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Search directions: best practice & strategy
Matt Trimmer
Principal Consultant & Managing Director

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Agenda
 Organic search
 SEO in a world of Google penalties
 Paid search
 The amazing and increasing power of AdWords

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SEO is really hard!
 On-page SEO is not easy
 With a changing/developing website
 Off-page SEO - link building
 Now genuinely difficult
 Spam free
 You have to be interesting
 Have something to talk about
 You have to embrace social
 Blogging to customer servicing via Twitter/Facebook
 Zendesk
 Google Penalties

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Google penalties – understanding
 Manual penalties by Google Staff
 “Manual Actions”
 Google policing or acting on a tip-off (spam report)
 Notified to you via Webmaster Tools account
 100% are notified
 Automatic penalties (filters) by Panda, Top Heavy, Penguin, Pirate, EMD
 “Algorithmic Actions”
 No notification
 Use http://www.panguintool.com/

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Both result in
 Suppression of your organic rankings
 Greatly reduced organic traffic

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Manual actions – 0.22% domains marked for removal
 Source - Google – Inside Search
 http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/fighting-spam.html

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Manual action notifications via Webmaster Tools
 Source - Google – Inside Search
 http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/fighting-spam.html

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Manual actions – the reasons?
 On and Off-page

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Algorithmic actions – the reasons?
 Normally on-page spam, but not always
 25 Panda updates
 Now part of standard algorithm
 4 Penguin updates
 April 24th, 2012
 May 25th 2012
 October 5th 2012
 Sometime in 2013 according to Google
 See SEOmoz
 http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

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The good news?
 Actions are temporary
 If you take action with algorithmic actions
 They will correct (If you correct the problem)
 If you don’t take action with algorithmic updates
 They will expire (could be years)
 If you take action with manual updates
 You can do a reconsideration request
 You must do a reconsideration request
 If you don’t take action with manual actions
 They will expire (could be years)

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So what does this all mean?
 Don’t spam on your site!
 Be really careful about who’s building your links and how!
 Interflora
 Use of Advertorials

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Interflora – link building gone wrong?
 History of poor quality link building
 Blogger outreach for free products?
 “Random acts of kindness” campaign
 http://wearesocial.net/blog/2013/03/interflora-story-seo-
turning-ugly/
 Use of Advertorials?

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Interflora Advertorials

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Interflora Advertorials

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Interflora Advertorials

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Interflora Advertorials

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Google comment

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Safe, legitimate link building?
 Core infrastructure and vertical directories
 But don’t waste time on others
 Press releases
 News worthy, syndicated
 Blogger outreach
 Content for bloggers to post about you theme
 Manual outreach
 Identifying sites that would link
 Link bait
 Something so worthy, people link back
 Blendtec

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Link building and link acquisition
 We think of link building as a series of steps
 each step increasing in difficulty, resources and engagement
 with an appropriate return in ranking reward
 the 9 point link building plan

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The 9 point link building strategy
 Harness your internal link structure
 Harness your political link structure
 Connect to the core
 Develop your profile
 Connect to your theme
 Make your news
 Interact with your theme
 Make the news
 Develop thought leadership

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Paid Search - AdWords
 Fundamentals
 103 changes in the last year
 A larger number are planned for this year!
 Google is awesome at integrating products!

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You can target your audience in many ways
 Keywords
 Relevant to product/service
 Geographically
 You can target by countries, cities/states, metro areas
(e.g. Chelsea), or a radius around a location
 Through the wording of your adverts
 If you are high end quality or bargain basement, say so
in your ad to attract the right type of visitor

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Important features I don’t want to tell you about
 Enhanced campaigns
 Context of device, time and location
 Migration by July
 Offer extensions
 10% off this weekend
 Seller ratings
 Call extensions
 Product listings

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Google Display Network (GDN)
 Selecting relevant sites where your ads can appear
 Display your ad using keywords and topics
 Choose where you want you ads to appear
 the travel section of www.telegraph.co.uk

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GDN Remarketing (haunting)
 Display ads to a visitor has previously visited site
 Remarketing lists
 Visitors who abandoned the checkout process
 Visitors who viewed a specific product category but did
not purchase
 You can combine groups of people you target by time
frame
 Target visitors to your site in the last 12 month
 Exclude visitors to your site in the last 11 months
 Highlights an audience of people whose annual
health insurance is likely to be coming up for annual
renewal

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GDN Remarketing with Google Analytics
 Visitors who spent more than X seconds on the site
 Shows a certain level of interest
 Visitors who viewed more than X pages on the site
 Shows a certain level of interest
 Visitors who purchased product X, up-sell product Y
 If they purchase a dining table, up sell the matching
sideboard
 Visitors who purchased 3 months supply of product X
 Target them 10 weeks later to remind them to re-order, for
example 3 months supply of Wellman

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GDN - Dynamic Remarketing
 Ads dynamically created to include images, descriptions
and prices
 of the actual products previously viewed by the visitor
 This is Google’s response to Criteo
 Currently only available to whitelisted clients

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GDN Remarketing in search
 Remarket to searchers on Google
 Bid higher when customers search existing keywords
 Target broader more expensive keywords, only to visitors
who are on one of you remarketing lists
 Currently only available to whitelisted clients

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Remarketing – the business case
 How much of your revenue is from new vs. returning
visitors?
 What’s your E-commerce conversion rate for New and
Returning visitors?
 Returning visitors
 Will drive a % of sales
 Convert at higher conversion rate
 Have a higher AoV
 Dashboard
 http://goo.gl/R3jtU

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ivantage E-commerce dashboard

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Conclusions
 AdWords is very powerful
 Explore enhanced campaigns
 Explore remarketing
 Get sophisticated with remarketing
 SEO
 Get in control of your links
 Build a long term SEO strategy