Wednesday, June 29, 2016

AMP: Above and beyond

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Since the announcement of the project in October 2015, a lot has been said about Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) — what they are, how to get started, how Google and other platforms use them and so on. Yet there is always more to learn.

With more than one hundred releases/updates so far, the AMP project is evolving rapidly, adding more and more supported features and acquiring more and more adopters.

At SMX Advanced last week in Seattle, Rudy Galfi, product manager at Google for the AMP Project, and John Shehata, VP of SEO at Condé Nast, presented exclusive information and data around AMP.

Why AMP?

Galfi started the session by quickly covering the basics and explaining that the project was developed as way to make the mobile web faster and more user-friendly. The goals or requirements were well-defined: make pages fast, be easy to implement, enable monetization and embrace the open web. AMP, today, does all of this.

What is AMP?

Accelerated Mobile Pages are just web pages! AMP-HTML is simply HTML5 with a set of specifications (requirements and restrictions). The optimization is powered by JavaScript, styling can be customized via CSS3, and pages are cached.

Galfi took some time to expand on caching, as it is a “core key of how AMP works.” He explained that Google AMP cache functions in a similar manner as a content delivery network (CDN), that it is free for anyone to use and that it works on “stale-while-revalidate” model. This model helps make sure the content is always up to date in the cache. The process by which it works is quite simple: When a request is made, the client receives the cached version while the document is requested again from its original server to be updated in the cache.

AMP at Google

Galfi then shared interesting statistics from Google. The median load time for AMP is 0.7 seconds, the time it takes for your eye to blink twice. By contrast, the median load time for non-AMPs is 22.0 seconds, the time it takes for you to leave the site and never come back.

AMP launched in Google web search last February and continues to be deployed across Google platforms. The way Google is using AMP is also evolving, and Galfi’s team continually works on improving the user experience. For example, allowing users to swipe from one article to another in Google search appeared to be a key improvement and helped increase the number of articles read per session.

AMP adoption and statistics

With more and more users reading AMP articles in Google search, the integration of analytics, ads, content access and the release of plugins for WordPress and Drupal, the adaption metrics are now quite significant: 125M+ documents indexed, across 640K+ domains, according to Google.

John Shehata provided additional data from Searchmetrics showing the increase in adoption. From the analyzed websites, only three percent were using AMP in March 2016, versus 11.6 percent in June 2016.

Shehata also shared some interesting aggregate data from his clients: “For a strong news site, AMP is about 5% of total traffic (9% of total mobile traffic), 3% of total impressions, +2% in CTR and +5.6% in ranking position.”

Galfi mentioned that he’s not surprised about these numbers; having fast web pages has been a challenge for developers, and AMP helps to get there.

While AMP is mainly used for news articles and blog posts, Galfi explained that AMP is not restricted to this type of content. Pages that are “usable in static (cached) form and lazy loading friendly” are suited for AMP. This can be recipes, product listings, travel guides and so forth. AMP being applicable to several content types will also increase adoption over time.

How AMP works

The AMP publishing flow is pretty straightforward, but for it to work, a couple of things need to be done. The main requirement is that the page needs to be valid and discoverable. Additionally, if the page aims to be displayed in Google’s Top Stories carousel, it needs to be correctly marked up with structured data from Schema.org.

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Validating AMP URLs

Individual URL validation

Several tools exist today to validate your AMP URLs. To validate individual URLs, you can either use the original validator built in the AMP JavaScript library, by adding “#development=1” to the URL and looking at the Chrome DevTools Console output, or use the new Chrome extension.

Another tool, mentioned by John Shehata and developed by me, allows you to test and edit your HTML code for validation. I am, however, retiring this tool, as Google and the AMP Project team just released a similar (but better) tool that you can find at http://ift.tt/28TsPcA.

For structured data markup validation, use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Bulk validation

The other tool mentioned by Shehata is a bulk AMP validator on TechnicalSEO.com (Disclaimer: I also developed this tool). This one allows you to validate up to 100 URLs at a time, check their discoverability (canonical and amp-html tags), the presence of Schema.org markup and the potential link to the Google AMP cache.

Shehata also explained how Condé Nast was using a Slack bot to “relay messages from the CMS to Engineering when a newly published page does not validate.”

Google Search Console reports

Google, through the Search Console, also provides a validation report, giving you an overview of potential issues across your site. The report will give you information not only about the validity of your pages according the AMP specifications, but also about the validity of your Schema.org markup.

In addition, Google Search Console now returns AMP impressions and clicks through the Search Analytics reports.

Opportunities and challenges

Shehata, who worked on several AMP implementation projects with Condé Nast, shared valuable information about roadblocks his team had to face. He explained, for example, that while the WordPress plugin was helpful and saved a lot of development time, teams still have to work on customization to meet their needs. He also mentioned some issues around the design of pages and, more specifically, the integration of custom fonts.

Conclusion

Overall, the AMP project is a success; it evolves quickly and supports more and more features, and as a result, it gets more adopters. Both Galfi and Shehata said it: Developers love AMP, it’s relatively easy, and it fulfills a longtime need on the web — speed.

If you’re getting started with AMP, the official website of the project, the road map (listing future improvements) and the AMPbyExample.com website will definitely help you.

Also, remember than AMP is not restricted to news publishers. We can assume that AMP URLs will, sooner than later, be displayed in Google for several types of content. And, as is often in the search world, early adopters will win.

Check out Rudy Galfi and John Shehata’s presentations below:

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Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Survey: Amazon beats Google as starting point for product search

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A survey of 1,000 US consumers conducted by PowerReviews found that Amazon is the preferred starting point for product search. Google comes in a close second, followed by brand/retailer sites and e-commerce marketplaces (eBay, Etsy, etc.):

  • Amazon — 38 percent
  • Google — 35 percent
  • Brand or Retailer Site — 21 percent
  • Other eCommerce Marketplaces — 6 percent

Of those consumers who started their shopping journeys on Amazon, reviews, product selection, free shipping and deals/pricing were the primary reasons cited.

Amazon reasons for shopping

Among the 35 percent of shoppers who began with Google 52 percent said they clicked on Google Shopping Results, 41 percent clicked on an Amazon link and a similar number clicked on a retailer link, while 27 percent clicked on brand sites.

The survey also found that most shoppers ultimately purchased their desired products in physical retail stores.

A 2015 survey of 2,000 consumers from Survata for BloomReach found that 44 percent of users start product searches on Amazon; 34 percent start with a search engine. A 2013 Forrester survey found 30 percent of respondents used Amazon to start product research, while 13 percent started with Google.

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SearchCap: Google’s internet speed testing tool, Landy Awards call for entries & more

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Link Building

Local & Maps

Search Marketing

Searching

SEM / Paid Search

SEO

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SMX Advanced 2016 recap: Harnessing SEM analytics for smarter automation

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Automation doesn’t devalue the work of marketers; it allows them to focus their time and efforts on more strategic aspects of paid search. In this SMX Advanced session, three industry experts — Steve Hammer, Amy Bishop and Caitlin Halpert — tackled SEM analytics and automation solutions that will help save time and improve account performance.

Amy Bishop, director at Clix Marketing

Bishop presented on looking at PPC through a marketing automation lens, based on understanding marketing funnels and evaluating the conversion path so you can spend your time and money more effectively.

No one likes to be pushed — so it’s important to learn how to lead customers down the right path.

Use lead scoring to identify your most valuable customer and the most impactful paths. Determine which criteria (actions and behaviors) are most important to your conversion path and assign them a value. Then, layer both actions and behaviors into your model to understand your higher-value customers and to build out your funnel progression.

For instance, a high-value customer might spend more than 30 seconds on the site, then view a video or download a coupon before taking the final goal action of filling out a lead form or making a purchase. By layering criteria together, you can create a hierarchy of values to understand which actions are most likely to result in your end goal and show intent.

In PPC marketing, automation is less about creating a point-valued score and more about developing the process so you can scale. Use the flow reports in Google Analytics (behaviors, events, goals and funnel visualization) to understand and create your paths.

Then, begin to organize your paths and funnels to understand context behind the behaviors and actions and create unique audiences and messaging to help them get to the next action which would most likely result in your end goal.

Make sure that you track the right events and build audiences from them to see how sequenced behaviors impact conversion rate.

Test using custom audiences, messaging and landing pages to help drive consumers through the funnel and workflow. Just remember that as you test various combinations of audience, message and landing page, you’ll need to have enough volume to get statistically significant results.

Finally, remember that there is more value in some visitors than others. Identify where you have efficiencies and use the 80/20 rule to focus your budget. Consider creating separate campaigns for each stage of the funnel so you can allocate budget and control the focus on elements like new prospecting and funnel progression.

Now that you have your marketing automation infrastructure set up and understand where there are efficiencies in your accounts, you can save time by shifting your budgets to create the most profitable outcomes.

Steve Hammer, president of RankHammer

Hammer presented about the impact of attribution models on bidding and SEM. The key takeaway from Steve’s presentation is to use an attribution model that goes beyond last-click and take assists into consideration; this will help you understand the true value of performance.

Why is this important? Because remarketing isn’t scalable on its own, so you need to understand what is feeding your remarketing campaign success.

As Hammer put it: “No one cheers the hockey stick; it’s the player, not the tool, that wins the game.”

Are you over-valuing remarketing and giving it too much credit? The answer is most likely yes, and if that’s the case, you are undervaluing the feeder channels that are driving remarketing success. Use a data-driven attribution model (not just the beta product from Google) to understand what channels are feeding into your remarketing campaigns, and do more of that!

If the model you are using today overvalues channels and keywords due to last-click attribution, eventually the channels that assisted in driving that last click will be de-emphasized, and you’ll see your remarketing campaign performance dwindle as well.

Make sure that you have the right tools in your marketing toolbox — and one of the most important tools is an attribution model.

In AdWords, check out the data-driven attribution model, which is in beta, to get more insight on conversions based on the AdWords specific customer decision journey. This model shows which elements of your account (keywords, ads, ad groups, campaigns) play the biggest role in assisting conversions. Once you understand which elements are driving conversions, you can and should adjust your bid models to reflect the assists.

The next step in attribution is to go one step further, looking at Google and Bing, as well as other channels like Social and Email, to understand the entire customer decision journey and to build an attribution model that gives credit across all touch points that lead to a conversion.

Caitlin Halpert, account director at 3Q Digital

Halpert presented on how good automation not only saves time but also improves overall performance. The key takeaway from Caitlin’s presentation was to focus where and how you automate to save time. Don’t automate something for the sake of using a shiny new feature — automate when you can have meaningful, long-term savings and improve overall performance. Make sure that you have safety measures in place, like automatic reporting that can warn you of automation actions and outcomes.

There is the good, the bad and the ugly side of automation. Take the time to evaluate your current processes so that you can benefit from what is possible instead of looking at how automation might fail or cause issues.

The good side of automation helps you save time. Are there repetitive tasks that you do on a regular basis that could be automated? Automate parts of your reporting process by creating reusable reporting templates and scripts to pull data.

Use tools, or scripts, to help you identify when there are issues within your account. Create scripts to identify and automate processes when top-performing keywords have a drop-off in impressions or clicks, when landing pages are showing error messaging, when products are no longer available and so on.

The bad and the ugly side of automation is that you can automate specific elements, like keyword builds, that can lead to failure due to bad data or unscalable management. For instance, Caitlin shared an example of how automating keyword builds can create multi-million-keyword accounts that are difficult to manage or have little data behind them, causing an increase in time needed to manage the account. To address part of the ugly side of automation, Caitlin suggests that clean query mapping can help you enable effective bidding and reduce the amount of time you spend playing Query whack-a-mole.

What is Query whack-a-mole?  It’s when the same terms appear as unique keywords with different match types in the same or different ad groups. This can cause issues with different messaging and landing pages for the same base keyword, and small data sets scattered across multiple experiences. It’s why Caitlin recommends creating SKAGs (single keyword ad groups) and single match type ad groups plus an extensive negative structure.

To avoid the bad and the ugly side of automation, follow these simple rules:

  • Automate when you have processes that result in meaningful, long-term time savings and will impact performance.
  • Make sure you have safety measures in place to keep automation from running amok.
  • Test all automation before releasing it into the wild.
  • Review data more frequently than if you didn’t automate to make sure nothing has run amok.

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How “Do It With Me” marketing services can help SMBs access the latest marketing practices

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Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the new frontier for digital services. The enterprise is armed with excellent digital marketing tools that need to be right-sized to SMB needs and budgets before a small business will enjoy the same digital advantages.

This BIA/Kelsey report, sponsored by Vendasta, introduces an emerging online services category which will eventually serve SMBs the same type of information technology large enterprises use.

Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download Optimizing Local Marketing: SMB Marketing Needs “Do It With Me” Models.”

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7 types of keywords to boost your SEO strategy

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Keywords are essential to every aspect of your SEO campaign, from on-site placement and usage to link prospecting and acquisition. Knowing which terms to target and how to target them can either produce great results or end in a huge flop.

Defining and categorizing your keywords will help in your link outreach and community building online, both of which are essential in order to drive relevant traffic to your site. While there are a number of schools of thought when it comes to the types of keywords we should use, I want to walk you through the seven types we use at my company and how we use them in all areas of our SEO strategy.

1. Market-defining keywords

Market-defining keywords are terms and phrases your target audience uses when talking about your business or industry. These phrases are usually very broad and generic, so they are often much harder to rank for than others; nonetheless, they are still extremely important.

These terms are critical in your on-page optimization. Following SEO best practices, add these terms throughout your site pages. Market-defining keywords are also helpful in jump-starting your content creation. Framing these keywords inside broader questions can help you develop some great content for your site or blog.

When it comes to link acquisition, use these terms to prospect for link- or community-building opportunities. I know manual link building is not the most glamorous thing these days, but it works better than any other method. These terms may uncover some other great sites within your field that you can partner with.

2. Customer-defining keywords

Customer-defining keywords are the terms and phrases your customers use to define themselves. What do your customers call themselves? How do they refer to others in their group? These two questions will guide you to uncovering these powerful keywords.

This type of keyword is important because it will help you discover others who relate to your target audience. Some may be directly related to your customer base, and others may be in a similar niche. Either way, by using these terms, you can uncover some great insight into how your audience speaks and how you can frame your site in a way that entices them to interact.

SEO is much more than just search; it’s about creating a connection. Customer-defining keywords will help connect you with those who want or need your product or service. By understanding how your audience defines themselves, you can create better content, build more contextually appropriate links and build better, more authentic connections online.

3. Product keywords

Product keywords describe what you sell. When listing out and researching these terms, be specific. For example, if you sell computers, use the brand names as well: Dell laptop, MacBook Pro, Surface Pro and so on. This will help you uncover some great opportunities and prospects who meet very specific niches within your target customer segment.

In most spaces, you can find smaller segments that are very devoted to a particular brand, style or type of product. Within these segments, you’ll find product enthusiasts who are normally more likely to take action when approached for linking and brand building. Product keywords are great for use on your site and a great starting point for creating targeted content for your blog.

4. Industry thought leaders

Industry thought leaders are individuals or groups within your market segment that are known, respected and set the tone. These are the people everyone else knows, and if they don’t, they should. While these keywords won’t be in your home title tag, they are very helpful for your outreach efforts. Industry thought leader terms will help you uncover PR and interview opportunities that can attract targeted traffic to your site.

Some great places to look for experts, if you aren’t sure who they are, include Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter. Connecting with them on social is  great way to join the conversation, add value and even learn more yourself. The more you get to know the experts, the better you will be able to position your offering.

5. Competing company names

Competing company names are useful in uncovering how others report on and treat companies similar to yours. These terms are similar to industry thought leaders in that you won’t be using them for on-site optimization. Using competing company names, you’ll be able to see who has covered your competition in the news, on forums and blogs — and you can dig into their reviews to get a better idea of what you are up against.

6. Related vertical keywords

Related vertical keywords are terms within your target segment ecosystem. These terms can range from suppliers to customer industries, but they need to have a clear connection to your primary audience. These terms are helpful in uncovering new prospecting opportunities, as well as helping you build a strong community of like-minded individuals.

Related vertical keywords can help you “cross-pollinate” your link outreach and community-building efforts. By tapping into closely related niches, you can expand your message to others who may be interested but just don’t know much about you. With this new information, you can create helpful content and space to bring the two communities together.

7. Geotargeted keywords

Geotargeted keywords are key for your local rankings. According to Google, “50% of consumers who conducted a local search on their smartphone visited a store within a day, and 34% who searched on a computer/tablet did the same.” Defining your geotargeted keywords will help you target local prospects, groups and events your company can engage with and/or sponsor.

Local SEO is a powerful way to grow your reach and influence in your own backyard. If you have a brick-and-mortar business, local SEO will drive targeted traffic not just to your site, but to your store as well.

When doing research on geotargeted terms, don’t just stick to your town or city. Expand your territory to include neighboring areas. If you live in a larger city, break down your geo terms into neighborhoods to capture an even more targeted segment.

Final thoughts

When it comes to finding, organizing and using keywords, the biggest piece of advice I can give you is to be patient and keep digging. The more you search and investigate, the more you’ll uncover. After you have your list, organize keywords by action, and develop your plan. Optimize your site, and then focus on your outreach. Using these keywords, you’ll be able to build a community that helps drive your site in the right direction.

To learn more about how to use these terms for link building, I highly recommend this book, “Ultimate Guide to Link Building,” by Eric Ward and Garrett French.

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Ask The SEOs at SMX Advanced

Ask The SEOs SMX Advanced

Covering the “Ask The SEOs” session at SMX Advanced is like covering a geek version of a late night talk show with your host, Danny Sullivan. I’ll try to keep up.

On the panel we have:

  • Greg Boser, Foundation Digital
  • Todd Friesen, Director of Digital Strategy & SEO, Salesforce
  • Laura Lippay, Organic Search & Technical Optimization Lead, Netflix
  • Adria Kyne, SEO Manager North America & AU/NZ, Vistaprint

As Sullivan put it, “This is the session where we answer all of the questions that Google wouldn’t answer yesterday [at the AMA With Google Search session].”

I’m going to present this in Q&A style to trigger some Google Instant Answer Boxes:

Q: Best advice for consolidating unneeded pages?

Friesen: We do a lot of mapping to find better places for content and do a lot of 301s. If it’s unneeded content and not getting any traffic, we’ll take them down. Those are truly unneeded pages and wasting crawl resources. Often content is killed for corporate reasons (off-brand messaging and so forth).

Q: Best CMS?

Kyne: Every CMS claims to be SEO-friendly. We recommend limited feature sets to avoid people hanging themselves with too many options.

Friesen: It all depends what you do with it. You can screw up WordPress if you don’t know what you doing.

Boser: If it hits all the things ScreamingFrog tracks, that’s a good list.

Lippay: I like Pixelsilk.

Q: Yesterday, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes (@methode) said going to https is easy. Thoughts?

Friesen: If you are running a big ecommerce site with load balancers and Akamai caching, etc., I dare you to go to your network devs to ask for this, telling them that “Google said we just had to update a certificate or something” and see how they respond.

Boser: Understand that once you go, you can never go back. If you request a secure link and it redirects to http, the browser will give an “insecure” message, which is not good.

Kyne: I still think people should do it. We’re inevitably moving in this direction. It’s just not as easy as Google says it is.

Boser: And everything needs to go secure, like third-party scripts. It’s not the SEO bump thing everyone expects.

Lippay: We did it. Our rankings fluctuated, but nothing major, and we’re slightly worse a year later.

Q: How does Google treat changing links on your page?

Boser: It’s your site. Don’t get too stressed about changing links. If you are obsessing about it at this level, it can be absurd. If you are using data on a large scale like eBay did, you can switch out links and see huge benefits. Hearst is doing something similar now.

Q: When using affiliate programs like SkimLinks, links get redirected. Google says when done right, these links don’t work for SEO. Is this true?

(Lots of laughter.)

Boser: If you are doing affiliate marketing, you want to do everything you can to make sure Google has no idea what you are doing.

Kyne: If your affiliates’ pages are offering real value to your customers, then you probably don’t need to worry about how they link to you. If they are sketchy, then you should probably re-evaluate them.

Boser: I create a subdirectory that I exclude in /robots.txt so Google can’t even find my affiliate links.

Q: What about hidden content?

Lippay: If you have hidden content, Google will index it, but they claim it will not be as helpful to ranking. (Author’s note: I have seen little evidence of this.)

Q: If you have an XML sitemap, do you need an HTML sitemap?

Boser: Good architecture should be your HTML sitemap. If you need an HTML sitemap, you’ve built your site wrong.

Lippay: Netflix.com’s home page doesn’t do a good job of linking to our shows, so HTML sitemaps are good fallback until I convince people about crosslinks. But these HTML sitemaps are not the greatest pages, and Google will likely devalue them because they don’t have a lot of content. But sometimes it’s the best you can do.

Boser: The problem with HTML sitemaps is they start becoming a crutch because that’s the way new pages get linked in the architecture instead of the better way in the main UI.

Q: Is technical SEO just makeup?

Sullivan: We had a post on technical SEO last week that caused a lot of tweets.

Boser: I’m a little split on that article, actually. Big huge brands rank despite their SEO prowess or lack thereof. We see that all the time. So I can see where some might say there’s no big tech SEO wins there. Google likes “Brands.com.” But the lower you are down in the food chain, the more important it is to get the tech things right, because Google doesn’t care about getting your site right.

Lippay: When you work with different sites all the time, you get to know what works for different situations. And you can see that the same thing doesn’t always work on different sites.

Friesen: You may have a big brand that is doing well, but then a VP comes in and says, “We’re going to replatform,” and suddenly, you need an advanced technical SEO to stop the organization from destroying itself.

Boser: Did you read Dennis’s rebuttal? He talks about using data to build out tools that automated a lot of SEO to get the big wins. That’s what I call technical SEO. The days of making everything an H1 are over. One genius thing Dennis did is when eBay would have a big item like Jesus on toast, which would get a lot of links, after the event was over, he would create an historical overview of the content which created more SEO value. That’s technical SEO — thinking creatively.

Q: We are going to collapse our navigation for our mobile site. Will that affect rankings?

Friesen: It’s all about the implementation.

Kyne: Please don’t do it if you don’t think it’s a big win for your users.

Boser: It’s not about whether or not you can crawl it. The mistake people make is having too many links on the home page. Google still likes a hierarchy of links. Why pass equity to all those long-tail pages that are better linked to lower down the path?

Friesen: The hamburger menu can cause increased bounce rates. Why would you want that?

Lippay: Netflix is really into testing. If we are going to put a link in the footer, we test it to see how it affects conversion rate. User experience is always first.

Boser: The hamburger thing always starts with some designer thinking it’s cool, or they see it on a competitor’s site and instead of testing it with users, they roll it out.

Q: Thoughts on RankBrain?

Friesen: RankBrain could be substituting “did you mean” results without you knowing. Basically, they are thinking they know better than you what you are looking for.

Boser: At the end of the day, it’s just re-sorting stuff, and you have to get into the consideration set to be sorted. That’s links and content. So stop worrying about RankBrain.

Kyne: Ninety percent of the time, when someone asks me about what they can do to affect RankBrain, their site shows they are not doing the basics right.

Boser: Mining [Google] Suggest is a much better way to spend your time.

Sullivan: I was trying to get Gary [Illyes] to clarify whether this was a query refinement thing or a ranking signal thing. Gary suggested it was a ranking signal thing, but every other Googler has said it was a query refinement thing, so I think it’s a refinement thing. My theory is RankBrain is mapping queries to more popular queries, i.e., “Super Synonyms.” This doesn’t mean you have to put every synonym on every page, as Google should understand that a page about “shoes” should rank for “footwear” queries.

Friesen: Nobody has seen any changes since RankBrain supposedly rolled out. It’s not like Thesaurus.com started ranking for everything. (Line of the day!)

Q: How are you approaching voice search?

Boser: More conversational-based posts and looking at “How-To” based research for content ideas is the best we can do?

Q: Do you foresee an AMPageddon?

(Huge groans from audience.)

Boser: They are making a lot of thinly veiled threats to pushing media brands to get on AMP.

Friesen: You’re going to see it mostly for real-time info. Sites like Salesforce don’t have that kind of content, and AMP is not right for the kind of queries we target.

Boser: Our clients just spent millions on going responsive because Google pushed it, and now they are saying you have to go AMP, which will always rank ahead of their responsive site, so at some point you have to just throw your hands up because publishers cannot keep up.

Lippay: I think the idea of speeding up the web is a good one in general.

Q: Secure search. Should people do it in the near future? Should they do AMP?

Boser: Yeah, secure especially on new stuff. AMP, probably, but we should wait to see results.

Friesen: We’re not going to look at it until we’re forced to.

Q: Is Google going to be explicit that if you don’t do AMP, you’ll be sorry?

Boser: If you are in the news space, you’re already there. I hate to say it, but it’s a great experience. I don’t like how they are forcing it on us, though.

Kyne: If you have a speedy website, you shouldn’t be penalized by AMP because you are delivering on what AMP wants to do.

Boser: Google is going to bring carousel-style results to the desktop.

Sullivan: All results are going to be like Tinder.

Q: Do social signals matter?

Kyne: Yes, but it’s indirect.

Friesen: It’s a corroborating signal.

Lippay: Remember there used to be a social vertical? So there’s an algo out there, and it could still be around.

Friesen: And Google and Twitter are friends now.

Kyne: The way you are interacting with social media is not always the best way to determine relevance.

Friesen: The days of gaming social are pretty much done… or it’s at least way harder.

Q: Subdomain vs. subdirectory?

Friesen & Kyne: Subdirectory.

Boser: Depends. Subdomains can be great for head terms, not so much for tail.

Lippay: Yahoo and Microsoft put entire sites on subdomains. If the content is super different, go subdomain.

Friesen: If it can be its own website, it can be on a subdomain. If it’s part of the “content pyramid,” it should be on a subdirectory.

Kyne: If you have a small site, you don’t need to put stuff on subdomains.

Q: Why is Boser so jaded?

Boser: I’ve got 20 years in this business and half of what Google says is a load of crap. We would discover things Google’s algo did that they didn’t know it did themselves. We’re at a point where there’s a lot of misinformation coming out of Google. Take everything Google says with a grain of salt. It’s your business. It’s your site. You know what’s right for your business.

Q: What’s in your toolbox?

Lippay: I’m digging Stat and Ahrefs.

Friesen: Standard stuff. SEMRush & Screaming Frog. We use BrightEdge. We’re not using anything cool and tricky.

Sullivan: I like the one that allows you to view how a page looks on Chrome with different devices

Friesen: The Web Developer Toolbar is still the best

Lippay: I’ve been getting into accessibility tools to experience what someone [sees] who has visual impairment experiences on your site. Chromebox is a fun one.

Q: SEO strategies you want to share?

Boser: If you are hosting duplicate pages on partner site subdomains, cloak for Google and 301 to the main site. That may not still work. ;-)

Friesen: One of the biggest things we did was educate our copywriters to use the words we want to rank for in our copy. Moving our blog from a subdomain to a subdirectory, traffic doubled overnight.

Lippay: I enjoy breaking things lately. They took most/all of the content off their key pages and Laura prepared the org for a tanking, but nothing happened. TL;DR — It’s nice to be Netflix.

Kyne: I like looking at the information architecture and asking if the most important products/categories/pages, etc. are high in the architecture vs. a huge tree of stuff that is less important.

Fin

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