Post on 08-May-2015
description
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Advanced SEO by Patrick Altoft
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
What I’m talking about • The importance of making your content strategy & content marketing integral to
your normal day to day business, PR and comms strategy
• Why you need to focus on your core pages first as part of a content strategy
• Who is doing this right
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Doing Real Stuff Would you do this if it didn’t help with SEO?
When you release a new page or piece of content would your MD or PR department tweet about it?
If not then you probably shouldn’t be doing it
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Real Company Stuff
http://b3.io/10ZXMjy
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
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 create a better search result for our clients 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
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Achieving This
The tactics to achieve this are a mixture of links, content strategy, onsite optimisation & usability.
It’s important to remember that while the tactics might change the strategy has not changed in nearly 15 years.
As an SEO agency we focus on making our clients websites a better destination for searchers than their competitors.
If Google thinks that our clients site is more useful and will give a better experience for users then the site will probably rank higher.
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Authority Google measures authority using offsite factors, for example:
• Links
• Press coverage
• Social media mentions
• Traffic
• Search volume
All things being equal a searcher prefers to visit a well known authority brand than an unknown website with the same content.
Turning yourself into an authority and building your brand by becoming an expert is the best possible way to improve SEO
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Good News – Finance is Complicated It’s easy for an ecommerce site to be an authority on the products it sells & the barrier for entry is low
In the finance sector only a very small number of companies can be a true authority about their products
Whether it’s loans, mortgages, pensions, insurance, debt advice or anything else you need to take the initiative and become an authority
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Content Marketing Every time we execute a strategy we have to ask ourselves whether it moves us towards our ultimate goal of being a better search result. If not then why are we doing it?
How many people have published an infographic or linkbait article recently?
Why would this make you a better destination search result for your visitors?
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Infographics Does this make Confused.com a greater authority on insurance?
If not then why do it?
In the long term do you think Google will reward sites that built their SEO strategy around irrelevant infographics?
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
http://www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing/
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Data Visualisation Releasing useful and interesting data and integrating this with your core website is the key to driving long term rankings
If I was searching for “used cars” and the destination website had published an infographic showing lots of data on used cars and their likelihood of breaking down would they be a better search result?
How about if they had not done the infographic but included the data on their make/model landing pages instead?
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
KBB.com Real awards, real stats
Integrated into landing pages
SEO is an afterthought, they’ve probably been doing this for years
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Use Your Assets to Build Authority Moneysupermarket.com releases an annual Home Insurance Monitor report detailing which towns in the UK are most likely to be burgled, common accidents, premiums etc
With data from 3.3m quotes this could be amazing
It’s in a PDF – big missed opportunity
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Use Your Assets There is a press release page talking about it
It looks like this
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Rainfall Even the Daily Mail get this right
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Guardian Data Blog Interactive salary data map
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Bond Cars from Evans Halshaw
Brands should have fun too
Make sure it’s topical & you are passionate about the subject
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Think About the Future Google has a history of devaluing every type of link that was created for SEO purposes
• Directory links
• Press release syndication
• Article syndication
• Blatant paid links
• Wordpress theme links
• And many more
Unless the links you build are part of your overall marketing & communications strategy they will only work for a limited amount of time
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Authority Payday UK don’t have an SEO agency, don’t engage in link-building and still rank top 3 most days for “payday loans”
They built authority, in an industry where competitors have zero authority, by having an unwavering focus on the payday keyword which brands like Wonga are forced to shy away from.
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Payday Loans It helped that the previous market leader has not performed well this year
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Barclays Business Banking Authority
Lots of very useful information
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Barclays Business Banking
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Competitor Analysis Competitor analysis has become pretty much useless in the last 12 months.
Most of your competitors links probably look terrible
Maybe they disavowed them?
Never analyse links in the insurance sector
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Competing If you don’t have a better site, don’t expect to rank higher. Build links people can’t replicate rather than just copying competitors
http://www.rosshudgens.com/authority-bloat/
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Does The AA have a good SEO strategy? They have the best linkbait in the entire sector
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
They certainly have a lot of links
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Do they rank? The AA ranks well but nowhere near the position they could rank if they were to integrate their SEO strategy with the rest of the business
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Integration Every aspect of SEO has to be totally integrated and aligned with your current and future business strategy.
Whether it’s links being integrated with your PR & communications strategy (which Tim will cover later) or your website and content strategy if you are not integrating you risk seeing your SEO strategy fall apart in years to come.
In 2012 Google has made it clear they are willing to penalise major brands who thought they could outsource SEO without integrating it
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Content Marketing
Linkbait blog posts
Infographics
Data visualisations
All these things are great but they don’t always turn your site into a better destination for searchers unless you can use them to brand yourselves as the experts
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Money.co.uk Content Strategy Huge gains recently due to aggressive content strategy – is this sustainable during future updates?
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
It wasn’t always good
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Money.co.uk User Generated Content
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Money vs Moneysupermarket At current growth rates they could overtake Moneysupermarket for credit cards within months, purely due to content strategy
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Money vs Moneysupermarket They are also catching in the loan sector
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Money vs Moneysupermarket And are ahead already in savings
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Mint.com vs Lovemoney.com Two very successful sites in the personal finance sector
Built almost entirely around useful tools as a marketing strategy
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Mint.com Hugely successful in linkbaiting the tech and personal finance sector
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Mint.com
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Mint.com Build a travel budget planner tool, get links from travel blogs
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Mint.com Personal finance tool, sold for $170m
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Lovemoney.com Mint.com for the UK, with a strong content strategy
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Lovemoney.com Impressive recent growth as they have switched strategy to be a comparison site – definitely one to watch for 2013
The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
Patrick@branded3.com
Questions?