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Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | @ randfish | [email protected] Cracking the SEO Code for 2015: Tactics to Love vs. Leave
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SEO Tactics to Love vs. Leave

Aug 23, 2014

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Page 1: SEO Tactics to Love vs. Leave

Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | @randfish | [email protected]

Cracking the SEO Code for 2015: Tactics to Love vs. Leave

Page 2: SEO Tactics to Love vs. Leave

Download this Slide Deck

bit.ly/seoloveleave

Page 3: SEO Tactics to Love vs. Leave

A brief look at how SEO has evolved over the past five years.

What Changed?

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Ranking algorithms are far more complex – more inputs, more subtlety, more quality checks.

#1:

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Advancements in User Data SignalsVia Eric Fischer

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An Uncanny Ability to Spot Editorial VS. Manipulative Links

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Keyword Matching Has BecomeQuery Intent Matching

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Personalization by History, Device, Location, and Google+

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SEO has become a job description, not a job title.

#2:

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LinkedIn Analysis

Common job titles for those doing SEO include:

Marketing ExecutiveMarketing Manager

Web DesignerSearch Marketing ManagerMarketing StrategistMarketing ConsultantDirector of Marketing

Website Manager

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SEOs Have Learned that Doing Their Jobs Isn’t Good Enough

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Policing of webspam is more aggressive, more difficult to recover from, and less evenly applied.

#3:

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Non-Editorial Links Are More Dangerous Than Ever

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Webspam Has Become EverySite Owner’s Problem

Via David McSweeney

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Google is shortening the searcher’s path and disintermediating content creators.

#4:

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Less Opportunity in Many Simplistic “Give Me the Answer” Queries

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Less Opportunity in Many Simplistic “Give Me the Answer” Queries

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Less Opportunity in Many Simplistic “Give Me the Answer” Queries

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Less Opportunity In Some Not-So-Simplistic Queries, Too:

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More Opportunity in theEver-Growing Long Tail

Almost 6 Billion queries/day

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The ubiquity of social media has broadened the field of “influencers.”

#5:

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1997-2011: The Linkerati Rule the Web

Via Forrester Research

13% of web users can amplify content

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2012-Present: We Are All Potential Amplifiers

Via Pew Research Data72% of web users can amplify content

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Disappearing data makes SEO more challenging to measure and improve.

#6:

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Keyword Referral Data is Gone

On average, 87.5% of keywords from Google are now “not provided” (source)

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A Significant Portion of Search Traffic May Be Falsely Counted as Direct

Groupon’s experiment showing up to 60% of traffic reported as “direct” may be organic search

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How do these changes affect which tactics we can still pursue vs. those we must leave behind?

So…

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Great SEO Is No Longer Just “SEO”

KeywordsLinks

Crawl Rankings

SEO in 2004

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Great SEO Is No Longer Just “SEO”

Keywords

Links

Crawl

Rankings

SEO in 2014Social

Content

Design & UX

Speed

Accessibility

Email

Press & PR

CX

Webspam

Mobile

InternationalizationLocalization

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Our Job: Choose the Tactics that MarryOur Strengths to Our Opportunities

Page 31: SEO Tactics to Love vs. Leave

No tactic will be right for everyone.

But, awareness of our potential arsenal is essential.

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Tactics to Leave Behind vs. Tactics to

Embrace for the Future:

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KeywordResearch

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AdWords-Only Discovery

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AdWords-Only Discovery

Leave It Behind

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AdWords + Suggest + Customer Data

Many queries with 100s or 1000s of monthly searches don’t show up in AdWords but will show up here.

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AdWords + Suggest + Customer Data

My favorite tool for keyword suggest research: Keywordtool.io

This tool makes the process easier.

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AdWords + Suggest + Customer Data

Popular questions, phrases, and terms that your audience uses in web forums/social media are excellent sources of keyword data expansion

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ContentCreation

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Create & Scale Keyword-Targeted Pages of “Good, Unique Content”

This example from Wikihow is, granted, a bit ludicrous.

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This is a page from Angie’s List that ranks #1 for “Best Plumbers in Medford, OR”

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This is all the “unique content” on that page

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You’re dreaming!

Think you can build pages like that and rank?

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Create & Scale Keyword-Targeted Pages of “Good, Unique Content”

Leave It Behind

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Modern Criteria for Content:Unique – does not appear elsewhere on the web in a search-indexable format

Relevant – contains terms/phrases the engines can interpret as on-topic

Helpful – resolves the searcher’s query (or queries) in a useful, efficient manner

Uniquely Valuable – provides information that’s unavailable (or hard to get) elsewhere on the web

Great UX– is easy and pleasurable to consume on any device, even with slow connections

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A Great Example from Genius.com

Via Shelter from the Storm on Genius

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A Great Example from Genius.com

Via Shelter from the Storm on Genius

Accurate, readable lyrics

Uniquely valuable annotations

A community of contributors

One click to play

Data re: popularity& activity

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LinkBuilding

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Acquire Links Via Directories, Forums, Account Profiles, etc.

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Acquire Links Via Directories, Forums, Account Profiles, etc.

Leave It Behind

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Acquire Links w/ Off-Topic Infographics & Embeds

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Acquire Links w/ Off-Topic Infographics & Embeds

Leave It Behind

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Acquire Links through Guest Posting & Commenting

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Acquire Links through Guest Posting & Commenting

Leave It Behind

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The Truth:

Google doesn’t want to count links you can

“build.”

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The Truth:

Google only wants to count links you

editorially “earn.”

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Social Media& SEO

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Share Socially to Get Rankings

No doubt about it – there’s a strong CORRELATION between tweets (and Facebook and Google+ shares) and higher rankings.

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Social Impacts SEO Indirectly

Social shares expose content to those who might link to it (and amplify in other ways)

This blog post from OKTrends earned 100s of links after launch

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Google+ is the Exception for Personalized/Logged-In Results

Because I follow Mark on G+, what he shares/+1s can usually ranks higher when I’m logged into my Gmail.

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ContentMarketing

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Publish Blog Posts & Articles to Get Links & Rankings

Blog Post

Blog Post

Article

Article

Blog Post

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Publish Blog Posts & Articles to Get Links & Rankings

Blog Post

Blog Post

Article

Article

Blog Post

Leave It Behind

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Links & Shares are Tremendously Skewed to the Top 5% of Content

http://www.simplereach.com/blog/facebook-continues-to-be-the-biggest-driver-of-social-traffic/

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There’s No Prize For Hitting Publish

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Rules for Content Investments:

Strategic & Relevant– the content must tie to business goals and fit with your branding

Targets Likely Amplifiers – there should be an obvious answer to the question “who will help spread this content and why?”

Cannot Be Fire & Forget– most content will fail; you need to be willing to invest longer and harder than the competition to find success

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Need Help Getting Inspiration?

From Tinfoil Security’s Blog

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Check out Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo – my favorite tool for researching the competitive content landscape

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MeasuringROI

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Attribution Models

Via the Datalicious Blog

This is how most companies (& software packges) do web analytics by default

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Attribution Models

Via the Datalicious Blog

Leave These 2 Behind

A model something like this may make sense.

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Traffic & Performance by Keyword

Pre-2012 Post-2012

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Traffic & Performance by Keyword

Pre-2012 Post-2012

Leave It Behind

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Search Traffic Performance by Page (or Section)

Observing the pages that receive search visits can get close to the old keyword-based performance reports.

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Estimates in SEO Software Packages

If you use a tool like Conductor, Searchmetrics, or Moz’s own Moz Analytics, you can see predictions for the

keywords sending traffic to given pages

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SEO is getting harder

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But that high barrier to entry means greater opportunity for those who succeed.

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Cracking the SEO Code for 2015: Tactics to Love vs. Leave

Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | @randfish | [email protected]

bit.ly/seoloveleave