Cracking the SEO Code for 2015:
Tactics to Love vs. Leave
Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | @randfish | rand@moz.com

This Presentation Is Online Here:
bit.ly/seoloveleave

What Changed?
A brief look at how SEO has
evolved over the past five years.

#1:
Ranking algorithms are far more
complex – more inputs, more subtlety,
more quality checks.

Advancements in User Data Signals
Via Eric Fischer

An Uncanny Ability to
Spot Editorial VS.
Manipulative Links

Keyword Matching is Now Intent Matching

Personalization by History, Device,
Location, and Google+

#2:
SEO has become a job
description, not a job title.

Analysis of LinkedIn Profiles

SEOs Have Learned that Just Doing Their
Jobs Often Isn’t Enough
And, that the title “SEO” may limit influence

#3:
Policing of webspam is more
aggressive, more difficult to recover
from, & less evenly applied.

Non-Editorial Links Are More
Dangerous Than Ever

Webspam’s Become Every Site Owner’s Problem
Via Moz: Preparing for Negative SEO

#4:
Google is shortening searchers’ paths
and disintermediating content creators.

Less Opportunity in Many Simplistic “Give
Me the Answer” Queries

No Traffic For You,
NFL

No Traffic For
You, City of
Boston!

No Traffic For You,
Moz!

No Traffic
For You,
Hubspot!

Less Opportunity In Some Non-Simple Queries, Too:

If You’re Expedia, These Results Suck…

But It May Mean More Opportunity in the Long Tail
Almost 6 Billion queries/day

#5:
The ubiquity of social media has
broadened the field of
“influencers.”

1997-2011:
The Linkerati Rule
the Web
13% of web users can
amplify content
Via Forrester Research

2012-Present: We Are All Potential Amplifiers
72% of web users can
amplify content
Via Pew Research Data

#6:
Disappearing data makes SEO
more challenging to measure and
improve.

Keyword Referral Data is Gone
On average, 87.5% of
keywords from Google
are now “not provided”
(source)

AdWords’
[Exact Match]
No Longer Exact
Via
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/08/
close-variant-matching-for-all-exact.
html

A Significant Portion of
Search Traffic May Be
Falsely Hidden in
“Direct”
Groupon’s experiment showing up to 60% of traffic reported as “direct” may be organic search

So…
How do these changes affect which
tactics we can still pursue vs. those we
must leave behind?

Great SEO Is No Longer Just “SEO”
Links Keywords
SEO in 2004
Crawl Rankings

Great SEO Is No Longer Just “SEO”
Keywords
Rankings
Links
Crawl
SEO in 2014
Social
Content
Design & UX
Speed
Webspam
Mobile
Press & PR
CX
Email
Accessibility
Localization Internationalization

Our Job: Choose the Tactics that Marry
Our Strengths to Our Opportunities

No tactic will be right for
everyone.
But, awareness of our
potential arsenal is
essential.

Tactics to Leave Behind vs.
Tactics to
Embrace for the Future:

Keyword
Research

AdWords-Only Discovery

AdWords-Only Discovery
Leave It Behind

AdWords + Suggest + Customer Data
Many queries with
100s or 1000s of
monthly searches
don’t show up in
AdWords but will
show up here.

This tool makes the
process easier.
My favorite tool for keyword suggest research: Keywordtool.io

Popular questions,
phrases, and terms that
your audience uses in
web forums/social media
are excellent sources of
keyword data expansion

Content
Creation

Create & Scale Keyword-Targeted Pages of
“Good, Unique Content”

This is a LONG
page from Angie’s
List that ranks #1
for “Best
Plumbers in
Medford, OR”

This is the ONLY “unique
content” on that page

Think you can build pages like
that and rank?
You’re dreaming!

Create & Scale Keyword-Targeted Pages of
“Good, Unique Content”
Leave It Behind

Modern Criteria for Content:
One-of-a-Kind – doesn’t appear elsewhere on the web
Relevant – contains content the engines can interpret as on-the-topic
to the searcher’s intent & phrasing
Helpful – resolves the searcher’s query in a useful, efficient
manner
Uniquely Valuable – provides information that’s unavailable (or
hard to get) elsewhere
Great UX– is easy & pleasurable to consume on any device

A Great Example from Genius.com

Accurate, readable lyrics
Uniquely valuable
annotations
A community of
contributors
One click to play
Data re:
popularity
& activity

Link
Building

Acquire Links Via Directories, Forums,
Account Profiles, etc.

Acquire Links Via Directories, Forums,
Account Profiles, etc.
Leave It Behind

Acquire Links w/ Off-Topic Infographics &
Embeds

Acquire Links w/ Off-Topic Infographics &
Embeds
Leave It Behind

Acquire Links By Scaling Up Guest Posting
& Commenting

Acquire Links By Scaling Up Guest Posting
& Commenting
Leave It Behind

The Truth:
Google doesn’t want
to count links you can
“build.”

The Truth:
Google only wants to
count links you
editorially “earn.”

Instead, Build Relationships
My haircut place built a
relationship & partnered
with a local sex toy shop –
now both get more
branding, exposure,
customers, & links!*
*partnering with nearby sex toy shops may not be the perfect bizdev action for everyone

Use Content to Drive Editorial Links

Aim for Resource Pages & Blogrolls

Buy Exposure that Leads to Links
(not the links themselves)

For more link
building tactics to
love, see:
Link Building from the MozBlog
Paddy Moogan’sLink Building eBook
Experts’ Favorite Link Building Tactics
How to Leverage PR for Link Building
The Future of Link Building

Social Media
& SEO

Share Socially to Get Rankings
No doubt about it – there’s a strong CORRELATION between tweets (and
Facebook and Google+ shares) and higher rankings.

Share Socially to Get Rankings
Leave It Behind
No doubt about it – there’s a strong CORRELATION between tweets (and
Facebook and Google+ shares) and higher rankings.

Social Impacts SEO Indirectly
Social shares expose content to
those who might link to it (and
amplify in other ways)
This blog post from OKTrends earned 100s of links after launch

G+ is the Exception for Logged-In Results
Because I follow Mark on G+, what he shares/+1s can usually
ranks higher when I’m logged into my Gmail.

Content
Marketing

Publish Content to Get Links & Rankings
Blog Post
Blog Post
Article
Article
Blog Post

Publish Content to Get Links & Rankings
Blog Post
Blog Post
Leave It Behind
Article
Article
Blog Post

Links & Shares Skew to the Top 5% of Content
http://www.simplereach.com/blog/facebook-continues-to-be-the-biggest-driver-of-social-traffic/

There’s No Prize For Hitting Publish

Rules for Content Investments:
Strategic & Relevant– the content must tie to business goals and fit
with your branding
Targets Likely Amplifiers – there should be an obvious answer to the
question “who will help spread this content and why?”
Cannot Be Fire & Forget–most content will fail; you need to be
willing to invest longer and harder than the competition to find
success

Need Inspiration? Check out Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo – my favorite tool for researching the competitive content landscape

Measuring
ROI

Traffic & Performance by Keyword
Pre-2012 Post-2012

Traffic & Performance by Keyword
Leave It Behind
Pre-2012 Post-2012

Instead, Measure Search Traffic
Performance by Page (or Section)
Observing the pages that receive search visits can get close to
the old keyword-based performance reports.

And/OrUse Estimates in SEO Software Packages
If you use a tool like Conductor, Searchmetrics, or
Moz Analytics, you can see predictions for KWs
sending traffic to given pages

Attribution Models
This is how most companies (& software
packages) do web analytics by default

Attribution Models
This is how most companies (& software
packages) do web analytics by default Leave It Behind

Attribution Models
A model something like this
makes far more sense.

Pro Tip: Note which channels are frequently
part of your overall conversion process
Many times, these
contain channels that
can’t be tracked, and
you’ll only miss them if
you stop investing

The Best ROI Often Comes from Non-Measurable,
Serendipitous Marketing

SEO is getting
harder

But, that high barrier to entry means greater
opportunity for those who succeed.

bit.ly/seoloveleave
Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | @randfish | rand@moz.com