Cracking the SEO Code for
2015: Tactics to Love vs. Leave Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | @randfish | rand@moz.com

This Presentation Is Online Here:
bit.ly/seoloveleave

What Changed? A brief look
at how SEO has evolved over the past five years.

#1: Ranking algorithms are far
more complex – more inputs, more subtlety, more quality checks.

Advancements in User Data Signals
Via Eric Fischer

An Uncanny Ability to Spot
Editorial VS. Manipulative Links

Keyword Matching is Now Intent
Matching

Personalization by History, Device, Location,
and Google+

#2: SEO has become a
job description, not a job title.

Analysis of LinkedIn Profiles

SEOs Have Learned that Just
Doing Their Jobs Often Isn’t Enough And, that the title “SEO” may limit influence

#3: Policing of webspam is
more aggressive, more difficult to recover from, & less evenly applied.

Non-Editorial Links Are More Dangerous
Than Ever

Webspam’s Become Every Site Owner’s
Problem Via Moz: Preparing for Negative SEO

#4: Google is shortening searchers’
paths and disintermediating content creators.

Less Opportunity in Many Simplistic
“Give Me the Answer” Queries

No Traffic For You,
NFL

No Traffic For You, City
of Boston!

No Traffic For You,
Moz!

No Traffic
For You,
Hubspot!

Less Opportunity In Some Non-Simple
Queries, Too:

If You’re Expedia, These Results
Suck…

But It May Mean More
Opportunity in the Long Tail Almost 6 Billion queries/day

#5: The ubiquity of social
media has broadened the field of “influencers.”

1997-2011: The Linkerati Rule the
Web 13% of web users can amplify content Via Forrester Research

2012-Present: We Are All Potential
Amplifiers 72% of web users can amplify content Via Pew Research Data

#6: Disappearing data makes SEO
more challenging to measure and improve.

Keyword Referral Data is Gone
On average, 87.5% of keywords from Google are now “not provided” (source)

AdWords’ [Exact Match] No Longer
Exact Via http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/08/ close-variant-matching-for-all-exact. html

A Significant Portion of Search
Traffic May Be Falsely Hidden in “Direct” Groupon’s experiment showing up to 60% of traffic reported as “direct” may be organic search

So… How do these changes
affect which tactics we can still pursue vs. those we must leave behind?

Great SEO Is No Longer
Just “SEO” Links Keywords SEO in 2004 Crawl Rankings

Great SEO Is No Longer
Just “SEO” Keywords Rankings Links Crawl SEO in 2014 Social Content Design & UX Speed Webspam Mobile Press & PR CX Email Accessibility Localization Internationalization

Our Job: Choose the Tactics
that Marry Our Strengths to Our Opportunities

No tactic will be right
for everyone. But, awareness of our potential arsenal is essential.

Tactics to Leave Behind vs.
Tactics to Embrace for the Future:

Keyword
Research

AdWords-Only Discovery

AdWords-Only Discovery
Leave It Behind

AdWords + Suggest + Customer
Data Many queries with 100s or 1000s of monthly searches don’t show up in AdWords but will show up here.

This tool makes the process
easier. My favorite tool for keyword suggest research: Keywordtool.io

Popular questions, phrases, and terms
that your audience uses in web forums/social media are excellent sources of keyword data expansion

Content
Creation

Create & Scale Keyword-Targeted Pages
of “Good, Unique Content”

This is a LONG page
from Angie’s List that ranks #1 for “Best Plumbers in Medford, OR”

This is the ONLY “unique
content” on that page

Think you can build pages
like that and rank? You’re dreaming!

Create & Scale Keyword-Targeted Pages
of “Good, Unique Content” Leave It Behind

Modern Criteria for Content: One-of-a-Kind
– doesn’t appear elsewhere on the web Relevant – contains content the engines can interpret as on-the-topic to the searcher’s intent & phrasing Helpful – resolves the searcher’s query in a useful, efficient manner Uniquely Valuable – provides information that’s unavailable (or hard to get) elsewhere Great UX– is easy & pleasurable to consume on any device

A Great Example from Genius.com

Accurate, readable lyrics Uniquely valuable
annotations A community of contributors One click to play Data re: popularity & activity

Link
Building

Acquire Links Via Directories, Forums,
Account Profiles, etc.

Acquire Links Via Directories, Forums,
Account Profiles, etc. Leave It Behind

Acquire Links w/ Off-Topic Infographics
& Embeds

Acquire Links w/ Off-Topic Infographics
& Embeds Leave It Behind

Acquire Links By Scaling Up
Guest Posting & Commenting

Acquire Links By Scaling Up
Guest Posting & Commenting Leave It Behind

The Truth: Google doesn’t want
to count links you can “build.”

The Truth: Google only wants
to count links you editorially “earn.”

Instead, Build Relationships My haircut
place built a relationship & partnered with a local sex toy shop – now both get more branding, exposure, customers, & links!* *partnering with nearby sex toy shops may not be the perfect bizdev action for everyone

Use Content to Drive Editorial
Links

Aim for Resource Pages &
Blogrolls

Buy Exposure that Leads to
Links (not the links themselves)

For more link building tactics
to love, see: Link Building from the MozBlog Paddy Moogan’sLink Building eBook Experts’ Favorite Link Building Tactics How to Leverage PR for Link Building The Future of Link Building

Social Media
& SEO

Share Socially to Get Rankings
No doubt about it – there’s a strong CORRELATION between tweets (and Facebook and Google+ shares) and higher rankings.

Share Socially to Get Rankings
Leave It Behind No doubt about it – there’s a strong CORRELATION between tweets (and Facebook and Google+ shares) and higher rankings.

Social Impacts SEO Indirectly Social
shares expose content to those who might link to it (and amplify in other ways) This blog post from OKTrends earned 100s of links after launch

G+ is the Exception for
Logged-In Results Because I follow Mark on G+, what he shares/+1s can usually ranks higher when I’m logged into my Gmail.

Content
Marketing

Publish Content to Get Links
& Rankings Blog Post Blog Post Article Article Blog Post

Publish Content to Get Links
& Rankings Blog Post Blog Post Leave It Behind Article Article Blog Post

Links & Shares Skew to
the Top 5% of Content http://www.simplereach.com/blog/facebook-continues-to-be-the-biggest-driver-of-social-traffic/

There’s No Prize For Hitting
Publish

Rules for Content Investments: Strategic
& Relevant– the content must tie to business goals and fit with your branding Targets Likely Amplifiers – there should be an obvious answer to the question “who will help spread this content and why?” Cannot Be Fire & Forget–most content will fail; you need to be willing to invest longer and harder than the competition to find success

Need Inspiration? Check out Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo – my favorite tool for researching the competitive content landscape

Measuring
ROI

Traffic & Performance by Keyword
Pre-2012 Post-2012

Traffic & Performance by Keyword
Leave It Behind Pre-2012 Post-2012

Instead, Measure Search Traffic Performance
by Page (or Section) Observing the pages that receive search visits can get close to the old keyword-based performance reports.

And/OrUse Estimates in SEO Software
Packages If you use a tool like Conductor, Searchmetrics, or Moz Analytics, you can see predictions for KWs sending traffic to given pages

Attribution Models This is how
most companies (& software packages) do web analytics by default

Attribution Models This is how
most companies (& software packages) do web analytics by default Leave It Behind

Attribution Models A model something
like this makes far more sense.

Pro Tip: Note which channels
are frequently part of your overall conversion process Many times, these contain channels that can’t be tracked, and you’ll only miss them if you stop investing

The Best ROI Often Comes
from Non-Measurable, Serendipitous Marketing

SEO is getting
harder

But, that high barrier to
entry means greater opportunity for those who succeed.

bit.ly/seoloveleave Rand Fishkin, Wizard of
Moz | @randfish | rand@moz.com