A 20-minute presentation to students of Entrepreneurship at IIT Bombay and Gandhinagar

1. INTRO TO SEO IN
2022
A session for students of Mr Raj Jaswa
Digital Marketing (Entrepreneurship)
IIT Bombay and
IIT Gandhinagar
By @ashnallawalla

2. Ash Nallawalla
• 20-year veteran of SEO industry, mostly banks
and insurance giants, some consulting.
• Employed by Australia’s largest car marketplace
website – Carsales.com.au
• Writing a book for non-SEO managers who are
responsible for an SEO team or an outsourced
team – tentatively named “Accidental SEO
Manager”
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3. SEO in 20 minutes: What matters in 2022
• SEO can bring 30-60% of online revenues.
• Google uses AI and machine learning.
• Remember “entities”, not “keywords”. (Semantic SEO)
• Mobile performance (load time) is king.
• Structured data tags (schema.org) are important.
• EAT = Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.
• Quality links are important; most others are not.
• Never rely on Google for free traffic.
• Accessibility is always important.
• Some important Google tools.
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4. SEO can bring 30%-60% of online revenues. *
• Take note, future start-up founders, before you make your first
website.
• Get a professional SEO, not a co-founder “who knows SEO”.
• Give SEO the same focus as PPC (aka SEM). Institute proper SEO
governance in your company.
• It’s a specialised profession, not a technique anyone can pick up from
an article or book. Many practitioners know a sub-specialty and not
everything, e.g. Local Search, Video SEO, Voice optimisation, Audits,
Technical SEO, Shopify SEO, Magento SEO, WordPress SEO, Content,
Linking and so on. Use someone with several specialties.
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* Actual figures from my past employers.

5. Google uses AI and machine learning.
• AI and its subset – machine learning are used both:
1. To understand user search intent. – What is the searcher really after? Is this
an informational search, a navigational search, a transactional search, and
so on?
2. To understand what a page is about. – We’ll see on the next slide that
Google can figure out a page without needing the exact keywords typed by
the user on it.
• The takeaway for you is that you don’t need to (and can’t) trick
Google to get your pages to rank.
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6. Remember “entities”, not “keywords”.
• An entity is a “thing”, “place” or a “person”. Google can use many
keywords that it knows means one thing. E.g. “New York City” is also
known as:
• The Big Apple
• Manhattan
• NYC
• Metropolis
• The Five Boroughs
• (there are at least 20 others)
• Keywords are still important, but it is about the collection of related
keywords, not a couple of obvious ones. This is the Knowledge Graph.
• Now SEO is called Semantic SEO.
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7. Semantic SEO
• You should try to get not just a page to rank in a
search engine results page (SERP), but also for other
useful information, e.g. Featured Snippets,
Knowledge Panels, People Also Ask, People Also
Search For, etc
• IITB/IITGN own the first page SERP completely!
• Be like IITB/IITGN.
• Read: https://gofishdigital.com/blog/what-is-
semantic-seo/
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8. Mobile performance (load time) is king.
• Instal the Lighthouse browser extension in Chrome and test the
performance of various websites.
• The tool result panel gives suggestions to improve the scores.
• Getting a perfect score won’t directly lift your rankings, but it will
make users happier, so more likely to convert.
• The Performance score is affected by the quality of your hosting and
it changes depending on server load.
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9. Structured data tags (schema.org) are important.
• Structured data tags are similar conceptually to HTML
tags. You wrap them around text and thereby tell
Google what the words and numbers are, explicitly.
Google does not have to guess what is a phone
number, a special price, an address, and so on.
• There are hundreds to choose from.
• See https://schema.org/ for details.
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10. Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.
• A high-quality page should exhibit Expertise, Authoritativeness and
Trustworthiness (EAT). Google contracts third party quality evaluators
to judge sample pages and it adjusts its own algorithms based on
these checks.
• Pages that cover “Your Money, Your Life” (YMYL) are given stricter
scrutiny by Google than others.
• Read: Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines at
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9281931
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11. Quality links are important; most others are not.
• Three types of links are important to a website:
• Inbound links – from another website to yours.
• Outbound links – from your website to another.
• Internal links – within your website.
• Inbound links from the same or related niche are valuable. If those
sites exhibit high levels of EAT, even better. Paying money to get such
links is against Google’s guidelines.
• Link to a third party site judiciously. Use “nofollow” links unless you
have a logical, business affinity.
• Internal links, e.g. from a blog article to a product page are powerful.
• Keep the number of links per page to a minimum.
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12. Don’t Use Mega Navs.
• A huge, drop-down, fly-out navigation bar that is repeated on each
page creates too many unnecessary links. Use a flat nav instead.
• The principle there is internal PageRank. Each page has a fixed
quantity of PageRank that it can pass on through one link. Each
additional link on the page reduces the “juice” it passes to the
destination page, so it has less impact. ICICI Bank has done (almost) a
good job of using a flat nav. In a flat nav, the top menu takes you to a
new URL before deeper links are available.
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13. Never rely on Google for free traffic.
• Google changes its algorithms all the time. A well-built site is less
likely to get a nasty surprise from an update than a poorly built site.
• A site built with poor SEO choices, e.g. low-quality, “thin” content
(each page is much like another, with little uniqueness) could get a
rude shock and find its pages not ranking high.
• Google is primarily interested in its paid advertisers and makes the
ads more prominent all the time. So organic listings are moved lower
in the page.
• PPC ads should be part of a digital marketing strategy. You should
advertise on brand terms, even if they are likely to rank #1 –
otherwise a competitor will bid on your brand and get the click.
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14. Accessibility is always important.
• Making websites accessible to humans with different abilities is a
good plan, not simply because the law requires it in many countries.
If Google’s spider cannot read the page properly, the page might not
get indexed, so forget about ranking at all.
• Read: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
• Current: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/
• Proposed: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/
• Future: https://www.w3.org/TR/wcag3/
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15. Some useful Google tools.
 Google Search Console https://search.google.com/search-console/about
 Google Search Central https://developers.google.com/search
 Google Ads Keyword Planner https://ads.google.com/intl/en_au/home/tools/keyword-planner/
 Google Analytics https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/
 Google Data Studio https://datastudio.google.com/
 Google Trends https://trends.google.com/trends/
 Google Business Profile https://www.google.com/business/
 Google Structured Data Testing Tool https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool
 Google PageSpeed Insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
 Google Alerts https://www.google.com/alerts
 Think with Google https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/
 Google Test My Site https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/
 Google Digital Garage https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalgarage
 Search Think with Google
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/search/#?page=0,0&sort_field=date&limit=12&locale=en-us
 Google Analytics Academy https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/
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16. Thank You.
• I hope this quick presentation was clear.
• Feel free to ask questions.
• Ash Nallawalla, Melbourne, Australia
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