Module 5
Module 5
Module 5
PRESENTED BY
[SOBOTAMOH Elias M. Ngi]
Version 7.0
Certified Digital
Marketing
Professional (CDMP)
Module 5
SEARCH ENGINE
OPTIMIZATION
Version 7.0
SOBOTAMOH Elias Manyi NGI
Board Chair @ AdMeUp Digital Academy
3. Keywords
Organic Paid
Traffic is “free” but requires resources and time Traffic is paid. You pay-per-click (PPC) on a cost-
investment per-click (CPC) keyword basis
ROI is harder to measure but often improves ROI is much easier to measure but can stagnate
over time and/or decline over time
70-80% of searchers click on SEO results 20-30% of searchers click on paid results
Organic search (SEO) requires patience and persistence. The fruits of your
labour today can be enjoyed in the weeks and months ahead. Aside from being
free, SEO has approximately three times the amount of traffic compared to paid
search. With this in mind, it’s important to set expectations for all involved
including key stakeholders like marketing managers, CEOs, clients etc.
Paid search can work together with SEO and is particularly useful at the
beginning of SEO work and where there is a proven return on investment.
Paid Versus Organic Search
What’s the difference?
A. Paid Search A
• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Cost Per Click (CPC)
B. Organic Search
• Search Engine optimization (SEO)
• ”Free”
B
Paid search is Google’s number one revenue earner and appears above organic
listings. People tend to click in the organic listings more because they have more
trust in them compared to ads. While paid search can provide a great return on
investment, sometimes the introduction of more competitors can increase the
Cost Per Click which in turn reduces the return on investment. As a result of this,
some marketers decide to invest more in SEO.
Paid Versus Organic Search
Similarities between the two
Keyword Landing
Traffic
Research Pages
Both require Keyword Research. If you want to rank on search engines, you first need to know
which keywords to rank for.
1. Both require relevant Landing Pages. Once you know which keywords to target, you’ll
need to optimize web pages to make them relevant. You can use the same landing
pages to target SEO and paid search.
2. Both result in search engine traffic which can help a business grow by meeting its
business objectives.
In addition to the similarities to SEO, it’s not uncommon for marketers to combine both organic
and paid search as part of their marketing mix. When starting from scratch, SEO can take 6-12
months to see worthwhile progress, so marketers often turn to paid search to get momentum
and test out the market.
When good SEO progress is made, many marketers continue with paid search, either to target
the keywords they are not ranking well for, or in some cases to complement the keywords that
rank well. The latter depends on the businesses’ circumstances and search engine strategy.
How Search Engines Work
The three pillars of SEO
1. Crawling
2. Indexing
3. Ranking
Search engines rely on algorithms to find webpages and decide which ones to rank for any given keyword.
There are 3 steps to how search engines work:
1. Crawling
o Discovery stage
o Automated crawlers are sent to find new and previously known pages by following links from one page to another
Search engines send out web crawlers to find new pages and record information about them.
They discover new pages by following the links on pages they already know about.
For the pages they have previously visited, crawlers are periodically sent back to check whether the content has changed.
Sometimes websites instruct search engines not to crawl certain web pages and these are left out of the index.
2. Indexing
o Filing stage
o Some results are filtered
Most web pages that offer unique and valuable content are placed into the index.
Common reasons for pages not placed in the index are that the content was considered:
• Duplicate
• Low value/spammy
• Couldn’t be crawled
• The page or domain lacked inbound links
2. Rankings
o Retrieval stage
o Search engines scan their indexes
o They select webpages that provides the best answers
o There are over 200 rankings factors
How Search Engines Work
Search engine algorithms
Examples:
Navigational • Moz
• Moz.com
• Rand Fishkin moz
We can think of these types of keywords as signposts that direct searchers to a place
they already have in mind. If you search Google for a brand name, a person’s name
or a URL, you are using navigational queries. Queries and keywords are used
interchangeably in SEO.
Keywords
Informational queries
Informational queries are keyword searches that
help searchers find information
Examples:
• How to do keyword research
• Keyword research guide
• What’s the difference between navigational
Informational and informational keywords?
Collectively, informational queries make up the largest proportion of keywords and
because they happen at the earlier awareness stage of the buying cycle, so are harder to
convert into customers. Blog posts are examples of content where informational keywords
are often targeted. That’s because a blog post is more about informing, rather than selling.
For this reason, informational content tends to be more successful on social media.
Keywords
Transactional queries
Examples:
Transactional
• Keyword research tool
• Best keyword suggestion tool
• Buy keyword analysis software
Transactional queries happen at the last decision stage of the buying cycle, so
are easier to convert into customers, but tend to be more competitive to rank
for. As the name suggests, transactional keywords are targeted on sales pages,
so they are often the first types of keywords we research and optimize for. They
are also the most likely to improve the bottom line of your business and help
meet business goals.
Keywords
Keywords and the buying journey
Informational Keywords
Awareness • Collectively the largest proportion of all keywords
• Earlier stage of the buying
cycleHarder to convert into sales
Interest Less competitive to rank for
Navigational Keywords
• Smaller proportion of all keywords
Consideration
• Often brand related keywords
• Can occur at all stages of the buying cycle
Conversion
Transactional Keywords
• Smaller proportion of all keywords
• Last stage of the buying cycle
Retention
• Easier to convert into sales
• More competitive to rank for
As you might expect, transactional keywords are the most likely to help with sales
and help a business grow. But they are also the most competitive type of keywords,
so the hardest to rank for. Some businesses that are new to SEO, ONLY target
transactional keywords which means they struggle to rank for any keywords. By
targeting informational keywords, it often means progress can be made quicker,
particularly at the start for SEO.
SERPs
What is a SERP?
A
B
A. Title Tag
B. URL
C. Meta Description Tag C
D. Rich Snippets
D
E. Sitelinks
E
Classic SERPs are the more typical results and what most people think of when referring to SEO.
This will be the main focus for this module.
A.URLS: URLs are short for uniform resource locator and act as a web address. URLs are
always unique so search engines use them when filing and retrieving pages from their
index.
B. Title Tags: Title tags contain the blue clickable link text that you can click on to visit a
page.
C. Meta Description Tags: Meta description tags contain the short snippet of text
summarizing what a page is about and sits below the title tag.
D.Rich Snippets: Rich snippets help make your listings more visual and stand out.
Examples include product reviews (similar to the example on the slide) or event
information and only appears for some listings.
E. Sitelinks: Sitelinks are extra results below a search result. They are most often shown
for navigational queries as they help a user to quickly navigate your site.
SERPs
Universal SERPs
Maps/Local Search
Maps and local search is an example of Universal Search. They occur when you see maps
results e.g. ”plumbers in Los Angeles”, “Hairdressers in north Sydney” or “landscape
gardener in Toronto”. The process of optimizing maps/local search is known as Local SEO
and is quite different from normal SEO.
To appear in the maps and local Google search results, it starts with registering for Google
My Business. For more information on local SEO, see the Moz article in the references.
SERPs
Extended SERPs
Knowledge Graph
Summary
Introduction to SEO
• SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is • Keywords can be navigational, informational and
the process of getting traffic from the free, transactional.
organic, editorial or natural search results on
search engines.
• SERP stands for “search engine results page” and
refers to the listings search engines display after a
• Search engines work by crawling, indexing and listing has be shown.
ranking web pages.
The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base used by Google to enhance its search engine's
search results with semantic-search information gathered from a wide variety of sources,
including Wikipedia as in the above example. At the the end of 2016, the knowledge
graph held over 70 billion facts. As Google uses real facts, the Knowledge Graph tends to
be shown for more established businesses, so it can be hard for smaller or newer
companies to influence.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO AGENDA
Keywords
Lead Generation
Traffic
Reputation/Backlinks
Generate 35% more online sales from SEO for our top 10
converting landing pages in the next 10 months
Transactional
• Bl
og
s:
lo
ok
for
br
an
d
aw
are
If your business is transactional i.e. you sell a product or service, ultimately the
most important metric to measure is the sale of that product/service. If that’s
not available then you will want to measure a lead (e.g. web enquiry) that helps
convert into a sale.
If your website is more informational, you’re objectives will likely differ and may
be more traffic or brand focused.
Setting Objectives
Have a go!
#1 #2 #3
Set Objectives
• SEO objectives encourage buy-in from key • SEO objectives can be keywords, traffic, market-
stakeholders e.g. CEOs, marketing managers, share, brand/product awareness, lead generation,
clients. reputation/backlinks, e-commerce and/or ad
revenue based.
udamentals
SEO AGENDA
• Identify keywords with high search volume and omit low volume terms
Types of Keywords
The long and short of keywords
Short-tail keywords
Typically one or two words
Less specific
Skiing
Ski Holidays
Self-drive ski holidays France
Best snowboard for all mountains
Long-tail Keywords
Typically
three or
more
words
More
specific
Best time
to go to
Whistler
The longtail is an idea that was popularized by Chris
Anderson in his book by the same name. Here is a summary
from the book:
“The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy
is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively
small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets)
at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge
number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and
distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to
lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all
containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf
space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-
targeted goods and services can be as economically
attractive as mainstream fare.”
In the above definition, the small number of “hits” are what
we consider the short-tail, the more generic way of
describing a market or topic. They are hits because
individually the search volume is high, but there aren’t that
many of them.
In the world of SEO, there is now more of an expectancy
that a specific search query will be answered by a hyper-
focused topic on a webpage both by search engines and by
its users.
Types of Keywords
Short-tail versus long-tail keywords
High Volume
/ High
Competition
Low Volume /
Low
Competition
The Short-tail
accounts for 30% of all
search
traffic
The Long-tail
accounts for 70% of
all search traffic
#1 #2 #3 #4
Do Avoid
• Focus on one topic at a time • Going too generic
Do
• Think of closely related
keywords
• Think synonyms
• T
r
y
i
n
g
o
n
l
y
t
As long as you stay on topic, try and think of as many closely related keywords
as possible.
A good test to see if you are going off topic is to recall what the page/topic
you’re researching might look like and ask whether the keyword is best served
on it or another page. If it’s better served on another page, then you should put
the keyword to the side and re-visit it when you research that other page. As
this is at the brainstorming stage, try and think of as MANY related keywords,
rather than the absolute best. We’ll filter out some and prioritize the best
keywords later.
How to Conduct Keyword Research
Step 2: Brainstorm keywords using search engine suggestions & related searches
Earlier we put the * before our keyword but you can also
include it within the keyword to get even more keyword
suggestions. Once you have a topic in mind, this is a
great way of discovering longer-tailed keywords.
Another way, is to look at the related searches which tend
to be at the bottom of SERPs.
How to Conduct Keyword Research
Step 2: Brainstorm keywords using Google Keyword Planner
Google’s Keyword Planner is part of Google AdWords and is a great way for brainstorming and researching keywords.
It works where you provide an initial seed keyword, and Google provides related keyword ideas that you may find useful, plus
some extra keyword data like keyword search volumes.
It does require an AdWords account and if you are not spending money on Google adverts, the keyword search volumes are given
in vague ranges. We’ll look at overcoming this by getting more specific search volumes for free later.
For the most part, the results you get from the Google Keyword Planner are usually on topic but in the above example, this is not
the case.
You will see at the top of the image, we are researching the “what size snowboard do I need” but the suggestions are to do with
snowboard boots.
Keyword Options → “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”
If you select this option from the side menu, you will get less results but more specific results. 70%+ of the time this is not
necessary but in this case it is because the results shown without it are too generic.
With “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” enabled you can see the results are more on topic.
More specific search volumes
You may have also noticed that an extra column has appeared in the above image with exact search volumes, rather than ranges,
which is far more useful. This is using a free Chrome extension which we will now cover.
Important to note:
Google only gives keyword volume ranges, unless you spend money with them, but with some magic, you can get the exact search
volumes without spending a penny.
Make sure to check out the Google Keyword Planner Tutorial in the Resources section.
How to Conduct Keyword Research
Step 2: Brainstorm keywords using Keywordseverywhere.com
Reveals keyword
volumes on a
number of websites
Keywords Everywhere is a useful tool that reveals precise
keyword search volumes in Google Keyword Planner,
Google Search Console, Google, Amazon and many other
sites. It works as a browser extension in Chrome and Firefox.
How to Conduct Keyword Research
Step 2: Brainstorm keywords by conducting competitive research
SEMRush and Spyfu are tools that report back what keywords
a URL or website ranks for. This can be great for
brainstorming keywords and keeping tabs on what
competitors are up to. Both offer a freemium model, meaning
you get some functionality for free.
Topic
Search Volume Relevancy
Score
For beginner SEO’s deciding which keywords are the best for their topic and their
business, there are two key considerations; search volume and topic relevancy score.
The search volume and topic relevancy is available to everyone and should always be
used.
• Search Volume: we’ve covered that search volumes can be gained through
Google’s Keyword Planner/AdWords and also with the Keywords Everywhere
plugin. Be mindful that for SEO, we tend to target keywords to a country level, so
select the most relevant country that you wish to target. Targeting globally
becomes more relevant once you start to dominate your local country first and is
outside the scope of this module.
• Relevancy Score: is a subjective grading between1 (high) and 3 (low) on how
relevant a keyword is to a topic. Judging the relevancy score is subjective. if you
are new to the industry or the products/services/topics you are researching, you
may need help from a colleague to best help grade how relevant keywords are to
the topics you are researching. If you are getting help from others, emphasize that
you are judging the relevancy to the topic and not the website as a whole.
How to Conduct Keyword Research
Step 3: An example of reviewing keyword value
Topic
Monthly Google
Keyword Relevancy
Search Volume
Score
snowboard size guide 320 1 Topic: what size snowboard do I need?
snowboard sizing 320 1
picking a snowboard 90 3
snowboarding size chart 90 1
In the above example, we have graded “picking a
snowboard” as a 3 for the relevancy to the topic. The topic
is about snowboard sizing, so while “picking a snowboard”
is a related topic, it’s actually a parent topic and best saved
for another page.
How to Conduct Keyword Research
Step 3: An example of reviewing keyword value
Monthly Topic
Keyword Google Search Relevancy
Volume Score
snowboard boot sizing 90 3
snowboard sizes 70 1
snowboard weight 30 2 ?
Monthly Topic
Keyword Google Search Relevancy Priority
Volume Score
snowboard sizing 320 1 P1 Always one P1 keyword
snowboard sizes 70 1 P3
Now we will look at prioritizing keywords by collecting
keyword data from brainstormed keywords. The goal here
is to pick a half dozen or so keywords to target and order
them by importance.
Turning Research into Content
Have a go!
Picking a snowboard
Snowboard maintenance
Snowboard accessories
You may like to research your topics using a spreadsheet like the one above.
The main idea is that:
• You enter your topic in the left column
• Have one P1 keyword per topic
• Two P2 keywords per topic
• Typically around three P3 keywords but can be less or more depending
how big the topic is
Remember a topic will translate into a webpage that you can optimize the
keywords into. If it helps, you can add a column to the spreadsheet for the
URL of the webpage that you plan to associate to the topic.
Summary
Keyword Research
• Keyword research is the process of discovering the • The 4 steps to successful keyword research:
keywords used by potential customers to find your 1. Pick a topic: just one at a time
products and picking the most relevant keywords that 2. Brainstorm keywords: the more the merrier and
are within your reach and that have good search around a closely related topic
3. Review keyword value: such as the search volume,
volume.
relevancy score and keyword difficulty
4. Prioritize keywords: so you know how much focus
• Long tail keywords are less obvious, less competitive and to give each keyword when doing on-page
optimization
collectively have the larger search volume; so they are
worth spending the extra time researching and creating
extra content.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO AGENDA
2. On-Page Optimization
3. Off-page Optimization
Time
Ranking investment
Factors
Technical
Tools
Help
Activities
Features of technical optimization:
• Activities: involves SEO activities completed on your site that are designed to
improve SEO but are not related to content
• Ranking factors: this stage is largely about optimizing the crawlability of the site so
that content can be easily found and indexed. Contains a small amount of less
important ranking factors but is still important to get right
• Tech Help: they may require the help of a web developer or someone technical
because many changes require code tweaks within the website
• Time investment: this is largely up-front work, with some ongoing maintenance
• Tools: there are lots of great tools that can help diagnose technical issues,
including Google Search Console, Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Xenu Link Sleuth
Technical Optimization
Google Search Console
Technical Optimization
Step 2: Use redirects wisely
301 302
“Moved “Found” or
Meta Refresh
Or, copy the URL and paste it into the address bar of
Chrome with cache: before it e.g.
Select cached from cache:https://www.facebook.com
HTTPs
Mobil
e
Site Speed friendliness HTTPs
You’ll remember earlier that technical optimization or technical SEO is primarily about making
your website free of errors, easy to crawl and easy to index. Compared to on-page optimization
and off-page optimization, technical optimization plays a smaller role in keyword rankings but
we will now look at three technical factors that matter:
• Site speed: it was quite rare back at the time, but back in 2010, Google officially
announced a ranking factor for SEO. It was for Site Speed and it was rare because
ranking factors were mainly kept a secret. Although, as it is only a slight ranking factor,
improving site speed is more likely to be noticeable in your bottom line in helping
improve conversions and sales, rather than SEO. That said, if web pages are noticeably
slow, this could have a significantly negative effect on both conversions and SEO.
• Mobile friendliness: with the use of mobile overtaking desktop, this ranking factor has
become more important than ever.
• HTTPs: this means making your pages more secure.
We will now look at each of these factors in more detail.
Technical Optimization
How to improve site speed
Site Speed
Albeit a slight ranking factor, site speed offers additional benefits for
conversions/sales, rather than SEO alone. Independent studies by Kiss Metrics
and Google suggest a page should load in 2 seconds or less. If a page takes much
longer than two seconds it has a bad impact on user experience and could leave
the user frustrated and not want to continue using the website. In a later slide,
we’ll look at Pingdom which helps diagnose areas of a web page that can be
improved for speed such as making larger images smaller, compressing text and
files, and minimizing the total numbers of requests being made.
Often a technical person or web developer is required to make improvements
on site speed.
Technical Optimization
Google PageSpeed Insights
Technical Optimization
Test My Site – Think With Google
Google also offers a dedicated mobile page speed testing tool: Think With
Google. This goes more in-depth and may indicate that mobile site speed may
become a more important ranking factor in the future. Google mentions that
“70% of cellular network connections globally will occur at 3G or slower speeds
through 2020”, so it’s key to get a fast loading site under such conditions, so
bear that in mind for your current and future web builds.
Technical Optimization
Pingdom
Pingdom is an independent tool that also grades how well a web page is
optimized for site speed. It has the added benefit of providing a page speed
loading time.
Google’s Maile Ohye, states that “2 seconds is the threshold for e-commerce
website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second. Half a second
is fast, to put it in layman terms, it’s close to a blink, while two seconds is
shorter than one breath”. Bear in mind, while this advice is still relevant, it was
provided in 2010 but the general consensus is that these are still sensible
targets to aim for, especially with the rise in mobiles and tablets that often rely
on phone data signals.
Technical Optimization
Mobile Friendliness
Mobile
friendliness
Google announced mobile-friendliness as a significant ranking factor back in
2015. Although feedback from the SEO industry suggested its initial impact was
relatively small, the announcement suggests it will become a stronger ranking
factor in the future. This is enhanced further with Google’s plans to prioritize its
index for mobile over desktop in the future.
Responsive web design is the most common way of making a website mobile
friendly. It works by making your web pages look good on all devices (desktops,
tablets, and phones). Responsive web design uses HTML and CSS to resize,
shrink or enlarge content to make it look good on any screen.
Technical Optimization
Mobile Friendliness
snowboard sizes 70 1 P3
Before starting on-page optimization you need to decide
what page you are optimizing and what keywords you wish
to target. This requires keyword research and ideally
prioritizing the keywords like we did in an earlier exercise. For
the upcoming on-page optimization lessons, we’ll show
examples of how you would optimize the snowboard sizing
page.
On-Page Optimization
Portent’s SERP Preview Tool
Portent’s SERP Preview Tool is an excellent way of visually seeing what a Google
search result would look like before you make the pre-click on-page
optimization changes. This way you can make sure your snippets are the right
length and that they look enticing for the user to click through.
Amazon is incredibly dominant in SEO and there are lots of reasons for this.
They provide a great user experience on their site, have a big product range and
have a colossal domain authority. Although as we can see from the above slide,
their title and meta description tags are a little on the long side and get
truncated which isn’t ideal for click-throughs.
On-Page Optimization
Title tags
70 characters (600
pixels)
The most important part when optimizing title tags is to get the right blend of keywords. If it looks like
one long keyword list, you may be considered a spammer, but if it includes your main keywords (your
primary (P1) and secondary (P2) keywords) and is written in natural compelling English, then you should
be on track.
One of the reasons we prioritize the keyword research is for the title tag optimization. This is because
it’s hard to work more than three or four keywords into a title tag, so we tend to just focus on the
primary and secondary keywords; which are three keywords in total. Often the tertiary keywords (P3)
are closely related to the primary and secondary keywords, so they are fairly well represented.
How to optimize title tags:
1. Work in keywords (this is the most important part to get right)
Keyword Priority
snowboard sizing P1
snowboard size P2
snowboard sizes P3
This is for a fictitious snowboarding company called “SnoWayBro”. Normally, we
pay most attention in optimizing the P1 keyword and P2 keywords. But in this
case because many of the keywords are so similar in meaning, we managed to
accommodate all of the P3 keywords pretty well, asides from “what size
snowboard do I need”. That’s because so many of the P3 keywords were close
variants of the P1 and P2 keywords, e.g. synonyms or plural/singular differing.
The chosen Title tag is: Snowboard Sizing Guide, Charts & Calculator | Sno Way
Bro
You can see we have used Portent’s SERP preview tool which helps illustrate
what the title tag will look like and whether it’s within the recommended size
limits.
On-Page Optimization
Meta tag descriptions
• Try to make your listing stand out from the crowd. Does the page
contain any unique selling points?
• Describe the page in a natural language and enticing enough to
encourage click-throughs
2. Keep short and concise
2
In this example, both URLs would score about the same for relevancy.
The first one (“/snowboard-sizing”) is the simplest to do but the second one
(“/snowboards/sizing”) would be better for larger sites with lots of different
types of products because it gives an idea of the relationship of products to
their parent categories.
The two suggested URLs: 1) www.snowaybro.com/snowboard-sizing and 2)
www.snowaybro.com/snowboards/sizing
On-Page Optimization
Headings
H1 tag
H2 tag
Headings help outline what a webpage is about. They are used in a similar way as
Microsoft Word. The main heading should be within a H1 tag, secondary headings in H2
tags, tertiary in H3 tags and this can go all the way up to H6 tags.
Why headings are important:
Headings are one of the first things a user notices and the main heading (H1 tag) needs to
be relevant to what they have searched. Users scan a page's headlines before deciding
whether to read the whole page or go back to where they have come from.
• It's a medium weight on-page SEO signal and adds relevancy to the page.
There are six header tags (H1 through to H6) which are used to outline the hierarchy of
content. The main heading should be in a H1 tag. Secondary sub-headings should be in H2
tags. H3 - H6 tags aren't used as often in body copy but work in the same hierarchal sub-
heading way.
On-Page Optimization
How to optimize headings
• Informational pages: like blog posts tend to be more user focused and sometimes
include the main keyword or close variant
3. Look for opportunities to add your targeted keywords or similar meaning keywords as part of a
heading
On-Page Optimization
An example of how to optimize headings
H1 tag
Snowboard
Sizing
Snowboard
Sizing
Main copy is text on a web
page that features after the
main heading
• The main content is where the user is ultimately satisfied or not with
what they are looking for
On-Page Optimization
Keyword frequency in the main copy
Matt Cutts says there isn’t an ideal keyword density formula
and hints that thinking about it in such a way can be
unhealthy and may encourage you to over optimize and
load too many keywords into your content. He does
however say that including the keywords you’d like to rank
for is a good thing, but it should be done in a natural way
that enhances the readability of the page.
On-Page Optimization
How to optimize main copy
Ignore keyword
No strict guidelines density and don't
on length repeat keywords too
often
How to optimize main copy:
1. There are no strict guidelines on length
o The content should be long enough so that:
✓ It satisfies what the user is looking for and
✓ Search engines understand what the page is about
2. Keyword usage
o Ignore keyword density and don't repeat keywords too often
o As a loose rule for 500 words, mention:
✓ Primary keywords two or three times
✓ Secondary keywords one or two times
✓ Tertiary keywords zero or one times
o Use synonyms and close keyword variations
o Write in natural human-friendly language
As Matt Cutts mentions in the previous Google video, there isn’t a special keyword density
formula and when you mention keywords too often, search engine may see it as being
spammy and count against you. That’s why this keyword repetition recommendation for
500 words should be taken quite loosely.
Using synonyms and keyword variations can help, so instead of saying “seo training” ten
times, you could say it two or three times but then also mention things like “learn SEO”,
“SEO workshop”, ”class”, “search engine optimization tutorial” and “how to get to the top
of Google”. Even if such keywords were not in your targeted keyword list, they would help
by being synonyms or close in meaning to your target keywords, so would add relevancy
to a page – but again this should be done in a natural way that isn’t going to annoy your
readers.
On-Page Optimization
Hyperlinks in the main copy
Relevance
Reputation
The words you use in the hyperlink
is called anchor text and pass The more internal links a page has the
relevancy to the receiving page more important it is deemed to be, so
it will stand a better chance of ranking
So SEO training will pass more
relevancy than click here
In SEO, hyperlinks help the page you are linking to. The way you link to pages internally plays an
important role in search engine rankings. Linking to pages with descriptive and easy to understand
anchor text, that doesn’t look spammy, will pass more relevancy. Also, make sure you are linking to
your important pages regularly. E.g. If you wrote a blog post about “5 Things to See and Do in Paris”, it
would probably make sense to link back to the Paris destination page.
The words you use in the hyperlink is called anchor text and pass relevancy to the receiving page
o So SEO training will pass more relevancy than click here
Hyperlinks also pass reputation:
o The more internal links a page has the more important it is deemed to be,
so it will stand a better chance of ranking
o Although don’t over link where it makes for a bad user experience
On-Page Optimization
Images
Snowboard
Sizing
Images
• Filenames and Alt text can be the same but they don’t have to be
3. Make images web-friendly
• Gif, Jpeg and PNG
Alt text:
Snowboard sizing
Filename:
Snowboard-measurement.jpg
There isn’t an exact science here and it’s important that the Alt text and filenames
are descriptive and accurate first – and contain keywords or related words second. In
this case the Alt text contains one of the main keywords and the filename is a related
word that will add to the overall relevancy of the page. You’ll always want to keep
the size of images relatively low and often much smaller than the original image size.
This helps make the web page load quicker.
Off-Page Optimization
What is it?
• A backlink is an incoming
hyperlink from one website to
another
High
Topical Authority Authentic
Relevant to your industry Respected and trusted Earned on merit
Search engines, especially Google, are getting very good at detecting whether a backlink should
add to your website’s reputation or not. Here are three keys to look out for:
• Topical backlinks that are relevant to your industry and are likely to bring in relevant
referral traffic. So not only will you get an SEO boost but you’ll also get some great
referral traffic.
• High authority and reputable websites will pass high levels of reputation and we’ll soon
discover how you can measure authority.
• Authentic backlinks are earned on merit, rather than fake backlinks built purely for SEO.
Search engines don’t like to be tricked and target sites building phony links with a search
engine penalty.
Off-Page Optimization
What is a PageRank?
PageRank should be
considered more as
a concept and not
as a metric
40% 55%
At the moment the general consensus is that they don’t act like regular backlinks and do not
pass reputation directly. This may be because it’s hard for search engines to detect a strong
enough signal in all the social media noise although that’s not to say this stance may change in
the future. Also, many of the social media links contain “nofollow” attributes which means
PageRank isn’t passed.
However, social media often helps SEO in an indirect way and can play an important role. The
more followers you have on social media, the more “eyeballs” will see the content that you post.
Some of these people may have websites and may decide to link to your websites, so you can
earn regular backlinks through social media. Others may decide to re-share your content, which
in turn gets more publicity and increases the chance of receiving further backlinks.
Off-Page Optimization
The role of social media in the context of backlinks
Enter competitor
URL to research
Review competitor’s
backlinks
Open Site Explorer is a tool provided by Moz and allows you to research where a
website has got it’s backlinks from. This may be the site you look after, a
competitor or any other site that you wish to research.
The backlinks are ordered by Page Authority, so according to Moz, you should
get the most important ones first.
Open Site Explorer is great for beginner to intermediate backlink analysis. Ahrefs
and Majestic SEO are better for more experienced SEOs because they have a
larger and more thorough index of backlinks. Bear in mind, although very useful,
these tools are likely to be a simplified version of what Google sees and uses.
SEO Action Plan
Mini technical SEO audit
• Use https://tools.pingdom.com
• Select test location to be the closest from
your location
SEO Action Plan
Review site & URL errors in Google Search Console
By changing the Inbound Links filter, you get a better idea of how the whole domain is
performing, specifically for backlinks that can pass PageRank.
What to do:
• Setting the Target to “this root domain” ensures backlinks are reported for the
whole domain and not just the URL (e.g. homepage URL) that you enter
• Setting the Link Source to “only external” ensures that you only get backlink
information and filters out internal links
• Setting the Link Type to “only follow” ensures that you’ll only see backlinks that
actually pass PageRank and filter out those that do not
Then, review the incoming link and highlight the top three backlinks that you feel offer the
most value.
When deciding on the best ones, bear in mind the page authority of each but also
consider how relevant the backlinks are to the industry and whether they felt authentic or
not.
Summary
Optimize
• Technical optimization is activities on your site designed • Off-Page Optimization is the process of enhancing
toimprove SEO but are not related to content: awebsite’s search engine rankings through activities outside
• Primarily about crawling and indexing of the website:
• Ranking factors include site speed, SSL and mobile • It’s the important ranking factor category
friendliness • Backlink analysis is a great way of seeing where your
backlinks are coming from
• On-Page Optimization is the process of ensuring yourcontent
is both relevant and provides a great user experience:
• Keyword research and prioritizing ensures you target the
right keywords
• Keyword targeting is about how you best work the
keywords into the content in a natural way
Search Engine Optimization
SEO AGENDA
3. Measuring success
Traffic Sources
Monitor the sources of traffic to your website
KEYWORD RANKINGS
Early signs of SEO progress is seen at a keyword level first because you can see a rise in rankings before any
traffic, conversions or sales are generated.
• SEMRush is the leading tool for competitor keyword research. While SEMRush offers some
functionality for free, the majority, including keyword rankings, requires a subscription.
• SEOmonitor is another premium tool that offers keyword rankings. They also offer the ability to
benchmark how well you are doing against competitors and the tool hooks up to your Google Search
Console account, to help find keywords you may have missed.
• WhatsMySERP is a quick and free way to check your keyword rankings. While it works most of the
time, it can be a little buggy so an alternative free way to check rankings is the SERPs.com rank checker
tool.
• Wincher and Pro Rank Checker are both low cost but good quality and dedicated keyword ranking
checking tools.
There are a number of paid keyword ranking tools, many of which are part of a bigger SEO tool package. If you
are looking for a dedicated keyword ranking tool and not paying for extra features, Wincher provides a good
value option.
Lets say, you research 10 pages and average 6 keywords per page. That’s 60 keywords that you are targeting and
you will need a way of tracking their performance over time.
Types of SEO Metrics
Organic traffic
Organic Search =
SEO or Organic
Traffic
Organic traffic: is best measured in a web analytics tool like Google
Analytics.
Organic traffic indicates that a visitor has come from SEO, so it’s a
good high-level way of reviewing progress.
You can monitor organic traffic for the whole of a website, a
section of it or for specific URLs.
Monitoring your SEO traffic is straightforward in Google Analytics.
You can do this by:
• Accessing Channels from the Acquisition menu and then
viewing Organic Search, or
• By using the built-in Organic Search custom Google
Analytics Segment
Like many of the other metrics you might like to keep a close eye
on it on a monthly basis and perhaps even compare it Year-on-Year
(from date picker) to get an idea of seasonality.
Types of SEO Metrics
Conversions & sales
“Organic Traffic”
segment selected
Conversion
overview
selected Compare Organic
Traffic (orange)
with all traffic
(blue)
It is possible to have good keyword rankings and traffic but low or no
conversions/goals/sales. This may indicate that the keyword research and SEO strategy
was wrong.
Conversions and sales metrics are often considered the most important SEO success
metrics as they tend to be the most closely aligned to the business goals.
In Google Analytics, a conversion can be measured through Goals. This can include lead
generation e.g. newsletter sign ups, PDF downloads, brochure requests etc.)
Tracking sales or conversions in Google Analytics usually requires a bit of extra
customization your end but it’s really worth it as you can see how well SEO is performing
as a whole compared to other traffic sources and its also more granular, such as by seeing
what landing pages are organically having the biggest impact on your bottom line.
Once setup, monitoring your conversions and sales is straightforward in Google Analytics.
You can do this by accessing the conversions menu and by selecting the ”organic traffic”
segment.
Types of SEO Metrics
Referral traffic
Top Referrer
Referral traffic is an important metric for SEO. It’s a good sign
that you are getting the right type of backlinks as people are
clicking from them to your website.
Tracking referrals is straightforward in Google Analytics. You
can do this by accessing the acquisition menu. If your link
building has resulted in relevant backlinks, you should notice
that your referral traffic improves over time.
Types of SEO Metrics
Link building KPIs
Enter your
website
Take note
of the total
root
domains
Open Site Explorer is part of the Moz SEO toolset. It’s specifically for link analysis. To get the best out of it, try
the following:
• Enter the homepage of a website you would like to research to see how many and what backlinks it has
acquired. This could be for your own website or a competitor’s e.g. https://www.evo.com
• In the Page Link Metrics, review the number of Root Domains and Total Links. The Total Links are all
backlinks to the domain you are researching which may include one or many backlinks from the same
domain. The Root Domains count is for unique domains only. Often the Root Domain count is a better
metric for backlink volume as it’s possible to get hundreds of backlinks from the same domain which
would be included in the Total Links and skew the numbers.
• Consider changing the following Inbound Links options:
• Set Target to “the root domain”. This shows links to the whole domain and not just the
URL you entered.
• Set Link Source to “external”. This will exclude internal links and only show external
links/backlinks.
• Set Link Type to “only follow”. This will only show backlinks that pass SEO value.
• Review the backlinks that are shown for the domain. Note they are sorted by PA (Page Authority), so
according to Moz, you should see the most authoritative ones first.
Measuring Success
How to use metrics to measure performance
What SEO metrics to measure will vary from business to business and the most
typical are:
• Monitoring the rankings of a targeted list of keywords. E.g. 60 keywords for
the top 10 URLs (6 keyword / URL)
• Monitoring organic monthly traffic and often from comparing to the previous
month and previous year
• Monitoring total number of monthly sales and/or conversions e.g.:
• Contact form submissions
• White paper download
• Newsletter sign-up
• Number of external links
• Total number of root link domains
• Total number of backlinks
Measuring Success
What to do when SEO performance falters
• Does Google Search • Have you followed • Does your site lack
Console report URL best practice in domain authority?
errors? optimizing keywords • Do your key landing
• Are your key landing into key landing pages lack page
pages indexed? pages? authority?
• Have you avoided • Does your site lack
keyword stuffing? backlinks?
If you find your SEO efforts are not paying off in the way you would like or have expected, here
is a few key questions for each of your SEO activities:
Technical Optimization
• Does Google Search Console report URL errors?
• Especially look out for URL errors reported for important web pages. If there are
errors, understand why those errors are happening. You may need to improve the
reliability of your web hosting and/or redirect URLs that have been changed.
• Are your key landing pages indexed?
• Remember you can use the cache command in Google (e.g. cache:www.url-you-
wish-to-check.com) to check if a URL has been indexed. Check that all you important
web pages are indexed.
• If some are not they may be lacking links (either internal and/or external).
Check that you are linking to all your important pages effectively internally. If
your website is new, you may need to build up some backlinks to it before
search engines decide your content is worthy for indexing.
On-Page Optimization
• Have you followed best practice in optimizing keywords into key landing pages?
• Re-look at the Keyword Research and On-Page Optimization section of this course.
Are you targeting the right keywords and working them effectively into key
elements of the page? e.g. working keywords into Title Tags, Headings and the Main
Copy.
• Have you avoided keyword stuffing?
• If search engines feel you are trying to cram in too many keywords and it negatively
affects the readability of your content, you may be losing relevancy marks and
rankings.
Off-Page Optimization
In order to target competitive keywords, your website needs to have comparable off-page
optimization metrics when compared to competitors.
• Does your site lack domain authority?
• Does your key landing pages lack page authority?
• Does your site lack backlinks?
Review the top 5 landing pages you would like to rank and have optimized. Note the main (P1)
keyword you are targeting for each. Separately type each keyword into Google and review the
top three competitors. How do you compare in Open Site Explorer for Domain Authority, Page
Authority and number of Backlinks? If you’re metrics are noticeably lower, you will need to build
backlinks to boost your reputation and ranking power. You may also consider targeting less
competitive keywords.
Summary
Measure Performance
• After completing on-page optimization, monitor the • Where relevant, setup conversions and sales traffic in
targeted keywords on a regular basis. You can do this Google Analytics. If you are selling things online, take this
using cloud-based tools like Wincher or Open Site a step further and set up goals to track e-commerce also.
Explorer.