SEO training session 2 at Demand Quest in Minneapolis, September 2017. Intermediate and advanced SEO concepts and techniques.

1. SEARCH ENGINE
OPTIMIZATION
TRAINING
DemandQuest
September 2017
Session 2

2. TODAY’S AGENDA
1. 30-minute SEO Checkup Check-in
2. Real-time SEO Checkup
3. Intermediate SEO
4. Advanced Local SEO
5. Advanced SEO
6. Q&A

3. 30 MINUTE SEO
CHECK UP
HOW DID YOU
DO?

4. 30-MINUTE SEO CHECK UP – CHECK IN
1. What were the issues you found?
2. Let’s dig into the causes
3. How are you going to fix them?

5. 1. Launch a crawl on your site with Screaming Frog
2. Download the SEO Scan spreadsheet
3. While crawl is running, log into Google Search Console
4. After that, log into Bing Webmaster Tools
5. Check your crawl, if it’s done export the crawl overview and
load data into the Crawl Data Visualization spreadsheet
6. Log into Google Analytics
7. While logged into GA, head over to the Panguin Tool
8. Check your indexation in Google
9. Mark down issues as you go
WORKFLOW TIMELINE AND REVIEW

6. INTERMEDIATE SEO

7. COMMON SEO MYTHS
1. SEO is dead
2. SEO is easy
3. SEO is hard
4. SEO is snake oil/fairy
dust/magic
5. Content is king!!!!
6. Rankings = business
7. There’s one right answer

8. COMMON SEO MYTHS

9. SEO IS DEAD!

10. SEO IS DEAD!

11. SEO IS DEAD!

12. SEO IS DEAD!
https://www.getcredo.com/seo-work/

13. CMS OPTIONS
…and many, many more.

14. DUPLICATE CONTENT
• The presence of duplicate content on your site is
problematic for a couple of different reasons:
1. Duplicate content forces search engines to “choose”
what version of the content to serve in results.
2. It may appear to the search engines that your site is
attempting to manipulate the results pages by ranking
several different URLs for the same search term.

15. HOW GOOGLE HANDLES DUPLICATE CONTENT

16. HOW GOOGLE HANDLES DUPLICATE CONTENT

17. HOW TO FIND DUPLICATE CONTENT
• Screaming Frog
• Site:www.example.com/page
• Copyscape.com
• Siteliner.com

18. DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT
1. Redirects
2. Canonical tags
3. Parameter handling
4. Noindex tag
5. Robots.txt file
6. Server rules

19. DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT
You will almost
always use a 301
Only certain, specific
situations call for a
302

20. DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT

21. DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT

22. DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT
http://www.threedeepmarketing.com/blog/what-the-font-should-i-
care/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organictweets

23. DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT
• Prevent a page from appearing in
or remove a page from search
results by including a meta noindex
tag
• This tells Google and other visiting
search engines to remove/exclude
the page from search results
• It’s important to note that this is
useful in specific situations

24. DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT
• Use robots.txt file to prevent
certain pages from being crawled

25. DEALING WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT
• http://www.example.com
• http://www.example.com/
• http://example.com
• http://example.com/
• https://www.example.com
• https://www.example.com/
• https://example.com
• https://example.com/
GOOGLE SEES THESE AS INDIVIDUAL PAGES!
Choose your preferred protocol, host, and trailing slash consistency.

26. SEO TOOLS

27. TOOLS FOR SUCCESS – SEO TOOLS
• Screaming Frog
• Excel
• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• SEM Rush
• Google Keyword Planner
• Webpagetest.org
• Pexels

28. TOOLS FOR SUCCESS – BROWSER PLUGINS
• Ayima redirect path
• META SEO Inspector
• MozBar
• User-Agent Switcher
• Web Developer
• SeeRobots
• Scraper
• TinEye

29. ADVANCED LOCAL SEO

30. LOCAL SEO RANKING FACTORS
1. Google My Business signals
2. Link signals
3. On-page signals
4. External location signals
5. Review signals
6. Behavioral signals
7. Personalization signals
8. Social signals
Source: https://moz.com/blog/local-search-ranking-factors-survey-results-2017

31. SETTING UP GOOGLE MY BUSINESS (GMB)
• https://www.google.com/business/
• Choose the most accurate category
• https://moz.com/local/categories
• COMPLETE YOUR PROFILE TO 100%
• Choose a custom URL
• Choose wisely, this cannot be changed later…

32. REVIEW ACQUISITION
“Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking:
more reviews and positive ratings will probably improve a business's
local ranking.”
Probably a good idea to have a strategy in place.

33. REVIEW ACQUISITION
http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/products/google-review-handout/

34. REVIEW ACQUISITION
Real world example:

35. NEGATIVE LOCAL SEO
FACTORS

36. NAP INCONSISTENCY
The #1 issue that I see is
inconsistency across citations in
• Name
• Address
• Phone Number
Getting this right takes time.
www.brightlocal.com

37. WRONG GMB CATEGORIES
• Use as few categories as possible to describe your overall core business from the provided list.
• Choose categories that are as specific as possible, but representative of your main business.
• Do not use categories solely as keywords or to describe attributes of your business.
• Do not use categories that pertain to other businesses that are nearby or related, such as a
business physically contained within your business or an entity that contains your business.

38. TOO MANY GMB PROFILES
https://moz.com/ugc/local-seo-case-study-the-diary-of-an-address-change

39. KEYWORD STUFFED FOOTER
‘…loading a webpage with irrelevant keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s rankings
“results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking.”’

40. SETTING UP FALSE GMB PAGES

41. MONEY KEYWORD ANCHOR TEXT
• Google values sites that are
built for users, not search
engines.
• So, build your site for your
user.
• You’re better off optimizing
the on page elements than
creating a whole bunch of
these types of internal links.

42. CALL TRACKING NUMBERS ON CITATIONS

43. DUPLICATE CONTENT ON EVERY LOCATION PAGE

44. ADVANCED
SEO TACTICS

45. LINK BUILDING

46. WHY INVEST IN LINK BUILDING?
A technically sound site will only get you so far.
Without links, it simply will not have the equity or
authority to be visible in search engines.

47. LINK BUILDING TACTICS
Two methods:
1. Passive link building
2. Active link building

48. PASSIVE LINK BUILDING
Brand monitoring:
• Google Alerts
• SEM Rush
• Mention.net
• Buzzsumo
Embed links:
• Data Visualization
• Not “Widget Links”

49. ACTIVE LINK BUILDING
1. Content creation
2. Guest posting
3. Prospecting
4. Local links
5. Directories
6. Events
7. Broken Link Building
8. Image Link Reclamation

50. WEBSITE MIGRATIONS

51. 122,827
152,547
157,449
152,314 155,216
158,605 156,027
102,983
126,075 126,110 124,216 122,195
116,386
126,290
0
20,000
40,000
60,000
80,000
100,000
120,000
140,000
160,000
180,000
February March April May June July August
monthly organic session data
2014
2015
WHEN IT GOES WRONG…
SEO work
starts
3 months
before impact
realizedSite launch in
Jan. panic
starts
3 sites into one migration

52. WHEN IT GOES WRONG…
THEN, RIGHT
B2B ecommerce site
• A web redesign caused their organic traffic to tumble by 50% and
impacted revenue
• Engaged Three Deep to identified issues, develop priorities and
implement SEO improvements
• Rebuilt organic traffic, surpassed original goal and continues to grow

53. HOW CAN YOU AVOID DISASTER?
1. Plan your site structure
2. Understand your current digital ecosystem
a) Paid traffic?
b) Legacy sites?
3. Map out 301 redirects
a) Pull any legacy redirects
b) Map out redirects for any 404s currently reported in
GSC or captured in crawl
c) Pull link data from GSC, OSE, Majestic, and Ahrefs –
map any additional redirects
4. Monitor, QA, Test, Fix, Repeat.

54. GOOGLE ALGORITHM UPDATES

55. • Each year, Google changes its search algorithm
around 500–600 times.*
• That’s roughly 1.5 changes
EVERY.
SINGLE.
DAY!
THE SHIFTING SANDBOX
• Source: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

56. GOOGLE ALGORITHM
How can you figure out what happened?
1. Moz – Algorithm Change History
2. MozCast
3. Panguin Tool
4. Search Metrics

57. RECOVERING FROM PENALTIES
• Manual Actions:
1. Unnatural Links to/from Your Site
2. Hacked Site
3. Thin Content
4. Pure Spam
5. User-Generated Spam
6. Cloaking and Sneaky Redirects
7. Hidden Text and Keyword Stuffing
8. Spammy Freehosts
9. Spammy Structured Markup

58. RECOVERING FROM PENALTIES

59. INTERNATIONAL SEO

60. WHAT IS INTERNATIONAL SEO?
International SEO is the process of enabling of your
website(s) to become visible in search engines for
the languages and countries in which you do
business.
Or, to put it more plainly, get the right version of your
website in front of your customers regardless of what
country they live in, language they speak, or search
engine they use.

61. INTERNATIONAL SEO
1. TRANSLATION
2. TRANSLATION
3. TRANSLATION!!!
You MUST be speaking to your audience in their
natural language.

62. TRANSLATION

63. INTERNATIONAL SEO

64. CHOOSING THE RIGHT URL STRUCTURE
• ccTLD – Country Code Top Level Domain
• Choose this if you are targeting a specific country
• Subfolders – example.com/en-us/page
• Choose this if you are targeting language and country
• Subdomains – de.example.com
• Choose this if it is the only option you have

65. INTERNATIONAL SEO

66. <HREFLANG>
The <hreflang> tag tells
search engines what
language and
geographic location
each page on your site
is targeting.

67. <HREFLANG>
<link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“en-us” href=http://www.example.com/ />
<link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“en-gb” href=http://www.example.co.uk/ />
<link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“es-es” href=http://www.example.es/ />
1. Hey, Google in the US, please serve this page to English speakers
2. Hey, Google in the UK, please serve this page to English speakers
3. Hola, Google in Spain, please serve this page to Spanish speakers

68. BUILDING A CRAWLABLE
WEBSITE

69. BUILDING A CRAWLABLE WEBSITE

70. BUILDING A CRAWLABLE WEBSITE
• All web content can be accessed at unique pages with readable URLs
• No Javascript in navigation
• Logical content bucketing
• No flat structure
• All pages linked to internally

71. ACCELERATED MOBILE PAGES
(AMP PROJECT)

72. WHAT IS AMP?
The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project was
initiated by Google to help speed up the mobile web.
It is open source – non-
Google developers are
continuously improving.
Although not a direct
ranking signal, it improves
user experience.

73. SCHEMA

74. WHAT IS SCHEMA?
Schema is microdata – the information about the information on your
pages.

75. WHAT IS SCHEMA?
Schema helps search engines
determine entities and classify
information.
It helps them understand
relational connections to
provide information to
searchers that is likely relevant.

76. WHAT IS SCHEMA?

77. SOCIAL SCHEMA
Social schema is what triggers the information seen
on a social network when a web page is shared.

78. SOCIAL SCHEMA
og = Open Graph (Facebook and LinkedIn)
Twitter = Twitter

79. SCHEMA TOOLS
• Schema.org
• Structured data testing tool
• Facebook OG Tag tester
• Twitter Card validator

80. REVIEW
• Check your site regularly
• Duplicate content = BAD
• Local SEO = Visibility
• Build Links
• Don’t do bad things
• Mobile!
• Schema is important!

81. WRAP UP
• SEO is just marketing!
• It’s understanding your customer and your goals
• (Strategy and Planning)
• Understanding where and how they consume content
• (Market Research)
• Identifying their pain points
• (Keyword Research)
• Crafting a compelling, relevant message that resonates
• (Content Strategy)
• Making your message accessible within the proper channels
• (Technical SEO, Backlinks, Schema, Mobile-Friendly, Content Marketing)

82. THANK YOU!
QUESTIONS?