what's hot in seo ranking factors - smx advanced june, 2016

#SMX #11A @stonetemple

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What’s Hot in SEO Ranking Factors


Stone Temple ConsultingFull-service Digital Marketing Agency

Content Marketing• Strategic Plan• Off-site Placements• On-site Content• Influencer / Media Relationships• Link Building

On-Page SEO• Comprehensive Audits• Site Hierarchy (IA)• Search Engine Crawl Management• Crawls• Ongoing Site Reviews and Auditing

• Mobile Strategy• Mobile SEO Implementation• AMP• App Strategy• Deep Linking• App Store Optimization

Social Media• Strategic Plan• Drive Business Results• Influencer / Media Relationships• Content Strategy• Content Generation

Mobile


Featured Snippets: Let’s Look At Some

Data!


Rich Answers Continuing to Grow

Based on Reviewing 855K SERPs


Massive Churn in Featured Snippets


Google Appears to Have Built a Featured

Snippet Machine

Speculation Ahead!


Example Site: Got The Rich Answer

Does Getting a Featured Snippet Increase Traffic?


RankBrain: What’s the Real Story?


What is the label of a consumer at the highest level of a food chain?

“Name”

To eat not to buy

“The”

“Top”


Can You Get 100% Score on SuperMario Without Walkthrough?

Negatives


Built a DB of 500K queries from Google

and Bing Suggest


June/July 2015 Google Result

January 2016 Google Result

Pulled Results from Google on Two Different Dates


Why Are PDFs So Weak?

July 2015

Answer


Now Relates “Weak” to Security

January 2016

Answer


July 2015

Answer


January 2016

Answer


Google’s Mobile Update II


What Happened With Mobilegeddon?

We Analyzed 15,235 Queries

Week of April 17 2015, and Again on May 18 2015We Focused on

the Top 10 Results


Mobile DOES Matter as a Ranking Factor


What About Google’s 2nd Mobile Ranking Update?


Not as Big an Impact as the First Update


Why This Update is Still Important

Indicator of Google’s Confidence in the

Concept of a Rankings Boost

Will Likely be Followed by More

Such Updates

Future mobile ranking updates will include other factors such as page speed


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http://www.thesempost.com/next-mobile-friendly-update-includes-page-speed-coming-in-months/


Links: A Fresh Look at Their

Impact


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Ammon Johns: We heard that RankBrain is the third-most-important signal contributing to results now. Would it be beneficial to us to know what the first two are?Andrey Lippatsev: Yes. Absolutely. I can tell you what they are. It’s content and links going into your site.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8VnZCcl9J4#t=30m15sAired on Mar 23, 2016

Google’s Current Postion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8VnZCcl9J4#t=28m25s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8VnZCcl9J4#t=28m25s


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So What’s the Real Story?


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Mean of the Correlations Across All SERPs Tested


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Sum of all Links Per Ranking Position (Normalized)


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Aggregate Correlations Across Blocks of 10 SERPs

Positions 1 – 10Positions 11 – 20Positions 21 – 30Positions 31 – 40Positions 41 – 50

Pearson Correlation: 0.77Spearman Correlation: 1


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What Do All These Numbers Mean?

The Aggregate Correlation Values are

VERY High

The Average of the Individual SERP Correlations Still

Meaningful

Search is a Noisy System

• We found that at least 6% of the results came from different algorithms)• Local results• Query deserves

diversity• In Depth Articles

• Overall Content Quality / Relevance a Huge Factor Too


37Content Quality / Relevance

1. Link Score = 100, Content Score = 702. Link Score = 80, Content Score = 90

Which Would Rank Higher?Imagine a System Where You Multiply

2 Numbers

Link Score * Content Score = ?


38Impact of a Mix of Domain Authority and Page

Authority


39Commercial vs. Informational Terms


40Commercial Head Terms vs. Commercial Long Tail Terms


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Examples of the True Power of Links

This is a Process That

We’ve Repeated

Hundreds of Times


Eric [email protected]

@stonetemple+Eric Enge

(508) 962-8474www.stonetemple.com

Thank You!