Futureproofing your SEO strategy
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The document discusses strategies for future-proofing SEO, including avoiding penalties, improving user experience, developing great content, and building natural links. It notes Google is increasingly rewarding sites that users love and penalizing those with poor user metrics, duplicate content, or unnatural links. The author recommends businesses continuously survey users, focus on quality content to build trust and memory, and integrate SEO best practices like reviews and Q&As throughout marketing efforts to protect revenue in the changing SEO landscape.
Futureproofing your SEO strategy
- 1. Future Proofing SEO by Patrick Altoft
- 2. What I’m talking about • Penalties • 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
- 3. Panda Sites that Google thinks are low quality got wiped out • Duplicate content • Poor “return to search” metrics (voucher sites & car classified sites) • Lots of low value pages • Thin content
- 4. Panda Rather than having some huge change that happens on a given day. You are more likely in the future to see Panda deployed gradually as we rebuild the index. So you are less likely to see these large scale sorts of changes. Merchant update?
- 5. 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 & content rather than just devaluing them
- 6. Does Google like your business model?
- 7. Unnatural Links Google has manually penalised thousands of sites for having unnatural links We run a penalty recovery service and have helped over 35 brands recover from their penalties in the past 6 months
- 8. Penguin Artificial intelligence algorithm designed to identify sites that fit a pattern of manipulating the algorithm by building unnatural links to get rankings higher than the site deserves
- 9. Link Devaluation A gradual drop in rankings since 22nd November could be due to link devaluation (November 22nd was also a Panda update too)
- 10. 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?
- 11. 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
- 12. 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
- 13. Great sites are winning • 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 ?
- 14. People love John Lewis
- 15. People love M&S
- 16. 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
- 17. 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
- 18. 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
- 19. 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
- 20. 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
- 21. Content Audit Document • Typography • Readability • Spelling/grammar • Shareability • Keyword use • Copyscape report on stolen content • Social media shares Shareable Content • Brainstorming • Competitor Analysis • Examples & screenshots from competitors Informative Content • Research Q&A on Yahoo Answers, Quora, Facebook, Twitter • Search for questions in Analytics data & keyword tool data • Gap Analysis of current content • Examples & screenshots from competitors etc User Generated Content • Reviews – implementation, incentivisation etc • Q&A section or Q&A on product pages etc • Forums, blog comments, guest blog posts, in-depth content reviews • Examples & screenshots from competitors etc Site Structure • Where does content need to go (blog or Q&A etc) • How should the sections be structured • Design & UI • Interlinking between sections • Examples & screenshots from competitors Content Roadmap Document • Monthly or weekly content plan • Special events & calendar • Blog calendar • PR calendar Content Strategy Framework
- 22. People are already doing this
- 23. Reviews If you don’t have a user review strategy – why not?
- 24. Questions & Answers Why wouldn’t you do this?
- 25. External Reviews • Build users trust • Improve conversion rates • Increase basket size • Improve Quality Score for PPC Why wouldn’t you do this?
- 26. 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
- 27. Usability & Conversion Rates
- 28. 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?
- 29. 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
- 30. 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.
- 31. Link strategy The only way to future-proof your link strategy is to make links a natural by-product of your normal marketing strategy As you might expect, this isn’t easy. How many links does your marketing strategy deliver every month at the moment? If you sit back and wait for links to arrive you won’t get enough to rank
- 32. Relationships Client PR Strategy Corporate Comms Media Relations Blog Outreach Social MediaCrisis Comms Internal Comms Public Affairs Agency SEO Strategy Linkbuilding Keyword Research Other SEO projects Onsite Optimisation Client does some great stuff over here Most agency/client linkbuilding relationships work like this Agency does some other stuff over there
- 33. It should work something like this Marketing Corporate Comms Links Media Relations Links Blog Outreach Links SEO Keywords Technical SEO Social Media Links Crisis Comms Links Reputation Management Internal Comms SEO Training Public Affairs Links Every marketing task can be performed by the client or the agency – usually an agile agency will fill the gaps where the client doesn’t have in-house resource