The document contains 50 SEO tips and tricks presented at a C3 conference session. Some key tips include: using social listening tools to inform content ideas; measuring metrics that matter like conversions, not just traffic; taking advantage of new Google Webmaster Tools/API; and creating shareable, snackable content given short attention spans. Mobile responsiveness, meta descriptions, and eliminating duplicate content are also emphasized.

1. N E W Y O R K C I T Y | O C T O B E R 2 8 - 2 9 , 2 0 1 5
C3 2015 BREAKOUT SESSION
POWER HOUR: 50 ACTIONABLE
SEO TIPS & TRICKS
Digital Analyst Manager
Jonathan Brinksman
Director of Digital
Strategies
Pat Reinhart
Digital Marketing Search &
Content Strategist
Mike Tirone

2. #C3NY
You’ve done your keyword research. You’ve optimized your
pages. You’re looking for more content ideas. Take
advantage of some of the powerful social listening tools out
there – plug in your keywords and see what other words or
content are associated with your keywords in online
conversations.
INFORM YOUR CONTENT WITH
SOCIAL LISTENING

3. #C3NY
Traffic is great, but if you aren’t getting conversions from it,
is it really that great?
MEASURE METRICS THAT MATTER

4. #C3NY
Filter your data by queries, pages, countries, devices, search
type and dates. Benchmark on a regular cadence
USE THE NEW GWMT SEARCH ANALYTICS
TOOL/API

5. #C3NY
We’ve all been there. Your copywriter wants to include
florid language at the top of the page, but NOBODY is
searching for it. No worries – pop in an optimized H2 directly
underneath, and you should be good to go. Every little bit
helps.
H2 OR H3 TAGS CAN MAKE UP
FOR A LACKLUSTER H1

6. #C3NY
People have short attention spans, don’t write them a novel.
CREATE SHARABLE, SNACKABLE CONTENT

7. #C3NY
Google launched a “mobile-friendly update” on April 21,
2015 claiming to boost mobile search rankings for pages that
are legible and usable on mobile devices. And it’s usually
wise to listen to what Google says
IF YOU’RE SITE ISN’T MOBILE RESPONSIVE,
WERE YOU UNDER A ROCK THIS APRIL?

8. #C3NY
We know that they’re not officially a ranking factor, but
click-through rates are. Spending the time to make sure that
your meta descriptions contain relevant keywords AND are
appealing to the user can significantly affect your organic
click-through rates by informing your potential traffic in the
SERPs of just how qualified you are for their query.
DON’T FORGET ABOUT META DESCRIPTIONS

9. #C3NY
Always take a look back at the previous years SEO initiatives
and see what worked, what didn’t work, what’s left to do,
and what new opportunities are.
AUDIT YOUR SITE ANNUALLY

10. #C3NY
Mozilla’s recent partnership with Yahoo significantly
dropped Google’s US market share and continues to drop
ASSESS ALL OF THE SEARCH ENGINE
TRAFFIC SOURCES FOR YOUR SITE

11. #C3NY
We love keywords because it’s easy to quantify. Is it in your
title? Check. Is it in your header? Check. This type of
content creation, though, makes it easy to forget that we’re
writing for people. Ultimately, if people don’t find the flow
of your writing to be user-friendly, it doesn’t matter how
many keywords you’ve thrown in.
WRITE CONTENT FOR THE PERSON

12. #C3NY
Doesn’t matter what type of duplication is occurring, this is
something that should be discovered and fixed ASAP. Use
canonical tags, or 301 redirects to fix most of these issues.
ELIMINATE DUPLICATE CONTENT

13. #C3NY
Google & Bing Webmaster Tools data exports and analysis
provide a clearer view of your organic visibility
BLEND ALL YOUR TOOLS’ ORGANIC DATA
FOR A GREATER VIEW OF THE AUDIENCE

14. #C3NY
Remember when Meta Keywords did something? Your comp
set might. If you’re looking for ideas for getting ahead of
your competitors, take a look at the meta keywords of their
top-performing pages. If they’re in use, you now have with
90% certainty all of the keywords they care most about.
YOUR COMP SET MIGHT NOT KNOW THAT
META KEYWORDS ARE USELESS

15. #C3NY
You still need to tell search engines what your content is and
what it’s about. Create clear themes around your content
using like-minded keywords.
CREATE THEMES WITHIN YOUR CONTENT

16. #C3NY
# of Indexed pages > sitemap = thumbs up!
Remember to click to the last page of indexed pages when
conducting a “site:” search because the estimated numbers
might be wrong
CHECK RATIO OF INDEXED PAGES WITH
YOUR XML SITEMAP

17. #C3NY
Can’t figure out why you had such a sudden change in
Organic Search traffic? Check to see if Google made any
crazy (or mundane) updates to their algorithm.
PRO TIP: Add annotations to your analytics suite noting
when these changes occurred. You’ll thank yourself next
year when you’re charting YOY growth.
KEEP UP ON THE ALGO UPDATES

18. #C3NY
You can always create more pages, so there is no reason to
target multiple keyword sets on one.
DON’T TARGET MULTIPLE KEYWORD SETS
ON ONE PAGE

19. #C3NY
Think about the entire SERP and what part of that real
estate you take up; paid, answer box, etc.
Use the Opportunities tab in SL like Results Type Insights,
Paid and Natural Explorer, Visibility Explorer
OPTIMIZE FOR UNIVERSAL RESULTS

20. #C3NY
Updating your site’s aesthetic is great – you should probably
do it every 2-3 years. However, this can lead to changes in
your URL structure, which can lead to a boat load of lost
traffic. Spend the time setting up 301 redirects from your
old site-structure to your new site-structure. If you don’t,
you’ll probably regret it. It can take years to build back lost
domain authority.
ESTABLISH 301 REDIRECTS BEFORE YOUR
SITE REDESIGN LAUNCHES

21. #C3NY
Stop it.
DON’T. BUY. LINKS.
ಠ_ಠ

22. #C3NY
Google now endorses – and threatens - that sites without the
SSL certificate will be dinged in organic results
PLAN TO SWITCH TO HTTPS STRATEGY…
EVENTUALLY

23. #C3NY
I understand. It’s just so easy to forget about. But don’t
forget – in SEO, content is king. Guess what? Google counts
images as content, and the Alt Text is probably the best
place for incorporating your keywords into image content.
Just keep it under 100 characters kids. That’s less than a
tweet! See? It’s not that bad!
WHY AREN’T YOU WRITING IMAGE ALT TEXT?

24. #C3NY
If you have pages that have alternate versions in other
languages, use hreflang tags to tell search engines where
they are, and who they should serve them to.
USE HREFLANG TAGS FOR INTERNATIONAL /
MULTI-LANGUAGE PAGES

25. #C3NY
Google Analytics custom alerts for abnormalities like drop in
traffic, irregular spam traffic, zero goal conversions, etc
USE INTELLIGENCE ALERTS FROM YOUR
ANALYTICS TOOL

26. #C3NY
The layout of your content can sometimes be just as
important as your content itself. Items in the header are
important, but brief. The main body contains the densest
content. The sidebars hold ancillary information. Make sure
your page’s content is in a place on the page that conveys its
importance; users will thank you!
PAGE SEGMENTATION MATTERS

27. #C3NY
Google loves fresh content, in fact, did you know it’s
actually a ranking factor?
CREATE NEW CONTENT OFTEN

28. #C3NY
Save time, export site data & get holistic analysis from tools
like Screamingfrog, Xenu, Deep Crawl
USE A CRAWLING TOOL, NO MATTER THE
PRICE TAG

29. #C3NY
Making cool, relevant content is only half the battle. It’s
time to make sure that your content gets in front of the
most qualified audience. Great tools like social listening
platforms can give you insight into who is driving relevant
online conversations, and what words and hashtags are being
used. Incorporate these into your social messaging and
engagement – when paired with your new content, you have
the best chance of gaining links!
DON’T JUST GENERATE – DISSEMINATE!

30. #C3NY
If you’re telling Google to crawl 404 pages, it’s going to
come back less often & devalue your site.
FIX ERRORS IN YOUR SITEMAP

31. #C3NY
With recent algorithm changes & CMS updates, your Robots
file can be outdated quickly and directly impact which pages
are indexed in accordance with your sitemap
REVAMP YOUR ROBOTS.TXT

32. #C3NY
Look at your keywords lists or your terms for optimization.
Are there any common threads that bind them all together
(aside from the obvious)? There’s a decent chance that
you’ll be qualified for broader subjects given your depth of
content on the specifics. Maybe its time to create that
broader content to double-down. This is a great way to
supplement your top-of-funnel and awareness marketing
efforts (as well as boosting your SEO traffic).
LOOK AT YOUR RELATED TERMS

33. #C3NY
If you track 3x more than you optimize for, you are 3x more
educated to make decisions going forward.
TRACK MORE THAN YOU OPTIMIZE FOR

34. #C3NY
The best way to learn and improve is to test, tweak and
ultimately fail. From there… adjust accordingly &
strategically
FAIL AT STUFF

35. #C3NY
Have that stubborn client who is still using a separate
mobile site?
Step 1: Try to convince them to invest in a responsive design
site.
When that fails, Step 2: Implement rel = “alternate” tags on
both mobile and desktop content so that search engines
prioritize those versions for each device!
MOBILE SITE? REL ALTERNATE!

36. #C3NY
It’s not gonna happen overnight, man.
RELAX.

37. #C3NY
Structured data with Schema.org vocabulary is always
expanding and it is the future of search engines identifying
“entities”
Remember when implementing on your own to use the data
highlighter tools available
MARKUP YOUR SITE. SLEEP. MARKUP MORE
OF YOUR SITE. SLEEP.

38. #C3NY
Regarding the pun: I’m so sorry. The point stands though –
you should pick a preferred format for your name, address,
and phone number (NAP) and make sure that it’s consistent
in as many places as possible. Your website, your social
profiles, and your directory listings should all be in parity.
DON’T TAKE A NAP WITH YOUR NAP

39. #C3NY
Make sure the landscape for the keywords you are targeting
makes sense for your product or offering.
GOOGLE YOUR KEYWORDS BEFORE YOUR
OPTIMIZE FOR THEM

40. #C3NY
Searches with location-specific phrasing like “near me” or
“closest” have grown 34% since 2011 while in May, Google
confirmed mobile searches surpassed desktop
MOBILE OVER DESKTOP, NOW AND FOREVER

41. #C3NY
This is SEO 101, but something that I still see a lot of people
and clients getting confused with. Wherever possible (most
often in your URLs or image filenames), make sure that
you’re using dashes to separate words rather than under-
scores. This is the preferred format of search engines, and it
never hurts to throw them a bone.
DASHES; NOT UNDER-SCORES

42. #C3NY
Did you know there is a filter to break your (not provided)
information in GA into landing pages?
BREAK OUT (NOT PROVIDED) IN GOOGLE
ANALYTICS

43. #C3NY
Conduct your own search query tests on various engines. Ask
yourself “how would I search for…” and make it
conversational as Voice Search continues to drive long tail
queries
SEARCH LIKE A HUMAN, NOT A ROBOT

44. #C3NY
What are you? I mean, your business? I mean your website? I
mean all of that? Are you using consistent messaging when
talking about your brand and your services? Does your
messaging contain your target keywords? It should. Make
sure that you understand your (or your client’s) brand and
that you’re consistent in how you describe yourself. The
more consistent you are, the likelier you are for appearing
for those relevant queries.
CONSISTENT MESSAGING

45. #C3NY
You have 55-60 characters for title tags & 156 characters for
meta descriptions. Google will cut you off, and in some
cases, rewrite your tags if you don’t adhere to these limits.
AVOID TRUNCATION, MANAGE YOUR
CHARACTER COUNTS

46. #C3NY
URL structure continues to have strong value in SEO so the
standard practice of having URLs containing target keywords
with appropriate structure still outweighs query strings,
page IDs numbers or unique characters
USE NATURAL LANGUAGE URLS WITH
UNIQUE TARGET KEYWORDS

47. #C3NY
You’ve got analytics set up on your website – use it! Look at
your top organic search landing pages, and cross reference
this with ranking data from your SEO tools (shout out to
Conductor Searchlight). If you’re already getting traffic for
relevant terms to these pages, you probably don’t want to
overhaul them or make any drastic content changes. This
should be your first stop before making any additional on-
site optimizations.
DON’T SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE FOOT

48. #C3NY
It’s a scary world out there, make sure you partner with
someone you can trust.
VET YOUR SEO PARTNER THOROUGHLY

49. #C3NY
Ranking on irrelevant keywords or driving traffic that’s
unqualified might look nice but probably won’t move the
needle for the business
MAP ALL ORGANIC KPIS BACK TO
BUSINESS GOALS

50. #C3NY
AVOID AT ALL COSTS, JOE TAYLOR AND HIS
MORGAN FREEMAN IMPERSONATION

51. #C3NY
Jonathan Brinksman
THANK YOU
Pat Reinhart Mike Tirone