DFWSEM State of Search Conference 2017 | SEO Recap

DALLAS,TEXAS
OCTOBER 9–10,2017
RENEE GIRARD
STATE OF SEARCH 2017
SEO HIGHLIGHTS & RECAP

SEO TRACKS – TOPIC OVERVIEW
2
 Will SEO survive Google?
 AMP and site speed
 Cross-channel agency
 JS indexing
 Bill Hunt rant
 Structured data and Featured Snippets
 Local SEO
 SEO A/B testing
 SEO audits
 Technical debt
 Gary Illeyes Q&A

DR.PETE
PARADIGMSHIFTS:WILLSEO
SURVIVEGOOGLE?
SLIDESHARE

 Attack of the ads = Level 2 risk factor
 There’s a natural tension between ads and organic at Google and we need to pay attention
 Local Pack ads are live on mobile and being tested on desktop
 Personalized results = Level 2 risk factor
 Google assistant and Google Now are disruptive to the SERP and hyper personalized but
limited since it’s query-less and it will be hard to expand
 Voice search: voice of doom = Level 3 risk factor
 Voice searches are removing links
 Google Home can send a link to your mobile app and you can send data back to
Google Home if it makes sense like with a recipe
SHARKNADO (LOW TO HIGH RISK)
4

 Content wars: cached = Level 3 risk factor
 Images don’t take you to the website when you click on it
 Google Posts serve as an intermediary of curated content
 Instant Answers and KG
 Things like sports, weather, lyrics, and job listings (as of July), are creating curated
experiences that are sticky
 Local KP replaces terrible UX of local websites and also prevent you from directly visiting the
site by serving a map pack
 Content wars: creation = Level 4 risk factor
 These self-contained content experiences are expanding although only in a few niches,
especially YMYL industries and are highly disruptive
 On mobile, these packs are the only experience
 Google is particularly concerned with bad finance and medical results
 Ex. – “plan a trip” Google travel port, humpback whale sounds allows you to play the sound,
medical KP, NYC Fashion week, tabbed content for movies and books
5

 Takeaways
 Prepare for further disruption
 #1 concern is the increase of curated content experiences provided by Google and
their partners
 #2 concern is the increase of cached content that keeps users on Google and adds an
additional step to click through to your site
 Be aware of what’s going on and rollouts of changing SERP features both paid and organic
 Optimizing for FS doesn’t work for all queries because voice results don’t provide the link
 Pick your battles
 Be careful with giving all your data away to Google (local, news, and FS is ok)
 Think about short-term benefits
 Seamless integration across devices is coming, likely within the next two years
 Voice won’t take over, but will move between desktop >> mobile >> voice so we need to
better understand cross-device attribution
6

JOHNLEOWEBER
BUILDINGACROSS-CHANNEL
AGENCY
SLIDESHARE

 Each department has different goals
 PPC – leads and conversions, work individually, don’t have access to site, hoard data, use different
measurements of success
 SEO – rankings, keyword stuff, disregard UX
 Web Design – win awards, slow down websites, code bloat, not SEO-friendly, pretty
 Geek Agency changed the department structure from vertical to horizontal to be client-based teams
 Cross channel marketing secret formula:
1. Develop niche-specific content
2. Use traditional SEO, PPC, and Facebook to drive traffic
3. Use trap doors to capture email address
4. Use email addresses for retargeting and look alike audiences on Facebook to identify similar people
1. Drip campaigns are free automation for Mail Chimp
2. Emails should look like they came from a real person since typically the more HTML, the less
engagement
BUILDINGACROSS CHANNELAGENCY
9

 Takeaways
 Share data and standardize goals
 Communication
 Shared learnings = employee happiness
 Unity
 Innovation
BUILDINGACROSS CHANNELAGENCY
10

JONHENSHAW
FORGETAMP:MAKESITESFAST
SLIDESHARE
HTTPS://MAKEFASTSITES.COM/

FORGETAMP: MAKE SITES FAST
12
 AMP is our punishment for ruining the internet which is horse crap because it’s Google-centric
since it’s about delivering ads faster
 Faster = more traffic = more money
1. Refactor the code
 Identify and test which JS and CSS code is actually used and whatever is unnecessary, get
rid of
 WP is notorious for themes that are JS library intensive creating waste
 Conditionally serve code only on pages that need it
 Consolidate code into one file
 Use inline CSS and JS
 Put inline JS at the end of the pages
2. Use system fonts
 Google fonts are pretty, but slow down the site and add up quickly especially when you add
weights and styles
 Use system fonts that are optimized for displays
3. Optimize images
 Responsive-sized images are not optimized
 Optimized = serving different images on screen width through SCRSET
 Automatically can be done for WP

MAKE SITES FAST
13
4. Reduce and compress image size for PNGs and
JPGs
 SVG vs. PNG vs. JPG
 SVG: simple images, icons, vector
 Don’t need to compress SVG
 PNG: simple (8 bit) images
 JPG: complex images and photos
 Tool/plugin recommendations
 FileOptim
 WQ EWWW Image Optimizer
 Doesn’t recommend TinyPNG because it
ruins image clarity

FORGETAMP: MAKE SITES FAST
14
5. Cache, Gzip, and HTTP/2
 Use Gzip via .htaccess file or via PHP at the top of templates
 HTTP1 has every file from server to browser
 HTTP2 is 95% faster than HTTP1 because it streams everything at the same time (single
stream)
6. Improve UX
 AMP is bad UX so focus on primary purpose and consider a linear presentation of content
7. Use resource hints to speed up navigation
 Enhances UX
 Use prefetch to load resources in the background
 Use prerender for pages you’re confident the user will visit next
 Tool/plugin recommendations (use as few as possible)
 WP Rocket (paid)
 Checkgzipcompression.com
 Gzip Resource
 Free HTTP2 and SSL certificate through Cloudflare

BARTOSZGORALEWICZ
JAVASCRIPTINDEXING&SEO
SLIDESHARE
HTTP://JSSEO.EXPERT
HTTPS://MOZ.COM/BLOG/CHALLENGING-GOOGLEBOT-EXPERIMENT
HTTPS://MOZ.COM/BLOG/GOOGLE-SHARES-DETAILS-GOOGLEBOT
HTTPS://DEVELOPERS.GOOGLE.COM/SEARCH/DOCS/GUIDES/RENDERING
ELE.PH/HULU
ELE.PH/ISO
ELE.PH/CHROME41

JS INDEXINGAND SEO
16
 Background
 JS is not as forgiving as HTML
 HTML is easy to serve, but JS needs
to be exchanged into HTML
 It all started when Google deprecated the
AJAX crawling scheme in 2015 and
announced they are able to generally
render JS like headless browsers – based
on Chrome 41
 Google and JS have a complicated
relationship
 Google created AngularJS so we
assume it’s ok but that’s not true as
proved in a huge JS indexing test

TAKEAWAYS
19
 Not all JS frameworks are crawled and indexed the same
 Links generated by JS aren’t always crawled
 Inline vs. external JS makes a huge difference
 AngularJS2 always has to be server-side rendered
 JS kills your crawl budget
 Isomorphic JS is the ideal setup on React and Universal on Angular
 Avoid JS if you care about more than Google

BILLHUNTRANT
UNOFFICIALTITLE:DEALING
WITHSEODEPRESSION

 Goal #1: Help someone improve
 Goal #2: Improve our industry
 He wants to quit twice a week but has great clients, wins, and loves the digital community
 Goal #3: Personal therapy
 “Make Google your bitch and own all the results” – basically don’t fear Google and don’t panic,
prosper
 “SEO’s job is to make websites that don’t deserve to rank, rank!”
 “Paid search is the #1 tactic that marketers have offering precise targeting…that we squander
through crap ads”
 “IT people hate SEOs because they sometimes gives bad advice from bad articles”
Celebrity SEO types
1. Speakers – don’t actually do the work, they are not technical
2. Seekers – figure it out, they are technical
3. Sheep – followers
BILLHUNT RANT
21

MARTHAVANBERKEL
SCHEMA MARKUPFROM A-Z
FORTHENON-DEVELOPER
SLIDESHARE
GOOGLEI/O2017VIDEO

 Schema was originally designed by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex back in 2011,
 Structured data appears as microdata inline or in block of code as JSON-LD
 Appearing in search and email
 Not just about rich results, but also CTR, engagement, semantic analytics
 Think of it as marketing strategy and not just code
 Marketers have new job to manage brands as Knowledge Graph maps
 Focus on strategy, automate the rest
 Don't need to manually create JSON-LD code! Things change, manually updated
structured data is just not scalable
1. Define important things about your brand/product/service/reviews/etc.
 What's unique?
2. Relationship between each thing
 Explicitly define with Wikipedia
 Use schema paths - free tool by Schema App helps with this
3. Map Google features
 Review the 40+ features Google supports to see what else you want to add
SCHEMAMARKUP FOR NON-DEVELOPERS
29

 Maintenance
 Lots of updates happening constantly (44 since January)
 Data items change
 Showing value
 Focus on rich results - hard to measure, have GSC rich results in SA, SEMRush shows the
features, so does Moz
 BI = Semantic Analytics
 Ex - Adding author field in GA custom dimension
 How do you measure analytics of the machine channel?
 Scaling
 Hard for non-developers
 Can you GSC Data Highlighter but it’s super basic and can’t link to external items
 Create data feeds
 Plug it in in GTM
 Can use plugins for WP, Shopify, and Adobe Marketing Cloud but they are basic
TOP CHALLENGES
30

 Benefits
 Business intelligence
 Onsite search and chat box
 Competitive research
 Content strategy - what do search engines think are related?
 Takeaways
 Rethink schema as just code to part of marketing strategy
 Look into Schema App
 Pull in Analytics team to scale JSON-LD via GTM
 Stay up to date for Schema changes and Google features
TAKEAWAYS
31

ERICENGE
AMPTOPTOBOTTOM
HTTPS://WWW.STONETEMPL
E.COM/THE-CANONICAL-
GUIDE-TO-AMP/

 Background
 AMP is open source, supported by
Google and Baidu but not Bing
 Initial launch was meant just for major
news sites to be added to the AMP
News Carousel on mobile and the top
stories on desktop
 Thrillist converted 90% of all articles
to AMP and got a 70% lift in traffic
(custom implementation)
 AMP isn’t supposed to be a direct
ranking factor, but speed matters
 9to5google.com found over
half of users would prefer to
click on AMP links
AMP LESSONS
33

 Myth #1: AMP only benefits news sites
 No Broker has PWA and AMP (PWAMP) and saw drops in bounce rate
 PWA – when a website has access to your phone’s hardware in almost the same ways as a
native mobile app
 PWA prefetches the content by predicting what page you will visit next which allows the
site to function offline
 Myth #2: AMP can’t work for ecommerce
 It can with AMP Live List Component and AMP Bing Component, but there’s serious issues
with analytics data tracking
 http://www.myntra.com/ is an ecommerce PWAMP example and eBay is still testing it out
 Myth #3: Build it and they will come
 Since content is served from Google’s CDN, all engagement metrics are messed up and
pages per sessions is usually close to 1.0
 “Session Stitching” is a GA tactic that can be used to rectify these tracking issues
 Other common issues are omitting navigation and CTAs
 Myth #4: AMP sites have to be stripped down
 It’s possible to maintain your mobile design with AMP without compromising on UI
AMP LESSONS
34

 PWA + AMP = PWAMP
 You must fix analytics tracking if you implement AMP or it will be inaccurate
 It’s still new and coming out with new templates so expect the unexpected
 Many AMP pages return errors and won’t get cached by Google
 Google won’t consistently show your pages as AMP if there are errors
 Integrate dynamic components to improve UX and maintain functionality as much as possible
 Validate your pages using Chrome Developer Tools or another validator
 https://validator.ampproject.org/
TAKEAWAYS
35

TOMANTHONY
STOPGUESSING,STARTTESTING!
DISTILLED
SLIDESHARE
DIS.TL/CRO-HYPOTHESIS
SERPTURKEY
HTTPS://WWW.DISTILLED.NET/RESOURCES/PROPOSING
-BETTER-WAYS-TO-THINK-ABOUT-INTERNAL-LINKING/

 Crawl site
 Export in spreadsheet
 Get Moz rank for each then normalize MozRank
 Use NetworkX or similar to in it
 Then add a new page, linked from homepage then see the change - would the homepage
change in PR - could actually gain
 Actually - homepage small drop in PR when adding link to another page
WEIGHTED INTERNALPR
38

 Keyword targeting
 Test using SERP Turkey and Amazon Mechanical Turk
 Panda and Quality
 Panda created using human rather info then fed into machine learning algo to replicate
results, did algo overlay in 2011, then 2016 its part of core and live
 Suggest panda surveys to capture useful customer info to prioritize efforts
 Would you trust info from this website?
 Is this written by experts?
 Split testing
 Hypothesis: page HTML is verbose, adding list of products as structured markup will make
the intent clearer, had an 11% lift but didn’t work for other sites because they didn’t have
dirty HTML
 Freshness
 Date annotations = important
 Regularly making small updates helps freshness with dateModified itemprop, got 8%
lift in traffic
SEO SPLITTESTING
39

 Try to prove with data before launching
 Ex. – Adding “Free Shipping” to the title tags for one client worked where for another it didn’t
 We cannot predict rank with certainty
 Even experts struggle with predictions
 Move forwards with further data, build hypothesis, run tests
 Free tool Distilled split tester (DistilledODN)
 SERP Turkey
TAKEAWAYS
41

 Top challenges facing marketers include:
 Generating enough traffic and leads
 Proving ROI
 Securing enough budget
 New era of consumers
 Traditional >> Digital Transitional >> Digital Natives
 Traditional are going away and they are offline only
 Digital Transitional are more tech savvy but will do online research then buy offline
 Digital Natives do everything online, are not brand loyal, want everything to be
personalized, authentic, and “not suck”
 TV commercials >> Facebook ads >> Google Local
 Commercials (wrong people, wrong time)
 Facebook ads are personalized (right people, wrong time)
 Google Local (right people, right time)
 4/5 consumers use search engines to find local info
 Digital is so disruptive now that companies are focusing purely on understanding digital and natives
(Air B&B and Uber own nothing)
 Life expectancy of Fortune 500 companies was 75 years in 1955 and 15 years in 2015
LOCALINTENT ENGINE
43

 Top Three Local SEO Ranking Factors:
1. User’s location
2. Relevance
3. User’s actions
 Five Pillars to Enterprise Local SEO
1. Business Intelligence & Analytics – invest in a local tool
2. Data Integrity – critical to NAP consistency
1. Data sanitation
2. Data normalization
3. Data compliance
3. Preferred landing pages – PLPs, technical, and on-page SEO
1. Don’t use subdomains
2. Setup taxonomy by country >> state >> city >> neighborhood (everyone forgets about
neighborhood)
4. Digital PR – page-level backlinks, reviews, spam fighting
1. BrightLocal can trigger alerts if someone tried to change your GMB data
2. Create review funnel to automatically deter bad reviews with auto email asking for feedback
1. If happy, ask them to add a review to a third-party website and share it
2. If unhappy, ask how we can help make it better
LOCALINTENT ENGINE
44

 Invest in a local tool to get analytics from and use features like alerts if someone tries to do
“negative local SEO”
 Organize your site’s taxonomy not just by city, but also by neighborhood (makes sense for locations
with multiple locations in a major city in my opinion)
 Create your own review funnel to prevent getting negative reviews and boost positive reviews
TAKEAWAYS
45

 Fred is a joke, not actionable, happens multiple times a day
 Google looks at social mentions and sentiment
 "I click on a lot of ads mostly because they are more relevant than organic search results. This is
shameful but stuff we couldn't discover.”
 Technical SEO
• 302 / 301 - should pass the same still
• "I would do whatever"
 Title tags
• Won’t be able to opt out of Google rewriting title tags
 Don’t use noindex tags
 Lowering your own traffic, don’t like idea of doing it, much rather improve pages, if not
showing up, not indexed, not effecting site (Corner cases: hacked sites)
 Don't remove old content or comments unless spammy/low quality
 Does usability impact rankings?
• “Why do you hate me?”
 FS changes a lot, still under development
GARY ILLEYES Q&A– GRAIN OF SALT TIME
47

 Mobile First Index – small portion of sites are being tested now
 If site passes test, there’s a chance they could move it to the MFI, then monitor the traffic to
make sure not losing, if you have m dot and traffic declines, yell at John Mu
 Take links from desktop for now until figure out for mobile
 Hreflang plus canonical - update canonical for mobile? John created diagram for hreflang
mobile and Google is still figuring it ourselves
 Penguin - very good at discounting links but should we still do the disavow?
 "Do whatever makes you feel better“
 Personally doesn’t disavow anything
 When nofollow everything because of manual action penalty for linking from sponsored posts
 Nofollow dangerous for int links - thinks it's bat shit stupid
GARY ILLEYES Q&A– GRAIN OF SALT TIME
48

DAWNANDERSON
REDUCINGTHEBURDENOF
TECHNICALSEODEBT
SLIDESHARE

 Technical debt makes crawling, indexing, query
clustering, and semantic understanding more
complex for search engines
 Can be done by accident, intentionally, or
intentionally with awareness (we will fix it
later)
 Debt is inevitable for project success and
70% of all projects fail
 Project success is when you produce
the planned deliverables within budget
and on time (including approved
changes)
40% of SEOs wait more than a year to get critical
dev tasks done
 Top issues are legacy technology limitations,
marketers saying “we’ll SEO it later”, and
organizations running fragile instead of agile
Unpaid SEO technical debt leads to SEO
bankruptcy
 Google won’t wait very long for you to
deal and fix your technical debt
REDUCING THE BURDEN OF TECHNICALDEBT IN SEO
50

 Search engines never forget and we are finding that they have a lot of storage
 Incremental crawling never ends = the web gets bigger and bigger
 When there is consistency in signals, search engines use prediction based priority scheduling
 Helps maximize the index freshness
REDUCING THE BURDEN OF TECHNICALDEBT IN SEO
51

 Generational software cruft
 Spaghetti code or code that’s wanted, badly designed, and unnecessary complicated
 Legacy code bases and deprecation (ex. – AJAX and Flash)
 Content cruft
 Poor quality content signals build up over time as incremental crawling continues to gather
signals
 “Googlebot gets where water couldn’t”
 Ex. – Google indexes staging and test sites somehow
 Architectural and semantic cruft
 Taxonomy changes can compound into semantic loss as weaken topical authority signals
 “Concept drift” is the blurring of concept relatedness and topical dilution and can trigger AI
 URL cruft – no URLs are ever gone, only the resource there is gone
 Ex. – Filename extensions and junk directories like /public/
 410 HTTP status codes are still recrawled just in case something changes
 Crawl cruft
 Crawl frequency is based on URL historical change and importance rate
 URLs are added to the “queue”
 Push indexing is when Google indexes a URL through fetch and submit or XML
sitemap submissions
 Pull indexing is where Google indexes a URL through natural crawling and discovery
TYPES OF “CRUFT” THAT CREATE TECHNICALDEBT
52

53
“404 is the 302 of error pages” – John Mueller

 GSC analysis
 Add everything to GSC from the
past and present and review the
reports for patterns
 Ex. – internal link report for
“relatedness” and URL importance
 Server/IP block analysis
 Review IP neighbors or sites on
the same server as you and ask
questions
 Server log file analysis
 Review all protocols and sites but
filter out bot emulators
 Plan to repay the debt using the
MoSCoW Approach and Refactoring
(restructure existing code, altering
internal structure without changing its
external behavior or a small series of
behaviors that preserve
transformations)
ACKNOWLEDGE, CALCULATE, PRIORITIZE, REPAY DEBT
56

 GSC URL Parameters Tool is a directive for Google so use it with caution
 Helps guide Google with crawl rules and hint building
 Revisit all past .htaccess files
 Look to rewrite and reorder rules for efficiency with regex or cut out old rules still firing
 Fix redirect chains
 Remove redundant files like JS and CSS
 Avoid relative URLs vs. absolute URLs particularly in WP
 Review canonical link relation in all forms
 Ex. – redirects, canonicals, hreflang, HTTPS are all forms of canonicalization but rel next/prev is
NOT
 Rebuild strong semantics and relatedness
 Rather than removing content, improve it (upcycling URLs)
 Use co-occurring terms to develop strong semantic clues and conceptual structures
 Find what correlates in Google’s eyes using https://www.google.com/trends/correlate
 Create topical hubs for focused crawled
DIVERTTHE DEBT
59

 Build well categorized and conceptually structured sitemaps
 XML sitemaps pass URL importance signals
 Always check them periodically even if they autogenerate
 Create externally hosted XML sitemaps to take back control and jump the dev queue
 Forget about setting priority and last modified tags
 Exclude lower quality sections of the site
 Optimize and deoptimize internal links to increase and decrease URL importance
 Accept that some SEO technical debt is necessary for agility but do your best to avoid it in the first place
and chip away at it over time
DIVERTTHE DEBT
60

 C suite thinks in PowerPoint slides, not Excel
 Developers don’t want to waste time so they need separate doc like excel
 UX, IA, and taxonomy of websites applies to audits
 Don’t flip back and forth from topics, each should flow each other logically to tell the story
 Your client doesn’t think about you when you're not around -- it's just the way it is
 Help your stakeholders - if they cant make the case when you're not around you can’t get it
done
 Create standalone doc for each topic
 What it is, why important, what needs to be done, priority level, who needs to do it
 Show don’t tell
 Use screenshots and examples to illustrate your point
 Supplemental materials
 Include a checklist with step by step input toons and link back to audit
 Prioritization - cant be replaced by a tool
 May cost too much
 Site may replatform in a year
 May not be worth it (long URLs)
SEOAUDITS YOUR CLIENT CAN UNDERSTAND
62

1. Budget
• Fix sales process for people who can afford your services
2. Busy-ness
• Nagging is customer service, especially agency,
• Explicitly state I need this from you this week
3. Bad relationships
• Internal politics, especially internal
• Know your audience
4. Brain overload
• Break it down make tasks bite-sized
• Ex - page load time = big where compress images = small
SEOAUDITYOUR CLIENT CAN UNDERSTAND
63

 Audits are expensive, charge accordingly because they will always take more time than you think
 Do better work
 Get a reputation
 Beat the tool
 What is easy, but why how and when are harder
 Q: Split content and technical audits?
 A: Yes, to split content vs technical if that makes it easier to get it done and in JIRA, been successful
with that approach before
TAKEAWAYS
64

ALANBLEIWEISS
FEATUREDSNIPPETS
SLIDESHARE

 Research extensively
 Existing competitive answer box results
 People also asked, click on them
 Searches related to at bottom of SERP
 Think like student for educational content
 Readability is 3rd to 8th grade writing on average
 Do I trust this content? Meet needs? What info do I need to have confidence in this topic?
 Answer the public.com for topical research tool
 Add rich media, graphs, charts, photos to enhance and be more complete
 Don't need markup but still use because constantly being refined since G keeps making mistakes
 Doesn’t advocate for JSON-LD, prefer schema or microdata or RFID
 Bing doesn’t understand
 Code directly in HTML instead of in script, but cant have conflicting signals if do script and
HTML code
FEATURED SNIPPETS
66

 Deeper answers get more FS
 Dangerous to nest schemes inside each other, sometimes confused, need to test, not
perfect process
 Strong topical organization reinforces topical strength
 invasion also silo access
 URL hierarchical silo model
 Section level sidebar interlinking
 Autocomplete
 Choose schema carefully
 Manual action penalty for recipe schema for non food recipe (soap) need to use HowTo instead
which is new as of 6 months ago
 Smaller sites can win with more complete answers, stronger architecture and organization
 Ex - goodtherapy.org
 Toptenreviews.com own a lot of FS
FEATURED SNIPPETS
67

THANK YOU!
E N D TO E N D I S J U S T B E G I N N I N G

DFWSEM State of Search Conference 2017 | SEO Recap

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