American Marketing Association

July 22, 2014

Gregory J. Wright, Communications Manager

@G_J_W

How to Own SEO

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Overview

• SEO basics

• Let’s get technical

• Importance of content marketing

• Going local

• Tools you can use

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“Confessions of a Shopaholic”

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Search Engines

Google – 67.6%

Bing – 18.7%

Yahoo – 10%

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[star trek computer]

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Less than 1%

click on a result

beyond page 1

6% of clicks go

to PPC ads

53% of clicks on

first result

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What is SEO?

• Get your web pages ranked higher than your

competitor

• Basic problem with SEO

• You want people to find your content

• But search engines only want to show great content

• Unfortunately, search engines give little to no

answers

• And their search algorithms are constantly evolving

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SEO Pyramid

Source: Moz.com

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Accessible, Quality Content

• Domain authority

• Sitemaps

• Broken links

• Robots.txt

• Avoid duplicate content (use rel=“canonical”)

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Keyword Research and Targeting

• Research and use keywords

• Identify title tags (H1, H2, etc.)

• Don’t use the same title or description for content

• Page title length (<60 characters)

• Use search friendly URLs

• Use “alt” tag with Images

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Link Building

• Number of inbound links

• Quality of links

• Anchor text used is important

• i.e. stop using “click here”

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SEO Pyramid

• Google+

• Google Authorship

• Make your content shareable

• Increase engagement

Content is King

King Henry VIII

Fun Fact: He was 6’ 4” tall

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Content is King

• Write for your audience

• Good, high quality content

• Longer content >700 words seems to do better

• Frequent content is important

• Newer quality content will rank higher than older

quality content

• Blogging, news articles have become even more

important in SERP ranking

User Experience is Queen

Queen Latifah

Fun Fact: Signed her first

recording contract at 17

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User Experience is Queen

• Site speed

• Time spent on page

• Overall engagement

• Bounce rate

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Recent Google Algorithm Updates

• Panda – Detect low quality and duplicate content

• Penguin – Devalue link spam

• Hummingbird – Understand natural language

and the context of queries; keywords de-

emphasized

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The New Content Rating Formula

Expertise

Authoritativeness

Trustworthiness

Many ads = Low quality

Good supplemental content

(videos, other)

Poor page design

• Popups

• Ads incorrectly

categorized

• Inline advertising

• About us / Contact info

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Additional Steps to Domination

• Image search

• Video search (YouTube)

• Google News

• Local

• Structured Content (schema.org)

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Local SEO

Similar to regular SEO, but extra elements to

include:

• Name, address, phone on every web page

• Use city and state in title tags

• Use Schema markup

• Yext.com

• Be consistent!

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Common SEO Mistakes

• Not putting your audience first

• SEO is only a piece of the puzzle

• Forgetting importance of social

• Ignoring keywords

• Over-optimizing

• Infrequent content

• Not identifying duplicate content

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Free Tools

• Google Webmaster Tools

• Bing Webmaster Tools

• Google Analytics

• SEMRush (keyword research)

• OpenSiteExplorer.org

• moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-

tool

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Contact Me

Gregory Wright

Communications Manager

American Institute of CPAs

gwright@aicpa.org

@G_J_W

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