future proofing your seo by adria kyne

#SMX #24A3 @AdriaKIt’s mostly good stuff!

Future-Proofing Your

SEO

Adria KyneSEO Manager, North America

Vistaprint

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What are the changes you need to make?What are the trends worth investing in?What is going to decline in importance?

Today’s Topics

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HTTPSI told you so.

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Encryption – prevent eavesdroppingAuthentication – spoof your site to collect passwords or payment information Data integrity – not intercepted or modified between client and serversHTTP/2 – de facto requires HTTPS

The Carrot

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June 2014 “this is important, you should do this” - Google I/O Aug 2014 “we’ll give a ranking boost” – Webmaster Central BlogDec 2015 “we’ll index pages that have this by default” – Webmaster Central Blog

Strongly Suggesting

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Starting in January 2017:“we’ll mark HTTP pages that collect passwords or credit cards as non-secure”

September 2016 Announcement

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The Stick: Public Shaming

Now The Future

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Don’t Be the Last One

Dr. Pete from Moz

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Get a certificate, with 2048-bit encryption.a) Non-commercial or open source sites can get free

certificatesa) https://letsencrypt.org/

a) “Anyone who owns a domain name can use Let’s Encrypt to obtain a trusted certificate at zero cost.”

b) Commercial sitesa) Single host—one domain—is $10.b) Multi-domain certificate—localized, or a couple of subdomains—

using a CDN to serve contentc) Wild Card—if you don’t know what you’ll need—can be more

than $100

But Isn’t This Expensive and Hard?

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Set your certificate up correctly• Configure your server with consistent best practices

• Mozilla’s wiki page “Server Side TLS” http://mzl.la/Uew3xY• Qualys SSL Labs “SSL/TLS Deployment Best Practices”

http://bit.ly/1ImpYEW• Test the configuration• Optimize your server performance

Don’t let it expire.

SEO and your Certificate

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Redirect your URLs with a 301 redirect• Avoid creating redirect chains

Make sure all your internal links point to HTTPS pages on your site

• Beware legacy hard-coded links that are non-secure• HTTP assets such as JS files and images; advertising pixels

• Browser warnings about “mixed content”

Migrating the Site Correctly

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Don’t use the URL removal tool in Google Search Console

• It removes all the versions of the URLDon’t block the non-secure version of the URL with robots.txt

• SEs won’t see the redirectUse rel=canonical to self-reference the new URLsUse the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) header

• Sets a policy for the browser to automatically request the HTTPS versions of pages on your site

Replacing Your Listings in the Index

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Mobile EverythingI’m tired of talking about mobile

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Over 50% of Google’s searches are on mobileGoogle controls 95% of mobile search query volume1

Google handled 96% of search ad clicks2

Most new internet growth is coming from mobileGoogle keeps reporting positive financials even though desktop query growth is flat

You cannot avoid mobile

1StatCounter, via Search Engine Land2Merkle, via AdAge

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Feb 2015 announced that they will use mobile friendly factors in ranking, starting April 2015#Mobilegeddon

Early Warnings

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November 2016: “our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s

content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data,and to show snippets from those pages in our

results”

Mobile-First Indexing

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Mobile-Friendly Test

Mobile-Friendly Websites Guide• Make your mobile pages render in under one second• Avoid interstitials

They’re Defining “Mobile-Friendly” Clearly

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So get on it.

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Mobile conversion rates continue to be poor

But...

Monetate

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All new digital growth is coming from mobile usageMobile is cannibalizing desktop trafficGrowth of time spent in media is slowing

There Is a Limit to Media Growth

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Source: eMarketer

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90% of time on mobile is spent in apps

Nielsen

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Google’s Diversification

CNN Money

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Have reasonable expectations for revenue impact

Mobile friendliness will drive desktop visibility

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Up-and-Coming

Opportunities!

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Server-Side JavaScript

No, really.

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Why are we even talking about JavaScript?

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Vistaprint’s Faceted Navigation Problem

Sloooooooow performance• Trips to the server for every filter selection• What is acceptable for an initial load becomes

tiresome with each additional click

Switched to JavaScript for faceted navigation

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Performance!Client-side apps are FASTNo need for time-consuming round-trips with your server

Pros of JavaScript

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Cons of JavaScript

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Performance!Until you load all the assets, you’re waiting, so the initial experience suffersUnpredictable—affected by users’ devices

Cons of JavaScript

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1. Run the app on your server2. Render the page on the server3. Deliver HTMS and CSS4. Deliver JS app assets

Solution: Server-Side JavaScript

Source: tomdale.net

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Two Deliverables

Server-side rendered HTML JavaScript

assets are being delivered

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User gets initial server-side loadSubsequent interactions are JS-app-fastServer-side rendering of crawlable links on each page

Faster page load = Vistaprint saw higher conversion rates

Benefits of Server-Side JavaScript

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“Be sure that if using JavaScript to dynamically sort/filter/hide content without updating the URL, there still exists URLs on your site that searchers would find valuable, such as main category and product pages that can be crawled and indexed.”

Simplifying URL Space of Faceted Navigation Pages

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Structured Data Markup

So that Paid Search doesn’t have all the fun

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Data that has been marked to identify what it is

Schema.org vocabulary

Formats• JSON-LD• Microdata• RDFa

What Is Structured Data?

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RICH CARDSStructured Data Markup

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The Future: Recipes, Reviews, Events, Jetpacks

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Useful Right Now: Products

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Product nameImageDescriptionBrandRatingPricingAvailability

Example: Product Markup

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SITE ATTRIBUTESStructured Data Markup

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Sitelinks search box

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Breadcrumbs

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Featured Snippets

It’s not too late!

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50-80% of searches are Informational queries10% are Navigational, e.g. “Facebook” or “Gmail”

Don’t obsess about the 10% of queries that are Transactional!

Get In Front of Your Customers More Often

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Featured Snippets

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Featured Snippets - Tables

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Featured Snippets – Ordered and Unordered Lists

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Featured Snippets – Paragraphs

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Branding from citation

Click-through from snippet

Top-of-page visibility for sites that can’t crack the top three

Benefits of Featured Snippets

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Wherever you have top-ten results, look for existing snippets

• Rank reporting toolsLook for question-word keywords in Search ConsoleCombine keywords with question words in keyword tools

Finding Snippet Opportunities

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Add Q&A sections to your existing top-ten pagesSearch query in <title>, <h1>, <h2>Use <table>, <ol>, or <ul> to structure your contentWrite at an approachable reading level

Pro tip: Write answers that will have to be truncated (click-through)

Winning a Featured Snippet

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What is going to be less important?

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Google WMC hangout TwitterJohn Mueller says that they do not have a website authority score.

Domain Authority

Gary Illyes also denies domain authority

http://bit.ly/2m8KIMh 42:45 mark

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THANK YOU!