SEO Is Dead?
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I talk about how to evaluate if SEO is still relevant for your growth strategy.
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SEO Is Dead?
- 1. SEO Is Dead? Casey Winters PM Growth @ Pinterest @onecaseman caseyaccidental.com
- 2. Is SEO still an important growth channel? Casey Winters | @onecaseman | caseyaccidental.com
- 3. Why could it matter? • One of a few channels with true scale • Only cost is engineering opportunity cost Casey Winters | @onecaseman | caseyaccidental.com
- 4. How do you prioritize SEO? Casey Winters | @onecaseman | caseyaccidental.com
- 5. How do you know what box you’re in? • Who? • What? • When? • Where? • How? GrubHub, every restaurant name food, delivery, Chinese, indian, menus breakfast, lunch, dinner, late night Vancouver, University of BC, Kitsilano Online ordering, mobile app Casey Winters | @onecaseman | caseyaccidental.com
- 6. Now test for search volume and competitiveness Casey Winters | @onecaseman | caseyaccidental.com
- 7. What is good SEO? • Short answer: really good landing pages • Long answer: relevant and authoritative Casey Winters | @onecaseman | caseyaccidental.com
- 8. Relevance: On Page Factors • Title tags • HTML tags • Text • URL • Uniqueness • Freshness • Where keywords are located • Diversity of content types • Number of links on the page • Ad blocks on the page Casey Winters | @onecaseman | caseyaccidental.com
- 9. Authority: Off Page Factors • Quantity of external links • Quality of external links • Anchor text of links • Metrics from search engines e.g. bounce rate and CTR • Content area of external links • Diversity of link types Casey Winters | @onecaseman | caseyaccidental.com
- 10. Prequisites: Discoverability and Readability • Search engines use spiders or crawlers to DISCOVER pages across the web • They READ any content they find on those pages – Text – Flash – JavaScript – AJAX – Images – Video • So, in order to succeed you need to be DISCOVERABLE and READABLE Casey Winters | @onecaseman | caseyaccidental.com
- 11. You’re bought in: What’s next? • SEO is engineering/product driven • Change your site to improve • Do experiments – Adding content / pages – Improving uniqueness – Helping search engines find your content • You can’t experiment on attracting links Casey Winters | @onecaseman | caseyaccidental.com
- 12. I only have a mobile app. Should I care? Casey Winters | @onecaseman | caseyaccidental.com
- 13. Obligatory Connecting Slide • Connect with me on Twitter: @onecaseman • Read my blog: caseyaccidental.com • Work me at about.pinterest.com/careers • Use Pinterest heavily so I can keep my job Casey Winters | @onecaseman | caseyaccidental.com
Editor's Notes
- So, let’s cut to the chase. Is SEO still an important growth channel? Short answer yes with an if. Long answer no with a but.
- Well, let’s talk first about why could it still matter. And for that, we need to look at the growth funnel. SEO is one of a few tactics that is truly scalable if it works without requiring money. And spending money sucks.
- Depending on the business, SEO may be a large opportunity or a very small one, and a very crowded space or a relatively sparse space. The main question to ask is: are people on search engines currently searching for keywords that closely match the product or service I provide? If so, can I reasonably expect that by designing by site using Google best practices with some well placed content that I could rank in the top five for any keywords that in aggregate would drive a meaningful amount of new customers? You may offer a product with a ton of keywords, but heavily competitive for SEO e.g. apartment rentals, or a product with no keyword volume, but also sparse for SEO e.g. boat housing. What you’re hoping for is that you’re in a niche that has lots of search volume, but is not very competitive. This is rare, but does happen, typically when a user base is just starting to come online or when a trend is just emerging. But, the next best thing is a category that is not very competitive, but doesn’t have much search volume, because you can own the few searches that do happen, then use content marketing to target the broader category, which typically does have enough search volume. A competitive search result where there is a lot of volume is likely an area you’ll spend time, but not expect many short term gains. You will have to play the long game there. A category that is very competitive, but has lots of search volume is typically still worth going after, but that’s when you need to decide if you’re ready to make SEO a core competency to compete. This is what startups like Zillow and Trulia and Redfin have done. Almost everything about how their marketing and product organization is structured around how can this improve our SEO. For a category that is competitive and not much search volume, focus on other things that are higher leverage and let your competitors waste time on impressing Google.
- So, how do you determine what box you’re in? The first step is knowing what your service should be relevant for? I typically think who, what, when, where, and how, and answer those questions for the site. For Pinterest, that's a pretty broad set of keywords. So, let’s take my previous job at GrubHub as an example.
- Now, you combine all of those words together into Excel to get a target keyword list. Next, you use the Google Keyword Planner to see if anyone is searching for those terms. Upload a csv or paste them in, and Google will tell you how much search volume there was been for all of them. It’s definitely grain of salty, but a good read. How much is enough? That depends on the size of your business and what will make a meaningful impact. Clearly, hundreds of thousands is a lot. Hundreds is not. After you have this data, take the most meaningful keywords and do some spot searches. Do the results that show up seem like good results for the query? Are they well optimized?
- So, you’re looking at these search results asking, how do I know if these are quality results. The short answer is are these really good landing pages. The long answer is are they relevant and authoritative. Now, when I say landing pages, I generally don’t mean a blog post. Sure, that can be a winner, but I’d rather have pages that don’t require me writing a thousands words each time. Supply driven content and user generated content are the best way.
- So how do search engines determine relevance? Well, here's a rough hierarchy. They look at the title tag of the page first then the H1's and H2's, thing that typically indicate importance in HTML. Then they read normal text, and they look at what the URL says. They also look at this page compared to all the pages in their index and see how unique this page is compared to the rest. Search engines prefer unique content. They also look at the last time the page was updated. Frequently updated pages are seen as more reliable to search engines. They also look at the # of links on the page. A page with a ton of links is associated with a worse user experience and having less relevance. They also look at where the keywords are on a page. Google breaks up the page into header, footer, sidebars, and content area. Keywords in the content area are weighted higher. They also look at the # of content types. A page with text, video, and images is seen as better than just a page with one of those. They also look at the # of ad blocks on the page. A page with a bunch of ads is seen as less relevant.
- So, how do search engines determine authority. Well, the main two things are quantity and quality of external links to the page and domain. Search engines see links as votes, so if another site links to you, that's a vote that you're an authority. Now, not all votes are ranked equal. A link from the San Francisco Chronicle will be worth more than a link from my blog. They also look at how other sites link to you. So, the anchor text is very important. If a link says home decor, that will help more than a link that says click here. Search engines also look at the data they accumulate about a page. So, when a page gets clicked from Google, what is the bounce rate. When Google shows a page in a search result, what's its click through rate. They also look at which parts of the page people link from. A link from the content area of another page is worth more than a footer link. They also look at the diversity of link types. A page that gets links from blogs, news sites, and social media will be better than just a bunch of links from blogs.
- There are some prerequisites before authority and relevance matter though. To understand that, you need to know how search engines work? Well, search engines use spiders or crawlers to discover pages across the web by following links. When they get to a page, they take a snapshot of it and later try to read the content they find on the page. Now, search engines can mainly just read text. They struggle with Flash, JavaScript, AJAX, images, and video. They'll get some of it, but in order to succeed, you need to be discoverable and readable. Take Pinterest. It’s all images. By default, search engines have no idea what’s going on. So, we need to have our Pinners add text to describe those images if we want to rank at all. Now, Google will tell you just create a good web page, and we’ll figure it out. I have not seen that to be the case. If your site is heavy in JavaScript, you will not do as well as a site with clean HTML. I’ve tested it, at Pinterest, and we saw a huge drop in traffic from rendering more content in JavaScript.
- So, you’ve looked at the search volume, it’s there in multitude, and you think you can compete. What’s next. People always ask me do you know any good SEO marketers? I tell them, don’t hire a marketer, hire an engineer. Because SEO is engineering and product driven, not marketing driven. In order to improve, you need to make changes to your site. And at the risk of hurting my career, you don’t need to hire an expert like me. You just need to make changes and measure impact. An in order to measure impact, you need to do experiments. Why? Because the rules of search engines are closely guarded and change without notice. Things that were best practice a few years ago may be harmful to your rankings now. At Pinterest, we’re always doing experiments to add content or new pages, to improving how unique our content is, to helping search engines find your content. There is a caveat here: you can’t experiment on attracting links, or at least I haven’t found a scalable way to do it.
- Some people will say, but I only have a mobile app business. Should I care? Any my answer is, go back to Reverend Lovejoy. Whether you’re a web or mobile business, SEO can be useful, and you follow the same process to determine why. If you don’t have a website, but there’s all this value, you build one and focus your conversions on mobile app downloads via mobile web queries. The same principles that apply to Pinterest or GrubHub apply to Uber. That said, the shift to mobile is affecting search, so as a growth person you need to always evaluate where your potential audience is going. Is it still Google, or is it increasingly an app like Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram. Hopefully, this presentation shows you a framework for seeing is Google is still one of those channels for your audience.
- So, you’ve looked at the search volume, it’s there in multitude, and you think you can compete. What’s next. People always ask me do you know any good SEO marketers? I tell them, don’t hire a marketer, hire an engineer. Because SEO is engineering and product driven, not marketing driven. In order to improve, you need to make changes to your site. And at the risk of hurting my career, you don’t need to hire an expert like me. You just need to make changes and measure impact. An in order to measure impact, you need to do experiments. Why? Because the rules of search engines are closely guarded and change without notice. Things that were best practice a few years ago may be harmful to your rankings now. At Pinterest, we’re always doing experiments to add content or new pages, to improving how unique our content is, to helping search engines find your content. There is a caveat here: you can’t experiment on attracting links, or at least I haven’t found a scalable way to do it.