5. Dan and I used to rap together. Then we got tired of being broke so he
went to law school and I became a marketing guy.
6. I’ve been doing internet
marketing consulting for
10 years and a lot of it
feels like…
7. Dan and I used to rap together. Then we got tired of being broke so he
went to law school and I became a marketing guy.
8. Dan and I used to rap together. Then we got tired of being broke so he
went to law school and I became a marketing guy.
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Other Times It Feels
Like My Friend Ronnie
I’m not really sure what’s
going on here, but I imagine
he feels like a big kid in a
candy store with a 20% off
sale.
10. Oh, and they told me that I
shouldn’t talk about
technical SEO today. I
should do a broader topic.
11. Dan and I used to rap together. Then we got tired of being broke so he
went to law school and I became a marketing guy.
12. I think that’s indicative of
the larger problem that we
have as people trying to do
SEO.
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Progressive Web Apps
Google has rolled out Progressive Web Apps which effectively make web apps act more like native apps;
building upon the Singe Page App idea popularized with JS frameworks.
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Firebase
Google acquired and improved Firebase which has become a suite of applications for making apps far more
sophisticated and real-time.
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Accelerated Mobile Pages
Google has rolled out Accelerated Mobile Pages to help content load in milliseconds instead of seconds.
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Clients Still Don’t Understand What it Takes to Do Good
White Hat Link Building
A brand came to us looking to build links to their product page, so we built a content experience into the
product page below the fold. We built it and got link commitments, but they shot it down.
24. Despite the huge shift to
content marketing, clients are
still hesitant to take big
content swings.
25. In fact, clients generally won’t
make real change until Google
puts an algorithmic gun to their
head.
26. Dan and I used to rap together. Then we got tired of being broke so he
went to law school and I became a marketing guy.
27. Dan and I used to rap together. Then we got tired of being broke so he
went to law school and I became a marketing guy.
46. Organic Search is a channel, and
just like every other marketing
channel it should be measured
based on its ability to meet
business objectives.
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Setup your KPIs by Need State and Content Type
“Multichannel custom publishing.”
Tie your content types and KPIs to need states to more effectively measure the impact of Organic Search on the user journey.
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GA Content Groupings Supports User Journey Measurement
Read this: http://ipullrank.com/how-to-measure-the-user-journey-with-content-groupings-wordpress-gtm/
49. The only thing rankings
measure is opportunity;
your reporting needs to
be about outcomes
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I Made the Case, we Got our 301s, they Got Their Money
The project was at an implementation stand still until I put those numbers in front of the client. Shortly
thereafter, they made the push for 301s and traffic went up pretty dramatically despite seasonality.
August 27th
301 redirects
11,039,188
10,455,517
11,348,902
12,049,481
11,250,148
12,902,847
11,040,192
13,158,296
11,287,790 12,203,998
12,508,164
13,158,296
14,041,313
15,609,390
0
2,000,000
4,000,000
6,000,000
8,000,000
10,000,000
12,000,000
14,000,000
16,000,000
18,000,000
April May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct
Organic Visits
2014 2015
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BUILD BETTER
BUSINESS CASES
Your keyword research in context conversion data and search traffic through the lens of a specific persona
yields a far better business case than “hey, I have this cool idea”
60. A better SEO business
case means better
keyword research
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• Most keyword research is just a list of keywords and search volumes. That’s not strategic enough for any initiative let alone Organic Search or
Content Marketing.
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• Some keyword research is entirely metric driven, including conversion data and business value. This is better, but still not enough.
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GOOD KWR ACCOUNTS FOR INTENT
• Good keyword research includes some determination of intent. The best you see in the wild is “transactional, informational and navigational”
determinations of keywords.
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Great Keyword Research Maps to Need States and Personas
• Mapping keywords to the phases of the consumer decision journey provides more granularity to the understanding of what users are actually
looking to do with their search.
[flowers]
[when do roses bloom]
[what flowers for a first date]
[buying chrysanthemums]
[flower a month club]
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(Not provided)? So what.
• Keywords are gone and Google provides more than enough data to determine what types of users are coming to your site. Use that in context of
landing pages, internal search and channels
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Build User Journeys to Map Keywords
• A well-designed User Journey is more than enough to determine where keywords fall. Determining the thoughts, questions and feelings of your
target audience helps you understand where keywords will fall.
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KEYWORD DATA SHEET
• The keyword portfolio includes a number of data points on each keyword that allows it to inform strategic planning, content strategy, content
marketing, SEO and Paid Search.
This usually includes some combination of Word Count, Avg Monthly Search
Volume, Historical Traffic, Share of Voice, Google Ranking, Cost Per Click, Quality
Score, Target Persona, Need State, Keyword Segment, Conversions, Landing Page,
Target Landing Page, Page Entities, Rank Zone, Ranking Difficulty.
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CALCULATING WORD
COUNT
• Calculate the word count of your keywords using this formula. This allow you to quickly filter for head terms, “chunky middle” and long tail
keywords.
=IF(LEN(TRIM(A1))=0,0,LEN(TR
IM(A1))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"
",""))+1)
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CALCULATING SHARE
OF VOICE
• Share of voice is an indication of the amount of traffic a keyword could potentially drive vs. how much is being captured. A Share of Voice of over a
100% means that you’re capturing more traffic than expected.
Note: This is far less effective given (not provided), but Share of Voice is still a metric
that the C-Suite understands.
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VISUALIZE OPPORTUNITIES
• We visualize keyword data with regard to search volume, rankings and keyword category or persona and need state to clearly communicate the
opportunity.
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GIVE CONTEXT
Your recommendations will
go across many people’s
desk before it potentially
gets implemented. Be sure
to give business and
technical context.
77. We’ve also got to improve
our pitches. It’s one of the
most important parts of
our jobs.
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FAIL #1: WEAK
PRESENTATION
A marketer presents the creation of infographics via email and phone, but doesn’t succeed and ultimately the client sees them as “complicated” or
“expensive” measures.
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RESOLUTION #1:
PRESENT A DECK IN-
PERSON
Your presentation should not be an email or a phone call, it should be an in-person presentation with all the stakeholders.
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FAIL #2: LEAVING OUT
KEY STAKEHOLDERS
A marketer sells in an idea neglecting to invite key stakeholders only to have that content strategy fall apart once the miss stakeholders review it.
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RESOLUTION #2:
INVITE THEM ALL
Get all of the key stakeholders on board so you don’t have to repeat steps or risk the engagement falling apart after you believe
you’re good to go.
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FAIL #3: NOT
SHOWING THE VALUE
A marketer explains the content strategy using the wrong KPIs and the stakeholders respond that content is “nice to have” not as beneficial as “bombarding
people with 100k email communications.”
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RESOLUTION #3:
BETTER
MEASUREMENT
PLANNING
Build your measurement around the business objectives and things that actually show the positive affects of revenue.
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FAIL #4: RELYING ON
TOO MUCH DATA
A marketer relies heavily on data to make her case and lambasts the regarded accomplishments
of the key stakeholders.
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RESOLUTION #4: LET
THE STORY DO THE
WORK
Don’t use numbers as a weapon to insult your stakeholders, tell a compelling story using the data as an aside that drive
the points of ineffectiveness.
86. Dan and I used to rap together. Then we got tired of being broke so he
went to law school and I became a marketing guy.
87. Keeping Up with Technical
Advancements
I’ve got to give the people what they came for!
88. Google moved from “strings
to things” like four years ago.
Do you have an entity
strategy?
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ALCHEMY API
Using AlchemyAPI you can extract entities from pages and improve keyword research. http://www.alchemyapi.com
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Get AlchemyAPI Data in a Spreadsheet
Run your landing pages through AlchemyAPI to extract their entities via a Google Doc or Excel sheet and better align them with your
target keywords
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How About TF*IDF?
Run your landing pages through AlchemyAPI to extract their entities via a Google Doc or Excel sheet and better align them with your
target keywords
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Moz’s New Tool Will Help
Moz has made the related keywords concept more accessible by adding it to Moz Pro.
Searchmetrics also has a similar solution.
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Onpage.Org’s TF-IDF Tool is Also Great
http://onpage.org also has a solution that that shows the weight of terms that should be featured
on the page
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Get AlchemyAPI Data in a Spreadsheet
Run your landing pages through AlchemyAPI to extract their entities and better align them with your target keywords
96. We need to stop saying
‘just do 301 redirects.’
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Instead Do Optimal 301
Redirects
Pattern matching on the .htaccess level is always faster than a list of redirects and always better than doing
it on the code/page level. Developers will respect that you understand what you’re talking about.
ReWriteRule url_pattern
file_reference [R=301, L]
redirect 301 /relative/path/to/file.php
http://www.yoursite.com/path/to/new/file.php
redirect 301 /relative/path/to/file.php
http://www.yoursite.com/path/to/new/file.php
redirect 301 /relative/path/to/file.php
http://www.yoursite.com/path/to/new/file.php
>
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Schema.org / JSON-LD
Schema.org is a lot more reasonable to implement now that they are allowing JSON-LD. Being in knowledge
boxes and such yields a lot more traffic than it takes away.
100. A common thread across many
of Google’s innovations is that
they are all going to require more
speed.
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Progressive Web Apps
Progressive Web apps are about more than speed, but they do leverage Service Worker so that apps appear
to work instantly.
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Firebase
Firebase is more about building more robust apps and leveraging Google’s infrastructure to add more features
to them. It has its own analytics and supports app indexing.
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Google Expects Ludicrously Speedy
Google has an expectation that the above the fold content on the page will load within 1 second. You basically get 400 ms to
make that happen.
106. In other words, AMP exists
because Google thinks
people can’t code.
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Responsive Sites are
SLOOOOOOOW
One of the key things you
can do, aside from optimizing
for the critical rendering
path, is conditional loading.
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PreBrowsing Directives
• Browsers have preloading directives which allow the page to download elements in the background for
later viewing or within the same session.
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Rel-Preconnect
• Rel-preconnect will resolve the DNS, start the TCP handshake and negotiate the TLS tunnel
beforehand, effectively shaving hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds in page load.
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When to Use Rel-Preconnect
• When you see a long time for connections to happen or a lot of idle time, it’s a good idea to use
rel-preconnect.
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Use it With the GA API
Get the pageviews of the
ga:pagePath based on the
ga:previousPagePath set to
the current page that you’re
on.
You’ll get a list of the pages
your users are most likely to
visit next. Set one of these as
the rel-prerender.
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Code.
Inject rel-prerender into the
page programmatically.
You could also session the
URLs the user is going to to
ensure you are always
prerendering a new page.
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Rel-Preload for Same Page Preloading
I haven’t played with it yet, but Ian says they’re using it on the Portent site.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/02/preload-what-is-it-good-for/
124. SEO needs to step up its
technical understanding in
order to be more effective.
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Understand the Document Object Model
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document_Object_Model/Introduction
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Accelerated Mobile & Instant Pages
Even if you’re not a publisher, I encourage you to watch these projects as I expect that Google and Facebook will grow the specs
dramatically once they’re adopted.