seo 101 - user experience & 2016 seo best practices 5.17.16

2016 SEO User Experience and Best Practices5/12/2016

Join us again! Lesson 2 - June 14 2016 2pm estLesson 3 - July 19 2016 2pm estLesson 4 - August 16 2016 2pm est

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Agenda

User Experience

Lesson One: Areas to Optimize in 2016Join Us for Lesson Two

Overall User Experience

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User Experience

User experience is at the heart of SEO and it needs to be taken into consideration at all stages on and off of your site.

• Links

• SERPs

• On-site • Targeting • Page speed• Content• Interference • Filtering• Breadcrumb• Navigation• Site Search

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User Experience: Links

There are few examples of where hunting and weddings would naturally go together; the same is true for hunting sites and wedding sites.

Ask yourself; Do you share the same audience and does the content provide additional benefit to their audience?

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55 Inch Smart TVWe’ll use this as an example search

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User Experience: SERP ListingsDoes your listing speak to the needs of the consumer?

• Does it contain the keyword?If it doesn’t, then you change it or

create new content that is more appropriate. (The content should be naturally targeted to the keyword, don’t try to manipulate it.)• Does it include a value proposition?

Whether it’s price, quality, convenience or some other benefit that provides the best possible experience for your visitors, be sure to let them know. This will increase CTR with your target audience and decrease bounce rate from visitors who are looking for something else.• Structured data – We’ll talk more about this

later in the series

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User Experience: Targeting

Are visitors getting to the right content right away?

Don’t make the user try to find the content. We all know what a pain that is and we just came from a place that had plenty of other listings claiming to have what we need; Why not just bounce back over to Google and check someone else’s listing out?

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User Experience: Page Speed

We’ll talk about page speed at length later in the series, but here’s a simple stat; *pages that loaded in 2.4 seconds experienced a 12.8% bounce rate, while those that loaded in 3.3 seconds had a bounce rate of 20%.

*https://www.soasta.com/blog/mobile-web-performance-monitoring-conversion-rate/

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User Experience: Content

Are you providing additional information quickly, so that the audience can determine if they are in the right place?

BestBuy provides tons of additional information and links to other relevant/supporting content as well

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User Experience: InterferenceAre you hindering their ability to read the content or view products with pop ups or other annoyances?

While best buy does have a chat box that will pop up to offer assistance, that does not happen immediately. It is deigned to trigger late in a session so that the visitor can view the content without interruption.

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User Experience: Filtering – Breadcrumb – Navigation – Site Search

If they aren’t already at the content they really need, then are you making it easy for them to find what they want quickly?

On Site Areas to Optimize

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SEO Is Not Like It Used To Be

SEO is very different from how it used to be. In 2016 Google relies on machine learning algorithms that tie together over 500 different ranking factors

Some interesting reading:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-26/google-turning-its-lucrative-web-search-over-to-ai-machines

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/28/google-ceo-cites-shift-from-a-mobile-world-to-an-ai-world.html

http://research.google.com/pubs/MachineIntelligence.html

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So What Should We Optimize For?

Register your domain on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools:https://www.google.com/webmasters/ https://www.bing.com/webmaster/

First optimize for how your users will use your page.

Second, optimize for improving the page’s click through rate.

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Best Blue Widgets 2016 | Widgetsource

Optimizing Page Titles

• Less than 40 Characters Mobile• Less than 60 Characters Desktop • All titles should be unique to the page.• First and foremast write a title that makes sense

for the page. • TIP: Check search volume in Google AdWords.

Some phrases are searched more than others.

In the source it looks like this: <title>Best Blue Widgets 2016 | Widgetsource </title>

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Optimizing Meta Descriptions

• Less than 98 Characters Mobile• Less than 148 Characters Desktop • All descriptions should be unique to the page.• Write a description that makes sense for the

page and entices the visitor to learn more by clicking through it.

In the source it looks like this: <meta name="description" content="Our blue widgets are the best plain and simple. Want to know why ours are the best? Read this!" />

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Monitoring Click Through Rate

• Google Search Console > Search Traffic > Search Analytics

• Click “Pages” and set your date range. • You can also toggle for either mobile, desktop,

or tablet.

Action Item: Identify the pages getting click that have a CTR lower than your average.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/

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Good alt text example:<img src="puppy.jpg" alt="Dalmatian puppy playing fetch">

Optimizing Image Alt Text

Goal:  To create a descriptive alt text provides users with important information about the image.

• Describe the image without stuffing in keywords. • Don’t leave it blank. • Do this for every image on the page. • Too short would be only including one word.• Too long would be telling an entire story or

spamming it with keywords.

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Header Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6)

Header tags are used for the headings and subheadings of your content.

• H1–H6, historically in a sense of ‘importance’.• Normally only one H1 per page. • Write headings naturally rather than trying to

force a lot of keywords into them. • It is a good idea to use headings to improve your

visitor’s engagement and time on site.

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Please Join Us Again On 6/14/16!

We will continue our series going more in depth with lesson 2 of our SEO webinar series course.

Sign up now! http://bit.ly/1sjfvW7