Mike Tirone, Digital Marketing Search Strategist at R2Integrated, Pat Reinhart, Manager of SEO Services at Prime Visibility, and Joe Taylor, Strategic Customer Success Manager at Conductor squeezed 50 tips into just 45 minutes with this SEO Power Hour at C3. Hearing from both agencies and brands, you’ll leave these slides stocked and energized with new, practical ways to seize search opportunities and boost your rankings.

1. #C3NY
1
POWER HOUR:
50 ACTIONABLE SEO TIPS & TRICKS
Patrick Reinhart, Prime Visibility
Michael Tirone, R2Integrated
Joe Taylor, Conductor

2. #C3NY
2
DON’T TAKE YOURSELF TOO SERIOUSLY
Accept and learn from failing. You don’t know everything and
that’s OK.

3. #C3NY
3
HIRE AN AGENCY WITH THE BEST TRACK
RECORD, NOT THE BEST PRICE.
Legitimate agencies are looking for partners, not clients, and
you'll get so much more out of these types of relationships. I
hear Prime Visibility is pretty good.

4. #C3NY
4
CREATE CONTENT FOR EVERY STAGE OF THE
BUYER’S JOURNEY
The search starts long before the checkout button. Brands who
build their content around this principal will win more
customers.

5. #C3NY
5
REVIEW YOUR ROBOTS.TXT
Often times they become outdated, tampered with, not
excluding the right pages or linking to the appropriate sitemap

6. #C3NY
6
YOUR BRAND SHOULD ALWAYS COMES FIRST,
EXCEPT IN YOUR TITLE TAGS.
Unless you have a manual penalty assessed against your site,
chances are you are going to rank for your brand name. Let the
keyword(s) shine in your title tags and put your brand at the end.

7. #C3NY
7
REPURPOSE OLD MARKETING CONTENT
Most brands have marketing assets from years of non-digital
marketing. Open up the archives and see what can be reused.

8. #C3NY
8
MANUALLY SCHEDULE EMAILS OF GOOGLE
ANALYTICS MONTHLY REPORTS
Create your own database by scheduling monthly reports from
GWMT which you will be able to bank as an alternate data
source of top pages, impressions, keywords, clicks and CTR

9. #C3NY
9
ADD REL=CANONICAL TAGS TO FIX SITE-WIDE
DUPLICATION ISSUES.
You may have a duplicate content issue and not know it. Look for
duplicate pages that may have been dynamically created.
i.e. PrimeVisibility.com/home vs. PrimeVisibility.com/Home

10. #C3NY
10
MAP CONTENT TO BUYER PERSONAS
Different content speaks to different types of buyers; make sure
you’re covered where it’s most important for your brand to be
covered

11. #C3NY
11
WITHIN ADWORDS LINK YOUR GWMT ACCOUNT
Doing so will provide you with a great depth of knowledge and
data to support your work on the paid and organic fronts

12. #C3NY
12
NORMALIZE YOUR NAP INFORMATION FOR
LOCAL SEARCH.
Name, Address & Phone Number. If your information is different
across multiple sites, then people and search engines will be
confused as to who and where you actually are.

13. #C3NY
13
BUILD COMPETITIVE STRATEGY BASED ON YOUR
SEO COMPETITORS AND NOT YOUR TRADITIONAL
BUSINESS COMPETITORS
Brands often think their competitors are the same competitors
they’ve battled for years. In search, this is often not the case.

14. #C3NY
14
CHECK RATIO OF INDEXED PAGES IN SEARCH
ENGINES WITH YOUR XML SITEMAP
By finding the total number of pages you have indexed via
Google/Bing WMTs (or via site: search) you can compare against
the total pages in your sitemap. Indexed > sitemap = good |
indexed < sitemap = you’re doing it wrong!

15. #C3NY
15
WHEN DIAGNOSING A LINK PROFILE, NEVER
RELY ON ONE PLATFORM TO TELL YOU THE
WHOLE PICTURE.
I'm looking at you, Google Webmaster Tools. Export data from
multiple tools and manually investigate links before classifying
them as healthy or deadly.

16. #C3NY
16
MEASURE PERFORMANCE BASED ON CONTENT
SEGMENTATION
Highlights are great, but make sure you are grouping products
and sections of the site in a way that allows for direct
comparison to understand strengths and weaknesses

17. #C3NY
17
MARKUP YOUR SITE. RINSE. REPEAT.
Structured data with Schema.org vocabulary is always expanding
and it is the future of search engines identifying “entities”

18. #C3NY
18
TRUST YOUR SEO EXPERT.
You hired this person and (hopefully) vetted them out from a
group of others. If you are handing them the keys, let them
drive.

19. #C3NY
19
CREATE “BRAND EXPERIENCE” CONTENT
It doesn’t have to always be related directly to the product.
Create content that brings the “type” of people you want to
your site.

20. #C3NY
20
SEARCH LIKE A HUMAN, NOT A ROBOT
Actually do search queries rather than stare at graphs & numbers
Ask yourself “if I was… how would I try to search for it…”
Sometimes we overcomplicate things

21. #C3NY
21
WHEN THINKING OF ENGAGING IN
INTERNATIONAL SEO CAMPAIGNS, YOU NEED TO
HAVE A STRATEGY FIRST.
Don't just buy a country code domain, throw up a bunch of
pages, and duplicate the site. A meta description that promises
free shipping in the U.S. doesn’t help anyone in Canada.

22. #C3NY
22
DON’T OBSESS OVER DAILY—OVER EVEN
WEEKLY—DATA POINTS
Long term consistency trumps short term intensity. Stop
constantly hitting refresh or checking data points incessantly.
Measure in the context of an entire initiative, not just a single
push.

23. #C3NY
23
USE DASHES NOT PIPES
- vs. | in page titles

24. #C3NY
24
SPEAKING OF INTERNATIONAL SEO, DO NOT USE
AUTO TRANSLATION.
The quality isn't there and the message isn't targeted. If you are
going to target other languages, make sure that you invest time
and money in the effort. It will pay off with your potential
customers.

25. #C3NY
25
DON’T OVERSATURATE YOUR CONTENT
Pick one or two goals. Pick one or two keywords. Execute on
those specifically.

26. #C3NY
26
BE UNIQUE. AT ALL TIMES
Within your page titles, site copy, landing pages, big ideas

27. #C3NY
27
SITES HOSTED ON SERVERS IN THEIR OWN
COUNTRY WILL RANK BETTER.
For example: If you have a .CA, then that site should be hosted
on a server that exists in Canada.

28. #C3NY
28
USE NATURAL LANGUAGE URLS
Exceptions exist, but try to adhere to this gold standard

29. #C3NY
29
OPTIMIZE WITH YOUR MOUTH, NOT FINGERTIPS
More and more searches are going to be conducted through Voice
Search, adjust to more conversational content

30. #C3NY
30
USE LATENT SEMANTIC INDEXING (LSI)
KEYWORDS
This will increase the relevancy around the theme of a page,
rather than targeting the exact phrase over and over.

31. #C3NY
31
PREVIEW CONTENT AS A DIFFERENT USER AGENT
This will allow you to see what the content looks like on
different devices

32. #C3NY
32
THINK PROGRESSIVE & PERSONAL
Google Now, hyper-predictive & hyper-personal

33. #C3NY
33
AUTHORSHIP IS DEAD, BUT AUTHOR RANK IS
ALIVE AND WELL. GIVE YOURSELF CREDIT.
Make sure people know you authored your content by ensuring
there are bylines giving you the credit.

34. #C3NY
34
UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENT WAYS USERS SEARCH
ON DIFFERENT TYPES OF SEARCH ENGINES
Tools like Soovle allow you to see popular ways of searching a
topic on different search engines

35. #C3NY
35
USE CATEGORY MARKET SHARE REPORT (SHARE
OF VOICE REPORTING) TO HELP YOU FIND
DISPLAY OPPORTUNITIES

36. #C3NY
36
FIND NEW AND CURRENT KEYWORD IDEAS
USING A REDDIT OR SUBREDDIT SEARCH.
Look for threads with recurring themes and gauge volume to
create relevant content.

37. #C3NY
37
FIND AND FIX “CLICK HERE” LINKS
Identify these low hanging fruit opportunities to improve the
quality of your link profile

38. #C3NY
38
USE SCREAMINGFROG OR XENU TO AVOID SPOT
CHECKING

39. #C3NY
39
OPTIMIZE YOUR VIDEO ASSETS.
Leverage the description on YouTube or transcribe it onto your
site. This will essentially turn it into a smaller blog post and help
it rank for long-tail keywords.

40. #C3NY
40
IDENTIFY THE STRONGEST TLDS TO PARTNER
WITH FOR YOUR BRAND
Focus here for your high leverage linking opportunities

41. #C3NY
41
USE THE DATA HIGHLIGHTER

42. #C3NY
42
INTERNALLY LINK HIGHER AUTHORITY PAGES
WITHIN YOUR OWN SITE TO BOOST CONTENT
ON PAGE 2.
Sharing equity between pages isn’t a bad thing, just don’t overdo
it. Everything can work when used in moderation.

43. #C3NY
43
SEARCH FOR DUPLICATE PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS
See where other sites are cannibalizing your opportunities by
copying your product descriptions

44. #C3NY
44
THE METRICS COMING FROM THE TOOL HAVE NO
BUSINESS SUCCESS RELATION
There could be plenty wrong. it's not a picture of success

45. #C3NY
45
LOOK FOR DEAD LINKS ON WIKIPEDIA TO USE IN
YOUR FAVOR.
Wikipedia has an area that reports on dead links on the site.
Creating a piece of content and submitting to the site will help
round out your link profile, and creates opportunity to obtain
existing equity.

46. #C3NY
46
IDENTIFY THE HIGHEST PRIORITY KEYWORDS
AND DEVELOP BETTER DATA SHARING WITH PAID
TEAM
Start small, select a few key metrics for each channel, and share
on a weekly basis, preferably using an automated system

47. #C3NY
47
THINK ABOUT BRANDED SEARCH AND HOW DO
YOU WANT TO MANAGE YOUR PRESENCE
Do you want to show paid ads. How much does it cost? What’s
the opportunity cost?

48. #C3NY
48
SEO IS A MARATHON, NOT A SPRINT. YOU HAVE
TO BE PATIENT.
This stuff takes time people, and nothing will kill an SEO
campaign faster than impatience. Take the time to educate
yourself, you and your site will be better for it.

49. #C3NY
49
USE A WEB PRESENCE MANAGEMENT PLATFORM
I hear Searchlight is pretty good.

50. #C3NY
50
MAKE GOOD USE OF THE REL=ALTERNATE WHEN
YOU HAVE MOBILE OR LANGUAGES

51. #C3NY
51
DON’T TRUST ANYONE NAMED SETH.
Especially organizations with multiple occurrences.

52. Pat Reinhart
Manager, SEO
Services,
Prime Visibility
Joe Taylor
Strategic Customer
Success Manager,
Conductor
Mike Tirone
Digital Marketing
Search Strategist,
R2Integrated