Post on 23-Aug-2014
description
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What Google wants & how to future-proof SEO
Patrick Altoft – Director of Search
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What’s happening in
SEO?
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You can’t rank unless you deserve to rank
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What Google wants “The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfil their information needs. ”
Matt Cutts
Our strategy therefore is to make our clients a better search result than their competitors.
This can be split into two simple to understand factors:
• Creating more authority & being a better/more reputable company
• Making better landing pages, specifically your primary pages
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The current
CITATIONS
BUILD
CONVERSATIONS
NEWS
Sentiment
SOCIAL
Authority Relevance
Freshness
is listening to…
DESIGN
CONTENT
BLOG
Engagement
Satisfaction
Structure Quality
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The future (& present) of SEO
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Focus on Users
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Return to Search You have a few seconds to get the visitor’s attention and persuade them that they have arrived at a site that will answer their query
If they go back to Google that’s a negative signal
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Hummingbird
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Hummingbird [Hummingbird] Gave us an opportunity [...] to take synonyms and knowledge graph and other things Google has been doing to understand meaning to rethink how we can use the power of all these things to combine meaning and predict how to match your query to the document in terms of what the query is really wanting and are the connections available in the documents. and not just random coincidence that could be the case in early search engines.
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Understanding which words in a query matter most & giving them more weight
Long tail & badly thought out queries will now get much better results
Users are more satisfied
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Example Google wants to rank the best result for the query
Not just the one that best matches the keywords the user searched for
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UK example Google wants to rank the best result for the query
Not just the one that best matches the keywords the user searched for
We are not sure why this hasn’t changed
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Satisfaction Other than low quality websites, the biggest cause of searchers not being satisfied is the fact that Google showed them something they just were not looking for
Even if most people are satisfied there are always certain segments of people that are totally unhappy with a search result
Hummingbird will allow Google to dramatically increase satisfaction rates by gaining a better understanding of what people actually want, rather than what they type into the search box
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Segmentation & Personas
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Could Google really understand what people want?
•Cars
•Holidays
•Likes
•Restaurants
•Hotels
Andy
•Cars
•Holidays
•Likes
•Restaurants
•Hotels
Vin
•Cars
•Holidays
•Likes
•Restaurants
•Hotels
Tim Audi
Cruising SEO
Indian Hilton
Mercedes Malaysia Business
Indian Lastminute.com
Ford Turkey Design
Indian De Vere
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Segmentation Most brands perform research & segmentation to understand their customers
Until now, nobody has applied this research to content strategy with the aim of improving SEO performance
Branded3 is working with Incite, part of the St Ives Group, to create accurate segmentation models and are already using this knowledge to drive our content strategy
By understanding who the searcher is & what they are looking for we can satisfy a much greater percentage of searchers
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Incite.ws
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Segmentation & Content Strategy
• “Cruise deals” Mum with kids
• “Cruise deals” Retired couple
• “Cruise deals” Honeymoon
couple Privacy, romance,
spa, day trips, food, fitness
Social, food, entertainment
Play areas, babysitting, games,
kids pools
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Keyword
Audience Research
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Content Strategy
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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,
• 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
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Demographics
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Not Provided
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Data Sources Not provided will be 100% soon – no more keyword data, attribution modelling becomes largely useless
Solutions
• Total organic visits to top landing pages
• Total search visits minus brand clicks from WMT data
• Estimated visits per keyword via rankings, CTR & search volumes
• Click share for product categories
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A Good CTR Model
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A Better CTR Model Actual CTR from WMT
We will be sending details next week
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Patrick@branded3.com
@PatrickAltoft
Thank You
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