI and the BERT algorithm, which was introduced in late 2019.
- Personally, I’ve been in a mobile first mindset since 2015 and am pleased that Google is reinforcing my postulations. I believe web designers will continue to incorporate features that do not depend on keyboard input, such as voice commands, virtual reality, augmented reality, etc. Recently, my company has built an extremely powerful 3d modeling and rendering computer just to experiment with the possibilities of AR for marketing purposes.
- I think it is about time that accessibility for the impaired be brought the forefront and I’m slowly seeing more signals in this vein.
- In December 2021, it launched a new feature that automatically linked to places mentioned in videos, giving users even more context. Don’t forget youtube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world. I’m not counting Google Image Search since its integrated into the Google Homepage even though it technically is 2nd in traffic and youtube is 3rd.
- Videos can appear in several different places on Google, including the main search results page, video search results, Google Images, and Discover
- This is what I’ve done for over 10 years in one form or another
- This is what I’ve done for over 10 years in one form or another - the jist-
- This is what I’ve done for over 10 years in one form or another - the jist-