Digital Futures: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies

The Latest Advanced SEO
& Link Strategies
by Patrick Altoft


What I’m talking about
• The importance of making your content strategy & content marketing integral to
your normal day to day business, PR and comms strategy
• Making users love you
• How great sites are winning the SEO race
• How to make your site great
• Being memorable
• Content strategy
• Getting social
• Links


Doing Real Stuff
Would you do this if it didn’t help
with SEO?

When you release a new page or
piece of content would your MD or
PR department tweet about it?

If not then you probably shouldn’t
be doing it


Real Company Stuff

http://b3.io/10ZXMjy


What Google Wants
The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great
user experience and fulfil their information needs.

Matt Cutts

Our strategy therefore is to create a better search result for our clients than their
competitors.

This can be split into two simple to understand factors:
• Creating more authority & being a better/more reputable company
• Making better landing pages, specifically your primary pages


Achieving This

The tactics to achieve this are a mixture of links, content strategy, onsite optimisation &
usability.

It’s important to remember that while the tactics might change the strategy has not
changed in nearly 15 years.

As an SEO agency we focus on making our clients websites a better destination for
searchers than their competitors.

If Google thinks that our clients site is more useful and will give a better experience for
users then the site will probably rank higher.


Authority
Google measures authority using offsite factors, for example:
• Links
• Press coverage
• Social media mentions
• Traffic
• Search volume

All things being equal a searcher prefers to visit a well known authority brand than an
unknown website with the same content.

Turning yourself into an authority and building your brand by becoming an expert is the
best possible way to improve SEO


Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis has
become pretty much
useless in the last 12
months.

Most of your competitors
links probably look terrible

Maybe they disavowed
them?


Competing
If you don’t have a better site, don’t expect to rank higher. Build links
people can’t replicate rather than just copying competitors

http://www.rosshudgens.com/authority-bloat/


Do people love you?
It’s unquantifiable, tough to explain to clients & impossible
to make a business case for but love is slowly & steadily
becoming part of the Google algorithm

Google can tell whether people love your website & is
rewarding the most loved websites with higher rankings.

Panda downgraded sites that people didn’t love – why
wouldn’t Google reward sites that people do love?


How can Google understand love?
Hundreds of user engagement
signals are analysed and fed into
an artificial intelligence algorithm

The algorithm learns how to
detect whether users love a site
or not (probably with the help of
seed sites)

Remember, Chrome has 33%
market share & Analytics is in
use on over 10m websites


How artificial intelligence
shapes the algorithm
New algorithm
• Based on what we know
about sites that are loved, do
we think that people love
your site?

Old Algorithm
• Let’s score you on various
trust signals & see how you
perform


Poor quality sites just don’t perform as well
Historically a mediocre company with a below average site could implement an
aggressive link strategy based on mediocre links and generate top rankings.

Now Google actively penalises for bad links rather than just devaluing them


Great sites are winning in 2012 & 2013
• Doing SEO for a great site is 10x easier than doing SEO for a mediocre site
• For most companies this is the difference between success and failure in an SEO campaign

?
Panda


People love John Lewis


People love Very.co.uk


People love Currys*


What can I do?
• Want to know how Google sees your site? Just ask
your visitors.

• Every site should be permanently asking for
feedback from different groups of people

• Adopt a mantra of continual improvement & use
survey scores as a KPI

• http://qualaroo.com


Content Strategy
Our Data Insights team analysed visits across one of the UK’s largest
retail ecommerce websites and found that users who engaged with a
piece of content such as an article, forum thread or video on the site
before reaching a product or category page were 5 times more valuable
than users who arrived directly on a product or category page.

Users who engage with quality content place more trust in the brand so
convert at a higher rate, purchase more products and have a greater
tendency to make repeat purchases

Increasing brand trust, improving conversion rates and encouraging
larger sale values are all vital elements of any digital marketing campaign


Attribution modelling
Adding attribution modelling into the mix demonstrates even further why a strong
content strategy is so important – on average non-brand organic SEO is 40% more
valuable than a traditional “last click wins” methodology would show.
Content strategy increases assisted conversions


Content makes your site memorable
Our research shows that 40% of ecommerce transactions are carried out
24 hours or more after users first visit the website


Being memorable
Only 40% of revenue is attributable to users who buy on the first visit – most of your
customers will need to remember you and find you a second time


Content Strategy Framework
Content Audit Informative User Generated Content Roadmap
Shareable Content Site Structure
Document Content Content Document

• Typography • Brainstorming • Research Q&A on • Reviews – • Where does content • Monthly or weekly
• Readability • Competitor Analysis Yahoo Answers, implementation, need to go (blog or content plan
• Spelling/grammar • Examples & Quora, Facebook, incentivisation etc Q&A etc) • Special events &
• Shareability screenshots from Twitter • Q&A section or Q&A • How should the calendar
competitors • Search for questions on product pages etc sections be • Blog calendar
• Keyword use
in Analytics data & • Forums, blog structured • PR calendar
• Copyscape report on
keyword tool data comments, guest • Design & UI
stolen content
• Gap Analysis of blog posts, in-depth • Interlinking between
• Social media shares
current content content reviews sections
• Examples & • Examples & • Examples &
screenshots from screenshots from screenshots from
competitors etc competitors etc competitors


People are already doing this


Reviews
If you don’t have a user
review strategy – why not?


Questions & Answers
Why wouldn’t you do this?


External Reviews
• Build users trust
• Improve conversion rates
• Increase basket size
• Improve Quality Score for PPC

Why wouldn’t you do this?


Usability
How many sites are hard to
use on a mobile device or
iPad?

What’s your conversion rate
on Safari?

Our data for 30m UK users in
August puts Safari at over 30%
market share with most visits
coming from iPad and iPhone
use – Safari is the most
popular browser on lots of
ecommerce sites


Usability & Conversion Rates


This sounds hard, can we ignore SEO?
For an established business the new rules of SEO are a tough sell
because businesses need information about ROI to sign off projects
and struggle to implement new ways of working

Maybe you can just ignore SEO?


The new rules of The Internet
Look at it another way - Google is just mirroring real life and ranking sites that users
want to see. If people don’t like your site this will impact everything you do online.

If you don’t focus on making users love you then how will you get traffic?

• PPC – Google will bring these factors into the Quality Score algorithm sooner or later
• Direct – if users don’t love you will they still visit your site directly?
• Social media – unloved sites never succeed in social media
• Affiliates – can you afford to pay commission for all your sales/leads?
• Conversions – users convert better if they love the site


It’s not about growth
Look at all the brands who have lost huge amounts of revenue due to
Panda, Penguin and unnatural links.

SEO is no longer just about growth.

For some businesses SEO is just about forward thinking to protect market
share and make sure the next major update doesn’t ruin your business.


This is your Kodak moment
Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 and were
well aware in 1981 that digital was the future

They just didn’t do anything about it


Merchant Quality
We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of
merchants and whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t want low quality
experience merchants to be ranking in the search results.

What happens if Google develops an artificial intelligence algorithm to rank the best
sites at the top, regardless of how well SEO’ed they are?


Zappos

Digital Futures: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft

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Digital Futures: The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies - Patrick Altoft