SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

TRAININGDemandQuestOctober 2016

Session 2

TODAY’S AGENDA

1. 30-minute SEO Checkup Check-in2. Additional SEO Basics3. Advanced Local SEO4. Keyword Research5. Advanced SEO Concepts6. Q&A

30 MINUTE SEO CHECK

UP

HOW DID YOU DO?

30-MINUTE SEO CHECK UP – CHECK IN1. What were the issues you found?

2. Let’s dig into the causes

3. How are you going to fix them?

ADDITIONAL SEO BASICS

COMMON SEO MYTHS

1. SEO is dead2. SEO is easy3. SEO is hard4. SEO is snake oil/fairy

dust/magic5. Content is king!!!!6. Rankings = business7. There’s one right

answer

CMS OPTIONS

…and many, many more.

DUPLICATE CONTENT

• The presence of duplicate content on your site is problematic for a couple of different reasons:

1. Duplicate content forces search engines to “choose” what version of the content to serve in results.

2. It may appear to the search engines that your site is attempting to manipulate the results pages by ranking several different URLs for the same search term.

HOW GOOGLE HANDLES DUPLICATE CONTENT

HOW GOOGLE HANDLES DUPLICATE CONTENT

HOW TO FIND DUPLICATE CONTENT• Screaming Frog

• Site:www.example.com/page

• Copyscape.com

• Siteliner.com

DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT

1. Redirects2. Canonical tags3. Parameter handling4. Noindex tag5. Robots.txt file6. Server rules

DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT

You will almost always use a 301Only certain, specific situations call for a 302

DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT

DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT

DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT

http://www.threedeepmarketing.com/blog/what-the-font-should-i-care/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organictweet

s

DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT

• Prevent a page from appearing in or remove a page from search results by including a meta noindex tag

• This tells Google and other visiting search engines to remove/exclude the page from search results

• It’s important to note that this is useful in specific situations

DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT

• Use robots.txt file to prevent certain pages from being crawled

DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT

• http://www.example.com• http://www.example.com/• http://example.com• http://example.com/• https://www.example.com• https://www.example.com/• https://example.com• https://example.com/

GOOGLE SEES THESE AS INDIVIDUAL PAGES!

Choose your preferred protocol, host, and trailing slash consistency.

SEO TOOLS

TOOLS FOR SUCCESS – SEO TOOLS• Screaming Frog• Excel• Google Analytics• Google Search Console• SEM Rush• Google Keyword Planner• Webpagetest.org • Pexels

TOOLS FOR SUCCESS – BROWSER PLUGINS• Ayima redirect path• META SEO Inspector• MozBar• User-Agent Switcher• Web Developer• SeeRobots• Scraper• TinEye

ADVANCED LOCAL SEO

LOCAL SEO RANKING FACTORS• Link signals• On-page signals• Google My Business signals• External location signals• Behavioral signals• Personalization signals• Review signals

SETTING UP GOOGLE MY BUSINESS (GMB)• https://www.google.com/business/

• Choose the most accurate category• https://moz.com/local/categories

• COMPLETE YOUR PROFILE TO 100%

• Choose a custom URL • Choose wisely, this cannot be changed

later…

REVIEW ACQUISITION“Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking: more reviews and positive ratings will probably improve a business's local ranking.”

Probably a good idea to have a strategy in place.

REVIEW ACQUISITION

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/products/google-review-handout/

REVIEW ACQUISITION Real world example:

NEGATIVE LOCAL SEO FACTORS

rank ings

NAP INCONSISTENCYThe #1 issue that I see is inconsistency across citations in • Name • Address• Phone Number

Getting this right takes time.www.brightlocal.com

WRONG GMB CATEGORIES• Use as few categories as possible to describe your overall core business

from the provided list.• Choose categories that are as specific as possible, but representative of your

main business.• Do not use categories solely as keywords or to describe attributes of

your business.• Do not use categories that pertain to other businesses that are nearby

or related, such as a business physically contained within your business or an entity that contains your business.

TOO MANY GMB PROFILES

https://moz.com/ugc/local-seo-case-study-the-diary-of-an-address-change

KEYWORD STUFFED FOOTER

‘…loading a webpage with irrelevant keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s rankings “results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking.”’

SETTING UP FALSE GMB PAGES

MONEY KEYWORD ANCHOR TEXT

• Google values sites that are built for users, not search engines.

• So, build your site for your user.

• You’re better off optimizing the on page elements than creating a whole bunch of these types of internal links.

CALL TRACKING NUMBERS ON CITATIONS

DUPLICATE CONTENT ON EVERY LOCATION PAGE

ADVANCED SEO TACTICS

LINK BUILDING

WHY INVEST IN LINK BUILDING?

A technically sound site will only get you so far.

Without links, it simply will not have the equity or authority to be visible in search engines.

LINK BUILDING TACTICSTwo methods:

1. Passive link building

2. Active link building

PASSIVE LINK BUILDINGBrand monitoring:• Google Alerts• SEM Rush• Mention.net• Buzzsumo

Embed links:• Data Visualization• Not “Widget Links”

ACTIVE LINK BUILDING1. Content creation2. Guest posting3. Prospecting4. Local links5. Directories6. Events7. Broken Link

Building8. Image Link

Reclamation

WEBSITE MIGRATIONS

February March April May June July August0

20,000

40,000

60,000

80,000

100,000

120,000

140,000

160,000

180,000

122,827

152,547157,449

152,314 155,216 158,605 156,027

102,983

126,075 126,110 124,216 122,195116,386

126,290

monthly organic session data

20142015SEO work

starts3 months before impact realized

WHEN IT GOES WRONG…

Site launch in Jan. panic starts

3 sites into one migration

WHEN IT GOES WRONG…THEN, RIGHT

B2B ecommerce site

• A web redesign caused their organic traffic to tumble by 50% and impacted revenue

• Engaged Three Deep to identified issues, develop priorities and implement SEO improvements

• Rebuilt organic traffic, surpassed original goal and continues to grow

HOW CAN YOU AVOID DISASTER?1. Plan your site structure2. Understand your current digital

ecosystema) Paid traffic?b) Legacy sites?

3. Map out 301 redirectsa) Pull any legacy redirectsb) Map out redirects for any 404s currently

reported in GSC or captured in crawlc) Pull link data from GSC, OSE, Majestic, and

Ahrefs – map any additional redirects 4. Monitor, QA, Test, Fix, Repeat.

GOOGLE ALGORITHM UPDATES

• Each year, Google changes its search algorithm around 500–600 times.*

• That’s roughly 1.5 changes EVERY. SINGLE. DAY!

THE SHIFTING SANDBOX

• Source: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

GOOGLE ALGORITHMHow can you figure out what happened?

1. Moz – Algorithm Change History

2. MozCast

3. Panguin Tool

4. Search Metrics

RECOVERING FROM PENALTIES• Manual Actions:• Unnatural Links to/from Your Site• Hacked Site• Thin Content• Pure Spam• User-Generated Spam• Cloaking and Sneaky Redirects• Hidden Text and Keyword Stuffing• Spammy Freehosts• Spammy Structured Markup

RECOVERING FROM PENALTIES

INTERNATIONAL SEO

WHAT IS INTERNATIONAL SEO?International SEO is the process of enabling of your website(s) to become visible in search engines for the languages and countries in which you do business.

Or, to put it more plainly, get the right version of your website in front of your customers regardless of what country they live in, language they speak, or search engine they use.

INTERNATIONAL SEO1. TRANSLATION2. TRANSLATION3.TRANSLATION!!!You MUST be speaking to your audience in their natural language.

TRANSLATION

INTERNATIONAL SEO

• ccTLD – Country Code Top Level Domain• Choose this if you are targeting a specific

country

• Subfolders – example.com/en-us/page• Choose this if you are targeting language and

country

• Subdomains – de.example.com• Choose this if it is the only option you have

CHOOSING THE RIGHT URL STRUCTURE

INTERNATIONAL SEO

The <hreflang> tag tells search engines what language and geographic location each page on your site is targeting.

<HREFLANG>

<HREFLANG><link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“en-us” href=http://www.example.com/ /><link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“en-gb” href=http://www.example.co.uk/ /><link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“es-es” href=http://www.example.es/ />

1. Hey, Google in the US, please serve this page to English speakers

2. Hey, Google in the UK, please serve this page to English speakers

3. Hola, Google in Spain, please serve this page to Spanish speakers

BUILDING A CRAWLABLE WEBSITE

BUILDING A CRAWLABLE WEBSITE

BUILDING A CRAWLABLE WEBSITE• All web content can be accessed at

unique pages with readable URLs• No Javascript in navigation• Logical content bucketing• No flat structure

• All pages linked to internally

CRAWLABILITY ISSUES

• https://www.hogarth-ogilvy.com/• http://www.admgroup.com/• https://imation.com/en/

ACCELERATED MOBILE PAGES(AMP PROJECT)

WHAT IS AMP?The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project was initiated by Google to help speed up the mobile web.

It is open source – non-Google developers are continuously improving.

Although not a direct ranking signal, it improves user experience.

SCHEMA

WHAT IS SCHEMA?Schema is microdata – the information about the information on your pages.

WHAT IS SCHEMA?Schema helps search engines determine entities and classify information.

It helps them understand relational connections to provide information to searchers that is likely relevant.

WHAT IS SCHEMA?

SOCIAL SCHEMASocial schema is what triggers the information seen on a social network when a web page is shared.

SOCIAL SCHEMAog = Open Graph (Facebook and LinkedIn)Twitter = Twitter

SCHEMA TOOLS• Schema.org• Structured data testing tool• Facebook OG Tag tester• Twitter Card validator

THANK YOU!

QUESTIONS?