Four Advanced Strategies to Move the Needle on Your SEO (Webinar with SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin)
Four Methods to Accelerate Your SEO
- Increase rankings on individual results
- Earn rankings in alternative results types
- Improve visibility in the long tail
- Better convert existing search traffic
1. Strategies to Boost Individual Results
Competitive Analysis Process
Step 1: Determine weak vs. strong metrics
- Determine value vs. difficulty (Low difficulty + good search volume + high conversion rate = WIN) (How difficult is your keyword?)
- Paid search is a great way to test the value of a keyword
Step 2: Establish Analysis Process
- More root domains linking to the page
- Possibly more subtelty in anchor text
- Possibly higher value/relevance in links
Linkbait Ideas:
- Exact match domains (be careful here, and only use what makes sense)
- Widgets and badges (Example: picnik.com)
- Embeddable infographics (Example: this infographic)
- Content & technology licensing (Example: allrecipes.com)
- Link attraction targets with regular updates (Example: SEOmoz’s SE Ranking Factors – SEOmoz updates the same page with their biannual article, adding to the link juice collected from previous articles)
2. Earn Rankings in Alternative Results
Video Results & YouTube
- Huge opportunities for video by creating a keyword rich title, keyword rich URL, and good screenshot
- Title your blogpost containing your video something different than your YouTube video title – that way you’re not competing with your own video
- YouTube is the 2nd most popular search engine = huge opportunity
- Possible YouTube Ranking Factors
- Title/description
- Video length
- Number of comments
- Propencity for people to view video all the way through
- History of account uploading video
Local & Maps Results Tips
- David Mihm just updated his Local Ranking Factors article
- Make sure your Google Maps result name matches your name, phone number, and address exactly
- Google will remove suspicious looking reviews, so gather them organically
Image Results Tips
- Not necessarily associated with traditional ranking factors
- For certain industries, image search can be among the highest converting traffic (but watch for first click attribution)
- Possible Google Image Search Ranking Factors:
- Size – image has to be at least a certain size and below a certain size
- Relevancy – Google’s doing a great job matching relevancy for images
News Results Tips
- Start by getting site submitted to Google News results, you can do that here
- Rand thinks Google incorporates Real Time Search into News Results
- Including an associated thumbnail image will increase click through rates
Real Time Results Tips
- Real time results don’t get a great click through rate
- HOWEVER, posts and links that get Tweeted a lot will do better for real time results and where real time results are used
Blog Results Tips
- If you have a blog and it has an RSS feed, you can appear in Google Blog Results
- Continue creating keyword rich titles to do well hear
Shopping Results Tips
- It appears a certain quantity – or a certain level of competition for products – must happen before shopping results are displayed
- Read this post to learn more about ranking well for Shopping results: How to Rank Well in Google Products Search & a Big List of Places to Get Reviews
3. Improve visibility in the long tail
25% of queries searched on Google each month are entirely unique and have never previously been searched for in the engine’s 10+year history. -Udi Manber, Head of Search, Google
- How the long tail works
- The long tail is much less competitive
- It’s difficult to compete here, because you can’t (really) do keyword research for it
- You’ve got to create high quantities of unique content (forums and Q&A sites are great ways to combat this)
- Is Blogging a Long Tail Strategy? Not necessarily. (Examples of great long tail strategies: NY Times, Wikipedia, IMDB)
Long Tail Strategies:
- Paid content writers
- Tweets and social updates as content
- User-generated Content (UGC), Examples: Webmaster World, Yahoo! Answers, HowStuffWorks, Answers.com, Reddit, Ezine articles, Etsy, SlickDeals
4. Better Convert Existing Search Traffic
Conversion Rate Optimization Funnel
- Visits to your website (100,000)
- Visits to landing page (25,000)
- Add to cart (500)
- Complete checkout (250)
- Customer lifetime value ($850)
Rand’s review of “Influence: Science & Persuasion”: An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Influence & Persuasion
Conversion rate strategies:
- Anchoring with pricing (Ordering highest price to lowest price, left to right)
- Pre-selected options (most popular, pre-selected, etc)
- Social proof (positive review with picture of person)
- Scarcity (Example: airlines proclaim “2 seats remaining!”)
- Reciprocity (Share with a friend and get more, example: Dropbox)
Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz, @randfish
Tags: #mozinar, Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz