2015·10·19 · 30:27
Joost de Valk: Holistic SEO
SEO had already moved well beyond technical tricks by 2015, and I give a talk here about what I call holistic SEO: the idea that ranking well requires a combination of technical quality, genuinely good content, and real brand authority. I explain why the people I knew running SEO for major brands were facing the same challenges as smaller sites, and why WordPress users were actually in a better position to adapt. The central argument is that the best SEO strategy is to become the best result for your topic, and everything else follows from that.
0:11 good morning take your time to pick a seat I've just returned from a conference in Munich which every year very happily coincides with Oktoberfest so I'm both tired and a lucky guy but what if learned more this year than any any year before that this was the seven time I was at that conference is it
0:42 search n SEO is changing that conference is a conference with 50 people only each year there is about 2,500 people who want to get to that conference is about five people are able to buy a ticket why is it so popular well because the people that were there are for one reason or another wildly successful and what what really occurred to me this year is a for everyone who was as successful as we were seven seven eight years ago all of
1:13 our jobs are changing SEO has gone from being a purely technical challenge to becoming a challenge that's about a whole lot more than just technique so I want to talk to you today about holistic SEO and about what that means and what what it means that the web is evolving as quickly as it does Google is getting better at fighting spam all the other search engines are getting better and better at fighting spam this means that
1:46 all every website out there slowly as and in a very weird way has to get better without becoming more spammy it used to be such that in that small room in Munich there were 40 people that you could give a website and they would hit a couple of buttons and they'd hit jackpot you could rank any website for any keyword in a couple of weeks that's no longer true it's no longer
2:19 that easy in fact it's getting harder and harder and harder to do that now those in that room are lucky they work for the likes of Facebook Disney CBS they have huge websites and a lot of people to work on those websites so they can invest a lot of time and money to do things but the funny part is that all of you are probably even more lucky than they are because they're dealing with
2:50 old-school CMS's and a lot of [ __ ] out there and you are dealing with one of the best platforms that we have this is also the problem now that WordPress is about twenty-five percent of the web excellence is something that we are expecting websites are becoming better and better and better and we're expecting them to be speed while still an issue for some right now we'll in three four or five years no longer be an
3:21 issue you can already see that the amount of resources we have available to make cept websites faster and everything that an Amazon and other hosting services can do to speed things up leads to faster web sites regardless of how crappy you coded good design is also no longer something that's only available to the very top and you can buy or or just download well design teams everywhere wordpress org has an
3:52 incredibly big listing of very well-designed themes that you can just install ready done the question at at that point becomes how do I stand out how did what makes you better than all those other people and no longer is that technical excellence technical excellence is what we're expecting so if you're starting with a new house you start with a good foundation a broken
4:27 luckily we have WordPress so our foundation right now and I can honestly say that the last few releases we've done more and more and more on the SEO side we finally taken titles out of the feem space and into WordPress space we've done so many changes in WordPress quarters so good that there is no better CMS out there for SEO and of course there are still things that need to be done there are still things that you can optimize there are still things that I
4:58 think should be included in core like XML sitemaps well luckily there's us for that part but when you start building a site you don't actually start building a site immediately like with a house you start with a blueprint and what we're starting to figure out more and more is that where people have trouble is not necessarily in the technical part it's with all the other stuff it's with how
5:31 good is that product that you have how good is is your surface what what are you doing what are you adding value Luca was talking about the value adding are you asking the right right price well for a lot of stuff I'm seeing I go like okay I could optimize this but it probably won't work if your product is [ __ ] if your product is not good then the transparent printed transparency that the web is creating is causing it
6:04 to be such that your product is going to fail so no longer can you get away with being a mediocre product especially for online products it becomes very very easy to see what is good and what is bad comparison shops and everything else have there exists for a reason and trust it's not a coincidence i'm using Tesla pictures in my presentation and not
6:37 Volkswagens the entire automobile industry is being to being taught by a new company that wasn't in there 10 years ago what marketing looks like and they're still not listening but this is marketing is becoming about product more than about anything else it's the foundation and then you go from okay so I have my product now what's the goal of my sight what do I want to do what do I want my website to tell people they get
7:08 there what do I want them to do on my website if you sell Tesla's the chance of you selling a Tesla on that site is pretty slim the chance of you selling an experience that makes it and makes them remember Tesla forever is pretty big so you're creating touch points and you create touch points not on your own side but everywhere but you probably need a step before even that what is it that
7:40 you're optimizing for we wrote an e-book and we've been writing loads and loads of post recently about stuff like how to do keyword research which is basic basic SEO i know i came into SEO and now about 10 years ago i'm walking into the office of the company i was done working for and for the first few months most of what i was doing was doing bloody keyword research and i can tell you it's annoying which is what i want to teach you so that we didn't have to do it for
8:11 you it's a lot of work it takes a lot of time what is my product what which words do people use when they search for my product how would they describe my product not what you what name you give it I don't care what name you gave your product I care what you people search it's also a question of what should you be found for shoot you if you're a car dealership be found for the word car
8:44 it's very easy to start doing basic keyword research and think that car is your most important keyword or probably it's not because the chance of you ranking for car is very very slim the chances of you ranking for car dealer city name is a lot higher and probably would lead to but much much better results so start with that start thinking about keywords start thinking again and again and again like about okay what should people find me for and
9:15 then based on that create a good site structure and I'll be very honest this is the bloody basics if you don't do this right you're never going to even compete you're not on the playing field yet after that could use a good user experience and actually good accessibility to is expected it's what's needed you can't do that certain that
9:48 stuff badly anymore well we see every day that people can but I expected in four or five years the the level of expectation of normal user will be even higher than it is today most people don't realize when they look at their iPhones and go to a website how quickly they click away when a when a website is probably done but if you see them use a website if you do user experience studies and you look at people using
10:20 websites it's painful but we as website builders and owners should be working on that I'm making them better excellence really is expected it's the least you can do and this is only at the only thing I'm talking about so far is technical excellence and actually that's rather boring because once you've reached that point and that point should be fairly easy to reach using the right themes and write plugins and everything
10:51 that that's available to you at almost no cost everyone has a story so it's not just telling your story it's how you tell that story what are you doing that people that makes people engage with you what are you doing and make sure that people remember you now of course it's just as that not just how you tell your
11:23 story if I were doing this story in an empty room its impact would probably be very close to zero so you need to be where the people are that you want to reach and in the very beginning that is most definitely not your website because your website if its new starts absolutely zero we are lucky enough to reach a lot of people through yes calm but even for us facebook twitter and
11:59 other outlets are indispensable it really is and I can't stress the importance of this enough important that you get these things right if you go to Facebook I work for some of the bigger publishers in the world I've done work for the guardian for the Guardian on a regular basis now Facebook oh is it gives them more traffic than Google does on a day-to-day basis so this goes back and forth between the two of them and luckily they're fighting for it so both of them are sending more and more
12:31 traffic but this happens on all big publishing platforms out there for many many big publishing platforms facebook is now more important than Google so if you don't have a facebook strategy you're probably losing the funny thing is that because that search is changing to search is happening in all sorts of different places so search is happening in facebook and I pray God at some point they will actually fix it and make it
13:05 better but this is the most exciting change I've seen this here is that in the the left screen shot the top hits there what do you think those are coming from most people think that's Google it's actually not it's Apple search slowly very very very slowly Apple is introducing its own search engine into its own browser and
13:38 into its own operating system in a couple of years Google will not be the only player anymore because these guys will creep up I've added YouTube there because recently when Google split up and put alphabet on top of it Google just increase the chance of YouTube being split off of Google entirely if they don't do themselves I bloody hope the European Union does that sometimes because YouTube is the biggest search engine on the web for videos but it's
14:10 also the second biggest search engine overall it's bigger than being is bigger than Yandex is bigger than baidu it's it's bigger than all of those together actually so this is changing and it's changing it seems like slowly but in a couple of years you'll feel like oh wait this has changed very very rapidly what I didn't mention here but that's also very important and has its own troubles
14:41 amazon amazon has more ecommerce queries now in google as if it's not an Amazon a lot of my friends in countries that amazon delivers to they have have an amazon prime account if they can't find it on amazon just won't buy it it's it's a very rare situation but it's a situation in which google is slowly becoming less important because of that we're changing along with it you've seen
15:13 us put more emphasis on stuff like social in our plugin you've seen us put in the end it comes down to one thing you need to technical excellence and I expect you to get there in the next couple of years because that is not the hard part we try and make that as easy as we can for you and of course there's other stuff you need to do but we'll be there to help you with that but in the end your marketing needs you it needs
15:45 your story and it needs you to tell that on platforms where where you can reach people and the only thing people get right get right about SEO is that they think about keywords and then start optimizing for them what they forget is that you have to actually put that story out there and I'm not talking about doing weird link building I'm nope I'm talking about putting that story out there on the platforms where your customers are I've seen some great examples in the last few days of people
16:19 have built awesome content and then used Facebook's advertising to show that content to very very specific groups of people it's very easy in facebook advertising to create a group of journalists in the Netherlands that make more than 50k a year those are the journalists that you want to you want to reach with an ad and make sure that they see your product if that's something you are selling to you can even specify it by interest you can make it cart
16:52 journalists or something else so you can very very target with really very low budget to you can target people very specifically and make sure that they reach your content I've seen I've seen some examples in the last few days of people using that to do link building in much much more effective ways than all the other ways I've seen in the last few years marketing is changing and thus SEO is changing the keyword in all of this
17:26 is that it needs a brand and depending on who you are it might be your personal brand or if you're in the lucky position that i am in where your company becomes bigger you actually have a bit of trouble disassociating yourself from your brand you might have noticed we did a redesign I took we took my hat off of every page I'm not joking if I'm saying that I'm not the only one thinking that's a good idea because we've seen that the funny thing is our redesigned
17:57 costs like the ten fifteen percent uplift in sales and I what it wasn't too good for my ego I mean let's face it if your hat is that bad for sales it but you need a brand one of my best friends in that group I was with him Munich is a vp of growth at facebook when he came in six years ago he was he had just become
18:29 a manager at Facebook and he's gone to full path from manager to Phoebe within six years now reporting straight to Mark Zuckerberg that that guy took on a responsibility for brand recently instead of specific technical stuff why because brand means more to their growth that anything else and this wasn't something that happened to just him this is something that has happened to multiple SEOs in that room we were all
19:00 SEO seven years ago and now most of us call ourselves ourselves digital marketers we're going wider and probably everyone else needs to follow the keyword is integration integration of all these different things if someone is doing a PR for your company and you're not talking to them when you're doing marketing you're doing it wrong these things should be combined that is why we
19:32 call that holistic SEO because we like to word SEO too much we'll probably have to get rid of that point in the future too you need to combine all these things technical usability be our content all of it has one big goal and that big hairy goal is making sure that people know you and where they find you is irrelevant because it will probably find you several times before they buy your product so Google search is important
20:05 but it's no longer the only important thing if I can search for you in Google and then later search for you in facebook and you're not on Facebook then what kind of company are you would people trust it if you were if you were not on Facebook [ __ ] well they would if you were one of Facebook's direct competitors but other than that it would be very weird so you have to be everywhere and you have to think about SEO as much more than just some just a
20:38 few technical trip tricks left and right that being said if you have questions about those tenders and those those tricks that we pull I'm happy to answer okay so you have any questions how much
21:15 is the sort of help yeah I can so the question is how much is the change with Google promoting them promoting ssl helping sites and you'd ranking of sites yes and the problem is it's hard to say because Google themselves say that if all else is the same and you have has to selling your competitor doesn't then you'll win so that's what we call a tiny tiny tiny ranking factor it means very
21:48 very little at the same time for more and more things you actually need ssl so to be included in a in stuff stuff like iOS search or apple search they require you to be on ssl for more and more specific things you will need an ssl certificate and this leads to very peculiar problems because ssl it's not always easy and and for some reason we
22:19 usually most of the time still need an IP combined with one IP combined with one ssl certificate which is kind of a problem now that in the u.s. they've literally run out of ips a few days ago so it's a lot of weird stuff happening I will see where it goes but I think SSL is here to stay all of HTTP two is going is going to be ssl only for browsers chrome already supports it so all of the new advancements being made in making
22:50 the web faster are requiring websites to be on SSL ssl certificate only has to cost like 10 bucks right now so it's it's the casa das come down a lot which about mobile anymore and tell about consequence of mobile and infection base who is SEO so I honestly think that this
23:22 was the year in which mobile SEO became the normal SEO in I don't talk about mobile because I think mobile is expected by now not having I mean over half of search queries in Google are mobile and of course there are specific sites were being on we're being on the normal web sites has a definite advantage but for more and more of these things there is only mobile and if you
23:54 look at where the web is growing the most if you look at India if you look at Africa if you look at the countries out there that are adding more and more users than we could ever do that's all purely mobile so if you look from a global perspective there isn't the normal web is the old-fashioned way of doing things then you start with mobile and then you degrade for for the web and of course there are some stuff that you can do in the web right now that you can't do a mobile yet but that's a very
24:25 very small group of things and that group of things is getting smaller every day so I honestly mobile SEO is pretty much the same as normal SEO with a bigger focus on speed but that's something you should focus on anyway and if your website isn't mobile friendly well shame on you go download another phim it's not that hard I mean there's so many responsive themes out there that for WordPress they should no longer be a problem
25:03 and in a way with your advice to me everywhere I kind of interpret it is casting a wider net to be on all services as possible for survival axiom but I also hear a device like in recent years to be more focused to be a social services that match your product or service how have what's a balance between Institute how to buy out in
25:34 practice to make decision if we want to just be on everything and spreading through services right on every step is possible or begin okay so the question is which you should I be on every marketing service or I should I try to try and pick the most important ones i'm repeating mostly for the camera to be honest in most cases you're going to find that your customers are already at
26:07 a specific surface so there's a couple of required ones in my eyes facebook is not something that you can if you're in this part of Europe at least on facebook is required but a pinterest for instance might be interesting or might not be interesting depending on who your target audiences at the same time there's tons and tons of those services out there and I would not suggest that you go go and try to be everywhere we don't even try to do that we try to be global but being
26:40 on every surface is a lot of work if you've got a 100 people marketing team then by all means go try it but other otherwise don't even go there but if so if you're targeting like 16 year olds and you're not on Instagram then you're probably doing it wrong if you're chucking you're targeting 35 year olds and you're not on Instagram there's probably not too much of a problem so it really depends on what your target audience is and who you should reach and in that case well there's a
27:12 is a lot of different services out there but just see where they are talk to you the customers you already have to ask them which serves as they use and decide based on that I don't think you can do much more than three or four well in most cases and even that is a stretch I I know that a lot of my SEO friends have tried to do Google+ well and well that really didn't work out for the rest of the world so now I in the end you'll
27:43 probably end up with two or three that anymore questions are you also hungry
28:14 so how do I see the future for new till these top level domains like dot Academy and a lot of other things but we'll be using Yost Academy soon and but not as something I want to rank with because we'll do all the ranking on us calm I honestly and I keep telling people in the domain this is that when they ask me I'd tell them like okay every time you launch new top-level domains you increase the value of calm because the
28:48 question is not whether that domain at some point might become valuable right now people will not always recognize this so if you if if you put a weird top-level domain in an ad I can put Yost calm and an ad and I wouldn't need HTTP in front of our I wouldn't need I wouldn't need to show anything else and you'd know it's a domain name if I put your help somewhere and I don't put HTTP in front of it then a large proportion of people will not realize that that's a
29:20 domain name that specific issue is the entire issue with top-level domains it's become there's so many now that nobody knows anymore what to do who who knows what the website of alphabet the new google company is yeah ABC XYZ i mean if you show that if I show that to my parents the chance that they will understand that is a web address is very very slim so I don't really believe in top-level
29:52 domains yet google has already set that they won't use the keyword in the top level domain for ranking well at the same time it might in the future help if you have a dot hotel because people link to you with the word hotel in the Indian context all the time which helps in Google so there are some advantages but I'm not a big believer yet the answer your question if there's no more