Introduction to Google SEO

Fits in the larger Digital marketing strategy, which also includes: The roles work closely with SEO.

• Search Engine Marketing
  • Bidding for paid advertisements
• Social Media Marketing
  • Free/paid ads and engagements
• Content Marketing
  • Writing for blogs, newsletters, etc.
• Public Relations
  • Build relationships, promote content etc.

Types of SEOs:

• White Hat
  • Won’t be penalized or banned.
• Grey Hat
• Black Hat
  • Face more penalties, and known for churn and burn approach.

SEO as a Career

Complementary roles:

• SEO
• UX
• Content
• Social
• PR

Career Options

• Consultant
• Agency
• In-House SEO
  • You can work for Startup.
  • Small and medium-sized businesses
  • Corporate / Enterprise level clients
  • Working with External SEO Teams

Skills Needed

• Interpersonal Skills
• Project management and planning
• Strategic Thinking
• Agile and pro-activeness
• Stay updated on industry trends and news
• Ability to analyze data

Interview Tips

• Prepare a portfolio:
  • Highlight past work
  • Showcase practical experience
  • Reference specific and relevant examples
  • Listen to their issues
  • Offer solutions based on past performance, or if you don’t have any experience related to that offer a solution based on your theoretical knowledge.
• Ask Questions:
  • What SEO challenges do you face?
  • What future challenges do you foresee?
  • Short and long term goals for SEO
  • How does SEO fit within the organization?
  • What is the general knowledge or SEO maturity of the company?

How Search Engine Works

• Robots: crawlers or spiders
• Crawlers discover new websites through links
• Sites are then added to an index stored in Data Centers
• User searches for a particular topic, websites are served based on their rating, determined by backlinks, relevancy, and authority etc

Evolution of SEO

• Early Google
  • Google became leader in the 2000s
  • Search engines relied mainly on the site content
  • Site needed to be submitted
  • Backlinks revolutionized the web
  • Anything goes without any check
  • Domain penalties didn’t exist
  • All tactics used to rank websites
• Old SEO Techniques
  • Tons of keywords
  • List of keywords as white text over white background
  • Gaining hundreds of low quality spammy backlinks
  • Creating hundreds of pages for each variation of keywords
  • Relying heavily on keyword-rich domain names
• Page Rank
  • Old way: See website score based on backlinks
  • New way: More in-depth and secretive metric
• Improvements
  • Rise of personalized searches and results
  • Google Analytics to see how user interact with your website
  • Google Search Console formerly known as webmaster
• SEO
  • Now, SEO has become a widely defined term.
  • Social networks are search engines too.
  • Learning individual algorithms
  • Look at branding and social presence
• Questions to Consider
  • What is the future of voice and video?
  • What other technologies may impact search in the future? e.g., AR, VR, web3 etc.
  • How might gadgets impact how humans search and discover information?

Current SEO Best Practices

Introduction to Search Engine Algorithms

All search engines share the goal of providing relevant, timely information.

• As an SEO, our job is to look for the factors and optimize our website according to those, which affects an algorithm.
• Some factors are verified, some are secretive.
• Moz, an SEO tool, provides lists of possible factors, an algo looks for, every year.
• Google algos, Panda, Florida, caffeine. There are constant updates and shift using modern technology by algos to provide better results.
• Over 500 updates annually to Google algos. Only small percent of that updates are released, other info remain vague.

MOZcast

An SEO algorithmic tool created by MOZ, which is based upon turbulence.

“Turbulence means high ranking fluctuations, represented by temperature changes”

Algorithms Updates: History, Part 1

• Thousands of updates every year.

  So what you need to do is:

• Spot patterns

• Predict what Google may do next.

• Forms your recommendations and strategies.

• Look for case studies, how algorithm changes affected the different websites.

Algorithms Updates: History, Part 2

Major Algorithm updates

• Panda (2011)
  • Impacted 12% of search results.
  • Improved user experience.
• Targeted:
  • Duplicate content
  • Thin content
  • Low quality
  • Machine generated content
  • Pages with lots of ads
  • Substantial content
  • Content relevancy
• Penguin (2012)
• Changes related to links handling
  • Directory related links
  • Links from spammy or unrelated sites
  • High percentage of anchor text links Targeted to a specific keyword
  • Purchases links

Semantic Indexing

“Looks at usage of synonyms and relevant words or phrases for topical relevance.”

• Hummingbird (2013)
• RankBrain (2015)

Mobile Friendliness

• Mobilegeddon (2015)
• Mobile-first (2018)

Other Updates

• Personalized Search
• Caffeine – focused on speed and building a faster web
• Voice search – impacts how users are discovering your content

SEO Best Practices and Ranking Factors

• Don’t over-optimize
• Highly content
• Outside links increase authority
• Site must be visible in search
• Cloaking (users can see the website content but search engine not) may result in penalties
• User first
• Clear hierarchy (clear webpage structure)
• Only some info is public by Google itself, how algorithms work.

Three Major Types of Ranking Factors

• 1) On Page
  • Title tags
  • Keyword Usage
  • Keyword Placement
  • Heading tags
  • Content quality
  • Content length
  • Content freshness
• 2) Off-Site
  • Inbound links (relevancy/quality)
  • Outbound Links (relevancy/quality)
  • Brand Mentions
  • Social Engagement
• 3) Domain
  • TLD
  • Domain History
  • Domain registration
  • EMD (Exact Match)
  • Site Speed
  • Site structure
  • User Engagement

Panda: The Game Changer for Content

• Not a one time change, continues to update.
• Prevents low-quality sites from ranking highly.
• Negative impact can be reversed by improving content.
• Ongoing updates allow Panda to catch sites that have escaped past changes.
• Updates roll out gradually over several months, as opposed to previous daily updates.

Targeted: Think/Low Quality Sites

• Few pages with useful content
• Largely similar material
• Pages with no content, just links to forms
• Content scraped from other sites

Targeted: Duplicate Content

• Pages duplicated on site or replicated from another
• Duplicate pages cannibalize each other and steal ranking
• Site that publishes first receives credit/rank
• Too much duplicate or scraped content can lead to penalization

Targeted: Excessive Ads

• Low content, high amount of ads

Targeted: Poor Navigation

• Un-intuitive, doesn’t link to all content

Others

Panda also looks at;

• Auto-Generated Content
• Squeeze Pages: One main page contains all content, user must scroll for more information.
• Doorway Pages: Pages built for search engines, not users.
• Meta-Refresh: Once you “land” on the page, it will refresh to another site before you can exit.

Cleaning Up Links with Penguin

• Penguin aims to stop spammy links, is re-run periodically.
• Manipulative link Practices (unethical or spammy ways to generate links)

Penguin Targets: Link networks

• Sites built for the sole purpose of linking to each other
• Could be hosted on different servers, registered to different owners

Penguin Targets: Link Trading

• Involved standard reciprocal linking as well as advanced, unethical techniques

Penguin Targets: Comment spam

• Comments on blogs or articles that link back to site
• Often flattering or innocent comments followed by link
• Often made by bots, can also be more direct and overtly spammy

Penguin Targets: Bad anchor text

• Building links containing exact keywords to boost rank

Penguin Targets: Paid Links

• Paid links can be hard to detect, but there are clues
  • Link surrounded by ads or certain words, or items/business reviews

Penguin Targets: Irrelevant links

• Links on low quality sites
• Unrelated links may be paid or obtained through manipulation
• Algorithm update have made link building more complex and risky

Poor Link building

Link building methods of the past are no longer valid and may incur penalty

• Poor link building: Multiple directories
  • Directories are like a phone book for links and not ranked highly
• Poor link building: Spammy widgets
  • Free widgets, forms, or apps that contain a link to your site
• Poor link building: Free templates
  • Free templates and themes for blogs and websites with link to site
• Poor link building: Forum post links
  • Create multiple accounts with link in signature

SEO of Today, Tomorrow and Beyond

Core Web Vitals

“Google ranking factors that revolve around the user experience while on your site.”

Real-World Experience Metrics

• Page load time
• Sit stability
• Site security
• Intrusive interstitials (Pop-ups)

Impact

• Ranking on mobile and desktop
• Rank in Google’s top stories
• Must meet minimum score

Google Lighthouse

• Diagnose issues
• Recommend fixes

EAT & YMYL (Your Money, Your Life)

YMYL

“Effects sites that affect someone’s health, wealth, happiness, safety, or financial stability.”

• Any site allowing a customer to make a transaction or pay bills
• Financial: investment advice, retirement/estate planning, tax advice, etc.
• Medical: dieting tips, mental health, nutrition, health conditions, drugs, etc.
• Legal: legal advice, divorce/marriages, wills, child custody, etc.
• Official information: government information, policies, disaster preparedness, etc.
• Other examples: child adoption, real estate, car safety, etc.

E.A.T

• Expertise
• Authority
• Trust
  • Are you and your website authors experts on the subject?
  • Is the author or website an authority on the topic presented?
  • How trustworthy is the content that is presented, and the website itself?

Expertise

• Publishing high quality content
• About page addressing your credentials
• Author bio pages
• Links to media mentions

Authority

• Links and citations from press and media
• speaking gigs
• Often shareable content
• Branded search volume
• Wikipedia pages and mentions

Trust

• Clear and accurate contact information
• Clear about policies, shipping info, terms, and conditions
• HTTPS is extra secure
• General sentiment – positive or negative
• Look at reviews
• Register with the BBB (Better Business Bureau; specific to US only)

Google Evaluations

• Human quality raters for EAT review
• Manually review your site to determine your EAT score

Featured Snippets and Rich Snippets

Featured Snippets

• Position “0”
• Snippets for voice search questions

Pros

• Good branding
• Good if you want to obtain the voice search results

Cons

• You get less shelf-space for page one ranking
• The result may answer a query and prevent them from clicking to your website

Impacts of CTR

• Query type
• Target audience behavior
• Specific industry
• Type of featured Snippets
• Your search position

Click and traffic

• Optimize for the featured Snippets?
• Determine if the queries have a featured snippet
• Featured snippets are growing

Though Leadership and Branding

• Ideal
• Position yourself as a thought leader
• Not intended to drive people to your site

Rich Snippets/Results

• Having clear distinction from others
• Have
  • Star ratings
  • Data
  • Clickable navigation

Schema

• A markup to your existing content around specific data
• Visually appealing in search results
• Availability
  • Schema for everything
  • Visit schema.org
  • Obtain rich results
  • Integrate into your website’s code
  • Use JSON

BERT (2019)

• Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer’s
• Neural Network technique
• One of the biggest updates
• Impacts 1 in 10 search queries
• Helps Google understand human language better
• Determine context of search query

Specifics

• Now pays attention to context words like
  • To
  • With
  • by
  • AT
  • On
• Sentiments of phrases and discussions
• Sentence is positive, negative, sarcastic, etc.

Optimizing for BERT

• Well written articles
• Write in the voice, language, education level of target audience
• Articles should clearly explain what you’re trying to solve or teach them
• Include relevant details

Impacts

• Social listening tools
• Chat bots respond and interact with users

Evolution of Keyword Optimization

• Algorithms are constantly updated to help remove websites with no user value
• Algorithms analyze documents to determine usefulness
• Topic modeling allows search engines to gauge relevance
• Algorithms use topic association AND semantic relationships between keywords
• Knowledge of topic association will help in crafting engaging content
• Algorithm updates bring new SEO challenges
• SEO has become complex and difficult
• No longer enough for SEOs to adhere to simple checklists
• Require more holistic approach with a knowledge of relevant signals
• Optimized content now relates to overall page concept not keywords
• topic association and semantic analysis allow for better content
• SEOs must deal with the shifting methods of keyword research and optimization

Strengthening Your Keyword Strategy

Topic Association

“Used by search engines to determine relevancy and trustworthiness”

• Search engines analyze contextual meaning to find relevance to topic/theme
• Page should contain keywords relevant to focus keyword, rather than repeating the focus keyword, Examples;
  • Winemaking: wine, vineyard, wine growing, wine production
  • Support: learn, instructors, students, tuition
  • certification: course, class, lecture, program, certificate
• Long-tail optimization
  • Where can I learn to make wine?
  • How do I get a certificate in winemaking?
• Focus keyword can be broken up into synonyms and other elements
• What other ways can I describe the theme?
• What other words would be relevant?
• What other words support the page topic?
• Page should contain supporting keywords
• Having content that has a cohesive theme results in “long tail keywords”
  • Long-tail keywords are longer words or phrases – difficult to predict but very targeted
• Algorithm was updated to check for relevancy and semantic relationships
  • Semantic analysis looks at how words are related
  • After Hummingbird, semantic and related results were even clearer

How Does Branding Influence Website Rank?

Branding

• Important to marketing strategy
• Can support and boost SEO efforts
• Brand is becoming more Important to Google’s relevancy Algorithm
• SEOs must consider which factors separate brands from untrustworthy shops or spam sites

How to identify a Brand?

• Active social media presence
• contact information
  • Address
  • Phone number
  • Email
  • Contact form
• Established history (domain registration time) and visible intent to continue doing business
• Receive search volume for their specific brand
• More mentions around the web, including social media
• Bidding on paid keywords for brand names is a strong signal
• Brand keywords drive better conversions in paid search

How to do SEO for a Brand Recognition?

• Consider which external quality signals improve legitimacy
• Value leads to quality signals
  • Social presence
  • Contact info
  • Established history
• Branding and SEO are not mutually exclusive, two strong tactics that work well together
• A large part of SEO involves raising brand awareness
• Clear, value focused goals
• Help grow your brand
  • Create great content
  • Develop social presence
  • Acquire links
  • Helps to cultivate branded search

Persona Development

Creating a representation of your ideal target user.

Why is it Important to SEO?

• Buyer persona helps to identify user’s needs and how they search
• Create content around topics they want
• Important in keyword research

Where To Start?

• Existing customers or users
• Have bought your product or used your services, already
• Use existing tools
• Reaching out to users directly

Existing Tools: Google Analytics

• Demographics
• Interests based on other websites they visit
• What search engine they use
• What device they use
• What pages are the most popular
• Click maps of where users click the most within a page
• What pages they tend to exit your site on, and more

Existing Tools: Google Search Console/Google Webmaster Console

• Mainly gives site performance stats

Existing Tools: Survey Existing Users

• In-app messages
• Emailing past customers
• Request for a newsletter

Existing Tools: Ask your Support and Sales Teams

• As they regularly deal with customers and potential buyers
• What questions are they asked about?

Persona

• User profile
• Average age
• Income
• Type of job
• Photo or likeness

Marketing to Your Persona

Two Core Persona Types

• Potential Buyers
• Existing Customers

Potential Buyers

• Not aware of your product or services yet
• Searching for solutions to a problem
• Create content to solve their issues

Existing Customers

• Currently, shop or use your service
• What do they like best? Improvements?
• Create content to engage and retain them

Using Keywords to Mine Data

• Help define your user and build out your persona
• Discover potential search queries you can match to content topics

Getting to Know Your Audience

Google Trends

• Presents geographic data which helps us target Keywords
• Helpful for content that may generate lots of social shares
• Gives topic ideas for site content

Demographic Data

• Provides topic and keyword ideas
• Provides additional insight & helps to better optimize sites
• Demographics data is not 100% reliable
• Websites providing such data:
  • Alexa
  • quantcast
  • Google Analytics

Alexa

• Shows top keyword traffic for a site
• Audience insights help create user centered content

SimilarWeb

• Shows potential topics users might be interested in
• Shows traffic sources giving you ideas of where to promote content

Social Media Demographics

• Followerwonk helps analyze Twitter info
• Data is reliable as it is taken from Twitter (as reliable as Twitter :-)
• Twitter profiles/info can be fake
• Followerwonk cannot always identify follower gender

Creating Your Ideal Buyers Persona

Buyer Personas

• Fictional characters representing specific users of a website
• Personas help build user-centered sites & incorporate correct keywords naturally
• Create multiple personas to appeal to a variety of buyers

Couple of questions about our buyers

• Persona’s Age
  • Age could impact keyword choices due to lexicon differences
• Persona’s Location
  • Persona’s location Important in case of regional vocabulary differences
• Persona’s Gender
  • Buyer’s gender can influence vocabulary
  • Gender plays a larger role in than just their vocabulary
  • Sites might need a persona for both genders
• An image of a person brings your persona to life
• Add lots of details, since it will guide your site optimization
• Add additional information for your reference if applicable
  • for example: Is it a B2B or B2C persona?