Judith Lewis - SEO is Dead Again? It will never die.

SEO is Dead Again? It Will Never Die!

➡ Run DeCabbit Consultancy doing SEO, PPC, Social Media
and integrated marketing campaigns
➡ Online since 1985, online marketing since 1996
➡ Have worked with Amadeus, Brown-Forman, UPS, Qubit,
GalaCoral, Google, Vapemate, NatWest/RBS, Fidelity, NBC
Universal, Readers Digest, Bayer, AMD, AmEx, TotalJobs,
Virgin.com, Zopa, NSPCC, GE & more
➡ Contact me: decabbit@gmail.com
AM I
Who Obligatory slide !
Judith Lewis
@JudithLewis & @Decabbit

What matters, what doesn’t,
what works and what doesn’t

What Doesn’t Matter
Neil Patel & Yoast
Keyword Density
Bounce rate
Social media links for pure SEO
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Traffic light
systems and
isolating single
(often old) tactics
do not work for
SEO – it must be
holistic

Keyword
density is not a
ranking factor

Bounce Rate is
*NOT* a ranking
metric

Google does not
value social links

Why Latent Semantic Indexing Doesn’t
Matter

Not Everything Continues
Working Once Implemented

Stuff That No Longer Works
Noindex in Robots.txt
Authorship
Pagination
Exact match domain names
Single page, single keyword
Cheap links/link packages
Guest blogging for the link

Noindex in Robots.txt
Noindex in
Robots.txt is
dead

Authorship
Authorship is
dead and
buried

Pagination
Pagination was
murdered in secret

Exact Match domain names died long ago

Single page,
single keyword
targeting is dead

Single page,
single keyword
targeting is dead
In fact, over-
optimisation
is a thing

Cheap links/link packages
Cheap, low
quality link
building is so
dead, it’s stone

Guest blogging for the link
Guest blogging
for the link - dead

15/08/2019DeCabbit Presentation
So what does matter?

What Matters
User satisfaction
E-A-T
Quality outreach content
Featured Snippet
Local
Speed
Technical Debt & Crawl
410 over 404
Brand
Links

Google is always testing new ways of ranking
Incorporating Clicks, Attention and Satisfaction into a
Search Engine Result Page Evaluation Model
a model of user behaviour that combines clicks,
attractiveness and satisfaction in a joint model
the model can be used as a robust predictor of user
satisfaction without sacrificing its ability to predict clicks
decoupling satisfaction from attention and clicks leads to
inferior satisfaction prediction
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/45562.pdf

Check User Satisfaction Everywhere
Use Google Search Console to identify high impression,
low CTR keywords
Use analytics to identify conversion pages with no
conversions – check paths to and from that page
Identify and map user personas to site pages and identify
dead pages. Delete or repurpose depending on links and
traffic (if they have lots of links and traffic but don’t
match a user map, something is very wrong)

E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness)
“The quality and amount of main content, website information, and website
reputation all inform the E-A-T of a website.”
Is the author here an Expert* of what he is talking about? (Meaning the topic of
the query)
Is the web page Authoritative*? Have you done or written anything that is cited or
linked to by any other sites?
Can you Trust* it?
“Extensive reputation research is important when giving Highest ratings, and is
evidence of the E-A-T of the page. Very positive reputation is often based on
prestigious awards or recommendations from known experts or professional societies
on the topic of the page.“ - Google

Expertise
Experts can exist in any field (gossip, humour, fashion, etc.)
Experts can contribute to user-generated content too (Q&A
sites may have expert users participating)
An expert should have an expertise on the topic of the query.
There are no general experts. It’s important that expertise is
relevant.
Experts should not necessarily have recognized / formal
expertise (education). Some people share very in-depth and
detailed reviews: They can be considered experts for sharing
their “everyday expertise”. Sharing personal experience with a
disease is a form of everyday expertise

Authoritativeness
Very positive reputation is often based on prestigious awards or
recommendations from known experts or professional societies on
the topic of the website. In some industries (recipes, gossip,
humour, etc.) it’s ok to have a less formal reputation.
For topics which need less formal expertise, websites can be
considered to have a positive reputation if they are highly popular
and well-loved for their topic.
Quality raters are encouraged to use reputation research to find out
what real users, as well as experts, think about a website. They will
look for reviews, references, recommendations by experts, news
articles, and other credible information created/written by
individuals about the website.

Trustworthiness
On-page trust signals may include prominent “About”
page, extensive contact information, well-written privacy
policies.
These signals are more important for financial and
shopping sites but it doesn’t hurt to add these to any site
anyway.
A good signal of trust for informational pages is the
presence of good references (links to sources) supporting
statements in the main content.

Quality Outreach Content
Quality
outreach
content

Spy on the
competitions
ideas

Create a reason to
link - not empty
content

The research in to the kind of content Google seems to reward with a featured snippet was performed by
A.J. Ghergich and SEMRush looking at 80 million keywords. Each type of search that resulted in a
featured snippet was then analysed to see what kind of content was served, how Google was selecting
the winner (did they always have to be in position 1? The answer was no), and what would it take to be
included. SEMRush’s recent research has shed some light in to what in 2019 it takes to own the featured
snippet result. The following types of queries map to certain featured snippets results:
https://www.semrush.com/blog/large-scale-study-how-to-rank-for-featured-snippets-in-2018/

In order to understand what kinds of tables, lists and paragraphs were being used in the
featured snippets, AJ Ghergich further analysed the size/type of each featured snippet
they analysed.
The most important kind of featured snippet for optimisation is the paragraph format as
this is also used in People Also Ask. This should be structured as much as possible to
indicate the question being answered in or near the paragraph which is desired to be
featured.

For results where lists are the more appropriate result, having bullet points is important but
not always necessary.

Desktop Moves to Mobile First Index Instead

Google’s 1 Second Load Time Target
(Mobile)

Test Your Speed
GTMetrix.com
Chrome Audit Tool
Google PageSpeed Tool -
developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Consider making 404 pages 410

Be a
brand

Old Stuff That Works

Old Stuff That Works Again
HTML Sitemaps
Hyper specificity in landing pages
Local SEO
Optimised title tags
Links

HTML Sitemaps
HTML Sitemaps –
help the people,
help the crawler

Hyper Specificity in Landing Pages

Local Optimisation Matters
Use “&near=cityname” after search to restrict your
results
Utilise original local content for your locations
Update your Google My Business pages
For link building, perform research and outreach
based on a local focus
Focus on link acquisition from local papers, chambers
of commerce, and local sites

Optimised title tags

Content Hacks

Content Hacks
Don’t delete old content – repurpose
Unless it’s 11k of useless content that adds nothing but just eats up crawl
budget… then delete away
Check what a page ranks for and tweak
Don’t delete old content that ranks (but badly) – identify what the best
thing for that page to rank for is and optimise
Be the answer to begin with
It’s not just position 0 but also “People Also Ask”, sharable content and E-A-T
Make sure to use Copyscape
Check for content theft and duplicate content
Use copywriters strategically
Don’t create content for content’s sake

Repurpose
good!
Delete bad!

Make ranking
content work
through targeted
optimisation

Be the
answer

Use Copyscape
to find duplicate
content

Use
copywriters
strategically

10 Tips for Content Success
Understand your audience
Think big (data)
Map your sales cycle (or use an editorial calendar)
Write powerful/engaging titles
Evergreen content rewards in constant traffic
Focus on emotional, controversial, or useful original content
Simplicity and clarity in articles wins readers
Socially promote all content (don’t expect it to work alone)
Measure results

Link Building

Don’t build links without reading
the patents and understanding
how they work

“One embodiment of the present invention provides a system
that ranks pages on the web based on distances between the
pages, wherein the pages are interconnected with links to
form a link-graph. More specifically, a set of high-quality seed
pages are chosen as references for ranking the pages in the
link-graph, and shortest distances from the set of seed pages
to each given page in the link-graph are computed. Each of
the shortest distances is obtained by summing lengths of a
set of links which follows the shortest path from a seed page
to a given page, wherein the length of a given link is assigned
to the link based on properties of the link and properties of the
page attached to the link. The computed shortest distances
are then used to determine the ranking scores of the
associated pages.”
https://patents.google.com/patent/US9165040B1/en
How Links Work

It’s thought that according to
Google’s Reasonable Surfer patent
that links higher up in the document
may transfer more ‘PageRank’ than
those lower down. Same goes for
links in the sidebar vs. links in the
main content. This means the
position and likelihood of the link
getting a click now play more of a
role in link valuation.
https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-pagerank/

SeoByTheSea.com

Ideas for links
need to be
innovative

Link Building Tips
Reclaim dead links
Check 4xx and 3xx links
Do unique research and combine paid outreach with
organic
Exposure is worth as much as links – journos first but the pitch
has to be worthy
Find sites that have already covered something similar
Piggyback on other events
Use DaysoftheYear.com and plan ahead

SEMRush/Majestic & Screaming Frog

Content Designed to Attract Links
White papers
Expert research papers
Newsjacking
Lists
Interviews/Egobait
Surveys

Find Sites that Covered Infographics
Through “Search Google For Image”

DaysOfTheYear.com

Ask Me More Online
Twitter: @JudithLewis
Email decabbit@gmail.com
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/judithlewis
Web: http://www.decabbit.com
Blog: http://www.ThisFoodieTravels.com
SEO Blog: http://www.SEO-Chicks.com
HuffPost: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/judith-lewis

Judith Lewis - SEO is Dead Again? It will never die.

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