#SEJSummit Dallas SEO Strategies & Best Practices

Back at you LIVE from #SEJSummit Dallas blogging. Up next – SEO Strategies and Best Practices.

Previous post on Podcasing and Reddit. Post on Brand Marketing and Content Strategy.

“3 Common Mistakes in Branded Local Search (and How To Fix Them)”

Greg Gifford, Director of Search & Social at AutoRevo

Local Content / Local Links / Local Citations

• Even when other sites are bigger than you, you, as a small local business, can have a bigger impact locally because enterprise businesses have a different thought process
• A local company can  move quicker and is more agile. As a local business you are also more in tune with your local audience
• If you have a specific physical location you must have local SEO
• You have to beat enough of your competitors to appear on the first page of a search – this can only be done with local SEO
• Google keeps changing their algorithms which changes how you have to write your SEO so you have to stay up to date with Google updates

Content

• Enterprise companies have little to no local content on the site
• Local business must have awesome content to make it an awesome user experience
• Location pages must have useful information not just name, address, phone number
• City and State should be in the content and in the Meta tags and in the URL even though it doesn’t add to
  SEO because it actually adds to your local SEO
• Must have a phone number everywhere
• Use Schema markup – use the days of the week, hours, etc. that you are open based on the Schema markup
• Local content should be on your blog as well

Links

• Must have links to local content and to the local site
• If you are getting out ranked, links could be the reason
• Use open site explorer to check links
• Go after the local websites for links, even if they are small sites – small local sites can be hidden gold for your business
• Don’t forget to link to seperate location sites if you have them

Citations

• Mentions of your name, address and phone number on other sites
• That have to be 100% consistent on every site they appear, if not it will get you negative SEO value
• Just by cleaning up your citations you can leap from the last page to the front page of a search – they are that powerful.
• Use available tools to locate and check all your citations
• Check your competitors citations to see why they are ranking higher than you
• If you change locations or phone numbers, checking and correcting your citations is the single most important thing you can do

“What You Did Not Plan For in 2015”

Jordan Koene, Chief Evangelist at Searchmetrics Inc.

Content Security

• What is Google consuming from your website
• What sensitive content is being indexed by Google
• Have you done a content audit for risk
• Ask  yourself if this content is necessary to be on Google

Example:

Sales Force – custom help page. Gives competitors a complete walk through of how you run your sales department, etc.

Dooms Day Plans

• More and more brands are seeing dramatic SEO drops
• The number of penalties is growing
• Google changes are targeting niche or categories
• Recovery from these drops is very difficult
• It happens to all brands and all size companies
• Google starts to gradually phase you out of Google due to change in algorithms or other reasons

Example:
Retailmenot.com had this happen last year and it took them over 6 months to recover.

You have to have a plan in place in case something like this happens to you

Non-Google Search

• Yahoo, Youtube, Yandex
• Social search (Facebook and Twitter)
• Commerce Search (ebay, Amazon, Alibaba)
• Job search
• Local search

Pay attention to the kind of content that is getting put on other sites like CNN, etc.

San Francisco Zoo Job Page has little to no positive content from comments – Your job page or job site should be positive and encouraging to attract the top job seekers.

Twitter is starting to use images in their feeds – you must have current images in your Twitter feeds.

“How to Kick the Wonky SEO Syndrome”

Jessica Bowman, Founder of SEOinhouse.com

1. Enterprise-level SEO, you need an SEO army
2. Ensure your strategy isn’t wonky or that it doesn’t have gaps
3. Score how you actually perform in each pillar

Most companies are SEO avoiders instead of SEO pacesetters

SEO Operations are bigger than the SEO team

$2 million dollar two step: Every release you take 2 steps forward and 3 steps back because all aspects of the business were not involved with the SEO team in the release objectives.

F2R Methodology

• Integrating
• Systematize it
• Company wide

Then you become a SEO machine to be reckoned with.

SEO Strategie Pillars

• Crawl and reckoning
• Content
• Internal Links
• External Links and Shares
• Social Activity
• User Experience

Most companies operate in only pillars 1-4

Enterprise companies can survive in pillars 1-3

The “Needle Movers” operate in pillars 4-6

SEO Operation Pillars

• SEO Team
• Non-SEO Teams
• Processes
• Metrics

If you write bad copy you will affect 4 pillars – not just one

How you decide how your website tabs function can affect up to 6 different pillars

SEO friendly tabs, it can’t be just SEO friendly in content but must be SEO friendly in actual usage

If content is on all one page it lessens the number of shares that can happen because it is all on the same page

Diana Wells

Diana Wells is a writer, a poet, a blogger, an event manager and someone that loves to make people laugh. Lover and rescuer of any kind of animal, especially dogs, horses, hedgehogs, elephants and sloths. She doesn’t actually rescue elephants and sloths but supports organizations that do.

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