Driving the right Traffic to your Website

Driving the Right Traffic to your Website

Stephen Whitelaw

September 25 th 2014.

#techtourism#techtourism

Agenda

What is SEO?

Natural v Organic

SSL

Do’s and Don’ts

Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics

On-site and Off-site challenge

Timing, Catering, Toilets and Fire Alarm Info.

Please feel free to Tweet this morning 


Stephen Whitelaw

30+ years in software / web

/ internet / digital media.

Consulting, workshops, seminars, keynotes www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwhitelaw www.kimtag.com/stephenwhitelaw

@toowist


Introductions

Name

Business

Outcomes from Workshop?


Aims for today

This workshop aims to give you a deeper understanding of the following:

• Website traffic

• How search engines work

• The importance of keyword research and fresh content

• How social media activities can help you on Google

• Improving search engine positioning

• Monitoring the health of your website


What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ?

“ The process of improving web pages so they rank higher in search engines for your targeted keywords.”

(Thus we need to understand what words and phrases are used by target audience)


Why is it important 1 of 2?


Why is it important 2 of 2?

Organic Clicks vs Paid Clicks

The vast majority of clicks -- roughly 60 percent, go to organic listings.


Inbound Marketing


Different Traffic sources exist

• Search traffic

• Direct traffic

• Referral traffic

• Campaigns


Web search engines

• Search information on the World Wide Web

• Web pages, images, videos, information and other file types

• Automated process

• Complex algorithms to determine rankings

• Entire site searchable

• Updates to site should be picked up

Examples

• www.google.com

• www.yahoo.com

• www.bing.com


How Search Works… www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs


Have a friendly and easy to navigate website !

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbtf1oyNg-8


Search Engines


Yandex …


Baidu …


Search Engines

Top 3 tier-1 search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo

Internationally many local/huge players exist:

China – Baidu

Russian – Yandex

(80% market share, & YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google !)

(60% market share)


Global List …

www.searchenginecolossus.com

– global list of local search engines.


New Alternatives ..

DuckDuckgo

StartPage

Blekko


Harder than ever to discover!


The Filter Bubble

A distortion problem ….. “… people are exposed only to things they already agree with or are familiar with.”


Scott’s Search Daniel’s Search


57 signals!

Our Search History.

Our location – verfied the browser we use.

the browsers version

The computer we use

The language we use the time we need to type in a query the time we spend on the search result page the time between selecting different results for the same query our operating system our operating systems version the resolution of our computer screen average amount of search requests per day average amount of search requests per topic (to finish search) distribution of search services we use (web / images / videos / real time / news / mobile) average position of search results we click on time of the day current date topics of ads we click on frequency we click advertising topics of adsense advertising we click while surfing other websites frequency we click on adsense advertising on other websites frequency of searches of domains on Google use of google.com or google toolbar our age our sex use of “i feel lucky button” do we use the enter key or mouse to send a search request do we use keyboard shortcuts to navigate through search results do we use advanced search commands (how often) do we use igoogle (which widgets / topics) where on the screen do we click besides the search results (how often) where do we move the mouse and mark text in the search results amount of typos while searching how often do we use related search queries how often do we use autosuggestion how often do we use spell correction distribution of short / general queries vs. specific / long tail queries which other google services do we use (gmail / youtube/ maps / picasa /….) how often do we search for ourself


sort by:

Relevant

Important

Uncomfortable

Challenging

Other Points of View


Search engine market share

• Country specific

• 9 out of 10 searches in the UK are conducted on Google

Stats


Relationships between search engines

• Sharing primary search results

• Sharing paid search results

• Commercial arrangements

Bruce Clay bruceclay.com

• Search engine relationship chart

• Search engine relationship chart histogram


Natural / organic vs. paid / sponsored

• Natural / organic – free

• Paid / sponsored – pay per click

• Preference for organic?


Myths & misconceptions about SEO

• Free

• One-off task

• Black art

• Immediate

• Guarantees

• Meta tag keywords

• Keyword stuffing

• Advertising





Is SEO cheating Google!

Don’t do (Blackhat): Hidden content, keyword stuffing, link farming, doorway pages, IP cloacking. [Duplicate content]

Do (Whitehat/ethical) : Fresh up to date relevant content, inbound links, friendly

URL’s.


Buying Traffic – be careful!

www.trafficzap.com

www.nicheprofitclassroom.com/index.html

www.blazingtraffic.com

www.buyhitscheap.com


Search Engine Optimisation

Learn and keep up to date with: www.searchenginewatch.com

www.searchengineland.com

www.seomoz.org



Make connections secure

Secure Google https://www.google.com

!


EV SSL Certificate

Extended Validation SSL certificates – highest level of trust [Tells your customers the company is real and trusted]


Google Panda & Google Penguin


Google Panda Google Penguin

Penalise websites of low quality and those with low quality content.

Introduced Feb 2011

Bring down websites that violate

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and use black-hat SEO techniques.

e.g. excessive link building keyword stuffing cloaking, doorway pages meaningless content

Introduced April 2012


Launched about 30 th August 2013. (On 15 th Anniversary of Google)

Affected 90% of all websites.

The goal is to provide results that actually answer the question.

Resurgence of the Long Tail.

Conversational and more natural search.


Useful SEO terms …

SEM = PPC and SEO

Backlink

PageRank

Anchor Text

NoFollow

Title Tags

Meta Tags

SERP

SandBox


Dos and Don’ts for SEO

Don’t :

Directory submission

Guest Blogging

Compensated Links

Do:

Content Marketing

Blog

Create great content on your site and your social media assets


Author Rank is no more !!! … rel=author and rel=publisher


Matt Cutts


SEO – getting started …



PageRank … is a measure of trust and authority.


Google – The Mission Statement

“Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Larry Page, Google co-founder and CEO, once described the

“perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”


Duplicate Content

•

•

•

Duplicate content can be caused by:

Same content different url

Data feeds

Scraper sites

The Solution to Duplicate Content:

•

• Update internally

• Redirect

• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specifyyour-canonical.html

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/" />



•

•

Duplicate Content on your site & another

The Panda Update (released April 2011)

Check “sample text“ into google

Use www.copyscape.com




RBS Group has basically set up two sites with identical URL structure, theming and content.

The cost of saving on content is the loss of valuable search traffic

Make your site discoverable

Discoverability

Where crawling struggles:

•

•

•

•

•

•

• poor use of robots.txt

broken links bad site structure server & redirection errors no sitemaps complex urls limiting access to content using: flash, javascript, dropdown forms & ajax


Discoverability Tips

• how to check if a single page is indexed:

insert cache:www.yourwebsite.co.uk into the search bar

• how to check how many pages are indexed

insert site:www.yourwebsite.co.uk into the search bar


Never

buy fans, followers, likes etc..

www.buy-facebooklikes.co.uk

www.buy-cheap-likes.com

www.buzzoid.com

www.twitteraddicts.com/buy-twitter-followers www.buy1000followers.co

www.followers1.com

www.buyplusfollowers.com/product/google-plus-ones www.99medias.com/product-category/fanpagewebsite-likes www.socialjuicepros.com/google-plus-ones www.socialpinger.net/google-plus-service www.devumi.com

www.fastfollowerz.com

www.plusonefoundry.com

www.plus1followers.com

www.plusonefactory.com

www.getsocialjuice.com


Responsive Web Design (RWD) …

The beauty of this is that responsive design does not need to be code-specific to every device out there. It intelligently changes the content based on browser width. If it’s designed correctly, your user will no longer need to zoom in to find content.


RWD also applies to emails !


Richer Interactivity - RichUI

DeepZoom/SeaDragon/Silverlight www.gigapixel.com/image/gigapan-canucks-g7.html

www.360cities.net/gigapixel/strahov-library.html

Very Hi Res images http://bit.ly/cfvqBN


Reviews – do they matter?


www.reevoo.com


www.feefo.com


www.opinurate.com



Trustpilot

..


www.reviewcentre.com


Brownlist

!


Customer Care -


Customer Care –

(www.tkmaxxcare.com)


Google Analytics


Google Analytics does NOT count spiders, bots and crawlers


www.google.co.uk/analytics

/

Measure the return on investment of your web-site:

• Number of visitors

• How long they stay

• Where they come from

• What they do on the site…

• And much more…


Web Analytics Definition …

“Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage”


What is Google Analytics?

•

•

•

Visitors o Characteristics

 Browser, new vs. return, location

Traffic o

Content

Origins

 Keywords, refers, pages o Effectiveness

 Bounce rate, paths, navigation summary


When analysing data…

Review data e.g. look at one of your high level reports.

Do Segmentation e.g. drill deeper into the data.

Learn Something i.e. gain some insight(s)

Repeat above steps

You will NOT find some silver bullet inside your data then change it and have 5x revenue !!


What is Web Analytics similar to?

The x-Ray machine is like the Web Analytics Tool

The patient is your website

The x-Ray machine will detect and display pictures of broken bones (skull, finger etc..) – however it will

NOT end your pain or fix any of your problems – for that you need someone who can read and interpret the x-ray and then take action or tell someone to take action.

i.e. The best analytic tool in the world will not do it for you – you still need smart people to interpret the data and prioritise actions e.g. fix skull before finger etc..


Some basic maths !

If 99 visitors to your site spend £0 and the

100 th visitor spend £1,000

Question : What is the average visitor spend?

Answer : Average visitor spend is £10 i.e.

£1,000/100 = £10 !

Technically it is true, so be careful with your interpretation of averages/numbers


Top 10 Myths About Google Analytics ..

MYTH 1: "You get what you pay for." Google Analytics is free, which means the system is down a lot.

MYTH 2: Google Analytics is basic and doesn't have any "advanced" features or metrics

MYTH 3: Google Analytics only supports third-party cookies

MYTH 4: Google Analytics is not really accurate

MYTH 5: It's not possible to export your data from Google Analytics

MYTH 6: With Google Analytics you can't control your data

MYTH 7: There is no professional support for Google Analytics

MYTH 8: Google Analytics does not support A/B or multivariate testing and isn't well-integrated with other tools

MYTH 9: You can't segment data in Google Analytics

MYTH 10: You have to spend a lot of money to get "real" web analytics


Google Analytics

Take action Measure

Learn


Google Webmaster Tools – use as well as GA

Tells you :

The errors on your website e.g. 404 errors

How often people link to a page

How often a page appears in Google Search Results

Information on how Google crawls your website

Sitemaps information

[You see nothing about Bing, Yahoo etc.. Only Google here!]


Webmaster Tools

www.google.com/webmasters

/


How fast (or slow) is your website?


How fast (or slow) is your website?

( www.pingdom.com

)


Google Pagespeed Insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights


The “Not Provided” value is due to SSL


The Rise and rise of ‘Not Provided’


“Not Provided” websites!

www.keywordtransparency.com

www.notprovided.co.uk

www.notprovidedcount.com


URL Builder

• Email Campaigns

• Facebook Posts

• LinkedIn Advert

• Offline Campaign!

http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=103386

7




Bounce Rate

The percentage of web site visitors who arrive at a web site entry page, then leave without going any deeper into the site.

If page is higher than average site bounce rate percentage, focus on changing content on that page (blogs are different though):


Bounce Rates – what is good/bad/normal ?


Bounce Rate summary

0% Bounce Rate means that every visitor has visited at least 2 pages per visit, i.e. if your entry page does not equal your exit page for all visitors then you have an amazing site.

100% Bounce Rate means that all the visitors left your site on the page they arrived at. eg

Contact Us page, Blog page, Customer Support.

[Sometimes a high bounce rate is good i.e. they clicked on an advert and left or clicked on a link and visited one of your other sites]


Google


Google search

• Every day Google answers more than three billion questions from people around the globe in 181 countries and 146 languages

• 15%+ of the searches everyday have never been searched before !!!! – how can this be true? – Discuss.


Indexing

• Googlebot – Google’s web crawling robot

• Deep crawling

• Follows all links

• Fresh crawls

• Google crawls through over 20 billion pages per day


Processing a query


Ranking factors

• Over 200+ factors considered

• Constantly evolving

• PageRank

• Increasing social signals

• Knowledge Graph

Google Search Ranking Factors [Infographic]

• tagseoblog.com/images/infographic-google-ranking-factors.jpg

Search Ranking Factors: Rank Correlation [Infographic]

• searchmetrics.com/media/images/ranking-faktoren/searchmetricsinfographic-ranking-factors-us-2013-.jpg


Recent changes

Google Hummingbird – Sept 2013

• overhauled algorithm to better cope with longer, more complex queries

Google Penguin - April 2012 (Penguin 2.0 – May 2013)

• lower rankings for violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

• targeting black-hat SEO techniques

Google Panda – Feb 2011

• lower rankings for “low-quality” or “thin” sites

• higher quality = more content and less advertising

Google Algorithm Change History – www.moz.org/google-algorithm-change


PageRank

• Link analysis algorithm

• Numerical weighting measuring importance

• Links count as recommendations

• Quantity and quality of links to a page

Tools

• Chrome Extensions

• Firefox Add-ons


ON-SITE FACTORS


Indexable content

• HTML or text format

• Challenges with rich media files, images and video

• Text alternatives and descriptions where possible


Link structure

• Follows available links to fetch all content

• Orphan pages


Search Friendly URLs

www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/ african-elephants

Single domain

Shallow folder structure with relevant words

Keywords in page name, separated by hyphen


Search UN-Friendly URLs

Xyz3.nationalgeographic.com/a/?q=31z&mg=vv7z&sd=8

No keywords in the URL string

Unnecessary

Subdomain

Dynamic URLs don’t perform as well as static and engines recommend against more than two parameters


Google Knowledge Graph (GKG)

Used by Google to enhance its search engines result with semantic search information gathered from a wide variety of sources. e.g. wikipedia, freebase

August 2014 – Google announced the Google Vault

(which contains the GKG) – the

Google Vault is an accumulation of facts from across the entire web – i.e. site scraping.


Google Now

Googe Now is a personal digital assistant that is available within Google

Search on:

Android devices &

Apple ios devices &

Google Chrome browser on desktops


www.Schema.org

Schema markup makes it easier for

Google to find and index information on your website.

See www.schema.org

for schema generators e.g. restaurants can add opening hours, menus, prices, address, telephone number etc..


Keyword research


Keyword research

• To be found for “hotel edinburgh”, “hotel edinburgh” has to appear on your site

• You must understand what your customers search for

• Fixed content vs. fresh content

Tools

• Google Keyword Tool adwords.google.co.uk/keywordtool

(now Keyword Planner)

• Wordtracker wordtracker.com

| freekeywords.wordtracker.com

• Google Trends – www.google.com/trends


Keyword research

•

Search volume

•

Competition

•

High volume & low competition


Keyword research


The Long Tail of Keyword Demand



Google Trends

Google Trends is a publically available Google tool that shows you how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total searchvolume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.

Google Trends also allows you refine a search by region and time period.


Page content

• Write for users, not search engines

• Make all content indexable

• Title tag

• Description tag

• Heading tag(s)

• Alt tag(s)


Title tag

• Ability to specify page title

• <title>” … ”</title>

• Less than 70 characters

• Displayed on results page

• Optimisation vs. sales vs. call to action

• Page specific

• Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

• Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword


Description tag

• Ability to specify page description

• <meta name="description" content=“ … " />

• Roughly 155 characters

• Displayed on results page

• Optimisation vs. sales vs. call to action

• Page specific

• Not a ranking factor since 2009


Heading tag

• Ability to specify section / paragraph heading

• <h1>” … “</h1>

• <h1> to <h6>

• “Welcome” and “Homepage”


Content


• Write for the web

• <b> & <i>

• Primary and secondary keywords

• Keyword stuffing

• Readability

• Duplicate content


Alt tags

• Ability to specify image description

• <img src=‘ “… “' alt=‘” … “' />

• Image search

• Image file name


Page name

• Ability to specify page name / URL

• e.g. www.etag.org.uk/whats-on/etag-events

• Include content structure

• Readability

• Sharing


The page overall

• Be hyper-relevant to a specific topic (usually a product or single object)

• Include subject in title tag

• Include subject in URL

• Include subject in image alt text

• Specify subject several times throughout text content

• Provide unique content about a given subject

• Link back to its parent page

• Link back to its homepage


Creating content

• Fresh content


• Blog, news, articles, guides, tips

• Demonstrate your expertise

• Unique content

• On-going task


Content


Writing for the web

• People read 25% slower on screen

• Be succinct

• Make your text scannable

• Headlines

• Bullet points


Writing for the web


Content

Fixed content

• Who we are

• What we do

• Contact details

Fresh content

• Blog

• Latest News

• Articles

• Guides

• Insights

Dynamic content

• Latest updates

• Tweets / Facebook updates

• Featured items

• Upcoming events

• Most popular

• Related items


OFF-SITE FACTORS


Backlinks

• PageRank

• Referring traffic

• Paid vs. free vs. organic

• Link building

• Share worthy content

• Anchor text

• On-going process


Sources of links

• Blogs

• Forums

• Directories

• Spam links

• Social

Tools

• www.ahrefs.com

• www.majesticseo.com

• www.opensiteexplorer.com


Google Disavow Links Tools


Social signals

• Number of fans / followers

• Account activity

• Age of accounts

• Mix of messages

• Links


Measuring SEO success

Keyword Ranking.

Website Traffic.

Increase in "Share of Traffic" per keyword.

Increased Revenue/keyword.

Increase in Impressions ( good for Publishers to show advertisers).

Lower dependence on Paid Search.

Lowering the cost per acquisition.


Rel=nofollow – What is it ?

nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the ”rel attribute” of an html

a element to instruct search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index.


Rel=nofollow – How do you know ?

e.g. bbc website are follow links.

e.g. wikipedia are nofollow links.


Google+


What is Google + is a multilingual social networking and identity service owned and operated by Google Inc.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googleplus



Google+ (July 2011)



5 th time lucky!


How to access Google+ www.google.com/ + or plus.google.com

or www.google.com/plus or

Use Mobile App …


Why use Google+

Over 550 million online

(many many business customers)

Helps with your SEO a lot!

Communities, Hangouts, Photos

Very easy to use and powerful

Superb privacy/security controls

Perfect for sharing content

Circles are a very powerful tool

Great mobile experience.


Gender Breakdown …


Age/Gender Breakdown…


Time on the site …


What does the average Google+ and average Facebook user look like?


Google+ users by income …


Something is missing … thank goodness 


Summary of Tools


Google Webmaster Tools


Google Analytics


Additional tools

• Bing Webmaster Tools

• Page speed test tools

• moz.com/blog/100-free-seo-tools

• Inbound Marketing / Marketing Automation Tools


Google Remarketing – what is it ?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2ihfnGZ6Fk


Google Remarketing …

Some facts:

70% of visitors abandon their shopping carts

96% of visitors to a site leave without completing the action you want.

Remarketing allows you to re-engage with them as the surf other sites on the web (GDN) i.e. you have an opportunity to win back lost potential customers.

In order to use remarketing you must link Google Adwords with

Google Analytics

You need to make 1 small (1 time) change to your Google Analytics code.

Google Analytics then allows you to create lists of users to use get back in front of and you are able to remove them from the list once they have been converted.


Ghostery ! – “Detect Learn Control” …


Embrace User Generated Content (UGC)



A Final piece of advice


Create

Content


Thank You

www.linkedIn.com/in/stephenwhitelaw www.kimtag.com/stephenwhitelaw

@toowist


Before you go…

Feedback Forms – please complete

Slides will be available online at www.

etag.org.uk

Digital Quiz?

Keep in touch … @ETAG_UK


Please keep in touch… etag.org.uk

@ETAG_UK youtube.com/etaguk linkedin.com/Edinburgh-Tourism-Action-Group


LeadForensics – Lead Generation Tool www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP-Ol1AfBoQ


Yieldify – maximise revenue from visitors leaving your website !

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHCt-6TAPXc


Driving the right Traffic to your Website

“ The process of improving web pages so they rank higher in search engines for your targeted keywords.”

Search Engines

Search Engines

www.searchenginecolossus.com

– global list of local search engines.

sort by:

Relevant

Important

Uncomfortable

Challenging

Other Points of View

Google Panda & Google Penguin

Google Panda Google Penguin

Duplicate Content

Duplicate Content

Make your site discoverable

Never

www.google.com/webmasters

Google

ON-SITE FACTORS

Search Friendly URLs

www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/ african-elephants

Search UN-Friendly URLs

Xyz3.nationalgeographic.com/a/?q=31z&mg=vv7z&sd=8

Search volume

Competition

High volume & low competition

The Long Tail of Keyword Demand

OFF-SITE FACTORS

Summary of Tools

Thank You

Related documents

Products

Support

Driving the right Traffic to your Website

“ The process of improving web pages so they rank higher in search engines for your targeted keywords.”

Search Engines

Search Engines

www.searchenginecolossus.com

– global list of local search engines.

sort by:

Relevant

Important

Uncomfortable

Challenging

Other Points of View

Google Panda & Google Penguin

Google Panda Google Penguin

Duplicate Content

Duplicate Content

Make your site discoverable

Never

www.google.com/webmasters

Google

ON-SITE FACTORS

Search Friendly URLs

www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/ african-elephants

Search UN-Friendly URLs

Xyz3.nationalgeographic.com/a/?q=31z&mg=vv7z&sd=8

Search volume

Competition

High volume & low competition

The Long Tail of Keyword Demand

OFF-SITE FACTORS

Summary of Tools

Thank You

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