High Five Raleigh - Diminishing Returns - Knowing Where To Focus SEO Efforts When Resources are Limited
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When implementing SEO strategies within your organization, you are often faced with the challenge of knowing which strategies should be prioritized vs. those that are just “best practice”. This sessions is intended to help you identify high-impact focus areas for SEO, and help you to stop wasting resources on strategies that won’t make a difference. You should attend if you want help filtering the signal from the noise in modern SEO strategies.
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High Five Raleigh - Diminishing Returns - Knowing Where To Focus SEO Efforts When Resources are Limited
- 1. @jakebohall
- 2. @jakebohall DIMINISHING RETURNS KNOWING WHERE TO FOCUS SEO EFFORTS WHEN RESOURCES ARE LIMITED
- 3. VP, Marketing at Hive Digital Jake Bohall @jakebohall jbohall@hivedigital.com Jake is passionate about education reform and representing companies focused on providing opportunities for inspiring entrepreneurship, discovering life purpose, and improving quality of life. @jakebohall
- 4. Hive Digital, Inc. “Marketing a Better World” @jakebohall
- 5. The Hive Digital Vision To be a full service digital agency dedicated to serving companies working on creating a better world. @jakebohall
- 7. @jakebohall
- 8. @jakebohall
- 9. @jakebohall
- 10. Machines Aren’t StupidFasten Your Seatbelts @jakebohall
- 11. How to be Successful Luck = Preparation + Opportunity @jakebohall
- 12. Great Marketing … & SEO • Luck = Preparation + Opportunity • Rankings = (Relevance + Authority) + Intent @jakebohall
- 13. How Do Search Engines Work? Internet → Filtered by Relevance @jakebohall
- 14. How Do Search Engines Work? Internet → Filtered by Relevance Relevant → Sorted by Authority @jakebohall
- 15. How Do Search Engines Work? Internet → Filtered by Relevance Relevant → Sorted by Authority Polished & Personalized @jakebohall
- 16. How Do Search Engines Work? Internet → Filtered by Relevance Relevant → Sorted by Authority Polished & Personalized The Answer You’ve Been Looking For! @jakebohall
- 18. @jakebohall
- 19. Great Marketing … & SEO • Luck = Preparation + Opportunity • Rankings = (Relevance + Authority) + Intent @jakebohall
- 20. @jakebohall
- 22. @jakebohall
- 23. @jakebohall
- 24. @jakebohall
- 26. @jakebohall
- 27. Discover Opportunities Drive Improvement Stay Ahead ● HTTPS - Continue maintaining proper privacy / security for users ● Mobile 1st Indexing - Ultimately reflects focus for user 1st strategies. ● Control Sprawl - Be diligent to avoid creating unnecessary pages, infinite crawl spaces, etc. ● Internal Linking - Breadcrumbs (with markup!), help direct / focus visitors @jakebohall Crawler Experience
- 28. High Impact Items • Title Tags and Meta Descriptions • Canonical Tags (cross domain too!) • Best URL Structure (subfolders, hyphens, casing, etc.) • Sitemaps (indices, including representative images) • Responsive vs. subdomains (rel=alternate, canonicals!) • Search Quality Raters guidelines re: YMYL, Contact info • Page load times (compression, sprites, lazy-loading, cdn) • Breadcrumbs, hreflang tags, response headers, etc.. @jakebohall
- 29. Low Impact Items • Alt text on images • H1 tags, H2 tags, in order on the page • Image file names • Number of times keyword is on a page • Keyword anchor text on internal links • Underline/Bold/italics or other fanciness on keywords • Meta Keywords @jakebohall
- 30. Don’t be fooled... Best practices != Best use of time @jakebohall
- 31. Don’t be fooled... Best practices != Best use of time @jakebohall
- 32. @jakebohall
- 34. To succeed, you must …be the answer. @jakebohall
- 35. Schema Markup For all the things! @jakebohall
- 36. Keyword Research @jakebohall Discover Opportunities Drive Improvement Stay Ahead Can have great keyword coverage, but efforts always need to focus on trending terms and “Position 0”.
- 37. Keyword Research @jakebohall Discover Opportunities Drive Improvement Stay Ahead ●Identify terms generating answer box opportunities and our representative page. Prioritize content improvements to be best candidate for answer boxes. ●Perform keyword gap analysis with competitors to identify missed opportunities. ●ADWORDS => ROI TERMS
- 38. @jakebohall The Car-Buying Process: One Consumer's 900+ Digital Interactions
- 39. Content Creation should be done by expert contributors. Strategy should be organized in traditional content calendar. Discover Opportunities Drive Improvement Stay Ahead @jakebohall New Content Strategy
- 40. @jakebohall
- 41. Content needs to be inventoried to determine lifecycle, and ensure priority in crawl. Discover Opportunities Drive Improvement Stay Ahead @jakebohall Existing Content Strategy
- 43. Great Marketing … & SEO • Luck = Preparation + Opportunity • Rankings = (Relevance + Authority) + Intent @jakebohall
- 45. If Content is King, Links are Queen… (and she wears the pants!) … ☺ @jakebohall
- 46. Great Marketing … & SEO • Luck = Preparation + Opportunity • Rankings = (Relevance + Authority) + Intent @jakebohall
- 47. @jakebohall
- 49. Prominent Content Make sure site doesn’t distract from information in “Main Content”. Discover Opportunities Drive Improvement Stay Ahead @jakebohall
- 50. Give Intent Choices Bucket customers when you can! Discover Opportunities Drive Improvement Stay Ahead @jakebohall
- 51. Evaluate Query Intent Do you know what personas you are targeting… ? Does it match the persona of those performing search? Are you fresh? Do you have geo-indicators in content? Do they want an answer, list of ideas, product to buy? @jakebohall
- 52. @jakebohall
- 53. Implement and review data from user search to determine content focus and priority of delivery within the website. Discover Opportunities Drive Improvement Stay Ahead @jakebohall Content Engagement
- 54. <script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "http://schema.org", "@type": "WebSite", "url": "https://www.example.com/", "potentialAction": { "@type": "SearchAction", "target": "https://query.example.com/search?q={search_term_string}", "query-input": "required name=search_term_string" } } </script> @jakebohall
- 56. Great Marketing Takes Practice, Patience, and GENUINE Effort @jakebohall
- 58. How do I obtain SEO Success? ● You have an easily identifiable purpose and value. ● Your content addresses the needs of the users in a way that is easy for them to consume. ● You demonstrate authority in your field ● You make it easy for search engines to confirm all of the above @jakebohall
- 59. Priorities ● Ensure good crawler experience ● Optimize titles and descriptions ● Test keywords before optimizing ● Create engaging content with markup ● Share content with influencers @jakebohall
- 60. Image Credit: www.steve-dale.net/ Be Smart… Evolve @jakebohall
- 61. The Hive Digital Mission Hive Digital empowers globally responsible companies, organizations, and individuals by amplifying their message through innovative digital marketing. We use integrity, transparency and humility to promote a nurturing environment, which translates to growth for our clients and our company. We hope you’ll let us be a part of your change in the world. HiveDigital.com @HiveMarketing 800-650-0820
- 62. VP, Marketing at Hive Digital Jake Bohall @jakebohall jbohall@hivedigital.com Jake is passionate about education reform and representing companies focused on providing opportunities for inspiring entrepreneurship, discovering life purpose, and improving quality of life. @jakebohall
Editor's Notes
- Started doing online marketing when Myspace was a thing.. If you don’t know what Myspace is.. ... It was like a facebook where Tom, one of the cofounders was everybody’s friend It’s actually still a website, though I have no idea how. I love search marketing.
- Im VP of marketing and head SEO strategy at Hive Digital --- do technical audits, consulting, etc..
- I work daily to help clients leverage their products/services to do good in the world… Makes it easy to love my job
- My goal today is to help you do better at these 3 things with your SEO strategies
- Without wasting time being unproductive
- Or adding insult to injury. There is nothing worse than trying to fix something, only to find that you made a mistake. SEO is a long-term strategy, you should never make impulse decisions, especially if/when something goes wrong.
- No treadmills here.. No running in place… but moving forward like the monks that run so fast they appear to be flying.
- Okay, lets dive in Pay Attention, I’m going to move quick through some basics, then we’ll get to some specifics!
- Skipped getting an MBA and decided to read a bunch of business books. Common theme..
- Skipped getting an MBA and decided to read a bunch of business books. Common theme.. So… how do you rank?
- Simple black box…. At least in concept.. Enter a Query – Natural Language Processing Semantic Analysis Entity Extraction and Topic Modeling to filter entire internet by relevance
- What is relevant gets sorted by authority Citations Validators Brand Sentiment/Strength Social Trends Relational Authority
- Polished – Trending Topics, CTR data Personalized - Location, Search History,. Penalty Application – Removing spam, etc..
- To give you 10 blue links... Bunch of ads, shopping feeds, etc. Remember.. The goal is for the search engine to deliver the answer/result. They don’t care who you are... Focus is on the users. ... Some might say they want to get some ad revenue
- Sometimes that is one of the 10 blue links.. .... And a bunch of ads
- If we are going to talk about best use of time.. What do we control?
- We control relevance through content
- First priority for SEO should be titles, descriptions, and URLs. This is what shows up in Search, and is literally your FIRST IMPRESSION for visitors. I don’t normally pick on the host.. But this one was easy to see..
- We control relevance through content Adwords Ads - Use adwords ad copy as test for page meta descriptions.
- This tool lets you crawl your site and easily export a spreadsheet with all your titles and descriptions. You’ll get a lot of other cool things.
- Use the new search console and start troubleshooting the things they tell you that you are doing wrong
- What are the problems? Also stuff here I can ignore...
- Ryan Siddle with Merj built a plugin to give links in the new GSC… Sidenote, they have an awesome robots.txt monitoring tool As SEO, you should get a notice if robots.txt changes... And should have been expecting it!
- Set up Query Parameters in Search Console -- Get professional advice if you don’t know what something means.. The warning isn’t a joke. This controls how Google crawls the site..
- Test HTTPS -- All too often see redirects messed up here across www/non-www Leverage SiteMap Indices so you can see #pages indexed, errors, etc. in groups -- product categories -- content categories Etc.. great for monitoring for quick issues! If Screaming Frog is hanging up on you.. Then you probably have a sprawl/crawl issues.
- These two slides are really for you to read later when you download the deck.
- Last two actually have no known impact on rankings Google said it doesn’t use meta keywords Bing said it actually can count against you ... Whats Bing?
- None of those i’s are dotted.. But you get the message
- Just because something is a best practice doesn’t mean it should be done. Not suggesting you take shortcuts ...But evaluate your time/effort for maximum benefit... You run a tool like screaming frog, you’ll see a bunch of things that you may not need to worry about. Use your brain!
- Google is using theirs.. RankBrain to be specific.. SEOs seem to reference this to generalize Machine Learning within the algo. Goal: Better at interpreting natural language and query intent Long Term Impacts: Longer tail queries perpetuating a cycle of more natural query input Extracting query intent to deliver THE ANSWER
- Sometimes it’s an actual answer... Which makes “organic” even lower on the page.
- Sometimes that is one of the 10 blue links.. Position 0... Future of SEO is to be the answer the user is looking for... Voice assistants and AI..
- Json-LD makes life a lot easier… Bandaid (data highlighter in GSC), don’t forget Tag Manager Website, Company, location, business type, recipes, events, people, industry services -- travel/auto, etc.. If it can be an entity, it should get markup… Use structured data testing tool. You can test rendered versions here as well.
- “best practices” is keyword research... Hire If you are going to do keyword research SEMRush has the “keyword magic tool”.. Which lets you do keyword research and find those with instant answers and other features.
- Use a tool like SEMRush.. === Ranking 5-20 -- unbranded terms === Keywords competitors are focusing on -- Informational sites vs. commercial sites
- Don’t focus too much time on keyword research… Keywords and content creation should focus on buyer journey, talk to your sales team. Questions they get from customers should mimic new content you are creating.
- New content ideas -- Monitor competitor twitter accounts, newsletters, etc. -- If you have similar, promote it.. Of not, create it and piggyback -- don’t waste tiem building content for each keyword -- MarketMuse, Moz, SemRush, all launching tools to help with topic clustering for cornerstone
- Content Delivery Mix content types for likelihood of being included in featured snippets, images, etc. End of the day, people consume data in different ways.. You should deliver it in a variety of ways as well. Video/Images/Text/etc.. Improve your chances of answer boxes! Price/comparison – Get a chart How & How to – Get a list Why – Noun is X … clearly defined on the page
- Inventory content so you can consolidate overlaps, diary so you can revisit/refresh --- every page should have an expiration date – create an actual calendar and schedule your content for review when it is created. Update internal links from that page when you revisit!
- Time, everyone with me? Lets talk about high impact vs. “low impact”
- Authority is more of an offsite ranking factor that we aren’t supposed to control Manipulating this is against Google’s guidelines.. Not illegal, but comes with risks. Don’t!! Go out and buy links on Fiver or answer the emails from Indian SEO firms…
- It’s not just Rank Brain Future is all things algo based on Machine learning … Most spam, low quality, etc.. when Obvious to Us… really obvious to them Closer to machines being able to understand, predict, and even mimic human behaviours
- Sustainable link strategies are consistent outreach to promote your content. Fix your redirects or visit sites with old broken links and get them fixed If you acquired any companies, go back and audit their backlinks for updates Give something away. Include charts/data/etc.. And you will attract more links. Local businesses can you brightlocal or similar platforms..
- We don’t control intent.. But we can help with the outcome This is a “user query” Technically, you can optimize for multiple intents to improve likelihood of ranking
- How many of you have landed on a page from search and been confused? What do you do? Less than ½ of a second people make a decision to stay on the page or leave
- Once you get the user to your site, you have to actually be helpful. Otherwise they leave, and what was the point? Sends a bad signal with regard to site quality..
- Easily discernable from the random menus, ads, unrelated products, etc. Our title and description sell the click, but you have deliver on that user intent! It can be “boring” but read the search quality raters guidelines...
- Delivering on intent, means all the variations of intent when possible This not only helps with the users, but makes you better candidate for generalized queries Bucket / Disambiguate … bush Band, President, Shrub, Beer Misspelling, Creepy Adult Pics
- Generate your content along the buyer’s journey.
- How is your content used to benefit your purpose and meet the intent of users.. Write for context that matches intent.… This is how you deliver on user experience
- Engagement comes from understanding intent.. SiteLink Search Box.. Immediate satisfaction and data collection opportunity.
- Site-links search box… -- lately noticed on a few sites that didn’t “start” until https, correlation? -- helps users get where they need to go -- make sure you track search in analytics ---- make improvements parse intent, build better pages … build “popular” links from homepage!... second page poaching opp
- You are competing with at least thousands of other businesses… and you can’t fake it anymore. How do sites build real content or get real links? They worked really hard, and had some LUCK. If resources are limited, you have to focus on these high priority items, or you’ll never make it..
- We can easily exhaust ourselves focusing on all the aspects of SEO… I had a trainer… obviously not any time recently… but he would tell me.. If you aren’t “out of breath”, you aren’t working hard enough. You can’t half do things.. Not just talking about trying really hard.. Make sure that for the things we covered today, you go 110%.. And you’ll be fine
- In summary..
- In summary..
- Everyday 78% of search results have some rankings change -- Moz Everything is constantly changing, Competitors.. Algorithm.. BUT If you focus on what I’ve told you, you should be able to weather the storms.
- If we don’t get to your question, or if you want a copy of the deck.. Send me an email or a tweet.