Track: Inbound Topic: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Title: The Most Important SEO Initiatives to Plan for in 2016 Speaker: ALAN BUSH, VP of Strategy, Ignite Visibility Alan Bush, VP of Strategy of Ignite Visibility and UCSD teacher, reveals the biggest changes in SEO in 2015 and what to focus on in 2016. This presentation is not necessarily for SEO beginners, but instead, for those who have some basic knowledge of SEO and are looking to take their ranking to the next level. - See more at: http://sdama.org/events/2015-art-of-marketing-conference/#session-details

1. ALAN BUSH
The Most Important SEO
Initiatives to Plan for in
2016

2. Alan Bush
• Director of SEO Strategy –
Ignite Visibility
• One of the top SEO, social media
and pay per click companies in
the nation.
• Instructor of SEO Marketing at
UCSD
• Co-host of 2 internationally
known internet marketing
podcasts (WinTheWeb &
OwningYourOwn)
• Worked on over 400 digital
marketing campaigns, including
companies such as G4TV, No
Fear, Nixon Watches, Links of
London, Musician’s Institute,
Walking On A Cloud and many
more.

3. What we are covering today
• Why SEO
• SEO History in 2015
• My 5 Most Important SEO items in
2016

4. Why SEO?
• 93% of online research begins with a
search engine
• Google owns abut 70% of market share
• 70% of the links users click on are organic
• 75% of users never scroll past the first
page

5. - Optimization on
single web pages
- Site
architecture
- Fresh content
- Links to your site
- Social media
shares
- Reviews of your
website (local
search)
SEO
Rankings
Onsite Optimization
(about 50%)
Offsite Optimization
(about 50%)

6. Getting Warmed Up

7. What
happened
in 2015?
Mobile Update AKA "Mobilegeddon"
— April 22, 2015
Made it so you needed a mobile version
of your site to rank in mobile search
Sites without a mobile version lost
almost all mobile traffic
The Quality Update — May 3, 2015
Known as the Phantom update
Update to the overall algorithm.
Benefited sites with powerful links
Major brands won
Panda 4.2 (#28) — July 17, 2015
Helped sites hit by last panda update
Looks at quality content, see here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.
com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-
building-high-quality.html
3 major Google algorithm updates

8. Hints from
Google
Google says move to https
https gets ranking boost in Google
Warnings in chrome and firefox
Structure data as a ranking factor
Google says will be more
important

9. Application
SEO gets more
important
Apps get a ranking boost when app
indexing is done correctly and apps get
another ranking boost when they use
the app indexing API.

10. Example app listed in
search

11. RankBrain
• Google releases RankBrian
• Announced in late October
• Machine learning system
• Matches content to searches
• 3rd biggest ranking factor

12. Industry Survey

13. First, Get your Technical
Ducks in a Row

14. Go Secure, https:// (you have no
choice!
• Action Item: Switch your website to https, you will rank better!
• Update all internal linking to point to https
• Update all external links to point at https version of your site
• Make sure images and fonts are secure
• Put in 301 redirects and set up a new Google search console

15. HTTPS Video
https://youtu.be/cBhZ6S0PFCY

16. Go Mobile, you have no choice
• Action Item: Go mobile, responsive
design if possible
• Test with mobile usability tool
https://www.google.com/webmasters/t
ools/mobile-friendly/
• Shoot for mobile page speed scores of
65 or above
• Have a mobile ready website that is
optimized for Google (responsive
design, vary http header or subdomain)
• Map your mobile application URLs to
the corresponding web page and set up
a Google search console account

17. Watch your Ajax and Javascript
• Action Item: No more escape fragment optimization, make
sure you optimize around your Ajax and Javascript
• Google is now indexing Ajax and Javascript (no more escape
fragment optimization)
• Make sure you have an HTML and Ajax or Javascript strategy
• It will always important to have core HTML elements such as
URLs, titles, h1, copy, etc.

18. Schema.org
Action Item: Create a schema.org strategy for each page
of your site.
• This will be important for rankings, click
through rates and users.
• Some of my favorite schema is…
• Logo schema
• Product Schema
• Reviews Schema
• Video Schema
• Breadcrumb Schema
• Local Schema
• Article Schema
• Event schema

19. Schema.org Video
Reviews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=n0SF6PLCx4I

20. Sitemaps: Don't leave indexing to
chance
•Action Item: Make sure you have all the
sitemaps in green.
•XML
•HTML
•Video
•Image
•News
•RSS
Make sure you have
all of these sitemaps.
Have a news sitemap, if you are
news site and an RSS if you need
content indexed fast.

21. Second, Go Local Like a Pro

22. Have a location
specific strategy.
• Action item: Create Location
based pages on your site.
• Add local schema.org to your site
• Create the following local
profiles
• Google +
• Bing
• Yelp
• And use Yext or Moz Local

23. Fix Auto Example
• We do the franchise and corporate marketing for this client
• Started at zero, now getting thousands of visitors
• Started with almost 0 keywords ranking, now over 3,000
• Working together one year
Example Irvine URL, now
ranking for 43 keywords.

24. Third, Go Multilingual and
Enter All New Markets

25. Pick a new language and generate
more revenue or leads
• Action Item: Translate your site into a new language or target a new
country
• Read more here in the ultimate guide
• http://searchengineland.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-multilingual-and-multiregional-seo-
157838
• You have already done the work in English, translate your website into
Spanish, French, Russian
• Use hreflang tags and X default to be technically correct

26. Ecwid Example
• We pushed this client into over 25 countries and
• Languages.
• 8,542% increase in new users
• 5,284% increase in goal completions
• Man, that make me feel good to help a client that way

27. https://youtu.be/8ce9jv91beQ?t=2m38s
2:38 to 3:50
Before you make the jump

28. Fourth, Build out Hubs
of Content

29. Action Item: Create Hubs of Content
Motorcycle gear ex
H1 and h2
Copy
Optimized image
Articles
Guides
Subcategories
Products
Videos
Infographics
More!

30. Fifth, Build an External
Linking Strategy and Brand
Around Expertise

31. Have an influencer or subject matter
expert
Action Item: Have One or Two People be the Face of the
Company Online
• Align with one, or create one. Creating one take a lot longer.
• Write for top publications
• Give everything away in your blog
• Social media
• Build out personal profiles
• Run ads
• Make them the center of inbound
• Email marketing
• Reverse engineer with SEM Rush, Majestic SEO and
BuzzSumo

32. Sixth, Use the Right Tools

33. Use BuzzSumo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNy8U3tlFYs

34. Some of my Favorite SEO Tools
1. Hootsuite: Schedule social posts, feed your blog
2. BuzzSumo: Influencers, popular social content
3. Screaming Frog: Crawl an entire site
4. SpyFu: Competitive analysis
5. Soovle: Keyword suggestions from various search engines
6. Opensite Explorer Broken Link Checker: Fix broken links
7. Ahrefs & Majestic SEO: View backlinks to any website
8. KnowEM: Secure 300 social media profiles
9. Link Detox: Clean up work your bad SEO company did
10. Google Search Console: A MUST HAVE!
11. SEM Rush – Internet Marketing tracking tool
12. Browser Plugins – Foxy SEO, SEOBook, etc.

35. @ALANHBUSH
@IGNITEV
IGNITEVISIBILITY.COM/BLOG
Thank You