Here's my presentation on SEO basics for startups that I recently gave at #SecretSauce 2016 at Hackney as part of London Technology Week. A great time and an amazing group of entrepreneurial and inspiring people.

1. #SECRETSAUCE

2. SEO WTF QUESTION

3. SEO WTF QUESTION
One slash “/“ can take your
website out of Google.
Use wisely!!!

4. DIVE IN

5. STARTUPS SEO ISSUES
Since we’re talking
about startups, let’s look at
some of London’s “hot”
startups to see how their
SEO is doing.

6. ON PAGE SEO BASICS
This is the boring on-page
stuff…and it really matters!

7. Title
Description
Header
Crawlable Content
Here’s a “SEO breakdown” of a
traditional business website page
that’s been well optimized.
Their goal is to rank for “rockville
apartments” and related terms.

8. Here’s the SERP
showing the optimized title,
URL and description (as
referenced on previous
page).
Here’s the cached
“text-only” version of the
page. Note the clean and clear
navigation, header and
content.

9. Using SEMrush, we can see
what keywords the page ranks for.
Note “rockville apartments” in #6,
plus other page 1 rankings for
“rockville” and “apartments”.

10. Here’s a cool
company that has a non-
optimized title tag. The homepage
only says “home”.
Remember that good titles and
descriptions help click throughs
from the SERPs.

11. Looking
at the code, we see that
the title is only “Home | Seenit” and
there’s no description.
Good opportunity here to increase
branded and non-branded search
rankings via on-page
basics.

12. KEYWORD CORRELATION
+SEO
+ADS
=WIN
Keyword to content
correlation is one of the
primary building blocks of
SEO. Let’s take a closer
look.

13. +SEO
+ADS
=WIN
Here, we’re looking for
keywords to see what the app
does so we can figure out what
prospective customers might
search for…

14. +SEO
+ADS
=WIN
KEYWORD CORRELATION
Always start with
Google Suggest. It’s an easy
way to see what queries
people are search for.
For Velocity, doing a search
starting with “pay restaurant” pulls
up several options that correlate
with what the apps does.

15. +SEO
+ADS
=WIN
A search for “pay
restaurant bill with phone”
shows lots of competitors on
page 1. No Velocity.

16. +SEO
+ADS
=WIN
Here, I’m using
“site:website.com” to see all
the pages indexed in Google
for that website.
Then I add “pay restaurant
bill with phone” to see which
website pages are most relevant
for the query. Looks like the
home page wins.

17. +SEO
+ADS
=WIN
If I do the same
search but put the query in
quotes, I should see which
pages are exactly about
that term.
Unfortunately, none are.
Oops!!!
Here’s an
opportunity for Velocity
to optimize their homepage
(or another page) for a query
that fits their target
user.

18. KEYWORD CORRELATION
+SEO
+ADS
=WIN
Now, let’s look at the
website to see what other
content is on there that
people might be search
for.
Looks like the site features
some very well known restaurants.
Let’s take a look at Barbuto in NYC
(very popular). Seems like Velocity
would like to be found for people
looking for “Barbuto”.

19. +SEO
+ADS
=WIN
Using the same
“site:website.com” search as
before, we see there are no pages
on Velocity’s site about
“Barbuto”.
This is potentially a HUGE
missed SEO opportunity,
especially for folks searching for
the popular restaurants Velocity
features.

20. UNIQUE NAME
Startups are new.
That typically means a lot
of folks don’t know about them
yet. For branded search results,
it’s crucial that it’s easy for
prospective customers to find
the startup website
easily.

21. UNIQUE NAME
First up…is Zesty, an online
discovery and booking service for medical
services.
Doing a search for only “Zesty” pulls up a nice
branded SERP: website with proper titles,
sitelinks, and an optimized Google+ page.
Very nice!

22. UNIQUE NAME
Zesty’s branded SERP was even
more impressive to me when I found
that Zesty is also a Kraft Foods brand that
has had a ton of online promotion.
Again, well done!

23. UNIQUE NAME
Now, let’s use SEMrush to see what
their organic traffic looks like.
Right off, we see that their search traffic has increased
lately and is hold steady. What’s more, we see that the value
of their search traffic is relatively high at $7.8k. That
indicates they might have some good “non
branded” search rankings.

24. UNIQUE NAME
Going deeper into
SEMrush, we see zesty.co.uk
does indeed rank for a lot of target
keywords, such as “mortimer market
centre”, “archway clinic”, “burrell street
clinic” and so on. These appear to be clinics
that use the app.
This is the opposite situation as Velocity.
It indicates there is some quality
SEO work happening
here.

25. INBOUND LINKS
After keywords, inbound links
are a critical part of SEO and
ranking success.

26. INBOUND LINKS
Looking at
zesty.co.uk, we see that they
have 486 inbound links from 62 referring
domains and 64 referring ISPs.
I tend to focus on referring domains as that
indicates unique websites.
Overall, the site has a healthy and diverse
inbound link profile, especially
for a startup.

27. Here, we can drill down to see what are
the actual sites. We’re looking for quality
sites that are relevant to zesty.co.uk and
have good inbound links themselves.

28. Here, we can see
what’s the anchor text of the
links. It’s helpful to have a mix of
anchor texts including the company
name (most common) and also service
related queries (like, “sports massage”,
etc.).
Warning: Be careful about buying or
artificially acquiring specific
anchor text links; Google
frowns upon that.

29. INBOUND LINKS
For an inbound link
comparison, here’s the inbound
link profile for songkick.com — a
music site. Note the 2.6M links from 4.3k
different domains. Whoa! That’s
awesome. It also makes sense given
that SongKick is a music and
highly B2C service.

30. TARGET KEYWORD FOR AUDIENCE
We’ve looked at keyword
correlation to product /
service, now let’s look at
keyword correlation for the
target audience.

31. WE’RE NOT TARGETING DEMOGRAPHICS
Let’s look at
CityFALCON—a financial news
app.
Its users are individuals—both
people in the trade and
individual investors.
First off, they have a
great branded SERP, from
their website to branded
profiles like LinkedIn, etc.
Note the use of the English
spelling of “personalised” —
with an “s” (versus “z”).

32. Naturally, a UK company would
use the English version of the word.
In fact, the site ranks well for their
primary search query.

33. But search for the same query
using the non-English version (with a
“z”), and the site is no where to be
found.
This raises
two questions:
1)Do they want to be found for
the non-English spelling? (My
hunch is they do.)
2) Their title leads with
“persoanlized financial news
feed”. Is that the best
term?

34. Using Moz, we see
that “personalized
financial news feed” has “no
data”, which translates to
“little to no search
volume”.
And just “financial news
feeds” has very low search
volume.
Settings are for UK / GB.

35. Looking at which terms
drive search traffic, “financial
blogs” and “finance blogs” are in the
lead AND they both have more search
volume that “financial news feeds”.
This indicates they might expand their
keyword focus OR search for a more
popular term related to “financial
news feed”.

36. Now, let’s revisit the “s” versus “z”
location. Back to our old friend Google
Suggest, note that using the “s” version of the
query results in several suggested terms (which
means people are looking for them) while the “z”
version generates no suggested terms (indicating
very low search volume).
Again, this merits evaluating the target
keyword and the use of the “z” versus “s”
versions.

37. OPEN GRAPH
SEO is no longer only Google.
Let’s look at Facebook and the
Open Graph.

38. OPEN GRAPH
Check out Whichit. This is their
website. Note that on the top of the
homepage is “Winner of Facebook
EMEA App”. Clearly, this is a social
play.

39. OPEN GRAPH
Looking at their
SERPs, we see that the
homepage is missing a title and
has a basic snippet for a description.
Given that it’s an app that focuses on
social promotion, it stands to
reason that the SEO might not
be top of the list.

40. OPEN GRAPH
Looking at their
homepage site code, we
quickly see they are using Open
Graph and Twitter markup.
Very nice!!
It’s a good example of smart use of
markup for social
performance.

41. GOOGLE + / GOOGLE MY BUSINESS
Back to search basics, let’s
look at Google My Business
and Google+ which are
important for (1) branding and
(2) mobile discovery.

42. Here’s an example of a
nice branded SERP and
Google My Business page. Note
the adwords listing, homepage
(plus sitelinks), deep website
pages, and an optimized
Google+ page.

43. GOOGLE + / GOOGLE MY BUSINESS
Looking at Zeek,note how
the names are different: Zeek
versus Zeek Mobile UK. Based on
this, I figured that they were
different companies.

44. GOOGLE + / GOOGLE MY BUSINESS
Turns out they’re not. Zeek is using a
different name in their Google My
Business page than in the website.
Read on for the Google My Business setup
steps and the important of using the same
business name across all instances.

46. GOOGLE + / GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

48. GOOGLE + / GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

51. GOOGLE + / GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

53. GOOGLE LOCAL - HOW DOES IT WORK
Note which data
feeds have the biggest
reach and impact the most
citation sources. They’re
typically: Infogroup, Axiom and
Neustar/Localeze.
Also note how Apple and Yelp are
separate from Google+. For
now, your Yelp listing also
populates your Apple
Maps.

54. GOOGLE WANTS ORDER

55. GOOGLE NEEDS DATA CONSISTENCY
Make these consistent across all sources
Name = Book Store Name
Address = Physical Business Location
Phone = Local Phone Number

56. OTHER STUFF

57. DANGER!
Remember that early
warning about one slash can do
your site in?
In this robots.txt file the hashmarks “#” indicate
the code is not “active”. However, the Disallow is
setup to remove the entire website.
Danger!!!
Good time to update this
code.

58. ACCELERATED MOBILE PAGES
Additional reading to learn
more AMPs. Very important
for mobile.

59. ACCELERATED MOBILE PAGES

60. MICRO MOMENTS
Micro Moments (e.g., “near me”)
are driving search results for mobile
and desktop. Stay on top of this trend,
especially if your startup is location
based.

61. MICRO MOMENTS
“book store near me” is
increasing in search volume
significantly. An example of mobile
searches (a la voice) driving
search results.

62. SOCIAL MEDIA & SEO
Stay on top of Matt Cutts’
updates and advice.

63. DUPLICATE CONTENT
Watch out for duplicate
content. Monitor your website to
make sure you’re not
automatically creating dupe
content.

64. DUPLICATE CONTENT
SEO for apps…read on.

65. GOOGLE HELP
SEO basics from Google.

66. CLEAR, FUN & HELPFUL
Excellent SEO beginners
guide from Moz.

67. QUESTIONS
MAX THOMAS
@THUNDERMAX

68. THANK YOU