At the 2015 MnSearch Summit, Cyrus Shepard delivered a great presentation titled "Optimizing for Humans – How We Do SEO at Moz".

1. Optimizing for Humans
Cyrus Shepard

2. Actual
Moz
employees.
Most
are
harmless.

3. How we do SEO at Moz

4. What sorcery is this?
600%
Growth
in
5
years
•
Secrets?
•
Tricks?
•
Magic
Internet
Money?

5. The myth of
advanced SEO

6. Challenge:
Rank #1
“Best Restaurant
in St. Paul”

7. Easy!

8. Easy(?)

9. I’m a friggin’ SEO expert!

10. I write smarty-pants blog posts!

11. Let’s SEO the S%!T
out of this!

12. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant in St. Paul – Bob’s
Seafood</title>

13. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant in St. Paul – Bob’s
Seafood</title>
Optimize TF-IDF

14. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant in St. Paul – Bob’s
Seafood</title>
Optimize TF-IDF
Synonyms & Variants

15. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant in St. Paul – Bob’s
Seafood</title>
Optimize TF-IDF
Synonyms & Variants
Page Segmentation

16. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant in St. Paul – Bob’s
Seafood</title>
Optimize TF-IDF
Synonyms & Variants
Page Segmentation
Semantic Distance

17. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant in St. Paul – Bob’s
Seafood</title>
Optimize TF-IDF
Synonyms & Variants
Page Segmentation
Semantic Distance
Page Segmentation
Co-occurrence Optimization

18. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant in St. Paul – Bob’s
Seafood</title>
Optimize TF-IDF
Synonyms & Variants
Page Segmentation
Semantic Distance
Page Segmentation
Co-occurrence Optimization
Entity Salience

19. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant in St. Paul – Bob’s
Seafood</title>
Optimize TF-IDF
Synonyms & Variants
Page Segmentation
Semantic Distance
Page Segmentation
Co-occurrence Optimization
Entity Salience
Anchor Text

20. +100 other things

21. this might just work…

22. Advanced SEO
got us to page 1

23. …but failed to
get us here

24. Nailed it!

25. The page that best matches user
intent often wins.

26. Us
Chasing the Algorithm

27. Us
Chasing the User

28. Us
Chasing the User

29. Us
The User as a
Ranking Signal

30. 7. Examples of Human
Optimized SEO

31. 1. Formatting:
Robot vs. Human

32. We still
write
like this

33. …but only 1 in 5 read every word
hBp://dejanseo.com.au/web-­‐content/

34. Whiteboard Fridays
once upon a time

35. We added
transcripts

36. What human
likes to
read this?

37. Added rich
formatting
• Headers
• Images
• Scanable

38. Engagement improved!

39. 2. Old and forgotten content

40. Big launch, but then…
declining traffic

41. Half-life of
content is
only a few
months

42. Half-life of
content is
only a few
months

44. 2005
2015
Constantly (re)Market
Your Best Content
hBps://moz.com/beginners-­‐guide-­‐to-­‐seo

45. Refresh every 1-2 years
2005
2015
hBps://moz.com/search-­‐ranking-­‐factors

46. Small,
regular
updates
add
up
to
big
results

47. 400% increase when we
updated an evergreen blog post
hBps://moz.com/blog/technical-­‐site-­‐audit-­‐for-­‐2015

48. 3. Failed:
Big Content Launches

49. You worked for 9 months on this, and
only earned 2 lousy links!
Big
Content!

50. What if I told you…
You could guarantee success by not
launching big content?

51. Launch in smaller chunks
Blog Posts • Reports • Graphics • Press Release • Whitepapers

52. Each section is deep-linked
301
301
301
301
Combine successful smaller pieces into
canonical resource

53. 4. The limits
keyword
research

54. Limited keyword data
only captures a fraction
of your traffic

55. One page
Many answers
Keywords the robots
told us about
How humans are
unpredictably
searching!

56. SEO Success:
Provide users with satisfying
answers to questions they haven’t
asked yet.

57. “questions they haven’t
asked yet?”
Huh?

58. Questions
hBp://www.internetlivestats.com/google-­‐search-­‐staRsRcs/

59. Users have multiple questions

60. One of Moz’s most
successful pages

61. Questions the
robots told us about
Questions our
humans haven’t
asked yet!

62. Primary
Topic
Related
Topic
Related
Topic
Related
Topic
Secondary
Related
Topics
Secondary
Related
Topics
Secondary
Related
Topics
hBp://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-­‐descripRon
Don’t forget
structure!

63. 5. SEO Tunnel Vision

64. The Link Builder’s Dilemma:
Us
Build Links
Build Eyeballs

65. The Link Builder’s Dilemma:
Us
Build Links
Build Eyeballs

66. more eyeballs!

67. RSS

68. Email Subscription

69. Newsletters

70. Social Media

71. Promoted
Social

72. Webinars

73. Personal
Networks

74. Content Discovery Networks
hBp://moz.com/blog/maximize-­‐roi-­‐via-­‐content-­‐distribuRon-­‐networks
• Taboola
• Outbrain
• Gravity
• Zemanta
• ZergNet
• Adblade
• More
here

75. 6. Doing things for “SEO” Sucks

76. % of Sites
HTTPS

77. August, 2014:
Google announces HTTPS as
a ranking signal

78. HTTPS
hBps://moz.com/blog/the-­‐colossus-­‐update-­‐waking-­‐the-­‐giant

79. Ranking Signal?
~0.04 Correlation
Could be the “tie-breaker” Google claims

80. HTTPS “Penalty”?

81. Browser Warnings
hBps://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-­‐security/marking-­‐hBp-­‐as-­‐non-­‐secure

82. Here’s what sucks:
Loss of referral data
HTTPS doesn’t pass referral data
to non-secure sites

83. Web spammers know it:
Lots
of
spam
in
the
hope
of
scoring
links
+
traffic

84. <meta name="referrer" content="origin" />
hBp://w3c.github.io/webappsec/specs/referrer-­‐policy/
To the rescue!
Meta Referrer Tag

85. To the rescue!
Meta Referrer Tag
<meta name="referrer" content="origin" />
hBp://w3c.github.io/webappsec/specs/referrer-­‐policy/

86. Meta Referrer Tag
hBp://w3c.github.io/webappsec/specs/referrer-­‐policy/
Value can be:
• no-referrer
• no-referrer-when-downgrade
• origin
• origin-when-cross-origin
• unsafe-url

87. Meta Referrer Tag
<meta name="referrer" content="origin" />
hBp://w3c.github.io/webappsec/specs/referrer-­‐policy/

88. 7. The Future of SEO

89. We asked
200+ top SEOs:
”What ranking factors will
change the most in Google’s
algorithm over the next 12
months?”

90. # 3
Usage data (CTR, dwell time, etc.)
hBp://moz.com/blog/seo-­‐saRsfacRon

91. # 2
Analysis of a site/page's
perceived value to users

92. Perceived
Value
• Design
• Navigation
• Site Speed
• Trust
• Authority
• Accuracy

93. # 1…

94. # 1
Mobile friendliness – 91.2%

95. Trust us, we’re experts!