The State of SEO: 2015 and Beyond!

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bit.ly/dfwsem2015

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I GO A LITTLE OVERBOARD SOMETIMES

The universal answer to every
gardening question ever:
It depends…

/FAQ.html
1. I started learning SEO in 2005, and I’m still learning.
2. I totally figured out the MSN Search & Win contest in
2006.
3. I won an award at SES 2008 for ‘Most Innovative Use of
Search Engine Optimization’.
4. Danny Sullivan follow’d me on Twitter.
5. I spoke on a panel at SMX West 2010 with the product
manager of Google Buzz.
6. At SMX East 2012, I presented a ton of evidence of
blackhat/hacking related to payday loans. 8 months
later, Google launched the ‘Payday Loan Update’ to their
search algorithm. Coincidence?!? I think not!
7. At SMX Advanced 2014, I got a hashtag trending on
Twitter (#SmallData).

UH OH. IT’S MY FIRST TIME WITH A MIC TO MYSELF

LET’S TALK MORE ABOUT ME
In order to understand who I am as an SEO, you need
to know who I learned from.
1. Todd Friesen (aka Oilman)
2. Greg Boser (aka WebGuerrilla)
3. Todd Malicoat (aka StuntDubl)
4. Dave Naylor (aka DaveN)
5. Aaron Wall
6. Bruce Clay, Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Matt
Cutts, Bill Hunt, Mike Grehan, Adam Audette,
Markus Tandler, Avinash Kaushik, Shoemoney &
more!

SEO was cool in 2005. Kinda seemed like this.

Kinda like we were roller-bladin’ phone phreakers.

And I guess these guys were Matt Cutts.

IN REALITY, WE WERE MORE LIKE THIS:

MY SEO HEROES ARE THE REASON WHY:
• I love to test new ideas.
• I have 1,000+ Hotmail accounts.
• I spread my sites across several servers.
• I have different Google Analytics accounts for my
sites. (And why sometimes I don’t use GA!)
• I’m into domain’ing.
• I was sitting at my computer the exact moment
Facebook launched vanity URLs.
• I have 100’s of Twitter handles.
• I have dozens of Facebook pages.
• I recently created a few dozen Ello accounts.

NONE OF THAT WORKS ANY MORE
Google installed its
one millionth server
on July 9, 2008. That’s
a lot of processing
power. It’s getting
tougher and tougher
to game their system.
Google’s 1st server 

DISTANT MEMORIES OF SEO
For the longest time, the #1 goal of SEO was free traffic – and lots
of it! It seemed like the only thing people cared about was
increasing rankings and traffic.

TODAY’S SEO KNOWS BETTER
In 2015, we know that simply driving a lot of traffic doesn’t always
achieve our goals.
In fact, I have seen several times where driving too much traffic
had negative consequences:
Fewer “Qualified Visits”
+ Increased Bounce Rate
+ Decreased Conversion Rate
+ Decreased Revenue Per Visit
= Unhappy Client

REPEAT AFTER ME:
“MORE TRAFFIC DOES NOT
SOLVE MY PROBLEMS.”

RIDICULOUS HASHTAG OF THE DAY
MORE
TRAFFIC
DOES
NOT
SOLVE
MY
PROBLEMS.
#MTDNSMP
“That hashtag
is ridiculous!”

LET’S SWITCH GEARS FOR A MINUTE
“That dog is ridiculous!”

The SEO Timeline: Matt Cutts Edition
2000 2014
• Feb-2003: Boston
• Nov-2003: Florida
• Jan-2005: NoFollow
• Jun-2005: XML Sitemaps
• Oct-2005: Jagger
• May-2007: Personalized Search
• Feb-2009: Rel-Canonical
• Dec-2009: Real Time Search
• Jun-2010: Caffeine
• Feb-2011: Panda
• Oct-2011: Not Provided
• Apr-2012: Penguin
Before Cutts During Cutts After Cutts
<meta name=“keywords” content=“
viagra,phentermine,viagra,viagra,
blackjack,texas holdem,phenphen,
online poker,viagra,payday loans,
blackjack,texas holdem,phenphen”>

WHICH IS MOST IMPORTANT?
Knowledge of the:
• SEO Past
• SEO Present
• SEO Future

Why does everyone obsess about the Future of SEO?

WORD CLOUD: SEO PREDICTIONS FOR 2015
Top Keywords:
• brand(s)
• social
• people
• user(s)
• device(s)
• audience
• voice
• semantic
• data

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY ARTICLES?!
BECAUSE WE DEMAND IT. WE EAT IT
UP! THESE SITES ARE SIMPLY FILLING
THE SUPPLY SIDE OF THE EQUATION.
(Ironically, this is what every site
should be doing. Find out what your
visitors want – then give it to them!)

YOU CAN SEE THE DEMAND IN THE INDEX DATA

PERSONALLY, I LOVE THE FUTURE OF SEO!
1. It’s fun.
2. It sparks my
imagination.
3. It makes me wonder
where it’s all going.
4. Clients frequently ask
about the future of SEO,
so it’s good to know
about the various
predictions.
5. Sometimes, it makes
me laugh.

MAYBE EVERYTHING WON’T CHANGE OVERNIGHT
“It is a mistake to think that moving fast is the same as
actually going somewhere.” - Steve Goodier
“It feels like you're running
at an incredible rate, Harry.”

THERE’S SOMETHING FUNNY ABOUT IT ALL
The majority of my clients have goals and projections they
need to hit *THIS* year. Not 3-5 years from now. Most of
our time is spent on strategies for immediate goals.
Furthermore:
“A clear trend in client-agency relationships is to terminate
those that under-perform. In 1984, the average client-
agency relationship tenure was 7.2 years. By 1997 (13 years
later), that number declined by 25% to 5.3 years. Today the
average client-agency tenure is thought to be less than three
years.” (DigiDay)

WHERE TO START?
1. Mobile
2. Local
3. #Apptimization
4. International
5. Entity Search
“Whatcha gonna
do, BROTHER?!”

IT REALLY GOES BACK TO DEFINING THE GOALS
For clients who need long-term growth 3-5 years down
the road, focus on strategies that will help achieve those
goals.
For clients who need short-term growth, focus on
strategies that are working right now.
If there are goals in both time frames, develop a strategy
that will set them up for success in both the short term
and the long term.

IT’S ABOUT TIME FOR AN AVINASH QUOTE
“Without a clearly
defined list of business
objectives you are
doomed, because if
you don't know where
you are going then any
road will take you
there.”

TIME FOR A QUICK QUALITY CHECK

LET’S SWITCH GEARS FOR A MINUTE…AGAIN
#BearsWithBeaks

WHAT MAKES AN SEO?
Equal Parts:
• Marketer
• Brand Enthusiast
• Business Analyst
• Data Nerd
• Problem Solver
• Sales Person
• Economist
• Technologist
• Developer/Coder
• Creative
• Writer
• Futurist
• Reader/News Junkie
• And many other skills!

“What would you say you do here?”

SEO’s GET ASKED TO DO A LOT!
1. Technical SEO
2. Local SEO
3. Mobile SEO
4. Image SEO
5. Video SEO
6. Content Strategy
7. Usability & User Experience
8. Information Architecture
9. Digital Asset Management
10. Affiliate Marketing
11. Social Media Marketing
12. Reputation Management
13. Relationship Management
14. Link Building
15. Conversion Rate Optimization
16. Blogging (Writing, Topic Generation)
17. Domain’ing
18. Wordpess, Magento, Drupal
19. Platform Optimization & Migration
20. Analytics Analysis & Implementation
“SEO’s do #ALLTHETHINGS!”

MY SEO PRIORITIES FOR 2015
1. Basic strategies that we have to get right – right now!
• Meta Tags: Title tags & Description tags
• Basic On-Page Elements: H tags, Alt tags, image captions, etc…
• XML Sitemaps
• Store Locators & Local Information
• 3xx Redirects
2. Newer tactics that we have to get right – sooner rather than later.
• Modern/Social meta tags: OpenGraph, Twitter Cards, Pinterest Rich Pins
• Schema.org markup, especially location information
• HTTPS (Secure Search)
• SiteSpeed/PageLoad
3. Futuristic ideas that we need to research, learn & begin implementing.
• App Indexing Best Practices
• Content strategies for entity search & voice search
• Anything & everything related to mobile experience

MEAT & POTATOES
Real-World Tactics You Can Use Today & Tomorrow!

NOT PROVIDED
Advice: It’s a hurdle. Jump over it.

“I’m so over ‘Not Provided’.”
- @Rhea
BEST QUOTE OF 2014

TRY THIS: COUNT THE # OF URLS DRIVING VISITS
GA  ORGANIC CHANNEL  LANDING PAGE

TRY THIS: COUNT THE # OF URLS DRIVING VISITS
THAT NUMBER RIGHT THERE!

TRY THIS: GRAPH IT & LOOK FOR WEIRDNESS
THAT’S ODD.

TRACKING ALGO UPDATES
Advice: Look for any oddities in your daily organic visits data.

CAN YOU SPOT THE ALGO UPDATES?

TRY THIS: MEASURE 1 DAY BEFORE & AFTER

TRY THIS: MEASURE 3 DAYS BEFORE & AFTER

BONUS IDEA: DO THE SAME WITH RANKINGS DATA

RANKING REPORTS
Advice: URL-level reporting is the way to go.

TRY THIS: SEMRUSH FOR RANKINGS HISTORY
Path: SEMRush  Organic Research  Positions

NEXT: DOWNLOAD YOUR HISTORICAL DATA

NEXT: BUILD SOME PIVOT TABLES
Once you have the data, there is only one thing
left to do…
PIVOT
TABLES!

BONUS: TABLE MATCHES EXPLAINED

NEXT: GRAPH THE DATA (TRADITIONAL VIEWS)

NEXT: GRAPH THE DATA (MODERN VIEWS)

LINKBUILDING & LINKS
Advice: Don’t be dumb. Be smart. Don’t be careless. Be careful.

TRY THIS: “LINK RECLAMATION”
1. Download all the URLs that have driven traffic in the past 2 years.
• Get this data from GA, Omniture, CoreMetrics, etc…
2. Download your link profile/history from:
• Google WMT, Majestic, Moz, AHREFS, etc…
3. Merge all the URLs from 1 and 2; Filter for uniques.
4. Crawl those URLs.
5. Look for any response codes other than a 200.
• Specifically, look for 3xx, 4xx & 5xx codes.
6. Build/Update the redirects for URLs 3xx, 4xx & 5xx codes.
7. BOOM. Free Links!

CONTENT
Advice: Adapt to conversational search. Create topic hubs.

TRY THIS: TOPIC HUBS (ENTITY SEARCH)
“A good site for topical hubs
could be a microsite. We
have just to think of our site
as if it was a composition of
microsites all contextually
connected.” - @gfiorelli1

SEMANTIC SEARCH
"Semantic search is a search or a question or an action that produces meaningful
results, even when the retrieved items contain none of the query terms, or the
search involves no query text at all.“ - Tamas Doszkocs

CAN I HELP YOU?
Gotta love this SERPs template, right?

TRY THIS: MINE YOUR ONSITE SEARCH DATA
If you’re not
looking at your
website’s
onsite search
data, this owl
disapproves of
your entire SEO
campaign.

TRY THIS: MINE YOUR ONSITE SEARCH DATA
If this is your first
time to look at
your website’s
onsite search data,
brace yourselves.

ONSITE SEARCH TAKEAWAYS
1. Look at your site’s onsite search data.
2. Use that data to determine what your
customers are looking for.
3. Take all of that and build some pages
that target your customers’ needs.

REGARDING THE QUALITY OF YOUR CONTENT
You should look at
your content the
same way Uncle
Jesse looked at
Aunt Becky. You
should be singing
to your content:
“I’ll be forever
loving you.”

You should love your content as much
as Macho Man loved Miss Elizabeth.

HULK HOGAN SHOULD BE POINTING AT YOU!

XML SITEMAPS
Advice: Yes. These still matter. Maybe more than ever.

REMEMBER THESE THINGS?
Everyone takes it for granted that their sitemaps
are complete, accurate, and up-to-date.

DUANE’S ADVICE
“Right, because if you start showing
me 301s in here, rel=canonicals, 404
errors, all of that, I'm going to start
distrusting your sitemap and I'm just
not going to bother with it anymore.”
- @DuaneForrester (Mar. 3, 2011)
Source: http://moz.com/blog/bings-duane-forrester-on-webmaster-tools-
metrics-and-sitemap-quality-thresholds

KERRY’S XML SITEMAPS TO-DO LIST
1. Go find all of your XML sitemap file(s)
2. Make sure they are listed in your robots.txt
3. Crawl all of your sitemaps
4. Look for any URLs that are no returning a 200
status code; fix them or remove them from
the sitemap.
5. If possible, break your sitemaps into groups
by products and/or categories.
6. If you can, break them into smaller batches.
It makes it easier to diagnose problems.

Rel=Alternate Tags for Your International Sites

URL SPECIFICALLY FOR #WORLDCUP

APP INDEXING
Advice: This is a thing now.

GOOGLE IS SENDING SEARCHERS TO APPS
“Today, we’re expanding it to work
for English content worldwide. And
we’re including 24 more apps…
– Google Search Blog (Apr. 3, 2014)

THE PATH FOR ORGANIC SEARCHERS IS CHANGING
INITIAL SEARCH
OR
WEBSITE
VISIT
APP
VISIT

WHEN YOUR APP GETS INDEXED…
App
Launches
You may notice a drop in organic traffic to your website as Google
and Bing begin to send more organic search to your app instead.

GETTING YOUR APP INDEXED
More on APP indexing & structured data from @JustinRBriggs:
http://www.slideshare.net/justinrbriggs/increasing-mobile-visibility-with-structured-datao

BRACE YOURSELVES
SEARCH ENGINE
#APPTIMIZATION

A WHOLE NEW WORLD OF APP KPI’s
If organic search begins to drive searchers to your app, you will need to track
their behavior in the app.
1. Users
2. Session Length
3. Session Interval
4. Time in App
5. Acquisition
6. Screen Flow
7. Retention
8. Lifetime Value
9. …and more!
Get ready for App KPI’s. It’s going to get fun.

SITE MONITORING
Advice: It’s more important now than ever.

TRY THIS: MONITOR YOUR VISITS BY DIMENSION
1. Pull your organic visits data daily.
2. Trend based on ‘Source’. (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc…)
3. Trend based on ‘Device’. (iPhone, Galaxy S5, iPad, etc…)
4. Trend based on ‘Operating System’.
5. Trend based on ‘Browser’.
6. Monitor for any sudden changes.
Benefits:
- Quickly identifying site issues.
- Quickly identifying algo updates.

PRO TIP: MONITOR YOUR TITLE TAGS IN THE SERPS
Recent AuthorityLabs study suggests Google is modifying
title tags 60% of the time.

CASE STUDY: SITE STABILITY & RANKINGS
Lesson: Google is fast to drop you out of the SERPs.
Site 1:
Server errors for 3-4 days.

CASE STUDY: SITE STABILITY & RANKINGS
Lesson: Google is fast to drop you out of the SERPs.
Site 2:
Site down for 8 weeks.

YOU SEE…WEBSITES ARE KINDA LIKE FAMILIES.

LOVELY PARENTS, BEAUTIFUL KIDS, NICE HOUSE…

BUT DON’T FORGET ABOUT THAT ONE COUSIN.
“SH!TTER
WAS FULL!”

“IT’S TIME TO CLEAN UP YOUR SH!T.” - @kerrydean
Site B
Lesson: Fix your 4xx & 5xx status codes.

STUFF I’M TIRED OF HEARING
Advice: You might be tired of it, too.

UGGHHH….
1. “Just build great content.”
2. “Google says…”
“That really
grinds my gears!”

OH, AND THIS ONE, TOO.
3. “Buying links is bad.”
“Your advice is bad, and
you should feel bad!”

SPEED ROUND
Advice: The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down.

THE BEST SEO ADVICE EVER.
CREATE A CULTURE OF TESTING.

THE BEST SEO ADVICE EVER. PERIOD.
STOP READING ABOUT SEO.
START DOING SEO.

THE BEST SEO ADVICE EVER (REGARDING PRIORITIES)
“If it don’t make dollars,
it don’t make sense.”
- Deion Sanders
#PrimeTime

THE BEST SEO ADVICE EVER (REGARDING GOOGLE)
THIS IS WHAT THEY DO. GET USED TO IT.
FIND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE CHANGES.

SOMETIMES, THIS IS SEO. #DistantFuture

SOMETIMES, THIS IS SEO. #NearFuture

SOMETIMES, THIS IS SEO. #RightNow

THIS IS ALSO SEO. #TheRecentPast

AND, SOMETIMES, THIS IS SEO.
“I suggest you gentlemen invent a way to
put a square peg in a round hole.”

“We've got to find a
way to make this...
fit into the hole for
this...
using nothing but
that.”

The good news is that SEO’s love a challenge.

Meet every challenge with this statement:

BONUS PRO TIP
“Always end your presentation with a
picture of a cat.” - @kerrydean

The State of SEO: 2015 and Beyond!

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