State of SEO
WPToronto East - February 18, 2017
Let’s get some jargon outta the way...
Traffic: The number of visitors or visits to your website.
Search query: The words or phrases that people search for.
On-site or on-page SEO: All the optimization you do on your site.
Off-site SEO: Tactics to promote your site's content and affect ranking signals.
Page title, meta description: The text that appears in search results.
Keyword research: Techniques to determine what people are searching for.
1. SEO is a long-term game.
The value comes from incremental traffic over time
to the content you publish on your website.
2. Plan for topics, not keywords.
Focus on topical relevance and let Google handle the correlation.
Source: Moz.com
3. Go for quantity.
You'll need to pump out a lot of content on a regular basis.
4. Go for quality.
I'm talking epic, detailed pieces of content.
5. Go for speed.
Speed is better for users, Google, and you.
Speed Tests
6. Go for structure.
2009: Google adds rich snippets to search results.
2017: Featured snippets rise to prominence.
Rich Snippets
Featured snippet up top from wikiHow.
Related questions below.
Gotta scroll to see organic results.
All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
Add structured data markup to your WordPress content, no coding required.
7. Go for mobile-first.
“Our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site.” - Google
8. Go local.
“Local searches lead to more purchases than non-local searches. 18% of local searches on smartphone lead to a purchase within a day vs. 7% of non-local searches.” - Google
9. Effective tactics don't last forever.
We should all optimize our sites and our content for usability.
Tactics don’t last forever.
Old-school SEO tactics that no longer work, courtesy of Moz. (Video)
“This week we're going to chat about some old school SEO practices that just don't work anymore and things with which we should replace them.”
9. Effective tactics don't last forever.
We should all optimize our sites and our content for usability.
10. Remember that SEO is only one channel.
Diversify the content you're producing and put it out in multiple channels on a regular basis.
Thanks!
That’s all I got. Find the full writeup on my blog:
andymci.com/wptoronto-east-seo/