HUG Atlanta had the honor of learning from HubSpot's Al Biedrzycki about the intersection of content marketing and SEO and how to use both to improve our inbound marketing efforts. Check out his slides here.

1. Al Biedrzycki
Senior Marketing Manager
HubSpot
@albiedrzycki

2. 1 SEO in 2004
2 Content & SEO
3 How Google Returns SERPs
4 Off-Page SEO
5 Technical SEO
6 Avoiding Penalties
7 Wrap-up and Questions
AGENDA

3. SEO IN 20041

4. What We Used to Do

5. The Result...

6. SEO: circa 2004

7. SEO today (2016!)

8. Oh, and it’s always changing

9. So, What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a
website or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results—often referred to as
"natural," "organic," or "earned" results.
Anything that humans or technology do to influence those results is considered
the practice of SEO.

10. CONTENT & SEO2

11. Your Content Has to be Good
Criteria for good content:
1. One-of-a-Kind: Doesn’t appear anywhere
else on the web.
2. Relevant: Contains content that engines
can interpret as on-the-topic.
3. Helpful: Solves the searcher’s query in a
useful, efficient manner.
4. Uniquely Valuable: Provides information
that’s unavailable (or hard to get)
elsewhere.
5. Great UX: Is pleasurable to consume on
any device.

12. Your Content Has to Be Human

13. Your Content Has to Leverage
Keywords
Keyword research is still very important.
Researching the competition around
ranking difficulty will still be the first step.
Research around topics/themes rather
than direct keyword matching-- not just
the main keyword, but the related
keywords.
Use related keywords as “cast members”

14. Your Content Has to Be Helpful
When creating content, answer as
many questions as possible.
Google is trying to figure out what
your intent is, and answering
questions helps Google associate
your content to queries.
Use natural language and variations,
or “semantic keyword research

15. Your Content Has to Be Structured
1. Structure your content. Use
headers, paragraphs, lists, tables,
etc.
2. Most important content goes in
Header/Main Body tags.
3. Sidebars and footers are
weighted less.
4. Cite sources (if necessary) just
like you would in a college paper

16. Social Media Can Gauge Intent
Sites such as Facebook and
Twitter provide search engines
with important clues about which
web pages people are talking
about, or have shared with each
other.
Tip: Use social channels to drive
the dialogue!

17. Personalized Search Plays a Role
Search engines have been able to
use a logged in user’s Social
Network usage, and their previous
searches, to determine what is
more importantly to them
personally.
Data can be pulled from: Location,
device, search history, email and
calendar, Google+, browser history
and bookmarks

18. HOW GOOGLE
RETURNS SERPs3

19. How Google Presents Data
What types of search results does Google returns for a
specific query?
1. News
2. Images
3. Local Businesses
4. Rated Results (e.g. stars)
5. Products
6. Videos
7. One-box / answer results

20. How Google Categorizes Queries

21. How Google Judges Queries
Rating Scale Description
Vital Essential to the search query
Useful A page that is very helpful
Relevant A page that is helpful for many or some
Slightly Relevant A page that is helpful, but not entirely
relevant
Off-Topic or useless A page that is helpful for very few users
Unrateable A page that cannot be evaluated for a
specific query

22. Loyalty & Visitor Engagement

23. OFF-PAGE SEO
4

24. It’s All About Building Relationships
Remember that building links requires an “ask”
1. Social Media
2. Leaving insightful comments on
blogs/content
3. A friendly email
4. Advertising
“Links are a great side effect of awesome
relationships”

25. Link Building vs. Link Earning
Google doesn’t want to count links you
can “build”
1. Build relationships that earn
2. Use content to drive editorial links
3. Aim for resource pages and blog
rolls, no directories
4. Buy exposure that leads to links
Don’t just focus on the “big guys” when
link building. They’re overwhelmed with
requests and may experience “fatigue”.

26. Link Earning Tips: Avoid Spam
1. Link quantity is dying (or
dead)
2. You could get penalized for
spammy or “unnatural” links

27. Secrets for Link Earning
Tools for outreach:
● Conspire
● BuzzSumo
Tips for Outreach:
● Keep an organized spreadsheet of all your outreach targets.
● Know when “scale” and “spam” cross paths.
● Use SE operators to help identify if they have a submissions page or notes
on if they accept external communications
a. Go to Google
b. Type in site:www.domain.com “TERM” to see if that language is used
on their website.

28. Link Earning With Link Bait
Linkbait is any online activity that has the specific
goal of attracting links from other websites.
Types:
1. Infographics - (easy to embed & offer source
code for others to use/share on social
2. Ego Bait – Designed to be targeted at
specific influential individuals (i.e. 18 Startup
Founders Share Their Lowest Moments
Before Coming Out On Top)
3. How-To Guides / Resource style content
4. Interviews
5. Tools (Calculators, etc)

29. TECHNICAL SEO
5

30. Crawling & Indexing
It’s important to ensure your website is
easily crawlable by creating an XML
Sitemap and being wary of barriers:
1. Javascript (it’s fine in HTML, but avoid
it in excess)
2. Flash
3. Frames / iFrames
4. Cookies (i.e. “smart” versions of pages
aren’t currently indexable)

31. Know Your Status Codes
● 200 - Everything is a-ok!
● 301 - Permanent redirect. New page is indexed. Link
equity is transferred from the old page to the new.
● 302 - Temporarily moved. Not removed from indexing,
but link equity is not preserved.
● 404 - The page no longer exists. The page will
eventually be dropped from the index.
● 500 - Server error exists and no content is accessible
to crawlers or search engines.
● 503 - A “temporarily unavailable” status. Tells crawlers
to come back later.

32. URL Construction
Every URL is constructed in four, and
optionally, more parts:
1. Protocol - HTTP or HTTPs
2. Subdomain - www or custom
3. Domain - your custom name
4. Top Level Domain (TLD) - .com, .org, etc

33. URL Optimization
URLs should be:
1. Unique
2. As short as possible
3. Keyword focused
4. URLs are best built using a separator
between the words in the slug. The
types of separators that are acceptable
are, in order:
a. Hyphen (ie. built-like-this)
b. Underscore (ie. built_like_this)
c. Plus (ie. built+like+this)

34. Don’t Forget About Site Speed!
It affects ranking and UX

35. AVOIDING PENALTIES
6

36. Why Did I Lose My Rank?
1. Manual Action - Someone at Google
manually removed you for breaking the
rules
2. Algorithm Updates - Panda, Penguin, etc.
3. Data/Index Updates - Your were beaten out
by the competition.
4. Filtered out - Copyright claims, excessively
similar results, etc.

37. Once You’ve Cleaned it up...

38. QUESTIONS?

39. THANK YOU.