The document provides 30 SEO tips emphasizing the importance of collaboration across teams, user-friendly site navigation, and effective content strategies. It highlights the need for technical site integrity, proper use of schema markup, and maintaining a strong online presence while avoiding outdated practices like purchasing links. Additionally, it suggests leveraging customer insights and analytics to drive content development and organizational learning.

2. 30 SEO TIPS
& TRICKS
Stephan Bajaio
VP Professional
Services, Co-Founder
Holland Dauterive
Director,
Professional Services
Patrick Reinhart
VP, Digital Strategies
Katie Greenwood
On Demand Search
Services

3. SEO Is A Culture Not A Tactic
SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum, you need other to work with you:
• Care about other teams KPIs and map your work to them
• Create success case studies and evangelize them from execs down
• Don’t try to teach everyone SEO, try to teach specific teams how
SEO can help them
• Project managers are often an overlooked group to help
ensure you are included in the right conversations
@stephanbajaio#C3NY |

4. Good writing is good SEO
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• Stop keyword stuffing & worrying about keyword density
• The target keyword should fit naturally into the content
• Balance marketing-speak with actual informative content

5. Chill Out On Voice Search!
You can’t prove you’re winning in something that isn’t
measurable (don’t you dare talk to me about your Alexa
skill).
It’s good to be aware of what voice search is and may
become, but chances are you have many other projects you
should be paying attention to (that you can prove had an
impact).
@askreinhart#C3NY |

6. Your Customer Journey Doesn’t End
At Acquisition.
• Care about customer LTV and focus on FAQ pages (not one
longform page)
• Mine branded question based search terms with MSV
• Mine Google People Also Ask results
• Mine Searchlight Explorer feature for question related terms
• Mine your Call Center logs for problem plaguing your
customers
@stephanbajaio#C3NY |

7. Site navigation is for users…
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…so stop using your internal nomenclature & company structure
as a guide
• Search data should inform navigation naming conventions
• UX should inform the cohesive site structure

8. It’s Not The Size Of The Boat, It’s The
Motion In The…Index
Check to see how many pages you have in Google’s index,
you might (probably) have bloat.
We had a client that went from 42MM pages down to the
~13k which generated 3x more traffic and 2x more revenue.
Bigger is not always better.
@askreinhart#C3NY |

9. ADA Compliance Matters
• Create descriptive Alt image tags
• Transcribe videos
• Caption Images
• Descriptive Link anchor text
• Propper uses of Header tags (H1, H2)
@stephanbajaio#C3NY |

10. Looking For More Content Ideas?
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• The content your affiliates are creating
• Content being created by your influencers
• The questions coming through your customer service
chats/tickets

11. Fix Your Damn Site
Having a strong technical foundation has become more
and more important over the last few years, so fix your
broken site.
Google experiences your site as your users do because it’s
a creepy algo-humanoid now, so make sure it works.
@askreinhart#C3NY |

12. You’ll Always Overlook The Little Stuff
Which Can Cause Big Problems… So Don’t
Check these things periodically using site operators:
• URL Camel casing is a thing so don’t do it
• Secure vs non secure pages (http: vs https:)
• www. vs non www versions of the site
• / vs non /
• Robot.txt (can be the nuclear button so be careful)
@stephanbajaio#C3NY |

13. Audit Hreflang Tags Monthly
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• Are they pointing to 404s?
• Are they creating new (potentially blank) pages?
• Are you missing language/location instances?
• Are they pointing to the correct ISO codes?

14. Rel Prev & Rel Next Isn't A Thing
Anymore, Sad. Look Forward, Not Back.
John Mueller casually dropped a couple of months ago that
Google hasn’t used rel=prev & rel=next tags in indexing for
years. YEARS!
While annoying, you don’t have to go and undo all of the
work you already did for these. Other search engines still
use them, and they aren’t going to hurt anyone.
@askreinhart#C3NY |

15. The answers are hiding in your site
search box:
• Shows where your site navigation is failing users (your search
box absolves all navigational sins)
• Helps you understand post acquisition demand stripping out
branded searches (confirm these using external MSV)
• Informs you what queries are serving no results which can
point out content gaps
@stephanbajaio#C3NY |

16. Secure Your On-site Search Pages
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Site search still offers a way for outside parties to create (and
externally link to) spammy pages on your site
Indexed spam search pages can severely impact rankings,
especially if the creation of these pages goes unchecked
Make sure on- site search pages have noindex tags on them

17. Control Your Facets & Parameters
Facets can be very good from a UX & navigational
standpoint, but also a nightmare for indexation.
Use your robots.txt file to block unnecessary facets and
parametered pages, Google doesn’t need to see
everything.
@askreinhart#C3NY |

18. What About The Speed Of Your
Execution?
• Measure the speed of your content execution from ideation to
publish
• How does it vary? Net new vs current updates?
• Who are the players involved? Do they have KPIs tied to this?
• Is your technology (CMS limitations) holding you back
• Be maniacal about measuring, reporting and shortening the
speed of content going live
@stephanbajaio#C3NY |

19. Search Operators Are Still Useful
For Finding Weird Indexing Issues
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My two favorites:
• Site:
• inurl:
When combined they unleash the ability show you what’s
indexed vs. what you assume is (or is not ) indexed

20. Wondering If Your Site’s UX Sucks?
Ask A Third Party!
If you’ve been wondering about your sites UX and need a
second opinion, ask an unbiased third party (a.k.a. someone
who doesn’t work in digital marketing) what they think.
They will give you the best feedback because they are the
perfect example of your users.
I always call my mom.
@askreinhart#C3NY |

21. Image Compression Is Hiding An
Opportunity
• If you are going to compress your image files for site speed, take a
few more seconds to rename them keyword relevant names
• Extra Credit: Add suggested Alt Tag names for whenever they are
used
@stephanbajaio#C3NY |

22. Fix Your Schema
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Google treats schema as an all or nothing proposition – if there
are errors in one kind of markup, Google will ignore all your
markup
• Use only what you need
• Use Search Console and/or the Google Schema Markup
Testing Tool to diagnose errors and penalties

23. Stop Buying Links
Just stop it, it’s 2019.
Make some friends with similar sites, publications, and
influencers in your space already and build links naturally
(it’s actually a lot easier than you think).
Just stop.
@askreinhart#C3NY |

24. .PDFs Have No Place In This Dojo
They are a terrible user experience (They kill puppies):
• They don’t have analytics tracking on them so you won’t know
how users engage with them (think time on page)
• They lack navigation, so users can’t continue to engage with your
site (they are a dead end)
• They are a B2B goal metric not tracked properly
(better as HTML with a download button we can measure)
@stephanbajaio#C3NY |

25. Find The People Who Know Where
Your Log Files Live
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The most difficult part of log file analysis is finding the log files
Once you have them, make sure you can get updated files
daily and then throw them into a visualization tool (I
recommend Screaming Frog’s Log File Analyzer)

26. Stop Competing With Yourself
Content cannibalization is one of the most common
issues we come across when we analyze sites.
SEO is hard enough, so make sure you are checking your
site at least quarterly for multiple pages that are ranking
for the same keyword set.
@askreinhart#C3NY |

27. Earning Statements Hold Valuable Data
• Read your company’s (if Public) and or your competitor’s
earning statements for clues as to where to build content next
that will matter to your C Suite
• Create reports around these topics and terms to enlighten
execs as to opportunities or risks
@stephanbajaio#C3NY |

28. Migrating? Use This Time To Clean
Up Your Site
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• 301 redirects & redirect chains
• Content audit
• Missing metadata

29. Share Your Wins…And Losses
Always be confident enough to share you wins around
your organization, but don’t be afraid to share your losses
as well.
Knowing what works is great, but knowing what doesn’t is
equally as powerful.
@askreinhart#C3NY |

30. The Source Of Ideation Isn’t Always
The Source Of Measurement
• SEO can help you find content gaps, confirm demand, and
intent of users but the value of the content you build
shouldn’t be only measured via organic traffic
• Search helps define great content and great content should
be used by all channels
@stephanbajaio#C3NY |

31. Site speed work > AMP
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• AMP pages are very cool and impressive, but the
implementation is heavily dev dependent and time consuming
• A better option is to focus on addressing traditional site speed
issues, especially since not everyone searches on mobile

32. Try New Shit
Failed campaigns are usually the product of stagnation.
Try new things, learn new tactics, test things out. The
worst thing you can do is doing things the way they have
always been done.
@askreinhart#C3NY |

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