SEO

Top 5 channels for any B2B campaign

First things first...

Before we begin it's important to make the point that your choice of channels is of slightly less than **** all importance if you do not have a sufficiently ambitious and imaginative content strategy feeding into it.

One of the worst traits of the modern marketer is her tendency to think “channel first”. Nail the content, and the channels will all but take care of themselves.

1. The search engines

I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that I ran an SEO agency for several years before it evolved into a broader digital offering, so please to treat my bias with the scoop of salt it deserves, but my first instinct is always to lay the foundations for a healthy relationship between the website and the search engines. After all, for most B2B companies this is likely to be the strongest source of targeted traffic, and unlike social media or advertising, we’re developing an asset that’s going to grow in value over time.

Furthermore, despite what I hear so many people say, it’s still absolutely possible for relatively young websites to rank for really important terms, assuming they know exactly who their audience is and develop their landing pages accordingly.

2. Email

Alongside their website, the only other digital asset a business owns is their email list so this comes in at number two.

Email may be the grandad of digital, but don’t be fooled by his lack of style and glamour; he carries more commercial clout than all of his social media grandchildren put together.

Building this asset should be one of the primary objectives of any B2B campaign. Not only is it going to drive sales leads, but it’s also going to nurture relationships and extend customer lifetime value. It’s your best route for distributing content and an unparalleled tool for establishing yourself as a thought leader. With the right content strategy feeding into it, there is not much email can’t achieve.

3. Offline

“Offline” is an unhelpfully broad description that could mean anything from a handwritten postcard to an event. The reason why I group these together is that they all have one thing in common - they are unfashionable. And that is precisely the source of their power.

In a world of “Digital first”, the biggest opportunities are unlikely to be found online. After all, that’s where everyone else is busy investing their time and money. Paradoxically, the greatest opportunities are likely to be found in neglected channels. Partly because there is less competition, but also because traditional channels incur a greater cost than their digital cousins. And that cost conveys meaning.

The most effective piece of marketing I’ve done in the last couple of years was write handwritten letters to CEO’s and Managing Partners of law firms inviting them to an event. Over half accepted. One even responded with a handwritten letter of their own. Try to replicate that with a LinkedIn inmail!

4. Webinars

Personally I find it hard to get excited about webinars. Conducting them comes with all the stress of delivering an event, but without the gin and tonic.

That said, there is no question that they are a powerful tool in many B2B markets for progressing Marketing Qualified Leads (data and permission to be contacted from people that fall within your target audience) to Sales Qualified Leads (have an explicit need) and in a post-Covid world, they’re only going to become more important.

Even if the person doesn’t attend (drop out rates are often frustratingly high), by signing up to a webinar the person has made a significant mental investment, which means they are far more likely to open your emails and accept your phone calls.

5. Social

Finally, we have social. The set of platforms that somehow achieves 80% of the attention whilst delivering less than 20% of the value.

The trouble with social media is two fold:

• You don’t own these platforms - you are building someone else’s asset. If something goes wrong (account deleted, cost of advertising becomes too high, new GDPR regulation inhibits targeting, etc) you can’t do anything about it.
• There is little compound value. Often the content is ephemeral and new content is only as impactful as the advertising budget that propels it.

It’s not all bad. Social media is hugely important for communicating the culture of your organisation (so important for B2B) and with the right media plan it can be a scalable route for feeding your other channels, particularly your email list. You just need to be clear on what you’re using it for and how that performance will be measured.

Final thought

Clearly the above is a horrible generalisation and while I hope there are some useful points and principles communicated, I also hope that you know your audience well enough to understand that the right arrangement and prioritisation of channels will be utterly unique to them.

And above all, don’t even consider your channels until the overarching content strategy is so audaciously ambitious that your little part of the world can’t help but take notice.

Until next time,

Dan

by Dan Holt

Content Marketing Part 4 - Why Every Content Strategy Needs A Clear Framework

Transcription

Generating new ideas for content can be hugely challenging. If you start with a blank canvas every day, waiting for inspiration to strike, you may find you end up waiting an awfully long time, and what you end up with is a heavily disjointed range of topics, that fail to tell an overarching story. This is why we create content pillars.

Content pillars are recurring themes that provide a framework for our content generation. For example, if you are a law firm trying to sell to business owners, your pillars might include topics such as leadership, strategy and culture - in other words, things that are of interest to business owners. Thee will of course also need to be a pillar relating to business law, but the point is that you must first start on the terms of your target audience if you are to generate their interest, then eventually find the intersection between their world and your own. This is the point at which we can then introduce the prospect to our products and services without immediately losing their interest. In other words, this is how we turn nice content into actual business.

It’s important with any form of content marketing that you are clear on what the objective is. A common classification would be to segment content into that which is intended to maximise your brand awareness - that will typically be of a more emotive nature and really easy to digest. Often very visual. Then we have the content that will nurture the relationship, which is usually more educational and detailed, and then we have the content that will drive an action which is of course more product orientated and promotional.

Before starting your activity, it can be helpful to create a matrix that breaks down your content by these different elements, so content pillar on one axis and objective on the other. You can also include details of the format the content will take - image, video, podcast, blog, status update, etc - and the channels that each item corresponds to. For example highly visual content may be used on instagram and Facebook, while more educational content might be focused on the blog and email.

By having this framework you will not only ensure you are telling a consistent story that puts the users needs ahead of your own, but also that you are always clear on what it is you are trying to achieve and therefore how exactly success should be measured.

by Liam Parker

SEO part 8 - defining and measuring success

Transcription

As with any marketing campaign, establishing clarity on your KPIs is one of the most important things you can do within your SEO strategy so I just want to run through some of the most common KPIs that the SEO strategies will include and also introduce a couple of alternative perspectives.

Now the most common KPI that people will look at is naturally rankings - so what are those top trophy phrases and how are we performing? In the past we would we would track potentially hundreds of different specific rankings because we used to build authority around particular key phrases. That's no longer the case. Now we build authority around the brand as a whole which means that if the top five or ten priority key phrases are performing well then we can almost certainly assume that all the other key phrases are also performing well, so it's a slightly different perspective and and I I would therefore encourage you not to waste hours and hours tracking hundreds of different key phrases.

The second thing to look at of course is the organic traffic that comes through the search engines. Now very often this will actually provide a clearer and more comprehensive perspective on your site’s search engine performance, particularly if you operate in a market that has a significantly long tail, which means it's not dominated by a small number of key of short key phrases but rather it's it's it's full of of quite unpredictable, quite varied, often lengthy phrases and therefore following specific short tail ranking performances doesn't necessarily give you that much insight. You need to look at the picture as a whole.

This, however, still has a significant shortcoming which is that when you look at that traffic you might see the graph appearing to go up but actually it might be that 99% of that traffic is arriving on pages that are never going to drive your headline objective and this is particularly true when you have a large blog or a large resources section, so what I'd encourage you to do is to create a segment within analytics that isolates the traffic that's going to the pages that are going to drive that headline objective. Now if this is a service based business then they're going to be the service pages. If it's a product website then it's going to be the product pages or perhaps certain category pages, but isolating that traffic is going to give you a far clearer indication in terms of the the SEO performance from a commercial point of view and what you'll find is that it probably represents a tiny proportion the tiny fraction of the overall traffic volume, but it's that number even if it's just 2% of the overall traffic, that is going to really determine whether or not this thing is a success.

That's not to say that the other traffic is worthless, it's just that it's driving a different kind of KPI so it might be that actually on those pages it's more about email capture so you want a separate segment that captures what the traffic that's going to the blog for example, and you'll just measure that in a slightly different way and assign a far smaller monetary value to each conversion made within analytics.

So that's how I would encourage you to look at this. Far too often people, particularly within the SEO community, are guilty of focusing on vanity metrics or metrics that don't really determine commercial success, so yes look at rankings ,yes look at social or total organic traffic, but primarily you want to be focusing on that headline objective and how effectively your SEO strategy is delivering it.

by Dan Holt

SEO Part 7 - Building Your Brand

Transcription

In simple terms there have always been two elements to SEO. Number one is ensuring that the search engines can understand the content on the website and the kind of keyword that you're trying to target and number two that the search engines view your brand, your website domain, as being more authoritative and more trustworthy than that of the competition. They have always been the two aspects of SEO and that continues to be the case today.

Looking at the second element of that there's the trust, the authority. The way in which that's established has now become far more complex than it used to be so for a long time it essentially just came down to the sheer quantity of links you could get pointing to your website and consequently people engaging all sorts of sketchy and unethical tactics in order to acquire those sheer numbers. Now the nature of SEO has changed significantly but while it has become vastly more complex, link acquisition in my opinion continues to be the number one factor in determining
website Authority so it's absolutely not gone away, it's just that the way in which it has to happen has evolved. It's grown up somewhat so now it's it's absolutely imperative that any link that you solicit is done so in a legitimate fashion which just means that the way in which we have to go about it is very different, so legitimate press releases talking about real things with really interesting stats and thinking in a in more of a traditional journalistic fashion - that's become a really powerful link acquisition mechanism. Likewise engaging with influencers and using those relationships to acquire links from websites blogs within your target market again is really powerful.

So link acquisition hasn't gone away, it’s still super important it’s just that it has to be thought about far more strategically and in a far more brand orientated way now other elements that have played started to play an increasing role in recent years including engagement on the website which is quite difficult to define in a really clear way because what constitutes good engagement in one market could be quite different in another, so for example in some markets you don't necessarily want people spending hours on your website - you want them to come in perform a particular action and if they go again that's absolutely fine where as in other markets the time on site, the pageviews, the bounce rate - these things are really really important, so when you think about engagement stats I'd encourage you to think about it within the context of your industry. I’s quite similar with social media so there's been a debate over the role of social media for a long time in the SEO community and while a lot of people would contest the direct causal link between social media and rankings I think most people generally see now the strong correlation between the two, particularly if you operate in a market where community is important and really building engagement between your audience and your brand is important, in which case if you're not active, if you don’t have a clear social media strategy then that's a huge huge hole in that overall SEO strategy.

The final thing I want to talk about is the broader brand signals and for me this is the most important thing to take away from this. If you think about it from Google's perspective, if their goal is to determine the most trust trustworthy, incredible brands then if it were me I don't think there would be anything more important than the sheer number of people going to a website. Not by the search engines but just going directly, or going to the search engines and making brand related search queries. For example, if 10,000 people a day search for John Lewis TVs well then I think you can probably assume that John Lewis is a trusted source for televisions. So it's difficult in one sense to directly impact and probably doesn't sound like SEO but SEO in isolation just isn't really a thing anymore. It has to be part of a broader brand strategy. You have to be doing real things and adding real value to your audience, and building an ever-larger presence amongst that audience, and if you do that there to some extent that SEO will take care of itself.

by Dan Holt

SEO part 6 - getting under the bonnet with technical optimisation

Transcription

Now I'm not technical so this is going to be more about what to do as opposed to how to do it but I just want to run through some of the essential elements of your SEO plan from a technical perspective.

So the first is speed. Speed is absolutely everything - it's been important for a long time from an SEO point of view but it's something that Google has repeatedly spoken about more than ever in the last few years since mobile usage has just grown and grown, so if people can’t access that webpage quickly then Google is never going to prioritise it in the listings. So that’s the first thing.

The second is having SSL certification. Google said a couple of years ago that if a website doesn’t have SSL certification then they wouldn’t know if they could trust it and rankings might suffer, but I would add to that that without SSL certification, very often people will be entirely blocked out of websites so it’s a disaster from a user experience and brand point of view.

The third thing is structured data. So you may have heard of something called schema which is a form of structured data that enables Google to make sense of what a piece of content is - so is it a recipe or a cinema time or a review, etc - and can therefore give you the credit you deserve for your beautifully designed and richly packed landing pages. Whereas if you create all this great content but you don’t have the appropriate structured data in place then Google won’t necessarily be able to understand what each thing means. It will also have an impact on click through rate from the search engine results page because a lot of that structured data can get pulled through to the SERPs, so you might see cinema times or event information or review details often pulled through directly to the search engine results page, which can have a really significant impact on click through rate.

Then there is the general technical maintenance of a website. I think sometimes we can be guilty of approach SEO as a set and forget scenario, but there needs to be a company policy for how you’re going to monitor this on an ongoing basis. For some websites that might need to be daily while for others that could be monthly or quarterly, but there needs to be some kind of policy in place that says that every x period you will use whatever diagnostics tools you have at your disposal, which to begin with may just be search console, to assess the health and performance of the site and create a list of new tasks required to fix any of the inevitable issues that arise with any site that is constantly growing and evolving.

See you next time.

by Dan Holt

SEO part 5 - On-page optimisation essentials in 2 minutes

Transcription

The days of obsessing over keyword density and trying to stuff keywords and phrases into every last sentence and header are thankfully long gone, however we do still need to help the search engines and ensure that they can actually understand what it is that we want each page to be targeting so things like title tags and image alt tags are still really really important.

So, starting with the with title tag which is the first thing that Google will see when it arrives on that page - typically you'll just you'll have one or two key phrases at the start followed by the brand and you want to be containing it to about 70 characters or so. Then with the image alt tags if we can include keywords within these fantastic. They don't immediately appear to the user so we don’t have to worry too much about that so it’s another really great opportunity to build that relevance to the search engines. And the final thing is the URL structure so as long as we're not making the URL too too long, including some keywords is really sensible because as much as anything else then if people link to that page using that URL then it's a really nice natural way of including some keywords within that anchor text.

Those are where we can be quite pushy with the keywords. We we need to rein it in somewhat is with the content that's actually visible to the user, so with headers and with the body copy I'm definitely not saying don't include keywords. In fact more often than not some level of keyword inclusion is quite important to the user because it reassures the user that they're on the right page and that this page is going to cater to that search query that they just made the brought them there. However, we must ensure we don't step over that line and start to provide a spammy user experience. It’s very similar with the Meta Description. The Meta Description doesn't directly affect rankings but it does of course hugely impact likely click through rates which arguably in turn affect rankings so it is very important from a search engine perspective and once again it's really important that we are including keywords because that's going to reassure the searcher that this page is relevant and the search engines will often bold that text so it really draws the users attention to that Meta Description so really worth doing but just so important that we're always prioritising the key messages of the brand.

by Dan Holt

SEO Part 4 - Creating Killer Landing Pages

Transcription

There was a time with SEO when we wouldn't worry too much about the content of landing pages from a user's point of view. As long as the page ticked certain technical boxes and provided all the right keywords then that was fine, but those days are long gone. Now one of the most important things we can do is put ourselves in the shoes of the user and consider the almost infinite array of expectations and intents they might have whenever they make a given search query.

So, for example, let's imagine that we run an accountancy firm and we want to construct the perfect landing page targeting tax advisory services in London. Now what we what we have to do, as I say, is put ourselves in the in the place of that audience and think about all those different things that might be going through their minds when they make that search query. Sp for example are they hoping to find technical information, are they hoping to find case studies and testimonials from people or businesses just like them who have purchased those services and to see what sort of experience they had. Are they hoping to find local address information and a London telephone number, and perhaps they are hoping to see links to relevant resources so that they can research the subject matter first before before making that enquiry.

We have to try and tick as many of these boxes as we possibly can and by doing so not only are we going to achieve far better rankings but we're also going to provide a much better user experience that inevitably leads to a higher conversion rate, so this could not be more important.

The only other additional suggestion I'd make is to avoid any excessive duplication of content. Now some duplication is inevitable because from a brand perspective consistency is key, so if you imagine that with each of these pages they could be the first encounter that your brand has with this individual so there are certain messages that you're always going to want to communicate which means that some duplication is fine, but if you find that this page has in excess of 20-30 % duplicate content then you've got a problem, and if you have enough of those pages that have
that level of duplication then at some point the entire website is going to get penalized so that's the other really important consideration to make.

So I'd really encourage you to really invest significant time researching the competition to see the different types of content that they're providing within those key landing pages and ensure that you are ticking as many of those boxes in the richest and most unique way that you possibly can.

by Dan Holt

The Ultimate Guide to Technical SEO

Add an SSL certificate to your website to make it HTTPS enabled

One of the most important best practices over the last few years is to make your website more secure by enabling HTTPS with an SSL certificate. The easiest way to spot if a website has an SSL certificate is to check to see if there’s a padlock icon to the left of a website’s URL in Google Chrome. Check your browser now or take a look at the examples below:

An example of a URL without an SSL certificate

An example of a URL with an SSL certificate

When an SSL certificate is installed onto your website’s server, your website will become accessible via https://www.yourdomain.co.uk as opposed to http://www.yourdomain.co.uk. Put simply, this indicates that any information transferred between your website and server (form completions, usernames, passwords etc) is encrypted and therefore more secure. The more secure your website is for your users, the more trusted your website will be by Google and other search engines.

If you are one of the lucky ones and your website is already HTTPS enabled, great! If not, determine which CMS (content management system) your website has been created in. Nowadays in paid for CMS’s like Wix and Squarespace, HTTPS is built-in and can be toggled on and off. With Wordpress or other CMS’s you should contact your hosting provider and ask them to enable HTTPS for you.

If you are one of the lucky ones and your website is already HTTPS enabled, great! If not, determine which CMS (content management system) your website has been created in. Nowadays in paid for CMS’s like Wix and Squarespace, HTTPS is built-in and can be toggled on and off. With Wordpress or other CMS’s you should contact your hosting provider and ask them to enable HTTPS for you.

Before moving onto the next check, it’s worth pointing out some common issues that can occur when HTTPS is not set up correctly:

• Ensure that your website is set up to redirect to the HTTPS version of your website. I have seen cases with some websites when no redirect has been put in place and two versions of a website have existed, a HTTP version and a HTTPS version in which Google would index the website as an exact duplicate which is really bad for SEO!

 

• In some cases, HTTPS is enabled on a website but the website is still not showing up as secure. This often happens when HTTPS is enabled on a website but there’s links to HTTP versions of an image in the code. Luckily this is a fairly easy fix – simply use Chrome developer tools to view the source code of your website and search for any media files that reference HTTP and change these within your CMS to HTTPS.

404 Pages

When we talk about 404 pages as a technical SEO issue, I’m talking about website pages that Google has indexed or users are still visiting, but no longer exist and are therefore are now 404 pages. This commonly occurs either when a page has been deleted but Google is still referencing that page in it’s search results or when a URL has been changed and people are still being linked to the old URL.

The number of 404 pages that your website has will depend on the size of the website. Think of it this way; the more 404 pages your website has indexed, the more likely it is that a user lands on a 404 page rather than a actual page on your website. If Google sees traffic on your website landing on 404 pages, it’s going to rank your website lower than another website with fewer 404 pages as a user is more likely to find what they are looking for on the other website.

In order to check if your website has any 404 pages, sign in to Google Search Console and navigate to Crawl → Crawl Errors (see image below).

Google Search Console crawl errors tab

This view will show you a list of all of the 404 pages that Google has found, as well as the dates on which they were found. If the list is large, consider downloading the list as a CSV file and add redirect URLs in a column to the left of 404 pages and get the developer of your website to set up the redirects. If the list is relatively small, consider setting the redirects up one by one within your CMS.

Once your redirects are set up, head back into Google Search Console and mark the 404 pages as fixed. Over the next few days Google will try to index those pages again and if redirects are found to be in place, 404 pages will no longer be indexed. If the redirects aren’t in place properly those pesky 404 pages will appear back in the list again alongside a new detected date.

Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml files

I have probably used the term ‘average marketer’ far too often in this guide, but again, robots.txt and sitemap.xml files are another aspect of technical SEO that I would not expect the average marketer to know of, let alone understand how they can affect your website in Google search results.

In order to explain what these are, I like to give some context. To generate a web index and, in turn, search results; search engines will crawl each and every website using what is known as bots or spiders. When a bot first visits a website it will have to read the robots.txt file. A robots.txt file is a code file that can be used to set rules about pages or elements of your website that you do not wish to be crawled. After checking this file and adhering to the rules, the bots will then find the sitemap.xml file if your website has one. Think of this as a map for your website, while we navigate through websites using menus and links, bots use the sitemap.xml file as a map to visit major pages of your website and in turn, eventually crawl every page that hasn’t been disallowed in robots.txt file.

An example of the journey a Google Bot takes when crawling a website

To see if your website has a robots.txt file try going onto your website and typing /robots.txt at the end of the URL, e.g. www.yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt and likewise to test for a sitemap.xml file, this can be done by typing /sitemap.xml at the end of your website’s URL, e.g. www.yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml.

But back to how these can affect the SEO of your website. While not having a robots.txt or sitemap.xml file won’t negatively impact the SEO of your website, having them will speed up the process via which your website is crawled or indexed, meaning that if you make on-page SEO changes, you will see much faster results.

If you don’t have either of these, they can be generated through your CMS or by contacting the developer of your website – or, in some cases, your hosting provider. In terms of best practise, I would always advise adding a link from your robots.txt file to your sitemap.xml file, through which both can then be submitted to Google via Google Search Console. That way when bots or web crawlers visit your robots.txt file (as they will always do first), they then have a link straight to your sitemap without having to search for it. It’s also worth looking out for pages that shouldn’t be disallowed as there’s always the chance that a key page of your website is not being crawled by search engines and wouldn’t appear in search results.

Image Hosting and Optimisation

I know what you’re thinking. How do images link with Technical SEO? Wouldn’t images be classified under on-page SEO? You’re right! The process of adding images to your website to improve your rankings would be considered on-page SEO; but, once added, there are still technical SEO checks that need to be made.

The first check is to have a look at the images on your website and ensure that they are hosted through your CMS. It may sound stupid, but you’d be surprised how often this occurs as lazy content creators and website developers decide to link to an image that is already being hosted elsewhere rather than uploading it to your own CMS. Believe it or not, we had an experience of this with a client last year – over the course of a couple of years and a number of new website builds, each developer after the next linked many of the images on the website to past dev sites thus creating a trail of image links spreading across 4 different websites. As a result, until this was discovered and fixed, the website performed poorly in search results as the website couldn’t be trusted. There’s also the chance that the images will suddenly become broken if they are removed from the website they are being hosted on.

An example of a broken image on a web page

The next check related to images is optimisation. It’s easy to upload an image to your CMS without worrying about the size on the assumption that in most cases it will just scale to the size you need. While this is correct, this can have a detrimental effect on the speed and performance of your website as users are having to load images a lot larger than necessary. To give you a rather extreme example, take your average high-quality stock image that could be around 5000 x 3000px in size. If you add that to a slider section on your website that is actually only 1920 x 400px then you are loading a much larger image than you need to, especially on mobile. In order to check if any images on your website could be optimised, type your website URL into Google’s pagespeed tool and make a list of any that it highlights in the image optimisation section. Either reduce the size of these images or see if your CMS offers any sort of image compression such as a plugin on Wordpress. A very easy fix is to convert any non-transparent .png images on your website to .jpg as they will be a smaller file size.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool

Website Speed

Nobody likes a slow website and it’s commonly known that nearly half of all web users now expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, often completely abandoning a website if it hasn’t loaded within 3 seconds. Furthermore, Google now takes website speed into account when ranking pages, so even small improvements to the speed of your website can result in improved rankings.

There are many ways to test your website’s speed but my favourite tool is Pingdom’s website speed test tool. Type in your website URL, start the test and see how long it takes for your website to load!

Pingdom’s Website Speed Test tool

This is the point in which I would usually go into more detail about each improvement that could be made, but as Pingdom already does that for you with performance insights, I’ll just list a couple of common suggestions:

• Leverage browser caching – all modern browsers use some form of caching to save copies of web pages so that when you visit a website again, the browser can load elements of a page from the cache as opposed to the host server of the website.

 

• Ensure that images are being optimised or compressed. As mentioned earlier, there’s nothing worse than trying to load a super large image on mobile. It’s just not necessary!

 

• Reconsider your hosting provider. Although hosting providers like GoDaddy are cheap and reliable enough for a small business, the result of paying a little more and switching to a hosting provider that uses Amazon servers could be huge.

 

• Minify your code files – this is something that can be done by the developer of your website or through the use of plugins/tools within your CMS. Minification essentially reduces the size of your code files, much like using a zip folder to reduce the size of multiple files at once.

It’s worth noting that Pingdom’s speed test tool isn’t 100% accurate as you’ll notice that if you do a couple of tests in a row the load time will be different every time; it is, however, a great estimation.

Schema Markup

Schema, sometimes referred to as Schema.org or Schema markup, is a vocabulary of HTML tags that can be added to content on your website in order to improve the effectiveness in which search engines can read your webpages and represent that in search engine results pages.

An example of some Schema Markup code

In a similar way that image alt tags provide search engines with a description of an image, Schema can be used to highlight different content types to search engines in order to help them better understand the content. For example, if you type “cinema times” into Google, more often than not you will be shown the showtimes of films at your local cinema above the search results. That’s just one example of how Schema has been used to tell Google exactly what the content on a web page is.

In order to start tagging the content on your own website Google offers a nice Structured Data Markup Helper tool in which you can generate Schema markup for a number of different content categories that often appear on websites: Articles, Book Reviews, Events, Job Postings, Local Businesses, Movies, Products, Restaurants, Software Applications and TV Episodes.

The most common use of Schema would be for products and services. By using the Schema for products on your e-commerce website you can give your products a number of properties: e.g. Product Review Rating, Brand, Product Colour, Item Condition, Logo, Material, Model, Product Name, Product Description and many more.

Although there’s not conclusive evidence as to whether Schema Markup improves rankings, what we do know is that search results in which content has been marked up using Schema have better click-through rates.

An example of marked up content appearing in Google Search results

by Liam Parker

SEO Part 3: Designing the perfect website architecture for both SEO and UX

Transcription

Before we write a single line of code for a new website, we need to be really clear on where we’re trying to take this in the long term. We need a really clear sitemap that might not all be created before the site goes live but certainly provides a clear sense of direction for how this is going to evolve over time.

There are two distinct elements to this - the first is from a user experience point of view - what do we want people to do on the website and how are we going to get them to do it? The second is from an SEO perspective. Now to some extent these two things overlap, and with every year that’s gone by the degree tow which th they overlap has become greater and greater - we used to have all sorts of battles between SEO experts and UX experts.

Thankfully those times are changing and there’s an ever increasing overlap, so I’ll just give a very quick example. Let’s imagine we run a gym chain. The home page will naturally target certain keywords, and if we run a number of different locations then presumably we’re going to have a number of pages that each target those different local terms. Perhaps we might have a page for Chiswick that targets terms like “gym in chiswick” or “ladies gym in chiswick” or “budget gym in chiswick”. However, there are almost certainly going to be terms that it doesn’t cater to in any great detail. For example, maybe someone in Chiswick is searching for “yoga classes” and perhaps the gym does offer yoga classes but it might be 1% of what the gym does and therefore cluttering up the user experience with details of the yoga classes doesn’t necessarily make sense. On the other hand there’s no harm in getting that traffic and maybe we offer really good yoga classes and it’s something we want to be doing of more in the future, so we still want to be getting the attention of those people making that search query but we just don’t want it interfering with the primary user experience. So in that case we might create a separate landing page targeting yoga classes in Chiswick with really rich content about the instructor and the different types of yoga taught, and other information that’s going to add to the UX, but this is a separate page and not something that forms part of the primary user experience.

Now as you can imagine, doing this for some businesses can result in vast sitemaps. Some businesses that have hundreds of different products and services or different locations served, and with all the different variables and combinations of those things, you can end up with sitemaps that are thousands of pages large, so it’s not always practical to think that they’re all going to be created before the site goes live, but it is important that you have a sense of where you’re going to take this in the long term.

You may also want to consider searches that represent people earlier on in the sales funnel, so rather than just focusing on those who are ready to buy, we might want to target people as well who are earlier on in their decision making process. For example, rather than someone searching for “gym chiswick”, it might be more a case of targeting people searching for educational material on nutrition or exercise generally. This is really important as we want to be capturing this data and building these relationships. Now with pages like this we may decide that they belong more appropriately within a blog or resources section and we don’t necessarily need to create them before the site goes live and rather they’re going to form part of a broader content strategy, Again, it’s just so important, as with all of this, that we have a really clear sense of where we’re trying to take this architecture in the long term so that we don’t create any obstacles for ourselves in the short term.

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by Dan Holt

SEO Part 2: Choosing the right domain for both SEO and brand

Transcription

Now depending on what stage you’re at in the process of developing your website, you may or may not already have a domain, and if you don’t have a domain and it’s a decision you’re looking to take, you’re probably thinking that it could have quite significant implications from an SEO point of view, and historically you would have been right. Pick the right, keyword rich domain, was considered one of the most important steps to developing an SEO strategy.

Not least because when people link to the domain they’re going to be including keywords in a very natural, organic way, so it definitely has its advantages. However, those benefits are vastly outweighed by the potential downsides if it’s not brandable. So, to give you an example, let’s imagine you’re looking to launch a brand called tvsonline.com. You could imagine people talking about it as a real brand, like they could trust it and it even having offline shops. However, tvs-online-uk-cheap.info - forget it. Nobody’s trusting that, so even if it benefits from some very short term artificial ranking inflation, it’s not going to be sustainable. People are not going to trust it as a brand and Google are going to see that people don’t trust it as a brand.

That’s the first consideration. You have to prioritise the sense of brand. Can you imagine this becoming a brand?

Secondly, we have to consider the extension. Now, as a general rule, if you can get a .com fantastic, but that’s not always that easy and if you’re audience is local. If it’s UK based, for example, then a .co.uk can work really well. .Net’s can work well. .Org’s can be really nice if you’re looking to develop a sense of community. I’m usually reluctant to suggest others, but again it comes down to the brand. For example, .London could work really well for certain brands. You wouldn’t necessarily expect any short term SEO benefit. You’d need to build those brand signals, but certainly, it can work for particular businesses.

The final consideration I’ll add, is the inclusion or exclusion of hyphens. Within the domaining world, there tends to be a bit of snobbery towards hyphenated domains. and if you can get the non-hyphenated version then that’s probably best. But not necessarily. Sometimes it can help break up the words and improve the legibility of the domain, so again it comes down to how you feel about it and whether or not you can imagine it becoming a real brand. And to be frank hyphenated are easier to find so you may not have a lot of choice.

So, those are all the considerations. Ultimately, it comes down, as I keep saying, to this one thing - brand.

by Dan Holt