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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Top Tips for Managing Search Engine Optimisation
00:23:47
Get our top tips on managing SEO for your company. Whether you manage SEO via an agency or run your own in house programme, we have some top tips to help you with managing your search engine optimisation campaigns. Daniel walks us through the...
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Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello, and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
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And I'm Daniel Rolls.
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And today, Daniel, we're talking about managing search engine optimization.
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We are. We're going to try and come at it from kind of two different angles. One is, if you're using an agency to help you with this, just talk about the key steps that you're probably going to go through and some of the things to look out for, and then we're going to go through and look at it. If you're managing yourself and you might find it's a bit of a hybrid, you might find you're doing a bit of both as well. So I used to run a search agency, so I'm going to start off talking about that a little bit. So I think one of the important things to understand is the key stages that an agency will go through with search and being aware of their importance and some of the pitfalls as well. So normally there's two things you'll do at the beginning, which is a technical audit, which is looking at the technical aspects of how your website has been built, the templates, the content management system. And it's probably looking at things like Google Search Console, which is, if you're not familiar at all, we're going to talk about a fair bit here, which is basically a lot of the insights that you're going to get from Google about your SEO. And a technical audit can actually be very, very complicated. There's some really kind of clever stuff that could go into this and so on as well. There are tools out there that will audit your website for free or for very low cost. So I'd be really cautious at this stage because what you see an awful lot of is an agency comes in, they have a tool of which there are many very good tools to do this, and they hit audit this website button, the report comes out, they put their logo on it, send it over to you, and charge you a premium for doing that. And it's not the report itself that's useful, it's really what happens afterwards with that information as well. So I would be very cautious about finding out where they're going to get the data from in the first place, but also who is going to implement those changes. If they're just going to give it to your developers and expect the developers to do something with it, they probably won't know what on earth to do with it to some extent.
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And this is A pitfall I've seen a lot of big organizations that should really know better fall into, which is it's very easy to engage with an agency. They go off and put in the audits, come back with a whole bunch of recommendations and then none of it's implemented. And then it comes around, another six months, you expect another audit. And so it goes on because there is a lot of legwork behind this. Even if you're outsourcing, it does take time. So you've either got to have much higher agency fees for them to manage that, or you've got to allocate resources internally to make some of these changes or you never really move forward.
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Yeah, exactly. Exactly that. And don't assume that developers can take an SEO report and do something with it, because actually quite a lot of it needs interpreting and specific actions created from it. So you take a particular report and then you write a specification that, that says we need to change our template to do this, look like this, et cetera, what it may be, generally the more technical your staff, the more specific you need to be in your requirements. So giving them a fairly high level report isn't gonna help them. So make sure you've got that kind of covered as well. Then from this kind of technical audit, what you wanna go through and make sure you've also thought about is keyword research, which is what are the words and phrases that you actually want to rank for and that your audience is searching for as well. Now, it literally used to be as simple as going through and saying, right, these are the five keywords that I care about, let's just stick them in everywhere. The reality is the Google algorithm has got smarter. It's still important to have the words on the page that people are searching for. I don't think you can get away from that completely, but I also think it's about content themes or hubs of content around a topic. So if I'm going to talk about SEO tools, I'm not just going to write one SEO tools report. I might have 20 different bits of content that come at it from lots of different angles. So I'm covering the bases on that topic as well. So I would think about researching around themes or kind of hubs or topics as well and kind of building those key phrase lists based on that.
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It makes it so much easier to manage as well if you take a themes approach. And actually from the Google algorithm perspective, I think it looks so much more natural. It's also less problematic in terms of you not repeating yourself again. And again and again, which is really bad for your positioning actually, and really dull for your audience.
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So, yeah, so we've done our technical audit, we've done a bit of keyword research. Then what we're probably outputting is a bit of a plan with content. So we're going off and creating kind of content and then we're looking for link building opportunities. Now this is normally what you're paying for a lot of the time in the retainer. Bit of an SEO kind of contract is the ongoing maybe creation of content, but also getting people to link back to that content. Make sure they're not doing link building requests in the old fashioned way, which is going to a website and saying, can we have a link please? Can we have a link for you? And they go, oh, we had 4,000 link submission requests this month. It was great, fantastic. How many did we actually get though? So what you've got to start thinking about now is pr, really public relations, which is the whole thing of actually why would someone talk about you, why would they link back to you? So any good SEO agency will not only be talking to you about creating content, but looking for opportunities for engagement with maybe influencers, maybe with news websites, maybe with bloggers, whatever it may be, finding ways of why they get back to you, why would they link back to you. And link building is a very creative process now. So to give an example, we have our digital marketing skills benchmark, we can go in and benchmark your skills. One of the benefits of that for us is link building in that it's such a useful thing, people want to link through to it. So thinking about those opportunities, for me.
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Link building is an even broader church than that. I think there's a lot to be said for reaching out to your customer bases through social media platforms and encouraging the, the sharing and the linking. Those links have been shown again and again because they have dates and particular people and their networks associated with them can be really, really powerful. And not only are they powerful from a how you rank perspective, but also just from an ability to find you and your content because it's putting it in front of relevant audiences within those platforms. So that kind of link building very often is, is overlooked. Even do you know, even just internal link building. So you know, if you have new content, making sure that you know it's being shared with the agency managing social or your internal social team, and also cross linking, you've got lots of different content on similar themes. There's great opportunity to cross link internally within your content and that also helps as well. So, you know, take quite a broad look at link building. It's not what it used to be, which is kind of en masse, buying up links and getting them put anywhere you can. It's about being a lot more creative and a lot more social.
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So when you look at your, your relationship with the SEO agency, one of the things to be careful of is they're going to charge you probably for monthly link building. And it will say 12 hours of link building and there'll be a number associated with it as well. What are they actually doing? What actually is being done? Okay, I would be really careful. This is an awful lot of link building and you don't really know what's happening at all. So you want an agency that's creative, that is actually thinking about all these different connections between different types of content, and you want some detail of how that link building is being done. Now what you then want is some metrics and reporting that goes with this and that will look at maybe things like inbound links, but you might use a free tool or open site explorer to look at that. But also you want to look at some sort of ranking report that says these are the words and phrases that we wanted to be ranking for. And actually, are we now there's two places to get the data, really. One is an external tool like SE ranking is one that I always recommend. So seranking.com, very low cost. I think it's like US$10 a month and does really good ranking reports and other great things from an SEO point of view as well. All the other tools like Raven Tools and so on as well. Moz will have these kind of things built in as well. But essentially it's telling you, where are you ranking in Google uk, Google us, Google France and so on for a particular phrase. What position are you at? And have you gone up or down? Which is one thing. The other thing is looking at your data within Google Search Console and Google Analytics of what words are actually driving visits to your website. Because bear in mind, just because you want to get rankings, particular term doesn't mean you are. So the analytics reports can miss things that you're not ranking for yet as well. And that's probably where you want to focus quite a lot of your effort. But then you need a process for iteration. We've got to the reports, we're then going to go back and we're going to work out how we're going to change our approach. What content do we need on this particular Hub, whatever it may be as well. So thinking about that looping process, so make sure you're getting detail on what's actually being done for the hours. Make sure if you do a technical audit that actually something's going to happen to it in the first place as well. If you're doing things like outreach, be very cautious about where you're spending money and what you're actually getting from that outreach. Because there's this real trend now towards doing link building by doing social engagement and paying influencers. And actually are they really engaged? Is the value you're getting from that really very round as well? I think Kiran's had problems with this previously.
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Oh yeah. I mean, gosh, some of the things that I've seen going on where, you know, you'll have an influencer outreach program and you'll be playing paying some medium level blogger, you know, quite large sums of, of money and that, you know, that flies in the face of recommended good practice in the first place. Anyway, they're paid for links pretty much. Yeah, they are, they are. And I think this is one of the big areas that could yet be an expose, really. There's a lot of it going on because I guess it looks natural and it's quite hard. But actually, you know, sure, okay, there's affiliate links and that's a different kettle of fish altogether. But there's a lot of bloggers out there that are accepting payments for posting things on Instagram and on Facebook and on Twitter feeds. And what have it does fly in the face of that whole paid for link building, I think, and should be one you should be very, very cautious of indeed. Because actually if Google decide that they're going to slap down sites that have been involved in that and you've got 18 months worth of activity on that, you're going to have a problem. So we've always advised stay the right side of Google, keep involved in good best practice and don't try and game the system. So be very wary if that's what your agency is suggesting you should do.
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Absolutely. So those are the key kind of stages from an agency point of view. So what about, what should we be looking at, Kieran, if we're kind of managing this ourselves? Those are the key places to really think.
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So I think. Do you know what? I think the whole ranking thing, you need to be able to monitor that and know if you've done stuff, what effect has it had? And really the only reliable source of information, unless you're going to pay a lot of money, there are some really expensive tools out there that have their own proprietary ranking algorithms that give you all sorts of insight into how you're ranking for various terms in different locations. But actually the only reliable source of how you're ranking is from Google Console, in my opinion. And it doesn't give you 100% accurate, it's kind of averages it out. So because Google and other search engines are also available, have these ranking algorithms that very often are personalized towards the individual user, you don't get a true sense anymore of ranking number one in Google. That's pretty much a thing of the past.
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A good point, because just because I search something and it's number one in Google doesn't mean when you search, geographic difference is going to make differences as well. So the data in Search Console is giving you an average position in Google, but essentially when you go look, you might not be that position because of all those different factors that are going on. It's worth saying as well that, you know, a period of time ago, Google just took all the search data out of Google Analytics and pretty much everything was suddenly not provided. Still not perfect. You go into the Search Console now, we've seen it today like 50, 60% of data was missing, but there was a lot more there to work with as well. So it does give us a really good starting point.
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A lot more. So what I'm going to recommend is that you, if you haven't already, you need to link up Google Search Console, previously called Webmaster Tools for those of you that remember that, but it's now called Google Search Console. You need to set up an account for that. You also need to have a Google Analytics account set up and functioning on your website and you need to link the two together. Now you can find lots of tutorials online in doing this and actually the guidance within Google Analytics is pretty good for showing you how to do this. So do take a look at that. You have to authorize yourselves and there are a number of ways of authorizing yourself and it's a tricky one. You can fall at this fence. So the, the default and preferred way of authorizing your ownership of a website is through something called DNS, the domain Name settings. Very often these things are either too technical for you to want to bother with or locked down by your IT department. So Google do give you some other ways of doing this. You can, if you have admin access to Google Analytics, you can use that to prove you have ownership within Google Console. And also if you have Tag Manager, you can use that access to prove you have authorization and ownership of that website. One of the interesting things I've found, however, is that if your Google Analytics is set up in Google Tag Manager, it won't allow you to authorize through Google Analytics. So if it's not working, that's possibly why. And you maybe need to speak to your Google Analytics admin person to get yourself added, as I fell foul of that this week.
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Absolutely. And then once that's set up, you can then go in and under the acquisition reports, ones that tell you where your traffic's coming from, you've got the search console reports, and you can see things like the landing pages people are going through to the queries, the word they're searching for, the countries they're in, and so on as well, can't you?
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You can. And what's lovely about those four key reports is that you can drill down into them. So I can look at the devices report and if I drill down into that, it'll give me kind of devices by landing page, which is really useful, and vice versa. If I go into the query report, I can dig into a particular search phrase and see how various different landing pages in their report, and if I go in through countries, I can segment. So there's lots of different ways of segmenting your data. What I think is particularly interesting is it takes all the best data from Google Search Console and attempts to sync that up with all the best data within Google Analytics. One thing I would say is that some of the metrics don't necessarily marry up and I wouldn't waste too much time looking into data discrepancies. As with all of these tools, they all have slightly different ways of calculating things, slightly different ways of measuring, and I just kind of accept that, really, you can chase your tail for a long time trying to get to the bottom of that. There's plenty of online support to give you insights into why the differences are there. So I'm not going to go into that for this podcast episode, but make use of those reports, make use of the data and go on a few little data safaris where you just sort of delve into it and take a look and write down the questions that you end up asking yourself. Because actually, that can be a really great way of really honing in on important aspects of the data that you're seeing. Without that, you can disappear into a bit of a rabbit warren of data. I think having actual formulated questions or theories that you can go in and delve in and experiment with is a great way of staying focused and getting some good outcomes from your data information.
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The other thing I think about this stage when you look at these reports is the Hub hero hygiene model, which is that model. I've explained it before. But hygiene is the stuff that you have to have. It's the content you really need. That's the stuff that you should be ranking number one for in Google. So it's kind of when someone searches for what you do, you, your particular service, you want to be ranking as high as possible for that. So you want to keep an eye on that, you want to optimize for it, you want to keep an eye on your rank checking the hub content is the stuff that you regularly publish. And what you really want is to look at your hub content and work out which of it's really working, which of it has kind of become hero content to some extent. So I know when we look at our reports, there are two or three bits of content that consistently drive traffic every month. What we try and do is look at those and say, right, we need to update it. So our SEO tools report, for example, drives loads of visits every month. We, we need to update that, we need to kind of keep it. It's a really fresh piece of content. We rank really well for a phrase YouTube template and actually it's a graphic that seems to be working for us as part of a blog post. So again, we want to look at updating that and improving it and so on as well and then looking at what other content we could do that would be similar to these kind of things. So the iteration process becomes really important and you're thinking about, yes, your hygiene content. You have to have, yes, you're going to regularly publish stuff, so make sure you factor in the right keywords and phrases. But, but then look at that stuff you're publishing regularly and how can you turn it into hero content? By just getting it to be useful month in, month out as well.
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And as Daniel said, with an agency, they will track your positions on various keywords. And I think for a long time you just weren't able to do that well within Google Analytics. And you can now. Not to the same degree that you once could back in the day, but hey, things change. Let's get over that. I think one of the things I'd recommend if you're using Google Analytics to track this, obviously link up Google Search Console with Google Analytics. But remember that with every Google Analytics report, you have the option to automate and schedule getting those reports. So I can arrange to get a particular report Once I've got it set up on the 1st of every month, and that's great, it means you do have an ability to output into spreadsheet format or as a PDF if you prefer. I always prefer the spreadsheet because you can start pulling different data together and actually store the information for longevity. The reason I say that is that Google Search Console will only actually go back. Well, it'll go back to the point you set it up in the first place, but then it'll only carry on recording data for 90 days and then as each period gets older than 90 days, it drops off. So, you know, it's great to set up some processes so that you can start looking on month, on month and year, on year information and see how you've, how you've grown a little bit of creativity within your spreadsheets. You'll be able to do that, but why not schedule those reports so you don't forget to do it at the same point? You can do it weekly or monthly, depending on how much time you want to put into this. But I think that's great. You've now got the ability to do that and to look at those average positions that Google says that you're getting. And that's pretty good. If you start doing all this, you'll be doing a lot more than most people do.
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I would also say don't forget that a lot of these particular reports don't give you many link building metrics. They give you average position, which we very much kind of correlate through to how many links you've got. But directly in Search Console itself, there are link reports. Who's linking through to you? Where do you come from? And for example, when I look at our link reports very quickly, you come to see that the podcast is really important for us from an SEO point of view, that lots and lots of websites that talk about the podcast end up linking back to our website. So if you just look at the reports in terms of your HERO content, in terms of the keywords, that's fine, but look at the link building reports as well because they'll give you a bit of insight into what's actually driving links and having a kind of indirect impact on your search rankings as well.
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And I think there's a really interesting point there, Daniel, which is if you're going to be producing this content, don't do it because it's going to rank you higher. You know, Daniel and I were doing the podcast for years before we ever got access to this data. And the reason we did it A, because we love doing it, and B, you know, we got lovely feedback from people and they said it was really, really useful. So that was what got us doing it. And I think there's a real lesson there. The reason why our podcast episodes build so much traffic is because we've taken a lot of time to put a bit of love into it and to craft it and to try and make it better all the time. We're constantly striving to improve things, and that's what's paying the dividends. It's a. It's a lovely outcome, but it wasn't the aim. It was never the aim. The aim was to just share our knowledge and help people with what they do. That's what we're completely founded on.
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I think this is it. It's about providing value. If you're going to create content, think more about the value proposition and the user journey and all those kind of things. And actually that's what will generate the links naturally. The thing is, I got told off before for keep saying, oh, it's all very well saying, provide value. What does that really mean? But what it really means is that you've understood your audience, you've understood their pain points, and you're trying to fix those. So if you can do that, then essentially that will generate engagement, that will generate links naturally as well. So it's probably better, the more complicated the algorithm gets, to focus on that stuff, really, at the end of the day, because that's what actually has an impact.
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It does. What it means, people, is make the world a better place. Try and improve something, even if it's a small thing. All businesses exist because they solve a particular problem for an audience. And I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again, but walk in your customer's shoes, think about the pain points they go through, and use that to focus your time, resources and effort on finding ways of doing that. And at this point in history, we have greater reach and more power than we've ever had before to do this. And digital technology is one of the things I love about it. It gives you great economy of scale and great efficiency to do this. And that's exciting. Right? So use that to motivate your content creation and the stuff you're putting out to get those links. And I think you'll supercharge it way beyond the level of, oh, we've got to do this because it means better rankings.
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Yeah. Just to reiterate on that point as well, I would start when you're thinking about link building, of taking a step back and saying what creative concept, what could we do that would be different? Rather than just doing, let's write an article on this. Of actually just going back. I would look at Tim Ferriss stuff. I mean, most of the stuff that Tim Ferriss has done, there's been loads of stuff that he just did in an original way or he did something a lot better than anyone else. And therefore it just, it just drove a whole different tier and the kind of level of link building engagement as well. So the creative part of link building, I wouldn't underestimate how important that kind of is and what impact that will actually have, because that's what Google's looking for. They're looking for the fact that people are actually engaged and interested in this thing as well. So think about that. Go through the key processes, get the tools in place. And whether you're managing in house or kind of using an agency, make sure you've thought about each of these steps.
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And if it's dull, scrap it and start again or go and do something else. Seriously. I know that's harsh, but why? Life's short. Why are you doing this move on.
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That note that you should move on with your life and that link building is all about making the world a better place. We'll speak to you again on the Digital Marketing Podcast.
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Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mention, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to help.