SEO: How to cut through the bs
SEO: How to cut through the bs
SEO info + tips for non-SEO marketers
Very few companies have in-house SEO, and that means it ends up either being outsourced to an agency or a non-SEO marketer is tasked with looking after it.
Both of these options aren’t ideal; agencies can be extremely hard to trust, especially with SEO. The risk is high, as results aren’t immediate and you could be sinking cash that you’ll never see a return on. On the other hand, asking a marketer to tackle SEO when they’re not a specialist is also not going to get the results you want and need.
In today’s issue I want to focus on SEO from the perspective of someone tasked with it but not an expert in it. A lot of content writers are now expected to incorporate SEO best practice into their blogs, but don’t really know what those best practices are - and googling just gives confusing results because so many people are vying to be SEO gurus.
This week’s interview (and the first for Season 3!) is with Sam Ficek. With agency and in-house SEO experience across brands like Johnson & Johnson, Deputy, Car Next Door, and now at Canva, Sam’s answers are super easy to understand but have a lot of takeaways in them! Sam also runs a blog on SEO and on digital nomad-ing.
Interview
Kayla: For non-SEO people who are tasked with looking after their company's SEO (alongside their actual role), what are, say, the top 2 or 3 things they should invest time and effort into, and 1 or 2 things that they can deprioritise?
Sam: It really all depends on the current state of the company's website, current rankings and competitive landscape. For an established site that ranks well, doesn't change much, and whose competitors aren't that active in trying to outrank them (the dream scenario!) then a high level technical audit once every few months would be all that's required.
At the other end, if you're a new or growing business in a moderately competitive niche, then a lot more work is required. If you're a new or growing business in a highly competitive niche then you should probably get someone working on SEO full time :).
As a rough guide though;
Having decent technical foundations are essential. If these aren't in place, you will never rank well (if at all). There are plenty of audit checklists available online, but I would suggest getting a professional to do this - especially if your site is any larger than a handful of pages. For most people, it probably isn't an efficient use of time to learn about SEO and how to use the tools when you can get a professional to do it instead (most people wouldn't try to learn plumbing in order to be able to service their boiler, would they?). There's also a real risk of missing small issues.
You'll then need to make sure that you have pages containing good content that targets the relevant keywords within your niche. When considering whether to focus on the high-volume but more competitive terms (ie. 'head terms') or lower-volume but less competitive terms (ie. 'longtail terms') will depend upon your site's domain authority and how much time you have to spend on SEO. A quick way to devise a rough strategy would be to copy how a competitor has set their site structured, especially one that you know has invested in SEO already as they will have spent the time doing keyword research for you.
Then, you'll need links.
For many businesses, especially those that target a fairly limited range of keywords, link-building will be where you will spend a significant amount of effort over the long term. It's highly labour-intensive but essential if you want to rank highly in a niche that's even slightly competitive.
There's dozens of link building strategies that you can read online, but I recommend finding a good PR agency, as this can be an effective way of gaining really high quality links. Expect to pay about anywhere from about $4k per month for this - but a few links from the big news sites are well worth it (and you obviously benefit from the exposure too).
K: There's lots of misinformation about what's actually best practice in SEO, how do you stay up to date with changes?
S: The basics don't really change too much - it's just about providing high quality, useful content that serves users’ needs, on a website that works well and has some links going to it from other respectable sites. The relative importance of the factors is what tends to change, for example site speed is a much more important ranking factor nowadays than it used to be.
The Moz Blog is a great source of information for new and experienced SEOs alike.
K: For copy and content writers who are tasked with writing blogs, how can they take a blog from 'good' to 'great' in terms of SEO?
S: First and foremost, write in a natural way that's best for the reader. Then try to slip in a few keywords here and there if needed. Don't go overboard though, Google is clever enough to understand the semantic relevancy of related terms.
Search for the keyword that you're targeting and see what other sites rank in the top three spots. What can you do to make your piece better than them? Synthesising them can be a good approach.
Think about internal linking. It's one of the best ways to signal to search engines what pages on your site should be ranked for different keywords - so have a strategy. When linking to a page, use anchor text that matches the target keyword of the destination page.
eg, if I want my website to rank for 'seo specialist in sydney';
Good:
Sam Ficek is an SEO specialist in Sydney with over ten years of experience in digital marketing.
Bad:
Sam ficek is a SEO specialist in Sydney with over ten years of experience in digital marketing.
Worst:
Sam ficek is a SEO specialist in Sydney with over ten years of experience in digital marketing. Click here to find out more.
K: Do you have any advice on hiring an SEO (individual or agency)? What are some green/red flags?
S: I would tend to avoid agencies that are part global media agencies - with the possible exception of cases where you're a large company that might benefit from having all your agencies 'under one roof' - eg ATL media, performance marketing, SEO, creative. In my experience, they tend to charge high hourly rates (~$150+) and put the most junior people on the account that they can get away with. You're basically paying for their fancy offices and making up for the profits they're missing out on since the media industry got disrupted by digital.
If you did want to go with an agency, you could get recommendations from your network, or try to find out the agencies that are working for your most successful competitors.
Whether you opt for a freelancer or an agency, I would always get them to give specific examples of where they've had a tangible impact on rankings for specific websites, and how that impacted the business's bottom line. Don't pay anyone anything unless they can give you specific examples of where they've done similar work that has delivered strong results in the past. This sounds obvious, but it's quite surprisingly easy to get taken in by a fancy pitch deck with a good sounding strategy and the right jargon.
If you're hiring someone in-house, look for excellent communication skills. In most businesses (at least those with more than a handful of employees), the in-house SEO will need to work with developers as well as non-technical stakeholders to support the implementation of technical and content requirements, so it's important that they can explain complex concepts in a way that people can understand. They will also need to be persuasive in order to be able to gain buy-in from stakeholders and gain access to the right resources.
K: On the other side, how does someone stand out as an SEO? Do you have any job hunting advice?
S: Lead with tangible examples of your accomplishments in terms of traffic or rankings. Focus on where you've impacted the 'money keywords' rather than fluffy top-of-the-funnel keywords.
Get good data analysis skills. Learn Excel inside out. Perhaps even get some basic Python knowledge (Python is amazing for automating so many SEO tasks).
Ask prospective employers about how they prioritise technical SEO work (don't go somewhere where no SEO work gets implemented, as you could be there for years and not have anything to add to your CV).
Ask lots of questions in the interview. The best SEOs I know are curious, like to understand problems and think about possible solutions - I wouldn't hire someone that doesn't seem inquisitive during the interview.
Other resources
I also wanted to add that Google is generally pretty good at updating their SEO documentation, and if you haven’t already it’s worth giving it a read. Here are a few I recommend:
My last piece of advice regarding Google is that if you’re not utilising Google My Business and regularly asking your customers to leave you reviews (via email and push notification campaigns), you are missing out! While it’s less important for B2B businesses to have posts and product photos, it is still a free marketing tool that does bring in leads and provides social proof. Set aside 1-2 days in the next month to review and revamp (or completely set up) your business account.
Google also has a marketing toolkit to help you get the most out of Google My Business, but it is a bit B2C focused.
Finally, I know we all want more info on blogging and webpage setups. It is probably the most frequent thing non-SEO marketers do that relates to SEO. Personally, I’ve heard a lot of ‘tips’ that really just seem like they’re pulled out of thin air; e.g. you should have a link in your first sentence. After reading Google’s guidelines, I really wonder if there’s some SEO guru out there selling live laugh links signs or something. However, Google’s guidelines did also say a few thousand links in a blog is “reasonable”, so hey I guess it can’t hurt to try out a few SEO superstitions.
HubSpot have a strategy that they call pillar page and topic clusters. Essentially think of a spider web; the pillar page is the very centre and the topic cluster is all the intersectional points around it, with each post linking to the others, and always back to the pillar page.
Your pillar page will also be one of your SEO keywords, and a central theme to whatever your product is. At Perkbox, where we sold employee experience software, one of our pillar pages was ‘Your ultimate guide to employee experience’ and broke down all the many different areas, which were then spun out into their own standalone blogs for the cluster, i.e. employee attraction, recognition, rewards, perks/benefits etc etc.
I’ve tried looking for alternatives to this strategy, just to see what’s out there, but there’s so much love for HubSpot that I couldn’t find another - if you know one please tell me!
4 worthy clicks
Unrelated to this week’s interview, a serendipetous find!
Personally I find the ‘page’ layout helpful as I use it to visualise how a piece of content will be designed (e.g. how many words on each page of an ebook) so I never thought too much about how Docs was ‘out of date’.
All D2C, but I think it’s helpful to see how brands are doing something other than ‘best practice’ - once your user base gets to a certain size, SaaS businesses definitely need a healthy social presence and strategy.
This is a really interesting question to me, because we as marketers know we need to do customer research regularly… but often don’t. This article is heavy on the UX research focus, but there’s some helpful points on consciously filing and storing your research notes so you can link them all together and build a big picture.