SEO for Small Business

Transcript

1. September 2, 2015 SEO for Small Business Heather Acton, Helio Interactive Image credit Freshbooks
2. Agenda ✤ Introductions ✤ What is SEO? ✤ “On the Page” SEO ✤ “Off the Page” SEO ✤ SEO Tools & Resources
3. Introductions ✤ Grew up in Lindenhurst, live in Lake Villa ✤ Mechanical engineer turned web developer & strategist ✤ 8+ years & approximately 100 small businesses served
4. What is SEO?
5. Paid vs. Organic SEO
6. White vs. Black Hat SEO
7. “On the Page” vs. “Off the Page” SEO http://searchengineland.com/seotable
8. “On the Page” SEO ✤ Content ✤ Site architecture ✤ HTML
9. “On the Page” SEO - Content ✤ High quality ✤ Well-researched ✤ Use key phrases naturally ✤ Fresh ✤ Vertical content ✤ Answers questions that may be asked in search ✤ Covers topic deeply
10. “On the Page” SEO - Architecture ✤ Search engines should be able to easily crawl pages of your site ✤ Avoid table-based layouts and other outdated programming tactics ✤ Avoid overuse of Flash ✤ Avoid bloated computer-generated code (Dreamweaver, GoDaddy Website Tonight, etc.)
11. “On the Page” SEO - Architecture ✤ Manage duplicate content responsibly ✤ Most reputable CMSs help with this, specifically in blog or news sections with archives that may look like duplicate content ✤ Where you must duplicate content, utilize canonical URLs
12. “On the Page” SEO - Architecture ✤ Mobile friendly or responsive view ✤ Smartphones & tablets combined account for 60% of all online traffic ✤ Smartphones & tablets combined account for 33% of organic search traffic ✤ CONCLUSION: Many websites are not configured to efficiently convert mobile visitors
13. “On the Page” SEO - Architecture Mobile Friendly Mobile Responsive or Adaptive
14. “On the Page” SEO - Architecture ✤ Site load time ✤ Use solid hosting ✤ Avoid large, high quality images ✤ Measure at https://developers.google.com/speed/ pagespeed/insights/ ✤ Every 100ms increase in load time decreases sales by 1%. (Source: Amazon)
15. “On the Page” SEO - Architecture ✤ Friendly URLs heatheracton.com/seo-for-small-business vs. heatheracton.com/?p=987
16. “On the Page” SEO - Architecture ✤ Deliver secure version of your site to visitors ✤ Utilize an SSL certificate to deliver the https:// version of your site
17. “On the Page” SEO - HTML ✤ The following should be appropriately descriptive and include natural usage of targeted key phrases ✤ HTML title tag ✤ meta description tag ✤ headlines and subheads (h1, h2, etc.) ✤ img (image) alt and title tags ✤ a (link) title tags
18. “Off the Page” SEO ✤ Trustworthiness of your site and sites that link to you ✤ Links to your site ✤ Personal connection ✤ Social reputation and activity
19. “Off the Page” SEO - Trust ✤ Many trustworthy sites linking to your site makes your site more trustworthy ✤ Many trusted sources sharing your site’s content makes your content more trustworthy ✤ A site that’s been around longer tends to be more trustworthy ✤ Google Authorship, or another way to verify the author, gives a site identity and is more trustworthy ✤ Pirated content will hurt your site’s trustworthiness
20. “Off the Page” SEO - Links ✤ Trustworthy and numerous links from other sites to yours are very important ✤ Anchor text should be descriptive trustworthy commercial refrigeration repair vs. http://northeastcooling.com ✤ Check external link data here: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
21. “Off the Page” SEO - Links ✤ Don’t pay for incoming links ✤ Don’t spam other sites with your links
22. “Off the Page” SEO - Personal ✤ A person’s location with respect to your site’s can influence where your site shows up in their search results ✤ Whether or not a person has visited or shared your site before influences where your site shows up in their search results ✤ Whether or not your friends have shared or favorited your site influences where it shows up in search results
23. “Off the Page” SEO - Social ✤ Respected networks sharing your content help your reputation ✤ Number of shares on social networks helps your reputation
24. SEO Tools & Resources ✤ Measuring SEO Results ✤ Google Analytics (FREE) ✤ Overall traffic, search traffic, key phrase quality, social traffic, site speed, visitor flow, e-commerce sales, etc. ✤ Google Webmaster Tools (FREE) ✤ Sitemap submission, crawl errors, query data ✤ moz.com ($99/mo for 5 campaigns) ✤ Crawl errors, keyword rankings, competitive data
25. SEO Tools & Resources ✤ Ongoing Education ✤ Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/ ✤ Moz.com blog: http://moz.com/blog ✤ Matt Cutts blog: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ ✤ Search Engine Journal: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/
26. Time for Questions & Discussion