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Intro to Basic SEO
- 1. Intro to Basic SEO Lightning Lunch Talk Whitney Hill, Digital Marketing Consultant
- 2. What’s this talk about? ● High-level intro to SEO ● Quick overview of the different areas ● Food for thought It is not comprehensive and the info may change at any time.
- 3. SEO Defined “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.” (emphasis added) Source: Moz (https://moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo)
- 4. What does that actually mean? Focusing on the following: ● Good UX ● Search query relevance ● High-quality content ● Logical site architecture ● Link building
- 5. What goes into SEO research? ● Keyword and competitor research ● User experience research (qual and quant) ● Audit and analysis of website and content ● Seasonality / location ● Tracking traffic channels ● Discovering link building / review opportunities
- 6. Ranking Factors Source: SEM Rush Ranking Factors Study 2017
- 7. Today’s focus On-page SEO ● Content ● Technical ○ HTML ○ Architecture Source: https://searchengineland.com/seotable/download- periodic-table-of-seo
- 8. Content
- 9. Content: Quality 🌟 What makes quality content? ● Informative ● Readable (skimmable, simple, structured) ● Unique ● Expert, Authoritative, Trustworthy (EAT) ● Accessible
- 10. Content: Keywords and Research 🕵 How will people find your content? Keywords. ● Are you using keywords in the page? ● Are your keywords terms that people actually use? ○ What will they type into a search box? ○ What will they say in voice search? ● What is the pain point behind the query? ● Do you need a long tail or a broad head?
- 11. Content: Freshness 💥 When was the last time you updated that page? ● Is the information still correct? ● Is there fresh data or insight? ● Have you posted about a hot/newsworthy topic recently?
- 12. Content: Vertical 🕵 Which content verticals drive results? Try: ● Video ● Photos ● News ● Reviews ● Shop / Product pages
- 13. Content: Answers 🙌 Answer box! ● Part copy / information ● Part structure ○ Numbered lists (step-by-step, how-to) ○ Bullets
- 14. Position 0 aka ● Featured snippet ● Answer box ● Knowledge card
- 15. Content: Thin 💔 You can damage your SEO and rankings with content that: ● Lacks sufficient length to be of use ● Is false or misleading ● Does not have appropriate depth or breadth ● Fails human review (EAT / YMYL)
- 17. Architecture: Mobile 📱 Google 💖 mobile. ● Significant search volume comes from mobile, particularly for B2C ● Mobile-friendliness matters: tap targets, viewpoints, font size, etc ● Responsive design: 💯
- 18. Architecture: Speed ⚡ People hate waiting, especially on mobile. ● Website load time is one of the few confirmed ranking factors ● Impacts conversion and bounce rates ● Consider: page weight (MB), render-blocking JS/CSS, image optimization
- 19. Architecture: Crawl 🕵 Can you see me? ● JavaScript and AJAX: Not really ● Content behind forms: No ● Java and plug-ins: No ● Audio and video: No - provide transcript ● XML sitemaps: Yes
- 20. Architecture: Duplicate content 👯 Have I seen this somewhere else? ● Different URL parameters (sessions, tracking) pointing to the same content ● Print-friendly versions ● Scraped and syndicated content ● Comment pagination Screenshot from https://yoast.com/duplicate-content/
- 21. Architecture: URLs ⛓ Thinking about linking ● Does the URL contain keywords? ● Is it descriptive? ○ Could a human understand it? ● How are parameters handled? ○ Goes back to content duplication
- 22. Architecture: HTTPS 🔐 Security ● One of the few known ranking factors (small) ● Google has started notifying website visitors if a site is not secured with HTTPS
- 23. HTML
- 24. HTML 💻 ● Metas ○ Title ○ Description ● Structure ○ H1 / H2 ○ Schema markup* ○ HTML5 / clearly labelled sections
- 25. Pulling it all together
- 26. SEO and Usability Good user experience = good SEO ● Fewer clicks (flat architecture) ● Clear navigation with sensible linking ● Avoiding pop-ups or other interruptive site elements ● Clear structuring of page copy and content, site navigation
- 27. Why should this matter? ● 92% of traffic goes to page 1 results ● Content and structure can contribute to: ○ Ease of use for site visitors ○ Ease of crawlability for search engine spiders ○ Improved conversion rates ○ Increased trust
- 28. What are some things we can/should do? ● Always ask if content serves the interests and needs of the user ● Follow UX best practices for design and site architecture ● Make continual improvements ● Be patient! SEO is not a magic fix - it can take months to see the smallest results
- 29. Resources Reading ● The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization (3rd Edition) ● Moz SEO Learning Center ● Search Engine Land Tools ● SEM Rush (Research) ● Google Search Console (Webmaster tools) ● Screaming Frog (Crawler) ● MozBar (On-page research) ● MozCast (Algorithm turbulence) ● Majestic (Backlinks)
- 30. Thank you!
Editor's Notes
- Google has been said to make algorithm changes approximately 500 times per year. SEO marketing is a full-time job at some companies.
- Improving your website and content offering to deliver the best information and experience to searchers and visitors Good user experience - making sure it’s easy and intuitive to use the site - overall, more important than keywords Search query relevance - making sure that each page is appropriately targeted and the searcher finds the information they expect based on their search. Always asking yourself, what best serves the user intent? What is the purpose behind this page? Ask why 3 times to get to the core. Intent is key Quality content - providing information that addresses the visitor’s needs - are you answering the question or talking about yourself? Focus on providing content that solves someone’s needs or pain points. Good site architecture - making it easy for both users and crawlers to find what they need and move across the website Link building - getting your content linked on authoritative, relevant, trustworthy sites
- These are generally the things I’m trying to keep in mind when working on a website What words or topics are relevant to what we want to be noticed for, and what are we going to be competing against others for? Are users engaging with the website (Google Analytics or other website analytics tools) - what do they do when they arrive? Does the website accurately reflect what the business does, and is it properly structured? Is content engaging, up-to-date, relevant, resourceful, duplicative, competing with other assets, properly formatted? Does time of day/month/year affect searches? Location of searchers, or service area of business? Where does our traffic come from? Where does our audience live online? How can we match our content to that, to increase discoverability? How can we get more link juice and increase our authority?
- Hundreds of factors that go into ranking (~200) Many professional SEOs spend a lot of time trying to figure out those that matter This is just one agency’s take - keep in mind that factors like page load speed will impact bounce rate Want to draw attention to the ones in blue - those are directly related to user engagement and again go back to the importance of good user experience
- Off-page SEO is not something we can directly control - it is more to do with how people engage with a site Caveat: If we are doing naughty things like paying for links, spamming, or hosting pirated content, that will be penalized On-page SEO is what we can focus on, and it tends to be split into two sections Content: the copy (words on the web page) and assets Technical - itself split into architecture and HTML: what is going on in the code Content tends to be driven by marketing; in some places there is a job solely devoted to creating content (and that may be split by content type e.g. writing blog posts, creating videos, etc) Technical should be undertaken as a collaboration between marketing and dev teams, including UX and QA We’ll look at the most important aspects of all three areas today.
- Well written, quality content: Informs and answers direct questions; it’s intended to help users rather than to pitch services Is easy to read - the language is as free from jargon as possible (where appropriate), the reading level is not above where is absolutely necessary, it is clearly structured with headers, bullets, and (where useful) bold/italic, it follows UX best practices in presentation e.g. color contrast, etc It’s not copied or scraped from elsewhere (or uses appropriate code to tell search engines where the original content lives) EAT is a new google acronym - they want to be sure that it is written by someone with the appropriate credentials for the topic, that the content is good enough for external sources to link back to you or that you have high reviews (importance of backlink profile). Trust is more to do with UX design - is the page and experience easy? Does it load quickly? Is it easy to navigate? Quality sites are able to invest more in these considerations → feeds into trust
- Keyword research Skill that every member of a marketing team who is involved in copy writing should have - social, blogging, email, website, ads - everyone should know how to do effective keyword research Can be as simple as typing the start of a query into google and seeing what auto-fills, or doing a search and looking at “people also searched for” It’s less about picking one magic word than it is about ensuring you stay on topic Use semantic keywords - maybe KW is “dog washing” but you can also use “dog grooming”, “puppy baths”, etc to avoid KW stuffing Voice search is rising. Think of the differences. You might type “cinemas near me” but you might say, “where is the closest cinema?” Start noting how you talk to Siri vs how you type Think also about the pain: maybe they are searching “plumber near me” but they may have tried “how to stop a leaky pipe” Long vs broad: depends where your content fits in the funnel. If you’re looking at brand awareness/ToF, you might want a shorter KW like “popcorn poppers”. If you want lower in the funnel, you look at something longer: “best air popcorn poppers” Avoid jargon
- Updates and/or hot topics If you have evergreen content (content that is regularly in your top 10, regardless of age), set up a schedule to keep it fresh Look at google trends for trending searches
- Blog posts or infographics are the go-to content types, but what other related content can you include? Photos, videos, news articles, local reviews - what’s relevant? Remember - nobody is really interested in your thoughts - they want information that helps them presented in a way they can easily consume Covering a range of verticals (content types) gives you more chances to show up in results Pay attention to the types of content that work for you and build a strategy
- Can your content directly answer a question? This is part of why it’s important to know the purpose of your content before writing it
- Asked a question - the answer is presented Double-edged sword - SEOs are noticing a decline in clicks/traffic as content is presented in knowledge cards, carousels, and other innovations to the SERP
- Content lacking substance (under 300-500 words) Remember - crawlers can’t read the text in images (including infographics), although they can read alt text Google’s human reviewers will be looking at EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) as well as YMYL (content that affects your money or your life)
- There’s more to site architecture than I’ll cover here, but this is a good place to start.
- Taking these out of order from the table in order to focus on those that Google has confirmed first. Mobile-friendliness is a confirmed factor whose importance is increasing Studies have tracked the increasing reliance on mobile devices for search, the overlap between a mobile search and in-store conversions, mobile search and business calls, “near me” searches, etc More than half of Google’s searches come from mobile devices (source: https://searchengineland.com/report-nearly-60-percent-searches-now-mobile-devices-255025) Mobile-geddon - Mobile-first index is coming, and those websites with different versions for desktop and mobile may suffer Recommendation: Build all sites to be responsive and mobile-first
- Recent research from Google shows that as page load incrases from 1 to 5 seconds, the probability of a bounce increases 90% (source: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/) Remember the earlier slide that showed the importance of user engagement factors? Recommendations: keep mobile data connections in mind and optimize for that rather than WiFi. Consider how to reduce load time.
- AJAX and JavaScript are hard to read, so links or other architectural elements using those may be skipped over (and not exist) Crawlers will not submit forms Why does this matter? If it can’t be crawled, it can’t be indexed and listed in search results - missed opportunities to rank for something important Recommendation: For marketing/content-heavy websites, if there is an alternative way to develop that would provide more information, favor that way. Source: The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization (3rd edition), page 225-6
- Content that is duplicated or highly similar, displayed on multiple pages, confuses crawlers and forces them to choose which version to show - it may not be the original Uses up crawl budget = number of pages bot will crawl in a given session URL structure and parameters - any difference is read as a different page, even if it all points to the same thing in the database scraping/syndication results in the same content at yet more URLs - if canonical version isn’t set, crawler will have to make a choice (and it may not be the original site) Where appropriate, use 301 redirects OR rel=canonical tag, set preferred domain in Google Search Console (works for Google ONLY) for www / non-www and http / non-http versions
- Recommendations: keep URL structure as humanly-intuitive as possible.
- It is in their interest to be trusted - clicking a bad link from their search engine reduces trust
- Metas are not currently a ranking signal, but they help determine relevance Do they contain words relevant to the search? Are they duplicated elsewhere? Do they clearly and accurately describe what the page is about (-) Are you obviously keyword stuffing? Structure Are you appropriately using H1, H2 and so on to indicate the most important information? Are you providing additional information via schema markup This can help you show up in the coveted Position 0 (although it’s also based on how content is structured) Are you making it easy for engine to know what your page is about? What about the user (i.e. with styling of elements)?
- I want to reiterate the importance of usability and user experience to SEO Modern SEO is still about picking the right keywords, but it’s more about presenting a good user experience and content that is suitable to the industry while addressing the searcher’s intent There is no one-size-fits-all solution. For example: Security matters more for finance Clear, well-structured instructions matter more for cooking sites A few general recommendations for improving usability includes not using instructive pop-ups, clear navigation and linking, fast page loads, accessible content, good use of h tags and other elements for structuring copy
- When was the last time you clicked past page 1? Source for statistic: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2276184/no-1-position-in-google-gets-33-of-search-traffic-study
- It’s also not all in our hands - those hundreds of algorithm changes can impact a site’s ranking (positively or negatively) at any time. Sometimes you can make changes (migrate to HTTPS, improve content or load speed) and sometimes you can’t