Effectively Managing Organic Campaigns for

Small Businesses

By: Patrick Coombe@patrickcoombe

www.elite-strategies.com

Today’s Modified Audience

• Primarily in-house SEO’s

• SEO’s in General

• Affiliates who use SEO as

a traffic source

• Anyone interested in

learning more

What we’ll talk about*

• Ethics• Staying Organized• Methods / SEO Fundamentals• Flow of information• Outsourcing• SEO • Content Marketing• The role of Social Media

*intermediate talk / not super-technical

Ethics

With a new SEO company on every corner, the best way to set yourself apart from the competition is to practice ethical SEO. This means:

• Following search guidelines such as Google

Webmaster Guidelines

• Being up front with clients and managing

expectations

• Not gambling with a site that isn’t yours

• Affiliate guidelines

• Break laws

• Do no harm

Clients will love you for it.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

Search Guidelines

Spam tactics such as SAPE, blog comments and other link SPAM might “work” but is never a long term solution.

Just because you didn’t get hit this update, doesn’t mean you won’t get hit in the next one.

Don’t Gamble

If you are an in-house SEO, don’t gamble with a

site that you don’t own by using tactics that

could hurt a business in the long term.

Businesses are now starting to think about suing

SEO companies.

Affiliate Ethics

LOL?

Sounds like an oxymoron.

BUT

Again, in the long term, using unethical organic search tactics to drive search traffic to a landing page could get your account banned.

Example - NoNo

Do no harm

Examples:

• A client cancels so you noindex their site in

the htaccess

• Slandering a client or colleague for any

reason

• Buying links that could penalize a site

• Buying links that you don’t know what they

are

• Not refunding, etc

Breakin’ the Law

Sellers on the black market are selling links on sites that they do not own by way of SQL injection.

SQL injection = theft / breaking and entering

Plenty of other illegal ways to gain links (or 301)

Just ask Aaron Kelley lawyer in the next room.

Thanks Thomas Hawk Flickr

Staying Organized

• Project management software

• Spreadsheets

• CRM

• Internal file structure on your PC

• Backups

Thanks Z Andrei Flickr

Project Management

I

Basecamp

Why Basecamp is Awesome for SEO’s

and Affiliate Marketers

Well

It keeps all of your client data organized

It keeps all of your personal sites organized

It keeps all of your affiliate campaigns data organized.

You can add/remove members (colleagues, etc) to share information easily.

Easily collaborate with team members in another state.

Once you get more than 10+ clients or campaigns a spreadsheet just will not suffice.

Ballers use Basecamp.

A slide just for backups

Have you ever fell victim to a server crash and not had a backup?

Don’t trust that the “server guy” will do it.

Backup everything, often.

Thanks mayhem/flickr

SEO: What’s Important These Days?

Backlinks (still huge)

Site speed (now more important than

ever)

UX

Meta data / alt tags and all that jazz.

Proper coding

Fresh content

Social

What would an SEO presentation be without

backlinks?

Backlinks

Where not to get backlinks:

Automated toolz such as Scrapebox / Xrumer

Automated online systems (anything automated)

Most forum merchants

SAPE, etc.

“Private blog networks”

Or even

“Public blog networks”

So where can I get

backlinks?

Good backlinks will find you, you will not find them

Good backlinks come from creating good sites.

Create interesting websites that people feel compelled to share.

Make really useful properties, widgets, plugins, apps, infographics, charts, bells, whistles and widgets.

Share useful (helpful/resourceful, etc) information.

If you can’t become a huge brand, become a micro-authority or micro-brand.

Other ways to get links…

(Haro)

Ask for links

Always get credit where credit is due.

Find broken links. (there’s a tool for that)

Find places where you’ve contributed. (search for them)

Find organizations you belong to.

Blogger outreach

Network at places like this.

In this day in age, you are gonna hafta hustle to make it happen.

This means lots of emails, phone calls, interviews, patronizing, sucking-up, following up, and scheming.

UX

Google is straight up banning sites that look like crap.

Google and other search engines rate your site based on a quality score.

First and foremost, your site should be easy for your customer to navigate (esp. affiliates)

http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/insidesearch/howsearchworks/fighting-spam.html

SPEEEEEEED

I don’t need to cite or reference the dozens of studies that show the importance of site speed, it is.

In addition to studies, Google has publicly stated this.

Perfecting site speed and performance should be a large part of your efforts.

FACT

If your site takes longer than 2

seconds to load you have a problem.

How to test site speed?

Tried an tested:

Tools.pingdom.com

Does a fine job and will tell you everything you need to know

about site speed.

It’s free and you install nothing.

More on site speed

It could take months to perfect (depending on the size)

Consider speed from the beginning of a new site.

Plugins / and other fancy widgetry will bloat out your site faster than anything!

There are so many ways to optimize your site for speed:

• Minification of css/JS• Image spriting• Get a better host• Get a CDN• Caching• So much more

A guide on optimizing Wordpress for Speed:

http://bit.ly/17pvbVS

Meta data and all that jazz

Meta keywords tag = not important (unless it’s a press release)

Your meta description should accurately describe your page. It is good for SEO if it contains the keywords you are targeting. (140-160 char limit)

Same goes with titles.

Same with image alt tags, they should accurately describe the image and maybe even the surrounding text.

H1 tags and HX tags are great for SEO.

Keyword density, still important but not nearly as important as your content making sense.

Fresh Content

Updating your website frequently sends positive vibes to Google and other search engines.

This doesn’t just mean “have a blog”

It could mean:

• Updating a table of information• Updating dates• Adding new members or items to a data set• Adding new PDF’s to a page• Adding a new paragraph of text to a piece of

information• Adding images

Social Media & SEO

Weather or not social media plays a role in SEO is still up in the air to many SEO’s.

Some say it is important.

Some say it is not.

Others say “it will be” (like me)

Nevertheless, there are still a lot of aspects of social media that does help SEO.

For now…

Make sure you have active Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest accounts.

This means post information from your blog/site as well as relevant information from your community/niche.

Don’t forget social profile links.

Authorship?

Outsourcing

For an agency, not a good idea in general.

Linkbuilding should rarely be outsourced.

A good affiliate will outsource almost everything (except money site content and creative)

Remember: Everyone is not great at everything.

When you find someone good, treat them very well and hold onto them.

Trust no one with your campaign data and client data.

Content Marketing

Is so much fun.

Fun example

At our office, we do “1 hour buzz session

power hours” where we take 1 piece of

content from one client and 10-12 people

attempt to get as much attention as we can in

1 hour.

Sometimes the results are insane!

And very rewarding.

Content marketing is not:

• Re-writing lame “top 10 lists” and hitting publish.

• “Writing content”• Making an infographic• Publishing a video

Writing a post filled with content and developing pieces of media

might be part of content marketing, it is only the

beginning of it.

Content marketing is:

Finding an amazing outlet to share your newly written piece of content, curating it, and finding ways to share that outlet.

Spending an hour with a group of 3 people to think of the best way to title your content.

Negotiating with other social outlets to distribute your content.

Finding creative ways to get your content tweeted (trade, sponsored tweet, ask)

Allowing other content marketers to use your channels to share their content that is relevant to your niche.

Before I forget, a few tools that I love:

(everyone loves tools)

Scrapebox (yea, I said it)

Not recommended for building links.

The add-ons ROCK!:

• Dupe checker• Alive check• Dupe removal• Link extractor• Sitemap scraper• Import/export/sorting• Fake PageRank checker (so good)• OBL checker• URL shortner• And so many more

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is the best backlink analyzer and used by all of the top SEO professionals.

IMO, has one of the best indexes out there.

Picks up new links fast

Great for checking out competitors

Finding referring domains

Finding new and lost backlinks

www.AHREFS.com

PIWIKUsed as a replacement for Google Analytics

Does an amazing job of breaking down your data.

Great for exporting for client reports.

Great for affiliates.

Prosper 202

Not an SEO tool, but my favorite way to track an affiliate campaign.

Been running for over 3 years, without missing a beat.

Lastly

Don’t think about tomorrow, as hard is it may be. Think about next year, and 10 years from now.

Read, read, read. A good SEO is up to date on current information.

ABT = Always be testing. A good SEO will constantly be running tests, analyzing information, and sharing results with the community.

There are no shortcuts.