SEO tips and trends – MozCon 2014
MozCon is an annual conference for the search engine optimization (SEO) community organized by Moz, a Seattle-based SEO software company. Thinkso senior project manager Jess Mackta and I attended this year. Here is some of what we took away.
The Big Picture
Rand Fishkin, Moz founder and star of their popular Whiteboard Fridays series, kicked off the conference with “5 Big Trends in Web Marketing.” These were all useful insights, so we’re including them in-depth here.
1. We’re on the verge of regulation. This is happening globally, with laws going into effect in Canada and the EU. In the US, we dodged a bullet in May when internet regulation got shot down in Congress — thanks in part to Google now being the second largest lobbying spender in the country!
2. “Inbound marketing” as terminology is losing to “content marketing.” These terms are widely thought of as the same thing, but technically they aren’t. “Inbound marketing” is marketing based on earning attention rather than interrupting. “Content marketing” is producing and promoting content to earn customers. Relevance? When selling your SEO services or posting positions for online marketing experts, “content marketing” will resonate better with your audience.
3. Google’s penalties take a toll on spam, but they hurt many businesses too. “Back in the day, [website creators] had a ‘deal’ with Google. They told us to focus on creating good websites, and they’d worry about the spammers linking to our sites,” said Fishkin. Then in 2012 Google changed the rules on us. Now it’s website owners’ responsibility to combat these bad links or suffer in search result rankings. This creates good job security for SEOs, but adds just one more layer on to all the things site owners and their agencies need to think about and monitor.
4. “SEO” is now less of a job title and more of a job description. By this, I think Fishkin means that more and more roles — web masters, writers, marketers — require SEO skills.
5. Google is shortening the searcher’s journey. Google is taking our content and embedding it right into the search results page. On the surface this appears to hurt publishers. Users no longer have a reason to come to our sites; Google is essentially giving away our content. But, posits Fishkin, “Google needs to create and feed search addiction.” By pushing our content to the results page, Google is growing search volume, which will ultimately be good for site owners and content generators.
Why You Really Need to Care About Mobile
Google’s focus has been on mobile for the past two years, and that’s because mobile search rates are steadily going up. In fact, as Cindy Krum stated in her presentation, it’s predicted that the number of mobile searches per day will soon surpass those done on the desktop. Here’s what you need to know/consider for mobile SEO:
- Pay-per-click advertising is even more important on smartphones because organic search results are displayed lower on the page (below the fold).
- Don’t use mobilization platforms, which are sites that claim to take your desktop site and automate a mobile version from it. They generate mobile sites that have tons of SEO errors, doing more harm than good to your search rankings.
- Google has stated that responsively designed sites are its preference over separate mDot and tDot sites.
- Page load speed is of the utmost importance. Google penalizes for slower loads (which unfortunately is often endemic to responsive design). There are a lot of important programming tricks to reducing latency:
- Remove unnecessary javascript and CSS by the page.
- Gzip all code files.
- Reduce image size to as small as possible.
- Bundle page icons into a “sprite.”
- Consolidate roundtrip requests to as few as possible.
- Optimize load order. Put JS and CSS for above-the-fold mobile content in the head.
- Use the Google Page Speed tool to evaluate your pages.
Optimizing for Local Searches and Review Sites
To optimize your site for local search rankings, make sure all of your business information is consistent across the web. In other words, whatever directories you’ve listed your businesses in — including Yelp, Infogroup, Google Map Maker — make sure everything is consistent. If not, your Google rankings could suffer.
Mike Ramsey, who presented on this topic, also had a good tip for avoiding negative online reviews: Work a “request for feedback” form into your website. Have the emails come to you — and respond to them (LOL). If users have a direct line for venting, they’re less likely to do it publicly, on Yelp, etc.
PR and SEO: The Lines Are Blurred
Public relations pro Lexi Mills gave us some great PR best practices for boosting SEO:
- Use Moz Top Pages to see what media content is getting the best traffic.
- Make article pitches 400 words max.
- As permanent jobs in media become rarer, there are more and more freelance journalists available for task-based projects.
- Hire freelance journalists to write your press releases and story pitches, as they know what other journalists are looking for. (As permanent media jobs are becoming scarcer, the market is flooded with freelancers looking for project work.)
- Give journalists original images (via DropBox) to use with their stories so they don’t have to look for one. Making their jobs as easy as possible increases the likelihood that you’ll get coverage.
- Publications see themselves as global, so don’t limit yourself to domestic journalists.
- Add third-party experts to your press releases. Again, you’re doing the legwork for the journalist.
- Kickstarter sites are great for increasing SEO, even if you don’t need to raise money.
Google+ Is a Necessary Annoyance
By now, we have all realized that Google is ruling the world. Therefore, we’re all going to have to stop groaning and embrace G+, “Google’s Facebook.” In Mark Traphagen’s presentation, he showed us a case study that demonstrated how growing your G+ community improves your Google search rankings. So even if we all feel “no one uses G+,” we need to draw them into our groups on G+. As Traphagen said, “We don’t care if these people use G+ for anything else. If they are joining our groups and accessing our content on G+, our search rankings will go up.”
Creating Better Online Surveys
Stephanie Beadell gave us some handy tips on creating surveys. (I’m addicted to taking surveys and love creating them for our clients’ businesses, so I really geeked out in this session.)
- Use five- or seven-point scales. They capture variation without overwhelming respondents. Additionally, the odd number gives us a neutral midpoint, which can be important. (I personally think anything more than five points is too much.)
- Break big concepts into a number of questions.
- When looking at results, compare the answers across questions. This provides greater insights than looking at each question in isolation.
- Randomize question order to remove primer bias.
- Put demographic questions at the end of the survey to further remove bias.
- Set expectations and show a progress bar to diminish survey fatigue.
- Guessing is hard. Don’t ask responders to make tough calculations.
- Use an Excel add-in called Analysis Toolpack to improve result data display.
Quality Over Quantity
There was a lot of [great] talk at MozCon about getting away from sheer volume of site traffic, clicks, links, etc., and focusing on SEO in conjunction with user experience. In other words, we all need to care how satisfied our site visitors are, not just how many of them are coming to the site. At Thinkso, we often see media buyers use sheer metrics to try to justify ad spends, or even clients who focus on developing videos or articles without first identifying what information their customers really need. This is incredibly frustrating to us, so we’re happy to see the larger conversation beginning to take hold in the SEO community.
Words and Code: the Music and Lyrics of the Interwebs
Finally, the biggest takeway for me was this: There is a lot on the technical/programming side that affects SEO, and it’s changing and increasing daily. At Thinkso, we do a lot of content SEO, so we’re very focused on the dos and don’ts of editorial that please the Google bots. But that needs to work hand-in-hand with the coding side of things, and this knowledge — although overwhelming at times — helps us better choose and communicate with our development partners so that together we can continue to deliver really solid websites to our clients.