6 Fundamental SEO Truths To Live By

In his presentation «The Declaration of SEO: 6 Fundamental SEO Truths to Live By,» Bruce Clay states these 6 SEO truths: 2:50 …

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Hello, I’m Bruce Clay. Today’s
presentation which is six fundamental SEO truths is really a little bit
different than you’re used to. I’m going to talk about some of the
things that I hold to be important for an SEO to understand and to be able to
actually explain to others. I think it is very useful for us to determine what is
the actual state of the art of SEO and to that level I’ve developed some truths,
and that’s what I’m going to present on today. There are six fundamental truths
that I’m going to be speaking about: The first is that we really need to
establish SEO as an initiative at the company level. It has to go across the
whole company. You can’t have some people saying, «Yes! Let’s do SEO!» and then nobody
else participates. So there’s a uniform requirement that the organization, the
business, understand the importance of SEO and be supportive of it. I’m going to
talk a little bit about those specific issues in a moment… The second one is
that you really are not here to beat an algorithm. There’s logically an infinite
number of algorithms and you’re just not going to beat them all. So what we have
to do is understand how the algorithm works and understand that our job is to
beat the competition. We’re not here to beat the algorithm. The third is that
architecture matters. We actually have to build the website to make it work
correctly so the search engines appreciate what you are, they see you as
a subject matter expert, and they see a concentration of information in one spot.
That is going to help you quite a bit. It’s really not the job of a search
engine optimization organization to take a poorly maintained website, put lipstick
on it, and hope that it works… It’s not the job of SEO to make a pig fly! So
we’re going to talk a little bit about the role of maintenance and why that
actually has to be built into your SEO program. We’re also going to talk about
where cheap SEO can harm you. The saying, ‘the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you
get it,’ actually is true. You can’t do cheap SEO and expect it to work well for
your business. The last area we’re going to talk about
is when SEO is done. I still get people telling me, «Oh, I
did SEO! I don’t have to do it again, do I?» And that answers rather straightforward.
SEO is done when Google stops changing things and all of your competition has
died. In this particular case, I’m going to start by expressing exactly what you
have on the screen. At the CMO level, perhaps at the president’s level, we
really need to set an initiative for the company. We have to get the organization
to think about SEO. Every time there’s a meeting that talks about changing the
website, somebody in that room has to say, «How does this impact SEO? What can SEO do
to make this better for more traffic or more conversions or how do we improve
our website?» So we’re going to have to do that.
The real commitment that has to be made is organization-wide. SEO is a long-term
strategy. We don’t get to say, «Well, we’re gonna do SEO’s on Monday…» You
can’t do your SEO on Monday! It isn’t going to work if it’s not EVERY day! You
have to start thinking about SEO and… I’m not saying that you have to
think of SEO as a person. We’re not thinking about the team, we’re thinking
about how can we improve the overall quality and operation of our website. So
that it actually generates traffic or meets a KPI of the business. We’re going
to have to be able to do that and it’s very important to understand that unless
you have management support, an SEO team is just going to sit there,
recommend changes, it’s going to go down to the IT department who is clearly busy
doing something else almost all the time, and they’re gonna say, «I’ll get to it
someday…» That is not going to get you back the
30% of the traffic you’re giving to your competitors. If you want SEO, if the
commitment is to do SEO, and if you buy into it being long term then SEO is a
winning operation within your business. This part is often misunderstood, even by
a SEO’s. They kind of think that if I can
reverse-engineer the Google algorithm, that I can figure out how to always rank,
and there’s software tools out there that claim to be able to reverse
engineer things. We’re not here to reverse engineer the
algorithm. We’re here to understand our job is the beat the competitors. The
story I always tell is of two friends that go camping: They set up their tents,
they start a fire, they’re cooking a meal and along comes a bear… they take off
running down the path. The bear is chasing them! The guy in front doesn’t
need to be an Olympic runner, he just needs to be faster than his friend!
Well, SEO is much the same thing! I have a competitor…
all I really have to do is be better than them. Now, how many algorithms are
there? We have layers here. We have variables in the algorithm: 200, 300,
nobody really knows? Bing has actually said they have over 500! So we have
variables in the algorithm, then we have importance weighted averages. This one is
more important than that, but each of those are dependent upon the intent of
the query. For instance, if I’m e-commerce, the title tag might be more important,
whereas if I’m informational, I may find that the body is more important. Next, you
have all sorts of software and artificial intelligence layered on it like RankBrain, things like that… You have Bert,
of course, what’s the real meaning of the query and how do we actually find
websites that have the same meaning? So we have a lot of things at that level
and then of course there’s expertise, authority and trust, which is sort of a
subjective grouping (mentally grouping at least) that, ‘Oh, the trust is there, I can
trust that site! That site’s an expert. They have authoritative people talking
about why this site is in fact important.’ Those kinds of things are critical to
being able to rank, but we’re not here to beat the algorithm. The algorithm has as
many flavors as there are keywords and every keyword essentially is a new
algorithm. The question is for that keyword, what’s best? And then for that
other keyword, what’s best? So we’re not going to be able to outdo the algorithm.
The best we can do is determine who ranks, determine what they’re doing right,
are there any common characteristics, are there any common words, and then we use
them better! That’s where we’re at on this particular topic.
This next slide is talking about the architecture of your environment, your
website. According to Google, and it’s been in
Google Documents for a very, very long time, they prefer content that is
presented in a clear, hierarchical structure. In other words, a drill down.
You have electronics, you have cameras, you have digital cameras, we can
understand how that is a drill down. You have autos, you have Ford, you have
Mustang, you can understand a drill down… When you structure your site that way, it
actually performs better in search because you’ve concentrated in one
location all the information about that particular keyword. Instead of spreading
it all over the website, this is referred to as siloing. We came up with siloing in
2002, we’ve been promoting it ever since. We’ve had
great, great leaps forward, typically 30 to 900 percent increase in organic
traffic. So it really depends on the keyword in the structure and what is the
best organization for your website. It can be far more complex than that. So you
really kind of need to do a research project. You need to figure out what it is
you’re really talking about, but the architecture… in order to get SEO to
perform correctly, you have to be the subject matter expert.
You cannot randomly throw a bunch of things onto a website and expect it to
work. Our requirement, from an SEO point of view, should be: The website is
properly structured in a clear hierarchical structure itself; Parents
children, grandchildren – drill down, clear structure, and then from there, you worry
about how you interlink your pages, you worry about the keyword usage, and you
understand how people flow through that content. On this next slide, this happens
to be a particular topic that I like to talk about, we have a lot of people that
come to us that have absolutely terrible websites. When you look at it, it looks
like it’s 20 years old… They haven’t been updating it, they’ve
been using it as sort of a brochure, it hasn’t even been made to work on a
mobile device yet… and they come to us and expect that we can change it and get
it to rank number one just by making a couple quick little easy things on the
website. We’ve even had people say, «Well, my website’s only 25 pages, there can’t
be much to SEO! What’s it take to be number one???» We need to understand: We are
in a competitive space. Your competition may have a whole team of SEO’s out
there working on their project. That is not going to be, «I can just fix your
website – you’re number one!» They’ve obviously been working on
there’s. The way this actually works is that if your website is terrible,
that is the weapon we bring to the SEO battle to beat your competitors and if
you’re basically giving us bows and arrows and they’re using machine guns…
we’re in trouble! We cannot really compete. The job of SEO is simplified by
having the right technology, the right hierarchy, the right structure, but if you
have a pig – if that’s your website, you’re not going to find an SEO that can easily
and successfully convert it into something that actually is competitive.
It’s not the job of SEO to make a pig fly, it’s the job of SEO to take that pig
and work with you to genetically engineer it into an eagle. Then you may
have something that works. Way too many people come to us with old technology.
They haven’t updated their site in five years, they haven’t updated content, the
search engine sees every page on their site as being five years old, and they’re
expecting that the search engine is going to give them a reward in the face
of people that have been maintaining their sites all along. That doesn’t work!
If you don’t have a well maintained site, you’re not going to succeed, and you’re
going to find that all over the place in Google documentation. Please make sure
your site’s maintained. The next topic that I’m going to discuss is the
consequence of cheap SEO. Many times, you’ll find layers of SEO expertise. In
some cases the entire company that’s going to be doing your agency work all
of their staff is six months of experience recently out of college a
couple training courses online maybe and then there’s a process where they’re
learning on the job at your expense of course and that is a
common situation than you would think we’ve seen people who have the title of
senior SEO analyst that got out of college less than a year earlier you
can’t be senior without at least five years so that is not a very appropriate
thing it’s an artificial title you got to be careful of that but cheap SEO
really gets into the point where people are experimenting at your expense
and they often can be wrong you’ve heard the saying that cheaper you want it the
cheaper you get it and you’ve heard it’s funny how I can never afford to do it
right but it can always afford to do it over both of those apply to where it is
inexpensive do you want bad advice for half the price or good advice
what is the cost of time to market how long is it going to take you to discover
what went wrong after it goes wrong we have many clients that come to us where
were their third or fourth or fifth even SEO company and they’ve gone through
them and gone through them and gone through them and tried things and just
experimented and basically wasted all that money haven’t seen any results
so my advice cheap SEO truly is a near-death experience
you cannot experiment on your own website just because you can save a
little bit of money and it isn’t even clear you save money
experts have the ability to do things the right way the first time and faster
it is difficult to say that’s costing you more on a value level so consider it
cheap SEO is a near-death experience my last topic has to do with the fact that
this environment is constantly changing one of the things I like to say is that
SEO is done when Google stops changing things and
all of your competition has died well I don’t think that’s going to happen
anytime soon and the Google keeps changing things is
a constant Google has changed 3,000 times in a year
eight to nine times a day there is some form of algorithmic change they have a
hundred teams working on next generation changes to the algorithm at any one time
this is a very difficult thing for any agency let alone an in-house person to
be able to keep up with you need to understand we’re dealing with a dynamic
changing environment that is operated by a business whose sole purpose because as
a public company they would their sole purpose is to make money not to please
websites the way they make money is they please users so they’re leaning towards
things that affect usability and whether the user is going to find that the
content is really expert whether this is a trusted site whether they can actually
present results especially to a voice search that really are accurate they
can’t give medical advice that’s wrong they don’t want to give financial advice
that is wrong and in fact they don’t want to give any advice that is wrong
everything needs to be trusted and when you are in an environment like that
where the search engine is going to be constantly changing and experimenting
and trying to make itself better those are changes especially across hundreds
of variables those are changes that are going to really seriously impact on a
day to day basis how you perform in search results and I think we all
understand the top 10 they get the traffic the top five get more traffic
the top one really makes out you can’t live in that environment with the search
engine changing the algorithm them every day then you have your
competition if you do a search for any keyword and get a million results if
they change their page one time a year just once you have thirty thousand
competitor changes a day three hundred year three hundred days in a year so
when people are going to be optimizing a website when you’re having help an
agency or in-house and they are actually working to improve your website this is
a constant battle this is not an opportunity for you to say oh I did SEO
and be done with it you cannot ever be done with SEO the search engines have
seen to it so to wrap things up there’s multiple things that I’ve talked about
but first you have to commit the SEO it has to be a corporate initiative
you cannot just randomly do SEO in a little office down there on that floor
of your building and expect everybody to be supportive and understand it and set
priorities so you have to pay attention to that the second thing I discussed was
you actually need to be beating your competition and not trying to beat an
algorithm if the algorithm changes eight times a day that battle is
insurmountable and if the algorithm itself is different for every single
keyword that you’re trying to optimize for that makes it really difficult for
you to say I’m going to beat the algorithm your job is to beat your
competition the third thing I talked about is the architecture of your site
you need to structure it you need to have it be parent child grandchild a
clear hierarchy that’s going to establish a node if you will within your
website where you can prove that you are a subject matter expert the next one is
you’re not going to be able to make a pig fly if your website has not been
maintained it is time for a new website it is something that has to be current
but if you’re so far out-of-date you don’t get to pull in an SEO and say push
the easy button I want to rank tomorrow it’s a really difficult thing to make
the the search engine aware that you are actively involved with your website
especially in the face of competitors that are probably changing it every day
I mentioned that cheap SEO is cheap and that it may not be the highest value
that hiring a professional organization is much better than hiring somebody
that’s an intern you need to be able to get it done get it done right and get it
done properly first time you can’t afford to do it over and then I
mentioned that this is not a do at once thank you very much I’m done you
actually have a program here where it takes forever and as soon as you think
you’ve accomplished something five more things pop up maybe it’s a little bit
like a whack-a-mole I don’t know you can’t if you don’t know what a
whack-a-mole is but you that’s sort of what SEO is and every time you get a
change made you have no idea whether Google is going to change something else
and that makes it a perpetual project you’re going to be going on and on and
on forever that’s SEO to wrap it up I’m going to
tell you a little bit about us we’ve been in business since January of 96
which is 24 years I started the business on my dining room table we’re now on
five continents hundreds of employees across the world
I’ve spoken myself at over 300 conference sessions I sponsor
conferences I’ve written three books and if you actually go to Google and do a
search for who is the father of us I pretty much owned the first five pages
I have been around and been an advocate of SEO for a very very long time it
matters to me that people understand how it works that it isn’t going to be
something that is tedious that it’s fun if we get to solve puzzles for a living
this is the ultimate for me at least the ultimate career and I am so happy to be
here our whole company is focused on SEO and other search marketing programs that
are like it pay-per-click content that’s what we do and I encourage you that if
you’re interested to give us a call thank you for your time you

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