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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,

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

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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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