self storage basic seo 101

Self Storage SEOBasic SEO 101 for Storage Industry

Created by Travis Wright

Content in this Presentation• The Search Landscape

• How Do Search Engines Work?

• Site Architecture

• Effective Keyword Research

• Link Building Strategies

• Social Media, Social Search & Social Influencers

THE SEARCH LANDSCAPE

Completely different ranking algorithm than standard search

results

Probably doesn’t get traffic like most “#1” results. Actually,

11th listing on the front page.

News Results

Real Time Results

Local Results

Image Results

Click-Through Rates

HOW DO SEARCH ENGINES WORK?

Crawling & Indexing

Without links, the engines might never

find this page

Domain

Authority

Page Rank

“ PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion keyword terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

-Google’s definition of PageRank

Page Rank

The Flow of PageRank

PageRank is Split Evenly

Between the Links on a Page

Technically, Every External Link

“Leaks” PageRank

Nofollowing or Removing Links Can

Alter the Flow of PageRank

Or, at least it used to...

Crawlability / Link Architecture

Duplicate Content & Canonicalization

Canonical URL Tag

301 Redirects

302s

Search Friendly URLs

www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/african-elephants

Single domain

Shallow folder structurewith relevant words

Keywords in page name,separated by hyphen

Search UN-Friendly URLs

Xyz3.nationalgeographic.com/a/?q=31z&mg=vv7z&sd=8

UnnecessarySubdomain Dynamic URLs don’t perform as well as

static and engines recommend against more than two parameters

No keywords in the URL string

Important Tags & Signals

Title Tags

Meta Descriptions

Tag Length Recommendations

Anatomy

Of

A

Link

Page Copy

Image Alt Attributes

Good keyword usage in the alt tag

H1, H2, H(x) Tags

Keyword Research + Targeting

Create Spreadsheet w/ these Columns

Choose the “Best”

Words/Phrases to Target

Identify High Value Keywords

Geo Targeted / Local Keywords

Albuquerque storageAlbuquerque public storageAlbuquerque self storageAlbuquerque storage unitsstorage AlbuquerqueSelf storage AlbuquerqueStorage units AlbuquerquePublic storage Albuquerque

Add Keyword Data for Top Competitors

We like using a weighted average ofthe Page Authority metric

Link Building Strategies

#1 - Manual Link Submissions/Requests

#2 - Competitive Link Research/Acquisition

#2 - Competitive Link Research/Acquisition

#3 - Links via Embedded Content

#4 - Linkbait & Viral Campaigns

#5 - Content, Technology & API Licensing

#6 - Partnerships, Exchanges & Trades

#7 - Paid Links

#8 - Link Reclamation

Training & Incenting Link Builders

Training Camp (via Gil Searcy on Flickr)

• Do link building together

• Create consistent metrics

• Reward like a sales team

• Record reasons why links didn’t happen (like objections to sales)

and work on these (things like design quality, affiliations, language,

etc. will come up)

Building a Link Acquisition Funnel

Visit Link-Targeted Content

Grab Link Code

Link to the Site

Building a Link Acquisition Funnel

Visit Link-Targeted Content

Grab Link Code

Link to the Site

Building a Link Acquisition Funnel

Building a Link Acquisition Funnel

Questions?

Feel free to distribute this presentation for educational use. We love to help SEOs learn!