The slides from the talk I gave at Origin Workspace, Bristol on 13th Feb 2020

1. SEO for Beginners
With Jon Payne
Bristolmedia.co.uk @Bristol_Media

3. ORIGIN WORKSPACE
THE POWER OF
COMMUNITY
COWORKING + OFFICE SPACE
EVENTS + NETWORKING
STARTUP SUPPORT
MEETING + EVENT SPACE

6. LIKE TO KNOW MORE?
GET IN TOUCH
Caroline Hamilton
BUSINESS MANAGER
Gemma Menear
MARKETING + EVENTS MANAGER
Rob Hingston
MANAGING DIRECTOR

7. LIKE TO KNOW MORE?
GET IN TOUCH
VISIT OUR WEBSITE
ORIGINWORKSPACE.CO.UK
OR CALL
0117 4400400

8. Bristol Media
February 2020 | SEOTraining

9. 2
1
3
4
5
6
Technical SEO
On Site SEO
Off Site SEO
Local SEO
Intro
How Google Works

10. 2
1
3
4
5
6
Technical SEO
On Site SEO
Off Site SEO
Local SEO
Intro
How Google Works

13. @MrJonPayne

14. @MrJonPayne

19. Reporting quick wins
Google Analytics installed and set up
• Filter office visits
• Goals set up
• Filter spammers
Webmaster Tools verified and set up
• Geographic targets set up
• Sitemaps submitted
• Crawl errors and warnings heeded

20. Reporting quick wins
Google Analytics installed and set up
• Filter office visits
• Goals set up
• Filter spammers
Webmaster Tools verified and set up
• Geographic targets set up
• Sitemaps submitted
• Crawl errors and warnings heeded
https://www.noisylittlemonkey.com/blog/topic/analytics
https://support.google.com/analytics/?hl=en#topic=3544906

21. Where we were
ish
How Google Works

22. Search Engines

24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eKVizvYSUQ

25. Google no longer looks like this

26. This means that
• Context is everything
• Your boss Googling things from his desk doesn’t prove anything.
• There is no such thing as #1
• Even if you were “#1” you may conceivably be at the bottom of the page

27. Google wants to serve the best result for the query
• Has this resource tried really really hard to optimise their site?
• The most informative, best resource on a topic might be written by a wheezy old
professor who isn’t a great web developer…
• Think about the implications of that – in their perfect world, poorly optimised
websites that are genuinely the correct result should be able to rank in spite of
ignorance of SEO.

28. How do they do this without human bottlenecks?
• Use of proxy metrics; for example: computers can’t discern whether a brand is a “household
name” directly, but the number of citations from external sources might be a strongly
correlated metric
• Machine learning / deep learning / neural network decision making

29. What does this mean for you?
• Through SEO best practices, you will be able to ensure that your website is ‘optimal’
for performance in search engines.
• This means that you will be able to increase as far as Google might reasonably judge
to be your “rightful place” in the rankings.
• SEO cannot make a small, badly run business with a terrible reputation compete
against a large, well run business with a great reputation. If you somehow con it
into doing so, enjoy it while it lasts, that represents a fundamental problem with the
search product.

30. SERP
Paid for positions (Google Ads)
Non-paid for positions or “organic” rankings
Featured snippets
Also called “position 0”

31. What is SEO?
• Search EngineOptimisation
• Making changes & improvements to your website pages in order to improve your site’s visibility or ranking for commercially important
search terms, with the aim of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website.
• Google wants to serve the best – most relevant - result for the user’s search query.

32. Determining Search Relevancy
• What is the intent behind this search query?
• What is the best resource for visitors with this kind of intent?
• Of these; which sites do people historically seem to click on?
• Of these; which sites are talked about a lot on the rest of the internet?
• Does the resource display properly on the visitors device?
• Is the resource geographically relevant?
• Is the resource trustworthy?
• Is the resource compromised with a virus?
Content
Technical
Local SEO

33. Relics that no longer matter
“Meta keywords”
“Meta tags”
“Keyword Density”
Determining Search Relevancy

34. Relics that no longer matter
Meta keywords Your Target Keywords
Determining Search Relevancy

35. Relics that no longer matter
Meta keywords Your Target Keywords
Determining Search Relevancy

36. Implicit search signals (context) are also taken into account:
• Location
• Device
• Search history
Much more than a keyword match
Determining Search Relevancy

37. ?

38. Where we were
Technical SEO

39. Technical SEO
• Anything to do with your server, host, databases, etc., that has an implication for Search Engines.
• Improving your technical configuration won’t add value to your site – but technical issues can and will
subtract value.
• Very often, these are problems that you cannot see or are not immediately obvious; they are often
pedantic.
• In general, following web development best practices and Google’s Webmaster Guidelines as far as it is
feasible for you to do so is sufficient.

40. Technical SEO
• Site security & SSL certificates
• Site speed
• HTTP status codes & redirects
• Sitemaps
• Crawl budgets
• Schema mark up
• Mobile usability
• Robots.txt
• Canonical tags
• URL parameter handling
• JavaScript
• And more …

41. Speed

42. 53% of mobile website visitors will
leave a site if the page doesn’t load
within 3 seconds

43. A 100-millisecond delay in load time
can cause conversion rates to drop
by 7%

44. 20% of users abandon their cart if
the transaction process is too slow

45. Speed Tools

46. TTFB or Time To First Byte
• Time taken from initial client http request until the browser receives the first byte of data from the web
server
• This is a ‘ranking factor’
• Noisy Little Monkey aims for around 0.3 secs as a benchmark TTFB

47. Full Page Load
• Time taken for the content of a web page to be fully displayed.
• This is NOT a ranking factor (some developers delight in explaining this)
• However, it is closely linked with user experience and conversion rate.
• Can be improved by:
• File compression
• Minification
• Reducing redirects
• Content delivery network

48. Speed
WebPageTest
• Different testing locations and browsers available.

49. Speed
WebPageTest
• Test results look like this:

50. Speed
Number of requests
being made to the
server
Time until page is fully loaded
WebPageTest

51. Speed
Images (indicated in
purple) are usual
culprits for slow page
load times
WebPageTest

52. Speed
PageSpeed Insights
• As a Google-owned product, the recommendations from this tool are important to follow

53. Speed
PageSpeed Insights
• Based on Google’s Lighthouse tool (lab data) and Chrome
User Experience Report (real world data)
• More advanced data is available from PageSpeed Insights.
• Google breaks down “page load” into different metrics as
page load is not a static event but rather lots of smaller
milestones in the user’s journey on your website.
First contentful paint
Speed index
Time to interactive
First meaningful paint
First CPU idle
Max potential input delay

54. Speed
PageSpeed Insights
• Opportunities & diagnostics are listed in priority
order

55. Mobile
• Google doesn’t want to serve mobile unfriendly content to
mobile users
• Even if your site actually IS mobile friendly, you should check
that Google agrees
• There are technical issues which can occur which may interfere
with this judgement.
• https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

56. Mobile
• Click through on the error types to find the specific
pages
• Error means that the page is below a minimum
mobile usability level
• Users incompatible plugins
• Viewport not set
• Viewport not set to “device-width”
• Content wider than screen
• Text too small to read
• Clickable elements too close together
Search Console

57. • Stop your website from breaking by regularly crawling the site to find internal 404s and 301s.
• Additionally, make sure that visiting a non-existent page gives a useful 404 page that salvages the user
experience. Broken links are a sign of a poor user experience
• Ensure that the 404 page actually sends a 404 status code
Indexing
Status Codes & Error Handling

58. • Search Engines won’t bother ranking your new page if you use a temporary redirect
Indexing
Status Codes
• Permanent redirect
• Use when the webpage has been moved
permanently.
• Google will remove old page from index
• Example uses:
• HTTP to HTTPS migration
• Outdated/replaced URLs
• New domain name
• Temporary redirect
• Used for when a webpage has been moved only for a
short period of time / if you intend to bring the original
page back.
• Example uses:
• During redesign/updates
• Temporary redirect on the homepage to a
promotional page
301 302

59. Indexing
• Websites with heavy reliance on client-side rendering – such as React – have been known to affect visibility.
• A quick check is to disable JS and see how much of your key content renders properly.
• This is particularly important for sites with a high volume of products that change frequently
JavaScript

60. Malware & Manual Action Penalty
• Malware, hacking and manual actions can all affect your site’s visibility and ranking.
• Users are often met with an on-SERP safety warning from recently hacked websites.
• Notification of a manual action can be found in Search Console.

61. Malware & Manual Action Penalty
Google issues a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has
determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google's webmaster quality
guidelines. Most manual actions address attempts to manipulate our search index. Most
issues reported here will result in pages or sites being ranked lower or omitted from
search results without any visual indication to the user.
Google Search Console

62. Malware & Manual Action Penalty
• User generated spam
• Spammy free hosting
• Structured data issues
• Unnatural links to and/or from your site
• Thin content
• Cloaking of content or images
• ”Sneaky” redirects, incl. mobile redirects
• Pure spam
• Hidden text/keyword stuff
• AMP content mismatch
• Duplicate content

63. XML Sitemap
Best practice is to have a complete XML sitemap submitted to Google via Search Console. This is especially
important for new websites, large websites, and websites that host a lot of archival content that has poor
internal linking.
HTML sitemaps are only for humans and are designed for the purpose of helping “lost” users find what they
are looking for. However, you should focus on having an easy to navigate website rather than building an
HTML sitemap.

64. Housekeeping
• Broken links are a sign of a poor user experience
• Search Engines (probably) won’t bother ranking your new page if you use a temporary redirect

65. Housekeeping

66. Use a spider to root out issues

67. Error handling
• Let’s try to stop your website from breaking, but if it does, make sure we’ve got it configured.
• Make sure that visiting a non-existent page gives a useful 404 page that salvages the user experience.
• Make sure that the 404 page actually sends a 404 status code

68. Wider Reading
• Getting your website into “best practice” shape can be complicated.
• Google knows that not everyone is a computer whizz. That’s fine. Trying to grapple with this may not be a
solid ROI.
• However, if you want to learn more, here are some starting points:
• https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015
• https://moz.com/blog/seo-cheat-sheet
• http://schema.org/docs/gs.html
• https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-guide/
• https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

69. ?

71. 2
1
3
4
5
6
Technical SEO
On Site SEO
Off Site SEO
Local SEO
Intro
How Google Works

72. Where we were
On site SEO

73. • URL: domain & slug
• Page Title
• H1
• Images & alt text
• Page content: quality and volume
• Meta description*
• Keyword density
Determining Search Relevancy

74. URLs
https://noisylittlemonkey.com/p=dfg24-123 VS https://noisylittlemonkey.com/what-is-seo
• Include the keyword you are targeting in your URL
• Keep your URLs clean, simple and “intelligible to humans”
• Standard practice and Google recommendations are to use hyphens between words in URLs, not underscores
• Avoid special characters
• No capital letters as this can cause duplicate content issues
• Future proofing: build a URL structure that you can scale as your business grows.

75. • URL: domain & slug
• Page Title
• H1
• Images & alt text
• Page content: quality and volume
• Meta description*
Determining Search Relevancy

76. • URL: domain & slug
• Page Title
• H1
• Images & alt text
• Page content: quality and volume
• Meta description*
Determining Search Relevancy

77. • URL: domain & slug
• Page Title
• H1
• Images & alt text
• Page content: quality and volume
• Meta description*
Determining Search Relevancy

78. • URL: domain & slug
• Page Title
• H1
• Images & alt text
• Page content: quality and volume
• Meta description*
Determining Search Relevancy

79. • Meta descriptions do not affect your SEO or ranking, but they are the first point of contact you have with your potential visitors
so they are important.
Determining Search Relevancy

80. Internal Linking Structure
• An internal linking strategy is vital; demonstrating the relationships between content across your site is important for both
search engines to understanding your content and to keep users on your website.
• Contextual links
• Related posts sections
• Navigational links

81. Keyword Stuffing
• Unnatural repeated use of a keyword on a webpage in a bid to improve visibility for that keyword (“keyword density”).
• Using white text on a white background to hide copy from users whilst still being visible to search engines.
• Writing overly long, clunky and keyword stuffed alt text that does not accurately describe the contents of the image.
We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom cigar
humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at custom.cigar.humidors@example.com.
• Keyword stuffing is different in both presentation & intent from responsible keyword optimisation.
• If the copy sounds robotic and forced, consider rewriting it.
“Keyword density” Natural, human language

82. Keyword Research

83. Keyword Research
Google Ads
Keyword Planner
Answer The Public

84. E.A.T
Expertise
Authority
Trustworthiness

85. Remember:
Search engines want to serve the most relevant
results to a user

86. Remember:
Your prospect is likely looking for solutions to a
problem, not searching for industry jargon

87. ?

88. Where we were
Off site SEO

89. What is off page SEO?
Off page SEO is the actions, practices and efforts that you undertake outside your website to improve its visibility or ranking. Google
and its algorithm must approximate the “Real World” importance and reputation of a brand, using various trust, link and authority
signals. Off page SEO practices aim to contribute to building this reputation.
Aside from backlinks, most off page SEO elements are not considered to be direct “ranking factors”, but their importance in building
your brand’s online presence cannot be denied.
• Backlinks: quality, number, and relevance
• Social media: especially the engagement rate of social content
• Brand mentions* and branded search volume

90. Backlinks
Backlinks are another way in which Google can begin to “understand” and contextualise your website.
DO NOT PAY FOR THEM or participate in link farming.
Sponsored content is different. Ensure you use the appropriate link attributes:
• rel="sponsored": Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements,
sponsorships or other compensation agreements.
• rel="ugc": UGC stands for User Generated Content, and the ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user
generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
• rel="nofollow": Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement,
including passing along ranking credit to another page.
Tools like Majestic & Ahrefs can help you identify your backlink profile.
Your referring domains & backlinks need to be relevant, authoritative and error-free (no 404s).

91. Backlinks

92. Backlinks

93. Branded Search Volume
Branded search volume can be indicative of your off site SEO & branded awareness. Google Trends and Google Autosuggest can
provide useful insights here.

94. ?

95. Where we were
Local SEO

96. “Snack Pack” and Organic Results
• Prime position for “near me” type searches
• Most frequently displayed SERP feature
• As well as SEO factors, proximity also plays a
role in what appears in the local pack as well
as relevance and prominence – or how well
known your business is in the ‘real’ world.

97. Local Citations
Name
Address
Postcode
Opening Hours
Logos
Profiles (Social)
Consistency

98. Google My Business
Bing & Apple Maps too
Your business (or businesses)
need fully completed, verified
Google My Business & Bing
Places profiles, with consistent
NAPOLP.

99. Local Content & Schema
• Local Business schema is necessary for local businesses
• It’s easy to set up and helps contextualise your content for search
engines.

100. Reviews
• Google Reviews are a particularly
important component to your local
SEO
• Respond to all of your reviews,
especially the bad ones

101. ?

102. Where we were
Fin