What is the future for SEO?
Danyl Bosomworth suggested, a little light-heartedly, in his recent Smart Insights article ‘SEO is dead’, that one of the ideas for resetting your SEO agenda is to ‘Forget SEO and forget Google’ and in this he is absolutely correct.
SEO really only has itself to blame for the predicament in which it finds itself. Daily emails bombarding your inbox promising untold wealth from a number one position on Google, ‘guaranteed’ link building schemes that ‘Google won’t penalize’ and many other ridiculous claims have made SEO a very bad name for itself.
Of course it wasn’t always like this. There are many SEO professionals out there who have always had the best interests of clients at heart, have striven to produce good quality content and links and have generally behaved with propriety in a landscape dominated by excess and greed.
Even today you can buy…
A briefing on how 13 of the most significant algorithm changes impact SEO ranking
As you may have heard, Google has released a major update to its algorithm which has seen a significant impact on search results in the UK and the US. Penguin 2.0 released on the 22nd May 2013 is the latest in a long line of updates made by Google aimed at improving search results presented to the user.
Although Google has made several changes to its Penguin algorithm over the past year, this latest update is perhaps the most significant and has changed the way Google bots rank all pages on a site not just the homepage.
The algorithms are designed to highlight only the best results from a search term and Penguin 2.0 has been created to weed out paid for content that masquerades as ‘real’ content such as advertorials, sponsored content etc so that the user finds…
15 key takeaways from SMX London 2013
The recent SMX search marketing expo in London had a great range of speakers that covered a variety of topics over the two days.
In this post, I thought I’d share some takeaways on common best practices described by speakers. I've grouped the best practices under three key themes explored at the conference.
From authorship to authority
As search continues to evolve, a number conditions outside of links and on-page SEO factors will begin to affect a website’s authority within the SERPs.
‘Authority’ will become an increasingly important factor and it’s vital that writers and brands claim their online identities through Google Authorship and 'rel=me' for and build trusted and respected profiles.
1. Best practices for building authority:
Keep an author consistent on an article URL
Verify mark-up with …
How to use people-focused analytics to change how you measure search marketing effectiveness
Most marketers will know the volume of visitors generated by search, but are you using visitor quality to measure the effectiveness of search traffic (organic or paid)? If you are, conversion rate is a key measure effectiveness.
In this post I'll explain how to increase it without spending a penny more. It's not intended to be an unrealistic boast instead it's a technique that makes allocating marketing spend and identifying successful campaigns easier and more effective.
Why your Conversion Rate is lying to you
Most people would measure Conversion Rate for a paid search campaign (or organic search) like this:
However, this formula has one major flaw, it assumes that all visitors from this campaign have the potential to convert. The reality is that only a fraction of search traffic is convertible,…
Focusing on algorithm changes and new SEO team structures
Here’s a useful infographic from SEO agency Fuzz One. It summarises:
Major Google Algorithm updates in 2012 - if you don’t know it, the SEOmoz Google algorithm history gives more detail
The new SEO approaches now relevant in 2012 and into 2013
New ways to structure the SEO team - internal and external
I found the new team view most interesting, so I’ll pull this out...
It shows the creative input needed to be successful in SEO. The social media role is shown, although I hate “SeoCial”. Still it does reflect the joint SEO/Social/Content marketing roles we’re seeing more and more with clients. It's arguably how you integrate SEO resources with other specialists in PR and Social media that's most important.
Here is the full infographic:
…
Building a business case for investment in SEO
One of the joys of running an SEO business is there's a huge range of organisations out there for you to target: everyone, after all, wants to rank. But actually selling and delivering SEO services to a wide range of organisations can bring challenges as well as fulfillment.
I hope this post will be useful both to consultants and agencies selling SEO services, but also marketers and business owners looking to hire SEO agencies.
When it comes to selling SEO, I believe one of the biggest challenges we face is engaging with people who have different views of SEO and online marketing. Figuring out how people view their online environment and what it means for them and their business is fundamental to building a business case for SEO and a productive ongoing client-agency relationship.
How misunderstanding of SEO can lead to confusion
I think that there are…
This is the 12th step in my 12 part series on SEO. In this article I’m looking at the role of voice-of-customer programs to help SEOs learn what is, and isn’t, working on their website, helping to inform optimisation and testing programs. It’s going to be short and hopefully sweet.
Why is Voice-of-Customer relevant to SEO?
Consider this scenario: You’ve got a webpage ranking well for a primary keyphrase. It’s driving muchos traffic, but your bounce rate is over 90% and has blown the site average for organic landing pages. As a result, you start to see your ranking drop. The search engines are starting to think your webpage isn’t so great after all.
You can dig into your web analytics data to find out what is happening – visits, bounce rate, time-on-site etc, but...
What web analytics data won’t tell you is why that’s happening
This is where voice-of-customer (VoC) programs can help. VoC techniques…
3 DIY SEO approaches to start SEO if you're not an SEO expert
This post discusses a few of the relatively straightforward "do-it-yourself" things you can do in-house to improve your SEO, before you decide to call in outside help. I hope it will also be helpful to small business or startups who don't currently have budget for SEO. As SEO specialists we're often asked by friends, families or colleagues "where do I start?", "What matters?". These are the areas I recommend as a start.
Where to start your DIY SEO?
If you’re not well versed in Search Engine Optimisation (explanation), then the task of optimising your website can appear to be extremely daunting. There is a lot of jargon to learn, numerous horror stories floating about and lots of conflicting opinions to consider.
You have to understand all these issues before you can actually start…
A review of Google's key site quality-related algorithm changes in 2012
You will have heard that the Google update known as ‘Penguin’ was rolled out earlier this year; the 24th April 2012 to be precise. It came at a time when Google had rolled out a number of other updates, some more significant than others.
Given the negative effect on ranking for some sites there has naturally been an awful lot written about the Penguin update, however I can’t help but feel that there has been some confusion over what Penguin addressed and how to tell if you were a victim or not.
In this post I will discuss just what Penguin is likely to have affected, the other updates around this time (that some webmasters could have confused with Penguin), and what to do to recover if you have been affected by these updates.
…
4 issues to consider for successful link-building
There are many parallels in digital marketing where the knowledge we acquire and learn can be transferred and applied to other online marketing tools and tactics.
Over the past eights years, I have managed affiliate programs for start-up companies operating in different market sectors and have been fortunate enough to have gained experience with a "hands-on" approach rather than outsourcing the management of the affiliate programs.
More recently, I have been focusing my online skillset in learning the art of SEO campaigns - and my current employers have provided me with a platform to deliver and implement a strategy for the organisation. What I quickly began to find is there are a number of common similarities in affiliate marketing and devising a link-building campaign.
purpose being to provide similarities between running an affiliate marketing program and a link building campaign.
1. What's your USP?
Before you commence an affiliate/link building strategy it's…
