learn from the herd

Learn from the HerdSearchLove Boston 2014

Matthew Brown – @MatthewJBrown

Prologue: I’m proud to be a part of the SEO herd

Forgive me for any trash talk!

Credit: Dvidshub

How we see ourselves

Credit: Dvidshub

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Closer to the truth?

Information Cascades

An information (or informational) cascade occurs when people observe the actions of others and then make the same choice that the others have made, independently of their own private information signals. [wikipedia]

Exhibit A: PageRank Sculpting!

Information cascades = Jackpot for Google

It’s just SEOs, Matt, and penalties

Don’t believe the hype

SEO “truth”: Brand will save us!

Reality: You can still get hit, and for good

UK Brands are the latest victims - http://bit.ly/1gRRJI5

SEO “truth”: On-page is dead

Are we seeing decreasing importance of on-page factors?

Or maybe it’s just moved on from strings

SEO “truth”: Authorship is dead

Reality: I want my ‘SEO Guide’ ranking!

What about my beautiful metrics?

SEO “truth”: Using markup is suicide

Reality: Google don’t need ya

This is just a straight-up scrape of allmenus.com

It’s even happening to your friends

SEO “truth”: Google’s real estate grabs are always bad

SEO “truth”: Any SERP visibility is good

Reality: Don’t forget about searcher intent!

SEO “truths” are why I yell (and drink)

But I’ve got 26,000 customers to serve

What have I done?

What the heck are SEOs up to?

Credit: Jouni Seppanen

Industry Survey Data

Industry trends: SEO not dead, big push to Content

Content! Less focus on links

Adoption of Content marketing tools

Google is the top three for content marketing tools?

We hear: Content performance is hard to measure

“We use GWT, Excel, Screaming Frog and hack it all together in one big spreadsheet.”

Not provided: Scattering the herd

Moz usage data**obviously, correlation != causation

Rankings: Consistent, but no huge growth

Consistent rankings usage since Not Provided. Why?

“Rankings will be dead within one year”

“I still report rankings, but as a composite metric. Not individual rankings.”

“Rankings are part of my reporting, but near the back now”

We hear: Rankings are less important

We hear: SERP visibility is hard to measure

#3 organic ranking. How much traffic is that worth?

OSE usage has risen 50% in the last two years

Just Discovered Links has big growth within OSE

Fresh Web Explorer & Followerwonk growingFWE usage is up 40% and Followerwonk 17% in the last 12 months

Hypothesis: The herd is just starting to break away from ‘Old Testament’ SEO

Who’s leading us?(my SEO Academy Award)

SEO of the Year*

*award has no cash value

BILL ‘m-effin’ SEBALD!(@BillSebald)

For testing old assumptions - http://bit.ly/MemcTW

And hacking future SERPs- http://bit.ly/1cgMoaE

He’s IN!

Keep hacking!

Hack together your SEO experiments:http://bit.ly/1bdY7ZH

Test these on your own sites!

Hack your visibility - Google ved parameter: http://bit.ly/1jLKqVr http://bit.ly/1cs4Wll

Hack your competition - Nerdy Data: http://nerdydata.com/

Hack your competitor’s strategy - Rival IQ: https://www.rivaliq.com/

My prediction for our future? PAIN.

Start thinking about your “Future SERPs”

Plan a ‘non-HTML’ SEO strategyKG cards for Google Glass - http://bit.ly/1lsjG9V

Early adoption: Your only optionNew tech like JSON-LD for data markup - http://bit.ly/1k52cmx

JSON-LD lets you send schema.org markup using JSON instead of HTML

If you haven’t started, you’re lateCommon crawl stats for Nov 2013 - http://bit.ly/1k7Nprm

585 million URLs have structured data now, up almost 50% from last year. Schema.org is half of the total.

Get Freebase dialed in: YESTERDAY

Roll your own Knowledge Graph - http://bit.ly/1fGAjgM

It’s all about Google+Google is rolling in identity layers for everything

The best part: We’re in the driver’s seat!

Thanks for letting me rant!