Presentation given by Cyrus Shepard, director of audience development at Moz, as part of Full Stack Marketing at the Turing Festival, 21 August 2015.

1. Optimizing for Humans:
Value-Added SEO
Cyrus Shepard | @cyrusshepard

2. @cyrusshepard

3. What SEO sorcery is this?
600%
Growth
in
5
years

4. The
myth of
advanced
SEO

5. What’s an amazing
restaurant in
Edinburgh?

6. Challenge:
Rank #1 for
“Amazing
Restaurant in
Edinburgh”

7. Easy!

8. (right?)

9. I’m an SEO
EXPERT!

10. I write smarty-
pants blog
posts!

11. I read Google
patents for
fun!

12. Let’s apply
Advanced
SEO

13. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant – The Elephant House in
Edinburgh Scotland</title>

14. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant – The Elephant House in
Edinburgh Scotland</title>
Optimize TF-IDF

15. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant – The Elephant House in
Edinburgh Scotland</title>
Optimize TF-IDF
Synonyms & Variants

16. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant – The Elephant House in
Edinburgh Scotland</title>
Optimize TF-IDF
Synonyms & Variants
Page Segmentation

17. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant – The Elephant House in
Edinburgh Scotland</title>
Optimize TF-IDF
Synonyms & Variants
Page Segmentation
Semantic Distance

18. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant – The Elephant House in
Edinburgh Scotland</title>
Optimize TF-IDF
Synonyms & Variants
Page Segmentation
Semantic Distance
Co-occurrence Optimization

19. Optimized Title Tag
<title>Best Restaurant – The Elephant House in
Edinburgh Scotland</title>
Optimize TF-IDF
Synonyms & Variants
Page Segmentation
Semantic Distance
Co-occurrence Optimization
Entity Salience

20. This just might work…

21. Advanced
SEO got us to
page 1

22. But failed to
get us to #1

23. We forgot
user inputs

24. Content for Engines L
Credit
to:
Ma:hew
J
Brown

25. Two Optimization Strategies
Engines Users

26. One Unified Algorithm
New Paradigm:
The Rise of
User Inputs

27. h:ps://moz.com/search-­‐ranking-­‐factors/
The Future of SEO

28. The Future of SEO
h:ps://moz.com/search-­‐ranking-­‐factors/

29. User-based
features
Traditional
SEO features
h:ps://moz.com/search-­‐ranking-­‐factors/

30. Human-Optimized SEO:
5 Strategies
1
2 3 4 5

31. 1. The User Chooses You

32. Modifying
search result
ranking based
on user
feedback
h:p://www.seobythesea.com/2015/07/google-­‐click-­‐through-­‐feedback-­‐search-­‐results/

33. Rand’s
Experiment
h:ps://seomoz.box.com/shared/staNc/8fg6ete8oemwcw8im6ljeczt55axr5kl.pdf

34. Moved to #1
after ~500
interactions
(before falling back)
h:ps://seomoz.box.com/shared/staNc/8fg6ete8oemwcw8im6ljeczt55axr5kl.pdf

35. Art of click nudging
Title
Keywords
DescripNon
Brand
Rich
Snippets
URL

36. Hacking with Google Search Console

37. The user chooses you
again and again

38. 2. Task Completion

39. This
looks
cool,
but
what
about
other
restaurants?
Getting the click may
not be enough, if the
user doesn’t
complete the task

40. Ah,
I
can
complete
my
task
right
here!
• All
restaurants
ranked
• Reviews
• Maps
• Menus
• Prices
• ReservaNons

41. ≠ Pogo Sticking
h:p://moz.com/blog/seo-­‐saNsfacNon

42. No need to
go anywhere
else!
I
love
your
website
–
it’s
so
fast
and
a:racNve!
Engagement!
Aaron
&
Holly,
Engaged

43. Assisting elements
of task completion
• Design
• UX
• Navigation
• Site Speed
• Searchability
• Information
Architecture

44. 3. Answer questions
users haven’t asked yet

45. Lots of questions.
Many searches.

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

47. One page
Many answers
Long
tail
is
very
hard
to
predict
in
advance

48. Feature of Successful Sites
h:p://mozcast.com/metrics

49. Supplemental Content
h:p://www.scribd.com/doc/217994742/General-­‐Guidelines-­‐1
From
Google’s
Leaked
Quality
RaNng
Guidelines

50. Supplemental Content
YouTube
is
90%
Supplemental
Content
• Related
ArNcles
• Links
• NavigaNon
Aids
• Tools
• Resources

51. h:p://www.slideshare.net/hustwj/cikm-­‐keynotenov2014
Deep
learning
algorithms
aim
to
measure+predict
related
concepts,
and
rank
accordingly.
Ranking
Advantages

52. 4. Human Formatting

53. We still
publish
content
like this

54. …and 80% never read all of it.
h:p://dejanseo.com.au/web-­‐content/
Reasons
why
people
leave
content

55. Whiteboard
Fridays
Circa
2010
Video
Only:
Good
for
Humans
Poor
for
Robots

56. We added
transcripts
Search
engines
love
me!

57. What human
wants to
read this?!?!
Nope!

58. Added rich
formatting
• Headers
• Images
• Scanable

59. Holy Engagement Batman!

60. 5. Buy Links

61. 5. Buy Links

62. 5. Buy Eyeballs

63. The “free” channels
Moz’s
most
reproduced
graphic

64. Awe$ome People
We
spend
far
more
on
Community
+
Social
Media
than
Content/SEO

65. Paid
$ocial

66. Hire Awe$ome
PR People
Fabulous!

67. Event$

68. Content Di$covery Networks
h:p://moz.com/blog/maximize-­‐roi-­‐via-­‐content-­‐distribuNon-­‐networks
• Taboola
• Outbrain
• Gravity
• Zemanta
• ZergNet
• Adblade
• More
here

69. @cyrusshepard