NCO SEO Presentation

Editor's Notes

1. What is SEO? You probably believe that it is about getting your website to #1 in Google. SEO is really about creating content that presents a unified message, and solves a specific set of problems for a specific set of customers, and optimizing the delivery of that content to reach that audience.
2. SEO is about establishing your company as the first-choice solution for that customer set, and establishing your website and your brand as a top authority on your given subject. SEO ensuring that your website and your brand channels are the place where the largest set of your target customers can get definitive solutions to their problems and answers to their questions.
3. At it’s highest level, SEO is indistinguishable from brand building. How do you do that?
4. Get visibility in Google and to a lesser degree, Bing, and other platforms.
5. This leads to the question that most people want to know when it comes to SEO: How does Google rank websites?
6. Google crawls webpages from link to link. It can also crawl XML sitemaps. The pages that it finds go into what is call an index: a collection of all web pages, as they were, the last time Google crawled them.
7. When you type a search query into Google, the search engine tries to match the intention of your search to the pages it has in it’s index. It uses it’s ranking algorithm to determine the ranking order of the pages that return.
8. You and I may do the same search, but get different results, depending on our physical location, or our individual search histories.
9. Google also is using machine learning, aka AI, aka RankBrain, to learn faster about search queries.
10. Google employs human Quality Raters to evaluate search results, and give scores on certain specific things that are on each page in certain search results. These human scores do not affect the search rankings, but their findings are given to Google engineers, who try to write algorithms that help the machine learning make selections that are satisfying to humans. This is looking at larger patterns, of what satisfies a search query for the largest amount of people in a given situation for a given searcher intent.
11. So, how do you make your ranking go up?
12. Google tells us to focus on Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness in their Search Quality Guidelines.
13. Expertise: do you show that you are an expert on your subject? Do you have content on your site that others find useful? Are you regarded as an expert by others in your industry? I want you to be thinking about these three attributes, if you were Google, how would you measure this?
14. Authority: Is your content respected by others? Does it give the right answers to people’s questions? Does it solve their problems? Do people look for your brand by name? Do searchers seem to be happy with your content?
15. Trustworthiness: Does your site and your brand look, sound, and feel trustworthy? Do others trust what you say? If an uninformed searcher came to your page, would they find what they were looking for, and what is their response later? What is your brand reputation? (Hint: it is not only about what is on the page on your website.)
16. Here are the three legs of the SEO table that you should see through the lens of Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
17. Content, back link profile, and user experience.
18. Content: If you are competing against larger brands, a basic five page website will lose every time.
19. You must embrace the fact that you are a media company, every company is. You are in a war for attention and you must play to win.
20. How do you win attention, and web traffic: by publishing your expertise on a regular basis.
21. About 10% of your content will drive 70 to 80% of your traffic. You don’t know which 70 or 80 until you publish it. If you only publish a new post on your site every four months, what are your odds of ranking or driving traffic?(If you tried blogging, and gave up after four posts because it didn’t work, the process didn’t fail you, you failed the process).
22. #1 objection to content creation: I don’t have time. We all have the same 24 hours. It is not a priority, but it needs to be one. We’ll get into this later, but if your entire site is Home, About, Contact, Services, you aren’t getting links. You need informational content to get links. Also, most people start in your sales funnel through informational content.
23. Get on a content schedule, and start publishing in-depth content.
24. Link Profile: Why do big brands rank so high? Part of the reason is they have thousands of sites linking to them. This has traditionally been the easiest way for search engines to measure the authority of your website.
25. The problem with link schemes: Black hat (read: cheaters) SEOs have manipulated link schemes for years. PBNs, or Private Blog Networks, are a cottage industry in black hat SEO, where they buy expired domains, recreate the sites, and set up links to their own sites and clients sites. When Google detects these, they lose all their link equity power.
26. How to build links? You will need best-in-class content to earn links. Create the content, get a few people to link to it, share it on social media and to your email list, and drive traffic to it. If other people with authority in your space link to it or share it, it will gain traction.
27. Link building foundation: get industry links, be on industry association sites, guest blogging, YouTube collabs. Also think about brand awareness.
28. Brand awareness: social media, content driven, get help from industry peers.
29. User experience: How does your site compare to best-in-class?
30. Things to look at (some of these are technical SEO): site speed, mobile friendly, HTTPS, 404s and broken links, design of site, legibility and typography, easy to scan pages, info must be easy to digest.
31. Constant improvement of website, mobile first world.
32. Other factors not mentioned yet:
33. Reviews and reputation (Google, Yelp, industry specific)
34. Searcher intent (go with the flow not against)
35. Level of competition in your space
36. Branded search, do people search for you by name yet?
37. Hi, My name is
38. Questions?