Practically Teaching SEO in a classroom

Secret image from theOatmeal.com

Run through what we do today

• Who I am what I do• Technical vs Practical definitions of SEO• How Search engines work• Why do we need SEO – some big numbers to impress you• SEO research, plan, target and measure

– do a few tests at http://whichtestwon.com/ etc• How to do SEO with a case study – the new [client] campaign • Outline the multi agency strategy and then look at specific

– goal– measurement– research– plan

• You do SEO – goal, measure, research, plan– Crazy but true

Big numbers

me

Past clients

Present clients

What is SEO - technically

• From Wikipedia– Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a

website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings.

– In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.

– As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for.

– SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search and video search.

– Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

– Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.

Basically, getting websites into position #1 of the “free” listings

#1: that’s where all the traffic goes

What is SEO - practically

• SEO is getting people to your website and getting them to take the actions you want (normally to buy something)

SEO turns out to be a lot of things

Think about what you put on the internet – do you want people to see it?

• Does this happen by magic or by science?• Science can be researched, measured and

replicated

How search engines work

• They Crawl the web• Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of

stops in a big city subway system.• Each stop is its own unique document (usually

a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG or other file). The search engines need a way to “crawl” the entire city and find all the stops along the way, so they use the best path available – links.

How search engines work

• When a person searches for something online, it requires the search engines to scour their corpus of billions of documents and do two things –

• first, return only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query

• second, rank those results in order of perceived value (or importance). It is both “relevance” and “importance” that the process of search engine optimization is meant to influence.

Why do we need SEO?

Sales drop by £10 000 a week = £40 000 loss

Sales drop by £7 000 a week = £42 000 loss

Sales drop by £9 000 a week = £45 000 loss

Brand keyword revenue was about 25% up over the same period

The pie is big, where do you bite?

Mobile growth - exploding

Mobile growth – lots to learn

How to do SEO

• Know your goals• Measure onsite• Measure offsite• Research (lots of it)• Plan • Execute• Measure throughout

Set up your ONSITE measurements

• Google webmaster tools• Google analytics• 3rd party error checking tools like SEOmoz• Find your success urls to set up your goals

Google webmaster tools

Google analytics

Seomoz crawler

Measure OFFSITE

• Google Keyword tools• Marco Polo (private tool)• SEOmoz Opensite explorer

Research: Find your keywords

• Google keyword finder

Research: Find your worthwhile keywords

Research: find your competitors

Measure: track your competitors

Research: All the websites linking to TTL hompage

Research: the text used to link to TTL homepage

Research: learn from competitor backlinks

Notes• Significant number of links from

travel websites. Extra valuable as they also send buying traffic

• Timebased events are where they have sponsored an event or were linked to as a travel reference from a conference that has now passed

• A number of links were due to that fact that they could be used as an easy reference for train times

• I will follow the Twitter users with the [client] twitter account

Reference site; 27

Blog; 18

Student site; 13

News sites; 12

Timebased event;

10

Twitter; 8

Unique business oppor-tunity; 5

Own site; 2

Now I know

• What keywords are important for me• Who my competitors are for those keywords• What works for my competitors• Where they get their links from• I’m measuring so that I can see the impact of

my work over time• … time to make a plan

A big picture – how it all comes together

• [Client] wants to push their [super cool] application over the next 6 months

• Saatchi does overall creative concept, negotiates rights for celebrity that matches their campaign, produces artwork, TV and radio

• A celebrity will be the face of the campaign (show storyboard)

• Online agency must support the campaign, make it more effective and show 6:1 roi for all work undertaken

Web Agency supplies online strategy

• SEO provides research and measurement to make sure it all works and measure success

• Agency has some knowledge – Soc Med is powerful, but better if incentivised. Rise in mobile. We also see what works for competitors

• A lot of money is going into promoting the term “[campaign term]”

• ++ Must make sure to rank for key campaign term! ++

How does onsite look?

• How does the [client page] look like that will be the landing page of the whole promotion? Put the url into Google.

• What does the search result look like?

What keywords do people use for [campaign term]?

1 Page titleCurrent: [current]Change to: [new]

2 MetadescriptionCurrent: noneChange to: [new]

This is how the new pages will look

Get to #1 ASAP - Seomoz keyword research

• Go to seomoz opensite explorer and find out what its going to take to beat the current #1

The plan

• An incentivised social media competition with lots of partners– Lots of links, lots of traffic, lots of social sharing

stuff

Actual example Landing page redacted. This is a good example of one though

Remember: measure

• Seomoz – to measure links• Majestic seo – measure link growth • Google analytics – to measure traffic to this

page

What if we don’t get to #1?

• PPC• More links – PR• Tweet and FB more for recency• Buy links?

Now what is your business?

• If you are your business - what do you have to do to rank for your name?

• Search your keywords GKT• Find competitors – how many links do they

have in Seomoz?• What will your onpage look like?• What will your SERP look like? (seomofo.com)• Where will you get links?

Crazy scenarios

• OMG you got caught taking cocaine at a nightclub, every news paper writes about you– What will the search results for your name look like?

• OMG your most famous footballer cheats on his wife with a prostitute and gets caught

• OMG your girlfriend found out you cheated on her – and now image search for your name is?

• OMG one of your employees beats someone up and says they love Hitler