Like most things this year, the standard BrightonSEO had to be changed due to the current pandemic. Although the beachside city of Brighton couldn’t welcome thousands of people, the show still went on, this time completely online and virtual! The two days were full of engaging talks from SEO leaders, here’s some of the stand-out information we’ve learnt.
How to Have an Airtight Keyword Strategy
Keyword research is the blueprint of all your online marketing efforts and therefore should drive every decision you make. To have an airtight strategy and ensure you don’t miss any keywords, all of these elements should be taken into consideration: volume, relevancy, keyword gaps, competitor gaps and the main keywords for your whole industry. Here’s. simple and easy process to follow:
1. First find all the keywords you rank for
2. Find all the words and terms you might be missing
3. Use a keyword mixer prior to dropping them all in a keyword planner
4. Find out what keywords your competitors rank for including direct competitors and anyone sharing your search space.
5. Pull all the data together in a spreadsheet and highlight the monthly search volume and the number of sites ranking for each keyword.
6. DEFEND: all your keywords ranking on the first page from other competitors
7. EXPAND: on all your keyword gaps and places of opportunity
8. STEAL: large volume key phrases that only have a few competitors ranking for
How To avoid Linking to Spammy Sites
With backlinks becoming one of the most important ranking factors it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that these links need to be from high authority sites. Therefore, being able to spot sites that will do more harm than good is crucial, so here’s factors of a toxic site:
· The website has no purpose
· No about us page
· Lots of guest posts
· WordPress square tile design
· “Write for us”
· Submission forms
· Mention of guest posts or payments
· Blog pages for a homepage
· Affiliate widgets
· Inconsistent formatting
· No custom favicon
· Lack of EAT signals
· Look at site metrics including DA, the amount f traffic and the geographic of traffic
· Check the sites outgoing links
· Check the sites top keywords
The Ultimate Link Building Checklist
Link building is no doubt one of the most difficult elements of SEO, however with a solid plan in place and a process to repeat it doesn’t need to be that daunting. Below is a great link building best practice to follow:
1. Familiarise yourself with toxic websites
2. Conduct a linkable asset audit on prospect sites to ensure relevance and value.
3. Understand your own backlink profile
4. Do a backlink acquisition audit to check what your link building velocity should be
5. Undertake a DR Gap analysis to check you have enough sitewide authority to get your page to rank
6. Ensure your anchor text ratio is in line with competitors and industry standards
7. Create your quality assurance guidelines
8. Decide on your brand or product story
9. Discover what’s trending and relevant
10. Come up with tactics to land links
11. Uncover what link opportunities are out there for your linkable assets.
How to Find and Spot Keyword Cannibalization Issues
Keyword cannibalization is when multiple pages with the same intent are targeting the same keyword. This is commonly confused as many people believe it just comes down to pages targeting the same keyword, however if one’s purpose is informational and the other transactional then this isn’t cannibalization.
How to Spot Keyword Cannibalization:
· Multiple pages rank for the same keyword
· The ranking URL keeps changing in the SERPs
· The main page keeps fluctuating in rank
· You’re struggling to increase rankings for key search terms
· The wrong page is ranking
How to fix keyword cannibalization:
It’s important to note that it’s not a one size fits all and each circumstance causing cannibalization needs to be looked at on a page-to-page basis opposed to sitewide.
· 301 redirect cannibalized pages – look at visibility, traffic and links to determine the primary page
· Canonicalization is used if you need to keep two or more pages – this means all pages continue to exist but the equity is transferred to the primary page.
· Re-optimize pages if the cannibalization is only at a meta level
· Merge/consolidate pages into one
· Create subcategories
What SEO’s Need to Know About the New Bing Webmaster Tools
The new Bing Webmaster tool has been designed to be faster, cleaner, actionable and responsive and contains many great new features which are listed below:
· Search Performance Report
· URL Inspection
· Backlinks Tool
· URL Submission
· Sitemaps Report
· Search Keywords
· Site Scan
· SEO Reports
· Robots.txt Tester
How Machine Learning Can Determine Ranking Factors and Their Importance
Machine learning is the best way to determine what the ranking factors are among billions of sites. This can help us better understand what Google is looking for and to be able to create a solid and successful strategy.
The first step is to train your model with a great deal of data coming from the search engine results page and crawl data. Once the model is correctly trained you can use it to predict if your URL will rank in the top ten Google search results.
The model can then show the order of importance of ranking factors. It does this by calculating predictions and missing out one feature at a time for example “response time”. It then compares the error rates with and without the feature. The difference between the error rates shows us the importance of the feature.
How Python and Machine Learning can Help Technical SEO
How It can help with SEO:
· Automate repetitive tasks
· Provide data extraction analysis
· Efficient and time saving
· A way of future proofing your job
· Allows us to better understand data
· You Can make data driven decisions
· Provides concrete insights
· Gives us confidence in our recommendations
· Allows us to focus on other important optimisation efforts
Automation Possibilities:
· 404 checker
· Internal linking analysis
· Keyword research
· Image optimisation
· Parameter finder
We’ve really enjoyed the conference and hearing all the latest industry trends and best practices which we will implement into our current processes. We look forward to attending the next Brighton SEO!
If you are interested in working with us on your brand awareness, SEO scores, or any other marketing strategy contact us today. We’ll supercharge your visibility and maximise your conversions.