1. Future Proofing SEO
by Patrick Altoft

2. What I’m talking about
• Penalties
• Making users love you
• How great sites are winning the SEO race
• How to make your site great
• Being memorable
• Content strategy
• Getting social
• Links

3. Panda
Sites that Google thinks are low quality got
wiped out
• Duplicate content
• Poor “return to search” metrics
(voucher sites & car classified sites)
• Lots of low value pages
• Thin content

4. Panda
Rather than having some
huge change that happens on
a given day.
You are more likely in the
future to see Panda deployed
gradually as we rebuild the
index. So you are less likely to
see these large scale sorts of
changes.
Merchant update?

5. Poor quality sites just don’t perform as well
Historically a mediocre company with a below average site could implement an
aggressive link strategy based on mediocre links and generate top rankings.
Now Google actively penalises for bad links & content rather than just devaluing them

6. Does Google like your business model?

7. Unnatural Links
Google has manually penalised
thousands of sites for having
unnatural links
We run a penalty recovery service
and have helped over 35 brands
recover from their penalties in the
past 6 months

8. Penguin
Artificial intelligence algorithm designed to identify
sites that fit a pattern of manipulating the algorithm
by building unnatural links to get rankings higher than
the site deserves

9. Link Devaluation
A gradual drop in
rankings since 22nd
November could be due
to link devaluation
(November 22nd was also a
Panda update too)

10. Do people love you?
It’s unquantifiable, tough to explain to clients & impossible
to make a business case for but love is slowly & steadily
becoming part of the Google algorithm
Google can tell whether people love your website & is
rewarding the most loved websites with higher rankings.
Panda downgraded sites that people didn’t love – why
wouldn’t Google reward sites that people do love?

11. How can Google understand love?
Hundreds of user engagement
signals are analysed and fed into
an artificial intelligence algorithm
The algorithm learns how to
detect whether users love a site
or not (probably with the help of
seed sites)
Remember, Chrome has 33%
market share & Analytics is in
use on over 10m websites

12. How artificial intelligence
shapes the algorithm
New algorithm
• Based on what we know
about sites that are loved, do
we think that people love
your site?
Old Algorithm
• Let’s score you on various
trust signals & see how you
perform

13. Great sites are winning
• Doing SEO for a great site is 10x easier than doing SEO for a mediocre site
• For most companies this is the difference between success and failure in an SEO campaign
Panda
?

14. People love John Lewis

15. People love M&S

16. What can I do?
• Want to know how Google sees your site? Just ask
your visitors.
• Every site should be permanently asking for
feedback from different groups of people
• Adopt a mantra of continual improvement & use
survey scores as a KPI
• http://qualaroo.com

17. Content Strategy
Our Data Insights team analysed visits across one of the UK’s largest
retail ecommerce websites and found that users who engaged with a
piece of content such as an article, forum thread or video on the site
before reaching a product or category page were 5 times more valuable
than users who arrived directly on a product or category page.
Users who engage with quality content place more trust in the brand so
convert at a higher rate, purchase more products and have a greater
tendency to make repeat purchases
Increasing brand trust, improving conversion rates and encouraging
larger sale values are all vital elements of any digital marketing campaign

18. Attribution modelling
Adding attribution modelling into the mix demonstrates even further why a strong
content strategy is so important – on average non-brand organic SEO is 40% more
valuable than a traditional “last click wins” methodology would show.
Content strategy increases assisted conversions

19. Content makes your site memorable
Our research shows that 40% of ecommerce transactions are carried out
24 hours or more after users first visit the website

20. Being memorable
Only 40% of revenue is attributable to users who buy on the first visit – most of your
customers will need to remember you and find you a second time

21. 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

22. People are already doing this

23. Reviews
If you don’t have a user
review strategy – why not?

24. Questions & Answers
Why wouldn’t you do this?

25. External Reviews
• Build users trust
• Improve conversion rates
• Increase basket size
• Improve Quality Score for PPC
Why wouldn’t you do this?

26. Usability
How many sites are hard to
use on a mobile device or
iPad?
What’s your conversion rate
on Safari?
Our data for 30m UK users in
August puts Safari at over 30%
market share with most visits
coming from iPad and iPhone
use – Safari is the most
popular browser on lots of
ecommerce sites

27. Usability & Conversion Rates

28. This sounds hard, can we ignore SEO?
For an established business the new rules of SEO are a tough sell
because businesses need information about ROI to sign off projects
and struggle to implement new ways of working
Maybe you can just ignore SEO?

29. The new rules of The Internet
Look at it another way - Google is just mirroring real life and ranking sites that users
want to see. If people don’t like your site this will impact everything you do online.
If you don’t focus on making users love you then how will you get traffic?
• PPC – Google will bring these factors into the Quality Score algorithm sooner or later
• Direct – if users don’t love you will they still visit your site directly?
• Social media – unloved sites never succeed in social media
• Affiliates – can you afford to pay commission for all your sales/leads?
• Conversions – users convert better if they love the site

30. It’s not about growth
Look at all the brands who have lost huge amounts of revenue due to
Panda, Penguin and unnatural links.
SEO is no longer just about growth.
For some businesses SEO is just about forward thinking to protect market
share and make sure the next major update doesn’t ruin your business.

31. Link strategy
The only way to future-proof your link strategy is to make links a natural
by-product of your normal marketing strategy
As you might expect, this isn’t easy. How many links does your marketing
strategy deliver every month at the moment?
If you sit back and wait for links to arrive you won’t get enough to rank

32. Relationships
Client PR
Strategy
Corporate
Comms
Media
Relations
Blog Outreach
Social MediaCrisis Comms
Internal
Comms
Public Affairs
Agency
SEO
Strategy
Linkbuilding
Keyword
Research
Other SEO
projects
Onsite
Optimisation
Client does some great stuff over here
Most agency/client linkbuilding relationships work like this
Agency does some other stuff over there

33. It should work something like this
Marketing
Corporate Comms
Links
Media
Relations
Links
Blog
Outreach
Links
SEO
Keywords
Technical
SEO
Social
Media
Links
Crisis
Comms
Links
Reputation
Management
Internal
Comms
SEO
Training
Public
Affairs
Links
Every marketing task can be performed by the client or the agency – usually an agile agency will
fill the gaps where the client doesn’t have in-house resource

34. Recommended Reading

35. Patrick@branded3.com
http://www.branded3.com/
Questions?