A short adapted presentation that was presented at the Gift and Lifestyle affair in 2017. The presentation and works are based off of a presentation provided by a colleague.

1. HOWTO SEO LIKE A
PRO
Making sense of and kicking ass in search engines

2. How search engines work
(A simplified overview)
• Your website is crawled and a snapshot is
taken of how it appears at that time
(caching)
• This cached version is what the algorithm
evaluates to give your site a score for both
strength and relevance
• Search results are then ordered from
highest score to lowest

3. What search engines want to see
• What users are looking for!
• In the perfect world, users to be able to
blindly click the top search result and
find exactly what they’re looking for,
fast.

4. Do your keyword research
Use Google Keyword Planner

5. Know your audience
Get to know your audience very well
• Who are they?
• What voice really speaks to them effectively?
• What are their typical browsing habits?

6. Always keep your user in mind
• Focus on the user
• In terms of browsing habits, we are all entirely
self-centred. Always keep this in mind when
writing content or designing the layout of your
website.
• Users are searching for something and the
history of your business is rarely that something!

7. Create content for the user
Examples:
“Dale’s Car Hire started in 2001 with just 3 cars in a tiny office in Archerfield.
Since then we’ve helped many happy customers and have grown to a fleet of
more than 30 vehicles.”
“Make your next car hire experience a positive one with our price beat
guarantee, 24/7 pickup and drop-off service and free GPS.Travel your way
with Dale’s Car Hire.”

8. Your website should problem solve
• Consider user intent.
• Users who find your website in search results are
searching for a solution to their problem.This
“problem” could be anything from needing how-
to guidance to “needing” that new set of earrings.

9. Create outstanding content
• Provide a good volume of quality content
• Content gives search engines a greater
opportunity to “understand” what your
website is about
• Answers more of the users’ questions, keeping
them on your website longer for the right
reasons

10. Results from adding quality content
The Result of Quality Content:
Added content that spoke to the customer

11. Results from adding fresh content
The Result of Good, Fresh Content:
Added good, fresh content

12. Your site should be a good experience
Build a great user experience.
Your website should:
• Load fast
• Be intuitive; simple and effective navigation
• Be easy to read
• Be efficient and error free

13. The Impact of Site Speed
“If an e-commerce site is making
$100,000 per day, a 1 second page
delay could potentially cost you $2.5
million in lost sales every year.”
That equates to a cost of $25,000 per year for
every $1,000 per day made!
Source: kissmetrics.com

14. Basic principles to achieve this
Build a great user experience.
Your website should:
• Provide genuine, unique value
• Make the path from finding your site to
goal completion as simple as possible

15. Offsite SEO – Improving your backlink profile
• A backlink is a hyperlink that points from one website to another
• Your “backlink profile” is the list of these links that point to your site
• Search engines view a backlink as a kind of vote for your website; the more
people that are willing to link to your site, the stronger it is perceived to be
• Quality and relevance of these linking sites say so much about yours

16. Offsite SEO – Improving your backlink profile

17. The true aim of an SEO campaign
• The ultimate goal of a powerful
SEO campaign is not just
improving rankings
• It’s to increase the amount of
revenue your website generates

18. The true aim of an SEO campaign
This is done by:
• Increasing rankings
• Increasing traffic
• Monitoring this traffic and how they interact with your website
• Improving your user experience and value to increase conversions
• Growing your referral traffic with a strong link profile

19. Black hat SEO
• Search engine algorithms aren’t perfect and
some weaknesses can be exploited
• Rather than building a great website, black
hat SEO is only interested in rankings and
achieves them by “gaming” the algorithms
• It does work… but it’s a risk
• A black hat campaign is only interested in
rankings

20. General warnings & advice
Common misconceptions:
“My competitors are doing xyz and rank well
so I should just copy them”
The goal is not to match your competition, you want to be the
stronger choice.

21. General warnings & advice
Common misconceptions:
“I need to put keywords and locations
everywhere so search engines know what I
do”
If you have a good volume of content, you’ll naturally mention
your keyword(s) and synonyms enough; don’t force it!

22. GeneralWarnings & Advice
Advice directly from Google:
• Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or
agencies that send you email out of the blue
• No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
• Be careful if a company is secretive or won't
clearly explain what they intend to do.
• You should never have to link to an SEO.
Source: support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291

23. SEO requires a lot of work and it takes time!