What do SEO’s & Other Marketers Talk

About Now!

Some leanings from Mozcon 2013 and more…

Over Arching Message

Do Better Marketing

Make Customers About Our Life

Become a Brand People Know, Trust, and Share• Build a Relationship Between your Brand and your Customer

• Web Marketing is Becoming Brand Dominated

Multi-Device Marketing is

Now

Even Likes this

A Reminder…

• Do some marketing• Understand the target audience– Find out where the target market is– What websites they are on– What they are reading– Are they on the phone or desktop

• Find out what & how they are sharing • Know what inspires them.• Loyalty is key

Brand, Customers & Loyalty

• Share your brands story offline• Connect with customers and be transparent• Take the relationship offline• Anticipate needs and add value before

asked• Deliver on promises • Be consistent• Make it personal – put customers first and

be loyal to them -> Reciprocal Loyalty

Speaker: Joanna Loard

Key Change: Word of Mouth has become a digitally archived media

Notes from the 2012 Obama Campaign

• 500 experiments– Copy test drive high ROI - require low LOE

• 21% increase in conversion• Less copy does better

– Image tests - next highest ROI– Button design isn’t high priority

• Performance– Started with 5-7 second load time– New architecture drove an 80% faster time driving

14% higher conversions

• Overall 49% increase on donation page• 161% increase on email sign up

Speaker: Kyle Rush

Web Psychology

• Gender and Cultural difference affect the customer experience even on the web– Language– Body positions– Social contexts– Symbols– Aethestics

• The US Psychology– Low power difference - loose structure, exploration,

transparency, disclosure, reputation based on merit, equal access, peers, earned media

– Low uncertainty culture – facilitate open dialogue, plain language, don’t be emotionally expressive, allow users to take risk, complexity and wider choice of action, navigation can be layered,

Tools for the Data Geeks

• Chord diagram – Visually shows a direct relationship among a group of

entities– zqi.me/vizd3– zqi.me/amtga (how to get the tools)– zqi.me/MCAak (blog)

• Similarweb.com – Understand your competitors– Learn where their traffic is coming from– What’s working for them– Now Experiment

Speaker: Avinash Kaushik

We are SEO’s we want

Tactics

Need Links Content• 2008 SEO = On Page Basics + linkbuilding• 2013 SEO = Content Marketing – video, site

speed, UX, Mobile, Link Building, Content Strategy, On-page SEO

Link building vs content marketing in 2013

Speaker: Ross Hudgens

Find old content @ http://www.greenlaneseo.com/outdated-content-finder

Need Links Outreach Google

Collect Data + Analyze + Be SmartList of domains your customers have shared + Domain authority of those domains + List of

authors who’s articles are being shared

Tools to assist with research: bit.ly/twitterarchiver, SEO Tools for Excel SEO Gadget, bit.ly/followerwonfetcher, bit.ly/mozcontemplate, Rapportive

Speaker: Richard Baxter

Who are you

targeting?

Identifyinfluencer intersect

What Are those people

sharing?

Be there

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Find the Authors here

Video• When to use videos:

– If the message will be lost by any other medium– Video can be used to help sell a specific product or service– Video watchers spend 9.1% more money on average

• Optimize for SEO:– Include a transcription in the html – valuable for users, provides unique

and relevant content for the page– Enable rich snippets– Create a video sitemap– Include referring embed links– Available on your site first

• Host your own vs. You Tube– Don’t lose the traffic to You Tube by hosting your conversion videos

there– Use You tube for brand awareness and informational stuff– Measure engagement not views – You Tubes biggest ranking factor

Platform to consider: Wistia

Speaker: Phil Nottingham

Ecommerce SEOThen Now

Chase Algos Chase people

Keywords with most traffic Keywords with most relevance

Obsess on links Creating experiences with sharing

More links, more pages, more everything Less is more

Focus on rankings Focus on bottom line metrics – non branded revenue, conversion rate, new customers

Speaker: Adam Audette

Content Strategy & Ecomm

• Key words get you half way• Do a categorization exercise and

build persona’s• SEO and Content – – use terms in titles that trigger CTR– these terms are determined by the

customers

Speaker: Adam Audette

Other Ecomm Tips• Tablets used more than smartphones to visit ecommerce sites. Tablet users

look at more pages.• Reduce load time by using responsive - one code• Crawling tips:

– Fix server errors when they spike– Monitor indexation in XML – blow them out into different pages like category, sub category– Speed rules– Use 304 not modified– Parameter handling is good– Use log files to identify issues

• Okay to have a 404 page at the product level though have related or recommended items on this page. Or can do a 301 to related product or up a level.

• Navigation & internal links, external backlinks, canonical tags, XML files all point to the same definitive URLs.

• Use pagination• Use faceted Navigation

Web performance optimizationhttp://plotin.us/183sKv2

SEO site speedhttp://plotin.us/12gKxOy

Adobe:http://plotin.us/12QMH7d

Responsive: http://plotin.us/18GrTn2

Estimating hidden iOS6 traffichttp://plotin.us/12ViOjo

Speaker: Adam Audette

Social is In

Images work- Transcend the limitations of

text -- Easy to share -

- People are busy -- Help tell a story -

-Search engines designed for text but People love images-

WordlessWednesdays

Meme- Share an image with no text. Allow customers to

comment -

Infographics- Create your own-

- Infogr.am, Visua.ly, InfoActive.com, Poktochart,

Easel.ly, Many Eyes- - Fill the content gaps -

Quote graphics- Social works -

Speaker: Lena West

Some Tools:

Social @ Think Geeks• Valuable content, timely, informative, useful, entertaining• Instead of saying things about products, they say stuff about the fandoms that

come out of those• Approach social like TV, share good content – sprinkle in messages about

yourself• Today in Geek History accounts for 30% of their top 100 RT tweets• Frequency that works for them:

– FB & Google = 3 times per day– Twitter = once ever yhour

• Time of day that works for them– Tweeting – Noon & 1pm– Retweets 10 to 1pm– FB – 4pm and then after 7pm

• Best days that work for them– Google and Twitter: Mon – Fri– FB: Ever day for

• Content– Google: videos– FB: posts with images, links within posts are not performing as well

Speaker: Carrie Gouldin

Some Basics…

On-Page Factors & their Correlations with Ranking

• Word count: – pages that rank in top positions have a higher word count than

websites positioned at the lower end of SERPs except for branded sites

• Internal links: – pages appearing at the top of search results tend to have a greater

number of internal links– Use ‘hard’ links internally (i.e. with keywords) and ‘soft’ links

externally (i.e. generic/stop words/more words in the anchor, brand links, etc.). links than pages achieving lower rankings.

• Advertising less negative than before– well-ranked sites had fewer adverts than those that ranked

lower. The situation has now changed somewhat so these correlations are close to neutral.

• KW in title tag, on page, H1Possible ranking factors in the future: open graph, schema.org, G+ publisher, G+ author

Some Other Ranking Factors– External anchor text: Partial and exact match have the same

correlation (correlation data)– Survey says you need to maintain a good mix of anchor text– It’s not actual document complete time, but server response

time that has a higher correlation – which makes sense since Google often doesn’t load all elements.

– Fresh links and mentions to your domain and subdomain (citations) help

– Social:

• Very strong correlations to G+ (second only to page authority)• Facebook still strong, but slipped a bit recently• Twitter flat for the past few years• Questionable if this is correlation or causation

Title Tags• Main text that describes an online document. It is an accurate

and concise description of what’s on the page. It is critical for user experience and search engine optimization.

• 2nd most important thing after over-all content• Where does it appear:

– Browser– SERP (Search engine results page)– External websites (as anchor text to link to your content)

• Value: relevancy, browsing and SERP

• Benefit: low effort but high SEO impact• Rules:

– 70 characters or less including spaces– Place KW close to the front of the Title Tag– Include the Brand name within the tag to leverage the brand– Consider readability and emotional impact

Meta Descriptions• HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the content on the web

page• Value:

– Important in gaining user click-through from SERPs– Opportunity to advertise content to searchers

• Rules:– 155 characters including spaces– Employ the keywords intelligently, but also create a readable compelling

description that a searcher will want to click– Must be unique– Prevent Google from cutting off the meta description

• Don’t use quotes • remove all non-alphanumeric characters

– If the page is targeting between one and three heavily searched terms or phrases, go with a meta description that hits those users performing that search

Note: – Google and other search engines bold keywords in the description when they match search

queries– When choosing whether or not to add a meta description consider that social sharing sites like

Facebook commonly use a page's description tag when the page is shared on their sites. Without the meta description tag, social sharing sites may just use the first text they can find.