The SEO Battlefield WINNING STRATEGIES FOR SEARCH MARKETING PROGRAMS Anne Ahola Ward The SEO Battlefield Winning Strategies for Search Marketing Programs Anne Ahola Ward Beijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo The SEO Battlefield by Anne Ahola Ward Copyright © 2017 Anne Ward. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://oreilly.com/safari). For more information, contact our corporate/insti‐ tutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or [email protected]. Editor: Meg Foley Indexer: Judy McConville Production Editor: Nicholas Adams Interior Designer: David Futato Copyeditor: Gillian McGarvey Cover Designer: Randy Comer Proofreader: Charles Roumeliotis Illustrator: Rebecca Demarest April 2017: First Edition Revision History for the First Edition 2017-03-21: First Release See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9781491958377 for release details. The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. The SEO Battlefield, the cover image, and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. While the publisher and the author have used good faith efforts to ensure that the information and instructions contained in this work are accurate, the publisher and the author disclaim all responsibility for errors or omissions, including without limitation responsibility for damages resulting from the use of or reliance on this work. Use of the information and instructions contained in this work is at your own risk. If any code samples or other technology this work contains or describes is subject to open source licenses or the intellectual property rights of others, it is your responsibility to ensure that your use thereof complies with such licenses and/or rights. 978-1-491-95837-7 [LSI] I dedicate this book to my late, great father, J. David Ahola. As one of the leading internal forensic fraud examiners and top dads in the country, my father taught me valuable life lessons that molded me into the woman I am today. A portion of the proceeds of this book will go towards the J. David Ahola Memorial Internal Audit Scholarship at Bauer College of Business, University of Houston. Table of Contents Foreword. ix Preface. xiii 1. Welcome to the Battlefield. 1 Introduction 1 Practice Areas of SEO 5 Types of SEO Practitioners 9 SEO Versus Growth Hacking 12 How Do Successful SEOs Allocate Their Time? 13 Standing Apart 15 2. The SEO Mindset. 17 Getting into the Growth Zone 17 Gaining Authenticity 21 A Day in the Life 24 How to Spot Trends 28 Be Data-Agnostic 31 3. Standards, Philosophies, and Finances. 35 Establishing Program Standards 35 Standards and Goals 40 Audit Trails 41 Separation of Concerns 42 The CAVi(a)R Test 45 Complete 45 Accurate 46 Validity 46 v Restricted Access 46 Assessing Value for Organic Traffic 47 4. Tools for SEO Measurement and Beyond. 51 Machine Versus Humans 51 Analytics 53 Google Analytics 54 Optimizely 56 Mixpanel 57 New Relic 57 KISSmetrics 57 Honorable Mentions 57 The All-in-Ones 58 Hubspot 59 Pardot 59 Marketo 59 Eloqua 59 Honorable Mention 60 Research Tools 60 Serpstat 61 Scrapebox 61 SEO Diagnostic Tools 62 SEOptimer 62 Majestic 62 Chrome Developer Tools 62 Keyword Research Tools 63 Google Keyword Planner 64 SpyFu 64 SEMRUSH 64 Moz 64 Social Tools 65 Hootsuite 65 Buffer 65 Sprout Social 66 Simply Measured 66 Cyfe 67 Quintly 67 Automation 67 Google Alerts 68 IFTTT 68 Content Management Systems 68 WordPress 69 vi | Table of Contents Prismic 69 Ghost 69 Joomla 69 Drupal 70 Medium 70 5. Setting Up Programs and Reporting. 73 Building a Growth Program to Last 73 Using Keyword Identification Tools 75 Go Through the Weeds Toward Goals 75 Setting Up an Organic Search Program 77 Showtime! Check All Systems 85 Competitors 88 Reporting 88 6. Campaign Management. 95 Campaign SEO Juice 95 Mobile Campaign 97 Email Marketing 98 Social Campaigns 100 Content Campaigns 101 Crowdfunding Campaigns 103 Growth Hacking IRL 105 7. Technical SEO Elements for Success. 109 Setting Up for Ascendency 109 Meta Information 110 Site Usability 112 Setting the Stage 115 The Block and Tackle 118 Site Architecture 118 Site Canonicalization 119 Video Handling 120 CMS Management 121 8. Mobile Search. 125 The Lay of the Land 125 All SERPs Are Not the Same 126 Local Search 128 Mobile Voice 130 Mobile Design 132 Life with an Nth Screen 133 Table of Contents | vii Optimization and Performance 138 Rich Snippets and Schema 139 Project AMP 140 Facebook Instant Articles 142 9. Case Studies. 143 Multimedia Entertainment Site 143 Low Confidence, High Traffic 145 Toxicity in Search City 147 Special Snowflakes 148 Too Cool for School 150 Classic Growth Hackin’ 151 B2B Social Spice 153 Dysfunction Junction 156 Social Success! 158 10. Uncharted Search Frontiers. 161 Embracing Expansive Realities 161 Interfaces Galore! 164 Machine Learning 166 Ethical Data Science 171 A Moonshot 172 Index. 177 viii | Table of Contents Foreword Technology and visions of the future have always beguiled me, even in my earliest memories. My first computer was a Commodore 64 that I shared with my brother at around age five or six. Throughout my childhood, computers were ever-present—my dad always made sure of that. My parents encouraged me to pursue whatever interes‐ ted me throughout my life, so I did. Sometimes my interests seemed a bit odd to oth‐ ers. At age seven, I wanted to reinvent the diaper to be ecofriendly and made of leaves. This was probably inspired by Gilligan’s Island reruns. At age nine, I disassem‐ bled and reassembled my clock radio to see how it worked. In junior high school, I sewed a watch onto a T-shirt for my science fair project invention. The project was not well received. I was told nobody would ever want to wear a gadget. I constantly tinkered with every piece of technology I could get my hands on, trying to learn more. My fascination with the “interwebs” started the moment that sweet, sweet 28.8 Cardinal modem came into my life. I discovered Compuserve and AOL search, then chat rooms. Fondly I remember visiting the undergraduate library at University of Texas and cruising the web. Lycos, Alta Vista, Excite, Yahoo!, and Geoc‐ ities were my bridge to another planet. Information became rapidly available like never before and my fascination with the virtual world bloomed. After high school, I attended the University of Texas at Austin during the first dot- com boom in the late 1990s. It was a truly exciting time for a tech person, because startups began appearing everywhere overnight, even in lil’ old Austin. In college, I dabbled as one should. I sort of tried to start a record label, sold health supplements and knives (separately) for two seconds, managed records for a museum, and then became their DBA. My first “tech job” was as a DBA, but it was a joyless enterprise. Alas, the web beckoned. I very badly moonlighted while in the university system to also become an HTML editor at iBooks. This decision to straddle both cost me a lot; I underestimated my “easiest” class, showing up only three times during the whole semester, and thus fail‐ ix ing what should have been a ridiculously easy required credit. Don’t worry—to the happiness of my family, I did eventually graduate, but it was an interesting journey! iBooks.com converted books for various publishers from Quark to Pagemaker and then onto the web. O’Reilly Media was their biggest client by far. We didn’t have any friendly, glossy WYSIWYG tools in 2000—we barely had Dreamweaver. I still believe that BBEdit hacks were my ultimate savior until I learned about more advanced scripting languages. Most people had CRT displays in 2000, and nobody wanted to read books on them. Had the screen hardware been more advanced in 2000, I think that startup would have been far more successful. Like many people learning something new, I was not a particularly great web devel‐ oper at first. While working away at night as an HTML editor, I was also reading the books while I converted them and tidied up the images. There was a sizable library of O’Reilly books laying around at the office and anyone could pick them up, so I did. Reading those books changed the course of my career and life dramatically. Not only did I learn how to build cool things on the web, but I began to understand all the pieces of the WWW and how they came together. As a trailblazer and futurist enthu‐ siast, I was soon to discover search as a “thing to do.” It wasn’t always. I believe that search is both a tool and a key to life in technology. Connectivity to information is so, so important. Search happens in way more places than the browser. For example, I met my husband in late 2000 simply because he did a search for a band called Silverchair that had incredibly poor SEO. They’d created a fan chat module named Silver Chat that they didn’t yet rank for. I was a member of the telnet silver‐ chat, not the band-created one. It was a private telnet-based group in Austin, which was where he was moving, so he joined it just for kicks. They met in the meatspace every week, we both went the same week, and the rest is history. So technically I met my soulmate because of a 90s band’s inadequate SEO.