Presentation from Leeds Digital 2012 by Patrick Altoft

1. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
The Latest Advanced SEO
& Link Strategies
by Patrick Altoft

2. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
What I’m talking about
• 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. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
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?

4. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
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

5. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
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

6. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
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 rather than just devaluing them

7. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
Great sites are winning in 2012
• 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

8. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
People love John Lewis

9. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
People love M&S

10. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
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

11. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
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

12. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
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

13. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
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

14. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
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

15. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
People are already doing this

16. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
Get social
Make something
users will love
Encourage them
to share
*This is the Twitter Analytics
interface for verified users

17. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
Social SEO is not about fans & followers
It’s about engagement

18. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
Tweeting

19. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
Sharing

20. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
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.

21. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
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

22. The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies
B3
Questions?
Patrick@branded3.com
http://www.branded3.com/