Todd Malicoat: Choosing your keyword battles.
SERPS are really changing…far less than before. Constant rising barriers to successful SEO. Constant bid for resources…limited manpower and budget.
SEO’s spend a lot of time convincing decision makers why SEO is a high ROI Channel worthy of investment.
KOB Analysis: Being able to choose the right keywords in which to compete.
Every keyword result is a raging battle for position.
Marketing Battles are fought inside the mind…you can’t see what’s going on…you can just imagine it.
Tool Bar Page Rank: Doesn’t really work anymore. Moz Rank: Much more accurate.
How do you prepare for the battle? Tracking. Goals. KPI’s.
The Search Demand Curve…might take a year or two to be able to compete in the mid-tail…probably start with competing in the long tail.
Gives metric examples: Page Authority, mozRank, MozTrust, ratio between MR and MT, Total Links, etc.
How do you become the hero? Strong opposition / benefits analysis stills. Setting / managing / delivering on expectations.
What do we track? Links, Rankings, Impressions, Clicks, Visitors, Conversions, Awareness, Engagement, CTR. Gives example of split testing organic SEO.
Tracking Preparation: Baseline ranks, initial rankings,subscribers, other KPI’s, Conversion Goals, Unique Visitors, Page Views, Time on Site, Bounce Rate
Setting Expectations: Very important. Fund your site’s link equity…like funding a company financially. You must fund your organic rankings with a reasonable amount of link equity. Links = Rankings. Links cost money (or at least they have implied value).
You can fund links with money, creativity (linkbaiting) or development (bartering).
SEO process: Understanding the business model as it applies to search traffic. Intent of user queries. Keyword priority (benefit). SERP competition (opposition).
Understanding Query Type: Informational (looking for a specific fact or topic), Navigational (looking for a specific web site), Transactional (looking for information related to buying a product of a service. 80/10/10 split between these 3. CPC is the best predictive indicator of commercial intent.
Focus on strong consumer intent: CPC is the strongest indicator. Understand intent for campaign consistency. Keyword research is important for identifying user intent.
Sample strategies: Go for longer keyword queries initially. Plural vs. Singular. Synonyms.
Evaluating the list: Monthly traffic estimates, goals (short term or long term), eliminate words that may be too competitive.
SEO Strategies Consistency: Keyword Research should be consistent with Information Architecture, Internal Anchor Text + others.
SEO Playbook: Content, Links & Organization
Keyword Cannibalization: What is it? Too many pages with the same keywords…throwing all the pages at the search engines for them to figure out.
Sitemaps: Best Practices: Top level (100-400), 2nd level (100-200)
KOB Analysis strategy: 1) Enter Domain into SEMRush. Establish 5-10 competitors, collect all their keywords, organize short-tail keywords by benefit, analyze page level metrics using toolbars, compare site opposition at SERP level using inline metrics, record opposition scores, and choose phrases with the lowest opposition and the highest scores.
Opposition Analysis: Keyword level, domain level, page level, off page level.
SERPSOA = SERP Analysis of competitors at a keyword level.
Unique linking domains, page link authority, domain link authority, age, total links, exact match, relevance, social signals: methods of evaluating your competition.
Linkbuilding will likely make the largest impact for you.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.