SEO

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

SEO Part 7 - Building Your Brand

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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

SEO part 6 - getting under the bonnet with technical optimisation

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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

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

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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

SEO Part 4 - Creating Killer Landing Pages

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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

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

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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 Chisqick 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.

by Dan

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

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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

SEO Part 1: The First Rule of SEO...

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The first thing to get in your mind when starting an SEO strategy, is to forget all about SEO. That probably sounds like an odd thing to say but the reason is simple. The days of very tactical, very technical SEO campaigns that are geared towards identifying the shortcomings of Google’s algorithm and using them your advantage, those days are long gone. If that’s your objective, to sneak under the radar, employ some dodgy tactics and artificially inflate your rankings, then forget it. You may enjoy some short term wins, but it’s never going to be sustainable.

Google has one objective in mind and that’s to provide the best content from the most trusted brands for any given search query and it is bloody good at doing it. So you need to be thinking about all the different things that contribute to that - you need to be thinking about the business you’re representing, the audience you’re trying to engage with, the content that’s going to satisfy their search intent, you need to be thinking about social media, and mobile UX and a thousand other things, but first of all you need to begin by adopting that mentality - this is all about building the best content and the most trusted brand.

by Dan