Product-Led SEO

  • Author: Eli Schwartz
  • Full Title: Product-Led SEO
  • Tags: #Inbox #books

Highlights

  • Product-Led SEO builds a great product for users first and optimizes for search second. (Location 149)
  • focusing on the searcher experience rather than the algorithm will be relevant until search engines cease to exist. (Location 154)

Chapter One 1. The Basics of SEO and How Search Works

  • The primary goal of a search engine is and always was to benefit the user in their quest for answers. As search engine technology improves, the presentation of those answers will improve to the point where search engines may not even need to recommend any website links in response to a user’s query. (Location 178)
  • The strategic approach that I found to be most effective is Product-Led SEO. This approach reverses the traditional funnel of SEO efforts that focus on the search engine and instead focuses on the user, with the search engine acting as the medium where the product will be discovered. (Location 182)
  • The collective value of all organic traffic in the world is more than a trillion dollars. (Location 250)
  • A new innovation, update, or development in this field could also mean keyword research is no longer as useful as it once was—and that keywords are going to continue to become even more individualized. A tool that organizes keywords by topic and intent will be far more useful. (Location 306)
  • The Three Most Important Google Algorithms (Location 322)
  • On multiple occasions, Google has said there are three primary algorithms that feed its rankings, each of which serves a different purpose. (Location 323)
    1. Discovery (Location 324)
  • Discovery is the algorithm that crawls the web to identify new pages and sites that Google has not previously indexed. (Location 325)
    1. Crawling The crawling algorithm is designed to crawl and understand the entire web. (Location 330)
    1. Indexing The indexing algorithm determines how to cache a webpage and what database tags should be used to categorize it. (Location 337)
    1. Finally, the Ranking Algorithm Ranking uses the information from the first three algorithms to apply a ranking methodology to every page. (Location 346)
  • A successful SEO effort will include strategies that address all the Google algorithm and ranking-score factors. We must ensure all content is discoverable, crawlable, and indexable, and the content provides an excellent user experience. Focusing efforts on technical SEO, on-page factors, or user-experience optimization alone cannot give us ideal SEO results. We must have all three. (Location 376)
  • Nevertheless, the basics will only help you with the tactical aspects of SEO. To be truly successful, the tactics need to be wrapped in a strategy to reach a specific and predefined goal. (Location 504)

Chapter Two 2. What Is Product-Led SEO?

  • The real magic was on the non-branded search, which is where all SEO efforts should always be focused. Branded search will only grow as fast as a brand grows (a function of PR and user growth), while non-branded can have infinite potential. Prior (Location 536)
  • Then, the magic of compounding SEO traffic began to kick in in a huge way. SEO compounds as more pages are discovered by Google and additional queries earn visibility in Google’s search results. Just like compounding in an investment account, the visits get added to the base, and the growth happens on top of the principal. (Location 542)
  • It should be noted that keyword research wouldn’t have led us to this result. Some of the top queries driving clicks and impressions today, according to the popular keyword tools, supposedly should not have any search volume. (Location 548)
  • Instead of using SEO to market the product (when I refer to product, I am discussing the offering to the user, whether that is a service, subscription, content, or physical widget), the product should become the SEO driver. Many of the most successful websites on the internet have achieved organic dominance through this product-led approach. (Location 584)
  • Breaking down these proposals, you come to a sudden realization: you are not sure this proposal will lead to actual growth. The audit and competitive research will tell you exactly what you already know. The audit will tell you areas of the website that need to be improved, and the competitive research will tell you that the competition is far ahead. (Location 607)
  • In many cases, after an investment of tens of thousands of dollars, they have a library of content that may or not be working for them; however, in all cases, it is not defensible against competition. (Location 614)
  • Your conventional SEO plan offers three underwhelming options. (Location 616)
  • First, there is the conventional keyword-optimization option. (Location 617)
  • Next, you might consider a local strategy. Pivoting away from these high-value terms into local would make sense for how people currently search for medical needs, but now you would be faced with competition from doctors in every single village, town, and city. To achieve dominance with this effort, you would be fighting a war with 400 fronts. (Location 622)
  • There is one final option available to you in your health vertical, and that is to focus on conditions and illnesses. Again, like the other options, there is fierce competition, but this time, it is global. (Location 626)
  • Let’s approach the same problem from the direction of a Product-Led SEO strategy. Rather than have SEO efforts be your marketing channel for the product, which is telehealth medicine, you are going to make the product itself be the SEO channel. This sounds like a lofty idea, but as we delve into the possibilities, it will become quite eye opening. (Location 633)
  • The goal is not to generate traffic for traffic’s sake but to generate engaged users who will eventually become paying users of the product. (Location 636)
  • Unlike a keyword-research-driven SEO effort, a Product-Led SEO strategy needs to have a product-market fit. (Location 642)
  • The best way to get to product-market fit is to learn from users and really understand what they want. Even better would be to take this user empathy and build for personas that will be the most profitable for the business. (Location 643)
  • Rather than create content and an SEO product designed to convince users to seek telehealth, let’s instead build content and a product that appeals to those looking to avoid medical visits. (Location 664)
  • This product could be a library of all the weirdest, most embarrassing conditions. The goal of the product would be to reassure people their problem is not that strange. They will be okay. Inevitably, there will be some people who should see a doctor, and some of your articles should recommend that. The recommendation becomes more reliable when it is not the outcome of every page but, rather, is targeted to only specific conditions that truly need a doctor. (Location 666)
  • Let’s look at some of the key aspects of this hypothetical product that we might develop and why it would be advantageous for SEO purposes. First off, this is a product designed to help all users who arrive from search. In other words, they do not need to be a paying telehealth patient. The product is monetized by those who choose to become a patient, but it is not a requirement. Second, the product is aimed at completeness—referencing all embarrassing conditions within a set category (e.g., skin conditions) and not just those with high search volume. Third, your company will choose to build this product because it does not yet exist in this form on any other website. Furthermore, you know there is demand for this product because your user research conveyed this finding to you. Fourth, and most importantly, there is a direct revenue tie-in to the core business. The content will appeal to a persona of users who you have either proven or have a strong belief will buy your product. (Location 671)
  • Zooming in on this product, there are many aspects that make it an ideal Product-Led SEO strategy. It is programmatic and scalable, creates something new, and addresses untapped search demand. Additionally, and most importantly, there is a direct path to a paying telehealth user. Users can access the data without being a current customer, but the cost differential between telehealth (when appropriate) versus in-person will lead some users down a discovery journey that ends with a conversion. (Location 697)
  • During this process, it will be quite obvious that the build process will be lengthy and expensive, but you should take solace in the fact that it will be even more expensive for anyone to copy you. You are building a figurative moat around your product-and-acquisition strategy. (Location 708)
  • This very same mechanism can and should work for SEO. Build an experience that is useful for users first, and the search engines will follow. As we discussed previously, search engines use AI to mimic humans, and a great human experience is rewarded by search algorithms. (Location 747)
  • It is my opinion that there can be a Product-Led SEO angle in every vertical and niche. However, pulling off that work successfully will likely require monumental work by Engineering teams to build a product that will eventually become an SEO juggernaut. (Location 759)
  • The world is awash in rambling audio, shaky video, and the worst travesty of all: poorly written long-form content written for SEO. (Location 787)
  • In SEO, there will always be two distinct audiences: the search engine and the user. Search engines need words—even ones that don’t make sense to the user—but they can only reward you with high positions on Google. It is the users who need sensible products (in any fashion), and they are the ones who initiate the transactions that lead to business success. Product-Led SEO requires you to think of the user first and the search engine second. A user focus requires a human touch and is not something that can be machine or software driven. (Location 834)

Chapter Three 3. SEO Is a Job for Humans

  • After turning over every possible stone, I came up with the only logical conclusion: when it came to the plural versions of those queries, Google had determined a user’s intent in searching them was to find a place to take a survey rather than to create a survey. While this problem had been isolated to the UK only, I felt the problem would eventually migrate to the US, too, and cause an impact on traffic everywhere. (Location 848)
  • (Note: SurveyMonkey’s position on these keywords has since improved, but the majority of the results on these keywords are still survey-taking websites. This means Google has adjusted the way it views the intent here, reflecting the possibility a user searching either of these terms could want to take OR create a survey.) (Location 853)
  • There may one day be areas where AI will supplant humans and be able to do a job beginning to end without human intervention. But anything in the realm of Product and marketing must have human input. (Location 861)
  • A robot can certainly build a perfect set of blueprints to spec—but it can’t translate desire into a plan. (Location 873)
  • At best, software can mimic what others seem to be doing well, but humans can have creative ideas on how to get ahead. (Location 877)
  • If all SEO could be distilled down into doing keyword research and structuring web pages, perhaps SEO might one day be able to be done entirely by software. However, successful SEO is so much more than those basics. Good, strategic SEO includes knowing how to architect a website into folders and files, the types of content to create, and the personas of the potential users (we will touch on this later); learning from performance to optimize for growth; and, most of all, building a product that resonates with real users. (Location 886)
  • I was once talking to an entrepreneur about accelerating the SEO performance on his site, and I suggested he might want to get an SEO site audit to understand what is presently working and where there might be issues. He immediately rejected that idea, saying, “We already have Moz, so we are good.” The fact that he didn’t get the distinction between a tool and an audit made me realize a lot of people probably are equally unaware. (Location 900)
  • No one should rely on WebMD for a diagnosis. Similarly, when a website is experiencing an organic issue, the last thing anyone should do is rely on a status report from a tool. This is the time to have an experienced professional have a look at the site and conduct an audit to find out what’s ailing it. (Location 910)

What Does a Website Audit Look For?

  • The concept of an SEO audit has been somewhat abused in an SEO industry that has shady websites offering quickie audits for $100. An audit was never meant to be just a checklist to put on a wall poster. An audit should be a careful look at your entire SEO effort from an experienced practitioner. It is a very human task. (Location 915)
  • An audit, especially for a site that has never engaged in any SEO efforts, is meant to be a deep look into areas where SEO can be improved. For sites that are experiencing an SEO change, good or bad, an audit is an opportunity to dig into the drivers of that change. (Location 922)
  • As we’ve said, each audit will ultimately diverge as the auditor follows the site’s architecture. However, every audit will include at least a look at these high-level areas. (Location 926)
  • Penalty analysis—Are there any unexplained drop-offs in metrics that align with either Google manual actions… (Location 928)
  • URL structure—Do URLs have a nice, clean structure to make it clear to both users and search engines what… (Location 929)
  • Duplicate content and canonical usage—Duplicate-content issues cause Google to have to make a… (Location 932)
  • Internal links—Are internal links in good working order for proper crawling and indexation? (In many respects, internal links can be more important than… (Location 935)
  • Backlinks—Which sites link to our site, and are they helping or hurting us? For a big site, understanding the mix of… (Location 937)
  • Indexation—Is the site properly indexed in search? What is holding it back? In my opinion, this is the most… (Location 939)
  • Script usage—Which scripts are being used, and what are the implications? Despite Google’s proclamations to the contrary, using JavaScript is… (Location 940)
  • Keyword usage—What keywords are being used, and what gaps exist? Keywords are the bulwark of any SEO campaign, and mapping them… (Location 943)
  • On-Page SEO—What title tags (titles, descriptions, H1, H2, etc.) are being used? Good title tags are the basis of any effort, and it is always surprising to me how many opportunities… (Location 945)
  • Content quality—What content is being used, and of what quality? SEO is driven by content, but poor… (Location 948)
  • Robots.txt—How effective are the directions to search engines on what pages of the site can be crawled? Overdoing it will lead to important pages without traffic, while… (Location 949)
  • Sitemaps—How effective are the current XML and HTML sitemaps? They are both helpful and necessary for page discovery, and this analysis will point out… (Location 951)
  • Site speed—How fast do pages and the site load? Page and site speeds are factored into the Google algorithm for very slow sites, but even if there’s no algorithmic issue, very slow loads will lead to a… (Location 953)
  • Expired content—Are any content or products being shown to search engines and users who are no longer relevant? How these pages are handled can… (Location 955)
  • Spam—Is there any? Even the most authoritative and secure websites have had issues with spam. While this likely will not lead to a search-performance issue, it… (Location 957)
  • Schema markup—Where are the current markup and the available markup to help us find new opportunities for growth? In a world of voice assistants, schema markup is increasingly more… (Location 959)
  • Mobile versus desktop—How will mobile search experiences interact with the site? Mobile devices often approach search in fundamentally different ways, so there should be no surprise that mobile SEO can be… (Location 961)
  • International—How do all the areas above function in different countries? An international audit can be a standalone audit since, depending on how many countries are… (Location 964)
  • Consulting rates should always be evaluated by whether a person can provide the same output as a full-time employee for similar or less cost. (Location 1011)
  • (Don’t mistake reading blog posts or SEO guides as having the education you will need to make the right SEO decisions. Yes, you should absolutely read and learn as much as possible about SEO, but if SEO is going to be a critical channel for you, don’t rely on just your own knowledge. You wouldn’t code your key product after watching a few YouTube videos. Paid, social, and SEO are of equal importance and should be treated as such.) (Location 1022)
  • Many times, it is too early to invest any effort into SEO that might be put to better use in another function. For example, before a company reaches the point of diminishing returns on their paid-marketing spend, they should be returning at least $2 for every $1 they spend. If funding is pulled from paid marketing to invest in a longer-term SEO initiative, growth of the company could be handicapped. (Location 1040)
  • I always recommend early-stage companies first spend as much as they are comfortable allocating toward paid marketing before they shift to SEO. Paid marketing will help quickly determine product-market fit, identify customer journeys, and, most importantly, generate revenue. Knowledge gained from paid marketing will help SEO maximize its success. (Location 1044)
  • A PR-oriented person is most useful when the challenge faced by a company centers on increasing links to existing content. This person will have strong people skills and communication abilities. (Location 1077)

Chapter Four 4. SEO and Digital Marketing

  • The reason revenue had plateaued was because even though traffic might have been increasing, none of the team’s efforts were directed at anything that might have increased revenue. (Location 1203)

The Primary Success Metric for SEO

  • The primary success metric for SEO is and should always have been the same for every marketing channel: the amount of revenue, leads, visitors, etc., the business needs to be successful. (Location 1221)
  • Some businesses, especially those with long sales pipelines, may have challenges in tracking revenue or any other business metric back to organic-traffic sources. Organic search traffic will be mostly top-of-funnel in these cases. In the case where revenue can’t be measured, the fallback measurement option should be clicks from search engines, but an effort should still be made to determine that the clicks are of value. (Location 1224)
  • Since paid and organic searches are both going after the same user, I recommend strategizing each channel’s core competencies and having each focus on its strengths. This is not a cage match between search channels with one coming out on top to take all the marketing budget. You need both to be successful. (Location 1246)
  • Top of funnel—Since paid obviously has a cost, it needs to generate conversions and cannot afford to be just an awareness channel. SEO can easily be something that generates awareness or introduces potential users to a brand. (Location 1268)
  • Organic can and should focus on traffic that is less competitive and a lot higher in the funnel. For example, organic search is a better fit for long-tail queries that only have a small handful of searches per month. (Location 1273)
  • Organic can also help in the mid-funnel for users who might not yet be ready to click the buy button. They may be willing to take an intermediary step, like joining a webinar or viewing a demo from a sales rep. (Location 1275)
  • Unlike other performance channels, which are designed to go direct to conversion, SEO is a hybrid between branding and performance traffic. Judging SEO purely as a brand channel overlooks the tremendous impact it produces for the bottom line. At the same time, SEO can’t be viewed as merely a performance channel. (Location 1310)

So how should we think about the role of SEO in marketing?

  • SEO Lives High in the Buyer Funnel (Location 1313)
  • By its very nature, SEO will typically live a lot higher in the buyer funnel, and in many cases, users will not have any buying intent whatsoever. (Location 1313)
  • Once the user gets to the bottom of the funnel and has buyer intent, they are more likely to click a paid ad. (Location 1325)

The Three Levels of SEO Performance

  • Impressions are the first level of SEO growth. Each eyeball on a URL in Google search is considered an impression. (Location 1384)
  • A click is when a user clicks a search result and goes through to your website. (Location 1389)
  • Clicks are a factor of impressions as well as click-through rate. As a click-through rate from search improves, the users and clicks will grow without any subsequent change in impressions. (Location 1393)
  • Conversions are the final and most important result of SEO traffic. Conversion is how SEO campaigns should be judged. If clicks are arriving at a website from search but not converting, they will not produce revenue. (Location 1396)
  • Impressions mean a website is on the field, eligible, and ready to play. Clicks are hits and progress toward an ultimate goal, but what really counts is the winning that happens from conversions. (Location 1398)
  • SEO should not be measured on how well Sales teams close the deals created from organic traffic sources. SEO should be measured on how well organic traffic performs once it arrives on the website. Once you’re landing impressions, you should work on clicks, and once you’re creating clicks, you work on conversions. (Location 1404)

Buyer Personas for Keyword Research

  • Personas might be passé, but when it comes to SEO, I recommend that some sort of persona research be the foundation of any good keyword research. Too many people begin the process of keyword research by firing up their favorite keyword tool and picking keywords off the list. They think high monthly search volumes relevant to their business are all they need. Unfortunately, starting with keywords sorted by volume puts the emphasis on the wrong metric and leads to creating content that might not match the intent of a user or the needs of a website. (Location 1429)
  • Rather than using comparisons with competitors or building lists of desirable keywords, write for real people who will become actual customers. (Location 1434)
  • It makes the most sense to prioritize exactly the kind of content needed to help a website monetize. Prioritize based on customer need more than any other arbitrary metric. (Location 1435)
  • The easiest way to figure out exactly what content is necessary is to go through a persona exercise to understand exactly how, why, and what users want from the website. (Location 1437)
  • Persona research should answer questions, such as where in the buying funnel a user might be when they’re visiting a particular piece of content. (Location 1439)
  • here are the best practices for developing personas specifically for SEO. (Location 1450)
1. Identify all potential users of a website or product.
  • Who is your user? Identifying the user of your website, product, or service is where keyword research as the start of an SEO effort typically fails. Just because a website or product exists doesn’t mean users will automatically want to search for it. (Location 1452)
  • In both cases, targeting the problem rather than the solution will yield more search traffic. (Location 1457)
2. Determine how the users might search based on where they are in the funnel.
  • Again, traditional keyword research would only identify the popular terms for a vertical, not how the targeted users will search. Users very high in a funnel will be searching for a solution to a problem, while users at the very bottom will be looking for the brand plus pricing info. Where are your users, and what do they need at this moment? (Location 1459)
3. Slot users into the type of content they might expect.
  • What type of content is most helpful for your user at this part of their research? (Location 1466)
4. Match the user with a specific call to action relevant to where they are located in the buying funnel.
  • The user’s location in a buying funnel should determine the appropriate call to action (CTA) for the content. (Location 1470)
  • A reader who is very low in the buying funnel might be looking for a way to contact a salesperson, while a user high in the funnel should be encouraged to read more or maybe subscribe to a mailing list. (Location 1471)
  • When content is written for the user rather than keywords, it becomes a lot easier to have a targeted action for users to take. (Location 1473)
5. Classify the types of devices your users will be using to access the content.
6. Consider whether the user will need precise language or culture cues for internationalized content.

Chapter Five 5. Strategic SEO

  • (Note: Many sites fall into a trap with internal linking where their algorithms only surface related pieces of content on a page. These algorithms have a tendency to just reinforce SEO efforts on whatever is popular and never give anything not yet popular a chance at the spotlight. Quora did have related links, but all of it was from popular pieces to other popular pieces.) (Location 1516)
  • Content of the Red Ocean type becomes a race to the top (but in reality, it’s a race to the bottom) of who can write longer, have more research, build better links, and dominate search. (Location 1550)
  • A Blue Ocean-type SEO strategy would begin with a hypothesis about users and their potential demand. (Location 1557)
  • There is no keyword research to support the marketing effort, and only customer research can be relied on. (Location 1557)
  • Rather than measure itself by individual rankings or pages that are out of its control, Amazon measures its reach in aggregate, which is controlled by improvements in the page templates. (Location 1569)
  • In this model, successful SEO begins with customer interviews and whiteboards, not on a spreadsheet with search volumes and click curves. (Location 1584)
  • If your research does not find search volume for a particular category, this should not deter you but should rather excite your senses. This means there is an opportunity to create new demand for something in search, provided, of course, there’s product-market fit and an opportunity for you to be able to dominate the category. (Location 1586)
  • Unless you are the inventor of a brand-new product or process, you are likely sharing a business offering with many others. Think about why you (or the founders of the company) decided to create the business and why customers should and do choose your business. This is your Blue Ocean—create the content that answers the queries of a user in only the way you can. (Location 1589)

SEO and Competitive Tracking

  • I recommend learning from competitors. If there is something that is working for them, learn how to do it better. (Location 1675)
  • Observing how and why a competitor receives links is another great strategy for growth. Provided a competitor is accruing links in an above-board fashion, trying to understand the intent behind why someone might link to them can lead to even better ideas on where to find new links for your own site. (Note: If a competitor is using illegitimate link tactics, it might be reassuring to know they are probably similarly weak in other areas of the business.) (Location 1683)
  • It might be cliché, but the best defense is really a good offense. If your strategy is so simple anyone with a keyword-research tool and access to freelance writers can copy it, they will. However, if your strategy is complex, multi-dimensional, focused on a specific customer set, and the result of monumental effort, competition is far less of a concern. (Location 1702)
  • The longer it takes you to build your solution, the greater the head start you have over your competitors by the time they notice what you have built. (Location 1704)
  • The best time to invest in SEO is six months before it’s needed, but it is impossible to know when that time has arrived. A little bit of effort now is better than no effort at all. (Location 1732)
  • early-stage companies are very resource-constrained, and every dollar and hour put into SEO will come at the expense of something else that might have helped the company grow faster. (Location 1747)

Chapter Six 6. Tactical SEO

  • The primary signal Google uses to determine quality is the value of the links that point to a specific page or website. The value passed by those inbound links is calculated by the value of their own links. From Google’s perspective, the internet is a true web of pages linking and connecting to each other. (Location 1818)
  • Google’s insistence on link quality means a good SEO approach must consider links but in a nuanced way. (Location 1822)
  • Google modeled its ranking algorithm after a traditional academic-authority model. (Location 1823)
  • An academic paper with a new idea is considered to be more authoritative if it has a large number of citations discussing it. At the same time, the quantity of those citations has to be qualified by the quality of the citations, so a paper cited by a Nobel laureate would be more valuable than one cited by a high school senior. (Location 1824)
  • Every domain has to stand on its own within the web, based on its own backlinks. (Location 1834)
  • I strongly believe any effort expended on manufactured linking is wasted time, not because you will be caught by Google, but because the links just don’t work. (Location 1859)
  • a site may be forced to have a privacy policy, but it doesn’t want to be forced to have search engines crawl these pages and flow link equity to the page, so it would make all the privacy-policy links nofollow. Externally, page rank is a two-way street, so a site that wants to hoard all of its page rank would nofollow all its external links. (Location 1878)
  • Similarly, Google can recognize a well-placed link on any other site that has a nofollow attribute and choose to count it in the link graph just as it can recognize a spammy link that does not have a nofollow attribute. In short, it’s very likely there’s no real difference between a follow and a nofollow link, so at face value, one should not place much stock in the classification of a link. (Location 1889)
  • The most effective way to generate backlinks is to not focus on them at all. Rather than think about creating links from a technical perspective, instead build quality content and products that other websites will want to link to. Attract links instead of acquiring them. (Location 1896)
  • The solution is simple and, actually, one Google recommends: build a brand and take a PR approach. Brands don’t build links; they get links. (Location 1901)
  • A brand focuses on its core product offering first, and only after its product is perfected does it seek to get attention. A non-brand seeks to get attention so it can one day have a great product. (Once again, we return to the idea of Product-Led SEO. Products must always come first.) (Location 1909)
  • Focus on the product and let marketing tell that product’s story. (Location 1912)
  • If you are not in a position to hire a PR agency, you can still be successful at generating links. Just do what a PR agency would. Build relationships with journalists, understand what they like to write, and pitch stories. (Location 1916)
  • for backlink-building success, think PR first, links second. (Location 1927)
  • In 2015, I was leading Asia-Pacific (APAC) marketing for SurveyMonkey based out of Singapore. I initiated a partnership with an organization called the Restroom Association of Singapore to run their annual survey. The organization wanted to find out how clean people thought restrooms in Singapore were. (Location 1929)
  • Using Facebook, we targeted a cross-section of people in Singapore to complete the survey. For a total of $500, we received hundreds of responses. As the organization requested, we gained a good sense of where the cleanest bathrooms were in the city, but we also found out how often people washed (Location 1932)
  • their hands, dropped phones in toilets, and other similarly humorous tidbits. (Location 1934)
  • We translated our survey responses into an infographic and then reached out to our network of journalists. Not surprisingly, everyone wanted to cover our results. We ended up getting links and mentions in all local online and on-air media. Additionally, we were linked and covered in global media like Yahoo! News and Mashable. Since we owned the data and asset being shared, I was able to dictate how and where the links would go in exchange for a license to use the data and images. (Location 1935)
  • partnered with a credible organization, so even if the data was somewhat silly, there was a respectable organization that put its name on it. Whatever vertical you are in, there is likely an organization that will partner with you to benefit from free advertising. (Location 1940)
  • The data was interesting and unique. I had not repackaged anything anyone had ever seen before. This was my survey, and I was able to make it interesting enough to publish. In your link-building efforts, be creative and generate unique data. (Location 1942)
  • The data was interesting and link-worthy. Whatever vertical you are in, try to think outside your bubble to come up with something the media might want to write about. (Location 1944)

Internal Linking

  • If an internal page is the recipient of a powerful external link but doesn’t link to other pages, that external link is essentially wasted. When pages link to each other, the authority of all external links is funneled around a site to the overall benefit of all pages. (Location 1970)
  • For sites with flat architecture or only a handful of pages, a proper internal-link structure is simple and straightforward. On large sites, improving the internal-link structure can be as powerful as acquiring authoritative external links in terms of its impact on SEO. (A large site, in this case, might be one that has as few as one hundred pages.) (Location 1973)
Large Site Challenges
  • Build related page modules on each page that have algorithms that search across all pages with similar content and display related links. (Location 1988)
  • Sometimes, when these algorithms are developed, they key off specific connections between pages. This has the effect of creating heavy internal linking between popular topics while still leaving pages orphaned or near-orphaned. (Location 1989)
  • There are three possible ways to overcome this effect: (Location 1991)
  • Add a set of random links into the algorithm and either hard code these random offerings into the page or refresh the set of random pages whenever the cache updates. (Location 1992)
  • In addition to related pages, include a linking module for “interesting” content—which is driven by pure randomization—refreshed as in the first recommendation. (Location 1995)
  • Include a module on every page for the most recent content that ensures older pages are linking into newer pages. (Location 1996)
  • As an aside, I always like to build an HTML sitemap for large sites, as this gives one place that every single page is linked. (Location 1997)
  • If the sitemap is linked in the footer, it will achieve the goal of having most pages just one click from the homepage. While Google has suggested HTML sitemaps aren’t necessary, I have always found them very powerful on large sites. (Location 1999)
  • the ideal internal-link graph looks like the route map of a budget airline that thrives on point-to-point connections. (Location 2020)
  • Pages should link to important pages but also to other pages that seem to be random. And those pages should link back to important pages and to other random pages. (Location 2027)

A Logical Understanding of Crawl Budget

  • I have worked with renowned brands whose brand names were the biggest query in a vertical, and in every case, Google had an impression count that was many times the monthly volume showed by any keyword tool. (Location 2095)

Chapter Seven 7. Broad SEO Categories

  • The key lesson I took from this experience is that SEO is an optimization channel, not a demand-creation channel. SEO efforts improve the visibility of a website when the demand is already there. (Location 2258)
  • In a defined niche, there could be very narrow demand that will see significant growth of organic traffic when the site is first optimized for search, but then it will only grow at the rate of demand growth for the product and brand. (Location 2259)
  • For many categories, especially long-sales-cycle B2B, SEO is absolutely the wrong investment. For others, it’s the right one. (Location 2265)

B2B versus B2C SEO

  • Generally, the person conducting an organic search for a B2B product is much higher in the funnel than a user that comes in from an advertising channel. (Location 2274)
  • For consumers, it is far more likely to have a conversion happen in the same session as the organic click. (Location 2275)
  • The same SEO principles apply in all cases, but different approaches may be needed to serve each specific user. With that in mind, here are the major buckets to consider: (Location 2281)
  • Consumer—Usually, the consumer is buying for themselves with few decision-makers; therefore, the buying process is quicker. The consumer wants the information they are seeking quickly. If they have purchase intent, they want to be reassured the purchase is worthwhile. Content for a consumer should be conversion-oriented. (Location 2283)
  • Business—At any medium or large company, there will be lots of decision-makers, so the goal of the content should be to get the search user to become aware of the brand. Content should be written to get the user to search more or share information with an email list or database. SEO efforts may have to aim a bit lower to have users join a webinar, for example, rather than buy products. (Location 2285)
  • profit—A non-profit functions like a business in its buying behavior, except they are often more budget-conscious. Keep in mind a non-profit could be subsisting anywhere in the large range from a small local PTA to a global organization like the Red Cross. (Location 2289)
  • Government—Governments can range from local cities all the way up to national federal agencies. They often function like businesses with the clock rewound to a century ago. The content for government buyers has to establish the business as an entity worth exploring and should focus on building internal advocates. Understand individual governmental entities and their buying processes—and target those users. (Location 2292)
  • Too often, B2B SEO campaigns fail because there was an expectation of instant conversions. Understand upfront, SEO’s purpose is to assist. SEO, if done correctly, will set your business up for the jump shot—and the slam-dunk. (Location 2297)
  • In my opinion, we will never see a day where search has completely moved to voice only, and there are a number of reasons why this is true. (Location 2340)
  • First and foremost is the profit motive of Google and other search engines. If Google were to give only a single result in response to a voice query, and that result was organic, Google could no longer monetize queries. (Location 2342)
  • Essentially, the number-one reason voice search is never going to replace multiple results is voice must be perfect, and perfect is never possible in our changing world. Perfect will always change as users realize how much information it is possible to obtain by just conducting an online search for information. (Location 2372)
  • Are you sure your product or service is wanted in other regions or languages? It’s vital you do your homework before you decide on a game plan. A good starting place is to look at demographic data in your current analytics tool. If you are currently receiving visitors from places around the world, it is likely you already have unfulfilled demand for your product. (Location 2396)
  • There really are baby steps you can take toward international SEO without getting in over your head. You can have just a handful of your marketing pages translated into languages from countries where you are already seeing visitors to your site. There will be a bit of work that has to go into translating and optimizing for a new language, but you should see a significant return on your investment. Just remember: if you are going to try to internationalize your site and product, do your research and know your market. (Location 2446)

Chapter Eight 8. The Company and SEO

  • SEO should be viewed as a Product in and of itself. In this way, the engineering tasks would be a part of the Product roadmap and launch process from the start. Product managers are akin to a symphony conductor, and their roles are always reliant on other teams and inherently cross-functional. (Location 2589)

Chapter Nine 9. Implementing Product-Led SEO

  • A change might lead to lower average ranking positions on search, but if its net result is higher conversions, it is a winner. (Location 2993)
  • Changing title tags, improving page speed, and even writing a handful of keyword-targeted blog posts are not what I would ever consider to be building SEO. Developing a strategy to reach a total addressable online market with scaled content is a true SEO effort. (Location 3086)