Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical for everyone and anyone that has a website. An SEO-ready site is much more likely to outrank competitors in search engines, and search engines still dictate at least 50% of online traffic.
In last week’s #SEMrushchat, we discussed all the different elements that make a solid SEO strategy. We were joined by Sam McRoberts, the CEO of SEO agency VUDU Marketing. Sam had incredible advice about how to build an SEO strategy from the ground up, and our other chat participants had a lot of excellent wisdom to share as well.
Ready to get your SEO strategy in good shape? Let’s get started!
Q1. What would be the first SEO tactic that you would implement on your or your client’s website in 2018?
A1a. I'd probably do an audit first ;) But really it depends on whether it’s a new site being built, or an established site. The same foundational rules apply to both, but they have different priorities. #SEMrushChat
— Sam McRoberts (@Sams_Antics) February 21, 2018
A1. Always start with an audit - that way you can find the pain points and start in the right place. #SEMrushchat
— Reva Minkoff (@revaminkoff) February 21, 2018
It is important to note that a site audit isn’t a one-and-done step in your SEO arsenal. Regular audits are crucial to evaluate your SEO efforts moving forward, and you can’t afford to skip them.
A1) SEO is about incremental marginal gains ongoing. Far too many do a one off audit and then go off and create a ton of 'meh' content hoping to win. That's a mistake... Strong foundations matter #semrushchat https://t.co/0oZtfTpeEK
— Dawn Anderson (@dawnieando) February 21, 2018
For new and old sites alike, you will want to start with “foundational” SEO. This means getting the basics of your site up to standard with things like keyword optimization, meta descriptions, site architecture, on-page optimization, linking to reputable sites, etc. It is hard to be successful, after all, without the basics in place; there is no point trying to build a house on a broken-down foundation.
A1: As always, optimising page titles and Meta "Description" data (based on the outcome of keyword insights). Been the same since I started 12yrs ago. :) #semrushchat
— Neil Yeomans (@neil_yeomans) February 21, 2018
A1: Totally depends on the client, of course. What company, what customer, what budget, what resources, what...? #semrushchat
— Kevin_Indig (@Kevin_Indig) February 21, 2018
A1: Everything that falls into the "foundational" bucket. Hard to be successful without the basics in place. #semrushchat https://t.co/IiQxhavcmP
— Matt "Link Gravy" Lacuesta (@MattLacuesta) February 21, 2018
Part of that foundation will also mean building your site’s structure like you would a foundation of the house. You want to utilize consistent URL structures, structured data, and strong canonicals. If your site is already built and your audit reveals problems in any of these key areas, fix them fast.
A1 I Often start most SEO campaigns with an in-depth site audit, looking to things such as spider traps, badly implemented canonicals, inconsistent URL structures; to build a good foundation to grow upon. #semrushchat
— Bill Slawski ⚓ (@bill_slawski) February 21, 2018
A1) Creating a page for each product/service and optimizing it using competitive keywords. #semrushchat
— Ryan Johnson (@rsj8000) February 21, 2018
Keyword optimization is also an important part of SEO, so taking the time to do thorough research about the keywords your audience is searching for will do you a lot of favors. Go ahead and create a page for each product or service that you offer, optimizing each page with competitive keywords. Once you do this, you can start looking for long-tail keywords indicating questions users are asking, and provide answers through keyword-optimized FAQs or content marketing. While the technical stuff matters to Google, after all, SEO is also about optimizing for human behavior in the long run, too.
a1 That would truly depend on the website itself. But if I had to pick one thing it would be setting up a content marketing strategy. #semrushchat
— Debi Norton (@BRAVOMedia1) February 21, 2018
A1: in the background of these technical audits I always try to keep in mind that I'm optimizing for human behavior & experience first - then fit tech reccs into that framework #semrushchat
— JP Sherman (@jpsherman) February 21, 2018
A1: Firstly, do an audit of their site, secondly work on some key words, see if they have blogs etc #semrushchat
— Presbee (@PresbeeDesign) February 21, 2018
A1: Assuming all other ducks are in a row, I'd work on creating content for user intent (and where those users are in the funnel), and making sure technical speedy & mobile-friendly. #semrushchat pic.twitter.com/oxhbf1wSkK
— Carolyn Lyden (@Carolyn_Lyden) February 21, 2018
Q2. How can SEOs simplify the process of fixing mistakes?
It is never fun to find mistakes that need to be fixed, especially when they can be as complicated as those related to SEO. That being said, there are several excellent ways that an SEO can simplify the process of fixing mistakes, saving themselves a major headache in the long run.
Having the right tools on hand is an important place to start. SEMrush’s Site Audit tool will go a long way in helping you stay up to date about what problems need fixing. This way, you can address problems early on, instead of six months after they have been damaging your SERP rankings.
It is also significantly easier to fix small problems over time as they appear, instead of trying to address a laundry list of mistakes in enormous chunks. Because of this, expert Sam McRoberts recommends having daily, weekly, and monthly checklists of tasks to accomplish.
A2a. It’s a lot easier to fix little things constantly over time, vs. all at once in overwhelming chunks. I recommend having daily, weekly and monthly checklists of tasks for monitoring and improving. #SEMrushChat
— Sam McRoberts (@Sams_Antics) February 21, 2018
A2: I think SEOs should share their knowledge to help fix mistakes faster. The more they explain the reasons, the less likely the client will be to repeat mistakes. #SEMrushchat
— Narmadhaa (@s_narmadhaa) February 21, 2018
A2. Identify what the issues are and use crawling tools to monitor them. Make full use of custom extractions to stay on top of specific issues. #SEMrushchat https://t.co/qZ0haJwzP4
— David Gossage (@dgossage1983) February 21, 2018
On that same note, McRoberts also recommends that all team members in relevant departments are given SEO training. This includes web designers, content marketers, and even social media teams or PR managers. Anyone who is interacting or affecting SEO should have a solid understanding of how it works and why it is so important.
A2c. Making sure that all relevant teams and team members are bought into SEO, trained on its importance, is also super important. Easier to get things done when you don't have to fight for it. #SEMrushChat
— Sam McRoberts (@Sams_Antics) February 21, 2018
A2: when talking to devs I always portray things as:
- here's the list of things we can control
- here's the list of things we can'tlets prioritize the things we can control so we don't force search engines to figure it out themselves #semrushchat
— JP Sherman (@jpsherman) February 21, 2018
A2. Proceduralize and automate!
Solos, teams, agencies, in-house all need to make their processes strong.#SEMrushchat https://t.co/xaUVtOqAll
— 𝓓𝓸𝓾𝓰 𝓡. 𝓣𝓱𝓸𝓶𝓪𝓼, 𝓔𝓼𝓺. (@ferkungamaboobo) February 21, 2018
A2 Make sure you have a point of contact person; communicate problems clearly & provide a chance for discussion & education; help them learn and grow and feel involved and explain the importance of suggestions. #semrushchat
— Bill Slawski ⚓ (@bill_slawski) February 21, 2018
A2) My best pro-tip on this will be to ask for direct contact with the developers and cc the non-tech client in on correspondence. Avoids 'lost in translation' and email lag #SEMrushchat
— Dawn Anderson (@dawnieando) February 21, 2018
How you approach fixing mistakes will also go a long way. You should have a clear solution with a direct cause and effect reasoning behind it. This should involve KPIs and specific tactics that are backed up by data and created based on exact, measurable goals. All of this together will give you solutions that you can track for effectiveness after you implement changes, allowing you to monitor progress and make sure you are on the right track.
A2. A clear cause and effect and proposed solution. #SEMrushchat
— Reva Minkoff (@revaminkoff) February 21, 2018
A2 then I create an action plan - who does what and in what priority order.
It’s no good just telling them their canonicals are wrong - tell them what and how to fix.#SEMRushChat
— Simon Cox (@simoncox) February 21, 2018
A2: Also want to add that you should be mindful of stakeholders, and how they may feel about "mistakes". 😬 Diplomacy and strong communication is key. Use hard numbers, stick to goals, and have a strategy. #semrushchat
— Paul Shapiro (@fighto) February 21, 2018
At the end of the day, writing for customers and not just for search engines can actually work to your benefit. If someone is determined to find an answer to a question and your site has a solution, you will already be pulling ahead of the competition.
Q3. Which metrics should an SEO focus on when measuring the quality of organic traffic?
Measuring your strategy’s performance will help you assess its effectiveness and progress, giving you the information you need about how to continue to move forward. To do this, you need to be measuring the right things and knowing which metrics to watch will make a world of difference.
When measuring the quality of the organic traffic your SEO is bringing in, bounce rate will almost always be one of the metrics. If your bounce rates are high and the time spent on your pages is low, your content isn’t being consumed. This could either be an indication that you are not meeting your audience’s needs or you’re not attracting the right audience. Similarly, if users are visiting other pages, it shows that the content was engaging and relevant enough to keep them moving.
A3: There are difft types of metrics & this can vary by client type, but consistent metrics are those related to user behavior. Bounce rate, % exit, conversion rate -- all things that tell you how well content is performing or how engaging & relevant it is to users. #SEMRushchat
— Ashley P. (@ashpeterson14) February 21, 2018
#semrushchat A3 obvious one, but the split between brand and non-brand. Clients are gernerally looking for incremental traffic increases. Not looking at traffic in isolation - i.e look at conversion, high performing content, bounce - see the whole picture.
— Michael Friend (@mikoolfriend) February 21, 2018
A3: Quantitive metrics. Conversion Rates, Bounce Rates etc #semrushchat pic.twitter.com/5AThPQLJf5
— iPages CMS (@iPagesCMS) February 21, 2018
There are several other metrics that gauge audience interest, which include social shares, on-site engagement, number of impressions, and your percentage of returning users.
A3. CTR
Avg. Position from GSC
Page load speed
Avg session duration
Bounce rate
The CTAs in meta description#SEMrushchat https://t.co/Z3jvDxS6US— Parth Suba (@parthsuba77) February 21, 2018
A3) Micro and macro goal completions (leads, downloads, views of key pages, sales), rankings (yes, they still matter), impressions (how often is this page being returned in relevant results) #SEMrushchat
— Dawn Anderson (@dawnieando) February 21, 2018
A3. I think they should focus on the search engine referral traffic because it is more reliable for them to see the truth of your success with your business #semrushchat
— Cheval John (@chevd80) February 21, 2018
Taking a look at your overall clicks and CTR rates will give you insight into how engaging your audience finds your content. Evaluate how these metrics are holding up against your conversions, which can include email sign-ups, leads reaching out to book an appointment or direct sales. Conversions, after all, are always the end goal of any marketing campaign, and it is important to try to tie your SEO efforts directly to revenue.
A3a. Revenue! If possible, always work to tie SEO efforts directly to revenue. Sales, ad revenue, affiliate revenue...most sites need to make money :) #SEMrushChat
— Sam McRoberts (@Sams_Antics) February 21, 2018
A3 (1) Quantity of organic traffic, (2) leads (3) revenue #SEMrushchat #SEO #marketing
— Louis Gudema (@LouisGudema) February 21, 2018
A3) Revenue. Revenue. Revenue.
Goals for the steps that get to revenue eg traffic, conversions, conversion rates, sign-up rates, page performance, form performance etc etc#semrushchat
— David Rosam (@davidrosam) February 21, 2018
A3: also consider the customer journey: different phases have different goals & hence different metrics to define succes. Targeting customers early in their journey is not about revenue while succesful transactional queries are really driven by revenue based metrics #semrushchat
— Jan-Willem Bobbink (@jbobbink) February 21, 2018
Q4. What must-have tools (apart from Google Analytics) should SEOs use to accumulate data?
Google Analytics is a given when you want to gather data on your SEO efforts, but it is not the only tool that businesses and SEOs should be using. Our chat participants shared some of their favorite must-have tools that we should be using to collect data on our current SEO efforts, here is what they suggested:
- SEMrush’s site audit tool, which gives you a detailed look at what’s working and what’s not. It can even help you prioritize which issues you need to address first. You can even organize this data into an Excel doc that can be easily shared with your team.
A4a. That’s a broad question! At the very least I’d say Google Search Console, Excel/Sheets, Screaming Frog, BuzzSumo, BuiltWith, SEMRush, and Moz or Ahrefs or Majestic. #SEMrushChat
— Sam McRoberts (@Sams_Antics) February 21, 2018
A4b. You could also go for URL Profiler, Pingdom Tools, GTmetrix, Deep Crawl, Sitebulb...so many options! #SEMrushChat
— Sam McRoberts (@Sams_Antics) February 21, 2018
A4:
1. @SEMRush
2. @Ahrefs
3. @screamingfrog (a must)
4. @klipfolio
5. @DeepCrawl #SEMrushchat https://t.co/DmphJDJEXQ— Dean Brady (@deanbrady) February 21, 2018
A4) I'm a big fan of SEMRush of course (use it multiple times a day). Same with GSC. Screaming frog. Sitebulb has impressed me. Deepcrawl. Love Sistrix. #semrushchat
— Dawn Anderson (@dawnieando) February 21, 2018
- SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool for keyword data and keyword suggestions.
- Deep Crawl can help you understand your site’s architecture and look for errors that need to be addressed.
- Screaming Frog
- GTmetrix, which can give you information on site optimization and performance.
A4: @DeepCrawl is arguably the best tool for technical optimisation. If you run regular crawls, you can delve into the granular changes and improvements compared to the previous crawl #semrushchat
— Evolved Digital (@evolved_digital) February 21, 2018
a4) Also, run site speed tests on Pingdom or YSlow. A slow site can kill those rankings real fast #semrushchat
— Ryan Johnson (@rsj8000) February 21, 2018
- Majestic and URL Profiler can help you track and analyze backlinks, allowing you to evaluate your link building efforts.
A4: I put together a list of SEO tools that I use on a regular basis #SEMrushchat
(sorry I am late to the party) pic.twitter.com/6iM4BD9kVm
— Andy Drinkwater (@iqseo) February 21, 2018
- Ubersuggest for keyword research.
- Buzzsumo can also show you what content for any given term or keyword is getting the most traction online, which is valuable data you can use to your advantage.
#SEMRushChat a4 its a toolbox - picking the right tool for the job / client or creating something custom for a certain workflow- we tend to experiment with all common tools (obvs we love u @semrush)
— Michael Friend (@mikoolfriend) February 21, 2018
- Google’s Search Console, Quora, and Answer the Public are all fantastic forums that can give you an idea of what users are looking for, which is an essential part of SEO research.
A4. Google Search Console (consider the new dashboard too!)
SERP Index data
Backlink data from majestic fresh index #SEMrushchat https://t.co/kkUjS6f0wZ— Parth Suba (@parthsuba77) February 21, 2018
A4: I am a huge advocate of Google's #DataStudio. It is a free data visualization tool that pulls from multiple sources - Google or not - and can bring all your SEO and digital marketing data together to tell a story! #semrushchat
— Ashley P. (@ashpeterson14) February 21, 2018
Q5. When it comes to technical SEO, which data should marketers measure and analyze regularly? What can they skip?
Throughout the chat, it was clear that our experts and chat participants all agreed that regular monitoring and evaluating was an essential part of building a strong SEO strategy. When it comes to the technical side of SEO, we wanted to know which data marketers felt had to be measured regularly.
Mobile responsiveness was one of the first things chat participants mentioned. With 52% of website traffic coming through mobile phones in 2018, there is no getting around the fact that mobile-ready sites are a necessity. Your sites should be fully responsive, with a mobile version of the site design available if necessary to improve usability. If you see that mobile users are leaving your site quickly, but desktop users aren’t, make sure the mobile version of your site is up to par.
A5: Good question !
- Crawl and log errors
- Mobile compatibility
- Site Speed evolution (First contentful, first interactive) on Mobile and Desktop
- https://t.co/bnoRKAw8yU coverage and impact
- I18n and hreflang
And many other things ! #semrushchat— Aymen Loukil (@LoukilAymen) February 21, 2018
On a similar note, you can’t afford to have a slow site loading speed. Slow speeds will directly impact your SEO score, and they can cause you to lose the traffic that did manage to find you despite that. Track your site loading speeds frequently.
A5) Speed - I find so many sites are still unoptimised from that POV and on cheap, bad performance hosting.
Mobile UX, spiderability (watch crawl errors, list of pages crawled), redirects and canonicals, sitemaps, broken links, https set up correctly etc etc#semrushchat
— David Rosam (@davidrosam) February 21, 2018
A5) So... always be monitoring for things like speed, of course, but if the page content does not meet informational need speed will not make the difference. It will still be irrelevant Review content meets needs and then speed #semrushchat
— Dawn Anderson (@dawnieando) February 21, 2018
A5 it's all about site speed #semrushchat pic.twitter.com/xPhq2AI0GA
— Kabo Creative (@kabocreative) February 21, 2018
A5. The speed of the website should be a major priority for SEO professionals #semrushchat
— Cheval John (@chevd80) February 21, 2018
Crawl budgets— which tell you how often Google’s bots are crawling your site, will be crucial, especially for larger sites. Your crawl budget will tell you how many pages on your site Google will crawl on any given day. If they are crawling your site too much, you could see a hit on site loading speed. If they don’t crawl enough, they could be missing site updates. Watch this carefully.
A5a. For larger sites especially, crawl budget is going to be huge, so I’d keep a close eye on log files and search console data related to crawl depth and frequency, and run your own crawls regularly. #SEMrushChat
— Sam McRoberts (@Sams_Antics) February 21, 2018
A5. Check indexing, crawling, directives, server errors, redirect chains, soft 404s. Sitemaps and Fetch/Render in GSC. But don't worry too much about the countless 404s that get listed in GSC! #semrushchat
— Levi Bloom (@levi_bloom) February 21, 2018
A5. Watch and monitor crawl errors. Minimize/ eliminate 404s. #semrushchat
— Reva Minkoff (@revaminkoff) February 21, 2018
You also want to keep a close eye on signs of structural fractures in your SEO. Take a close look at your canonical tags, and make sure that there are no broken links or redirects happening.
A5
1. Redirects
2. Canonical tags #semrushchat— Krishna Rg (@krishnarg22) February 21, 2018
a5) Speed, indexing/404s/sitemap errors, site architecture: is structure easy to follow? Do you have a page for each service? #semrushchat
— Ryan Johnson (@rsj8000) February 21, 2018
You also want to regularly check to make sure that your content is being properly rendered and understood by bots. Great SERPs don’t make much of a difference if the bots are rendering your content all wrong. To check on this, you can use Google’s Fetch and Render tool.
As for skipping metrics? That is a little more tricky. This will vary by site, audience, and industry, along with the business’s specific goals. Most metrics will give you at least some insight into how your SEO is performing; there aren’t as many vanity metrics with SEO as there are on other platforms like PPC or social advertising. It is better to be safe than sorry, and focus on the metrics that matter most, but also, don't ignore anything just because it is not center stage.
A5d. As for skipping, that’s going to vary by site and industry. I’m always hesitant to make blanket statements like “you can safely ignore this”, because there are exceptions to everything in SEO :) #SEMrushChat
— Sam McRoberts (@Sams_Antics) February 21, 2018
That is all for today! Make sure you join us this week as we discuss "How to Create a Killer PPC Campaign in 2018" with special guest, Kirk Williams!
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