Aaron Dicks of award winning digital marketing agency Impression presents a session on what's new in SEO, for an audience at Impression's Nottingham HQ.

1. What’s new in SEO?
June 2017
Aaron Dicks
M D
I M P R E S S I O N
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What is SEO?

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Who knows (roughly) how a
search engine works?

4. First, how a search
engine works
Three key functions
Crawl
Index
Rank
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5. 1. Crawler
● How?
● Best pages are crawlable
● Block access to resources?
● Load speed is critical for users and search engine
crawlers alike
● Crawl budget
● Encryption -- security
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6. 2. Indexer
● Once crawled/discovered - pages are indexed
● Test whether your site is indexed in a couple of ways
○ Cached page or site: operator
● Confirm Google has all the content indexed
● Indexes pages based on topics and keywords for later searches
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7. 3. Ranker
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● A page will only rank well
○ if it has lots of inbound links
○ and if it has great content
○ and it’s part of a great website that Google can understand
● Outcomes
○ Rankings on Google.co.uk
○ traffic in Google Analytics
○ Sales in ERP & leads in your CRM

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Today I’ll be covering…
➔What’s new in SEO
➔What the future of search looks like*
*maybe

9. 1. DMOZ has closed and Google no
longer uses its data
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● DMOZ closed in March
● Google used to rely on snippets of information
for page descriptions, but no longer does
Outcome: website owners and marketers need to
spend time crafting these ourselves

10. 2. Google updated its terms around PO
boxes and virtual offices
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No changes noticed just yet
Outcome: Beware if you are trying to get map listings on Google with non-
permanent addresses
https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en&ref_topic=4540086#address

11. 3. Updates to Accelerated Mobile Pages
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● AMP continuing to grow in popularity
● Original source now available via the paperclip
link
● Tech so successful that it will soon power paid
display ads on Google’s network

12. 4. Google Data Studio
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● Free/beta limits removed earlier in the year
● More connections now available
● Growing in popularity for dashboard building

13. 5. Featured snippets
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● Compelling stats →
●

14. 6. People also ask
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15. 6. People also ask
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● An output of Google’s machine learning
● Huge % of queries now triggering them
● Much more prevalent on mobile
● We can use tools to mine PAA question
date for content generation purposes

16. 7. “near me”
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● Not recent, but constant growth to be aware of
● Local businesses need to be considering Local SEO
and citation building
● ‘Best” “near me” → Google reviews are important too!
Since 2011, Google reports a 3400% rise in searches containing “near me”.
80% of these searches come from mobile devices

17. 8. Limited ranking fluctuations
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● Pattern we’ve noticed over the past couple of months or so
● Reports of ranking algorithm changes, some sites report to be hit negatively by the algorithm
● Appears to be based on automated/poor quality link building
○ 2011 Panda v1. 2012 Penguin v1.
● Google have blogged on Webmaster Central reminding us of quality guidelines

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What the future of search looks like*
*maybe
- Site speed
- Walled garden publishing adoption
- Natural language processing
- Voice search
- Image search

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Site speed: always on the agenda
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/

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Publishing tools adoption
AMP deserves second mention
(there are alternatives, like Facebook instant
articles, but not from an SEO point of view)
Tech firms are pushing adoption of these
platforms for speed gains
AMP should solidify as a standard as more
websites use the code markup, but it’s been
slowly adopted to date.

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Google alone has these devices

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From 2017 onwards, we’ll see more
changing habits to voice search

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Google’s already getting ready for
this

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Relaxing “exact match” keywords

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Investment in NLP and AI

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20% of search already
comes from voice
...is your brand discoverable
by voice-only search?

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Conclusions

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Google is still looking for great,
unique content

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Unethical link building / spamming
is still seeing sites being demoted

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Google’s investment into natural
language programming is meaning a
more human search experience

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Technical considerations, such as
having a lightning-fast website
should be a top priority

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Ensure your existing content is fully
optimised in light of recent changes
(the width of the results changed last year meaning
more space)

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Consider using Google Accelerated
Mobile Pages if you have a large,
popular blog/content hub

41. Thank you
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