Hi guys! It’s Monday again and I know a lot of you are down. So let me ask you a question. Do lions complain about Monday? No. they don’t. They are up early, chasing, biting. Reminding everybody that they are lions.
Don’t just dream about success.
New Monday. New week. New opportunities.
Inspired by my own words last week I’ve decided to spend an hour this week studying a bit of coding…python to be more precise. Why python? Well, when it comes to machine learning and you know I love talking about machine learning in SEO.
Today I am here to talk about RankBrain. I hope very quickly it becomes very obvious that I am not actually talking about RankBrain but the way you have to adjust to the new reality in SEO called machine learning. So let’s start with the obvious. Last year Google or at least somebody from Google declared that RankBrain…
Python is probably the most popular language.
Meanwhile, let me show you my new socks. Boom. The Ted Rubin effect.
Last but not least the rise of video will make SEO marketers focus even more on visual content, but it will also force artists to create video with optimization in mind. In fact, it will probably give life to a new category of videographers who will specialize in SEO content, just as it happened with writers two-three years ago.
You should use every opportunity to remind your customers about your business or services.
Yes, even Friday the 13th. I know you are serious company but Friday the 13th and Halloween is probably your best chance to show the human side of your company. Yes, David Amerland is always talking about this one. The moment I get home I will email you all my ideas. Yes, and I will give you 13% discount.
Hi, my name is Omi Sido. I am not a robot, I am a human being so let me tell you something. Use every opportunity to remind your customers of your business.
Marketers around the world are facing a dilemma: they aren’t sure what’s working, they’re feeling underequipped to meet the challenges of digital, and they’re having a tough time keeping up with the pace of change in the industry. What’s worse, nobody hands you a playbook to show you how to make it all work.
But the opportunity for marketers is too great to let uncertainty slow you down.
If you are bold in your digital marketing efforts and investments if you are taking smart risks if you are educating all your teams to be ‘digital ready’ you are in a great position to capitalize on digital’s full promise in the future.
Guys next week I am going to the Search Love conference organised by Distilled where I’m gonna be meeting my favourite digital marketing speaker the amazing Purna Virji. But you do come back here next Sunday cause you’ve got the problems and I’ve got the solutions.
Hi, guys. It’s Monday again and I am so pumped up as this week I am going to the Take It Offline roundtable in Brighton organised by Tom, Andy and Gerry White. Learning from the best is always a good practice especially so in the universe of Digital Marketing where everything changes at light speed.
Learning should be part of your company culture.
Customers nowadays are transforming faster than we are. So if we don’t catch up we gonna be in big, massive trouble.
Customers nowadays are transforming faster than we are. So if we don’t catch up we gonna be in big, massive trouble.
Learning from the best is always a good practice. Especially so in the universe of Digital Marketing, where everything changes at light speed.
Learning needs to be part of your culture. Consumers are transforming faster than we are, and if we don’t catch up, we’re in trouble.
Yes, Steven. I can educate your SEO executives but tell me are they involved in the strategic planning. Probably not.
I will tell you a secret now.
In many small companies, there is no formal manager training. People do well, they get promoted. So he knows Adwords, he gets to manage the digital marketing team and before you know it he is defining your SEO strategy, your Social media strategy. And this is actually a good example. I’m not even gonna mention the digital marketing director does not even come from digital.
Pro tip Steven.
Everybody in your organisation should know the basics of everything that is Digital Marketing.
Thursday morning. First I’m gonna go to work and then I’m gonna go to the Take It Offline roundtable in Brighton. I know it’s gonna be very very good so if you happened to be in Brighton or somewhere around Brighton come say hello.
It’s one thirty in the morning and I just came back from the Take It Offline event in Brighton. I am super tired but I am also super excited as I’ve learnt so much this evening.
The main thing: Social Media advertising can be extremely effective for many businesses but getting it right is not always straightforward. I guess it all comes down to you have to try and fail, try and fail until you find yourself in the right place at the right moment for success.
Friday morning. Seve o’clock. I’ve probably slept for two hours but I’ve just remembered that I’d forgot to say something yesterday. Andy, Gerry, Tom you rock guys. Your event is getting better and better every single time. Now I’m gonna go and do my first Facebook campaign. Gerry, I’d probably experiment with your video.
One of the best things about life is that we never have to stop learning. There are always new skills to learn and new techniques for us to adopt. When you look at the most successful people in the world, they understand this. Big and successful companies like Facebook or Google are heavily investing into their own employees. Or the way I normally say it:
Without doing something beyond of what you’ve already mastered, you will never grow.
Guys, next week let’s all of us try and spend an hour learning something outside of our comfort zone. So if you are a developer learn a bit of SEO. If you are an SEO learn a little bit of PPC.
Meanwhile, don’t forget to come back here next Sunday cause you’ve got the problems and I’ve got the solutions.
Today, storytelling may seem like an old-fashioned tool – and it probably is. But this is exactly what makes it so powerful. Life happens in the narratives we tell one another. A story can go where quantitative analysis is denied admission: our hearts.
Bas van den Beld is an award-winning consultant, trainer and professional speaker who has helped businesses worldwide adapt swiftly to the forever changing media landscape.
He is the founder of State of Digital, one of Europe’s largest online marketing and SEO learning platforms and has worked with big brands, like KLM and Viacom, to develop solid marketing strategies based on the innate understanding of the needs and behaviours of their customers.
The one-day event features world-class speakers that cover all of the need-to-know search marketing topics to develop and advance your brand’s search engine presence, including:
Organic search (SEO) – how to achieve and maintain your brand’s ranking in natural search engine results and ensure your customers can easily find you.
Paid search (PPC) – driving targeted traffic to your website by showing ads in search engine results when people search for related keywords.
Social media – enhancing brand awareness and advocacy to support your search visibility; your social authority is increasingly considered by Google as a ranking factor.
Content marketing – how to be smart with your content campaigns to build trust and credibility by returning relevant answers to search queries, and earning quality backlinks.
Who’s behind Benchmark?
Located in North West England, Click Consult is a multi-award-winning search marketing agency with a focus on organic (SEO) and paid search (PPC). With over 70 professionals employed and a portfolio of over 60 clients from across the UK, Click Consult works with businesses looking for a measurable return from their search marketing budget.
Click Consult also provides a range of other services, including content marketing, inbound marketing and conversion rate optimisation (CRO), as well as international and multilingual search.
The company is Google AdWords and Microsoft adExcellence certified and is on the Recommended Agency Register.
There are so many reasons to move to HTTPS and apart from the slight ranking boost, Google made it very clear that they really want us to protect our site and our users.
1. Data sent using HTTPS is secured via Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS), which provides three key layers of protection:
Encryption. Encrypting the exchanged data to keep it secure from eavesdroppers. That means that while the user is browsing a website, nobody can “listen” to their conversations, track their activities across multiple pages or steal their information.
2. Data integrity. Data cannot be modified or corrupted during transfer, intentionally or otherwise, without being detected.
3. Authentication. Proves that your users communicate with the intended website. It protects against man-in-the-middle attacks and builds user trust, which translates into other business benefits.
Who is Gerry White?
Gerry White is a technical marketing consultant working with Just Eat supporting SEO on the 14 sites they operate around the world, including apps, mobile, technical and outreach. Ensuring that the sites are organic leaders in the markets they operate in.
With a 17 year history in digital – Gerry has worked on sites from the BBC, McDonalds, Premier Inn and DirectGov in various roles from digital analyst, site search but usually in SEO, as well as spending a large part of his career agency side.
Gerry White also co-runs a digital roundtable conference called Take It Offline which aims to replicate the best of the post-pub conversations, typically in a pub.
The one-day event features world-class speakers that cover all of the need-to-know search marketing topics to develop and advance your brand’s search engine presence, including:
Organic search (SEO) – how to achieve and maintain your brand’s ranking in natural search engine results and ensure your customers can easily find you.
Paid search (PPC) – driving targeted traffic to your website by showing ads in search engine results when people search for related keywords.
Social media – enhancing brand awareness and advocacy to support your search visibility; your social authority is increasingly considered by Google as a ranking factor.
Content marketing – how to be smart with your content campaigns to build trust and credibility by returning relevant answers to search queries, and earning quality backlinks.
Who’s behind Benchmark?
Located in North West England, Click Consult is a multi-award-winning search marketing agency with a focus on organic (SEO) and paid search (PPC). With over 70 professionals employed and a portfolio of over 60 clients from across the UK, Click Consult works with businesses looking for a measurable return from their search marketing budget.
Click Consult also provides a range of other services, including content marketing, inbound marketing and conversion rate optimisation (CRO), as well as international and multilingual search.
The company is Google AdWords and Microsoft adExcellence certified and is on the Recommended Agency Register.
BrightonSEO – is a major search marketing event in the UK. One of our favourite events of the year, This is a superb conference for search marketing professionals, novice or expert.
BrightonSEO is a chance to learn from some of the best minds in search, and then rub shoulders with them at one of the friendliest, and largest, gatherings of Digital Marketers in Europe.
Omi Sido https://omisido.com/ is a seasoned international speaker and is known in the industry for his humour and ability to deliver actionable insights that audiences can immediately start using.
From SEO consulting with some of the world’s largest telecommunications and travel companies to managing in-house SEO at Daily Mail and Canon, Omi loves diving into complex data and finding the bright spots.
Hi, guys. Thank you for coming here today. My name is Omi Sido and as most of you know I am very active online and I love talking about Digital Marketing and SEO.
Server logs analysis
Today I’m gonna be talking about Server logs analysis and how understanding what the Googlebot does and what the Googlebot sees on your website can massively boost your digital marketing efforts.
I’m gonna start with a short story. A few months ago – this is a real story by the way – a few months ago a guy came to me and asked me to teach him the basics of SEO so he can collaborate with his SEO team. Of course, I said yes. So I gave him some books and some blogs to read and we agreed to meet again in two weeks. Hi, David. So in two weeks, in two weeks we went to Costa and of course, I asked the guy him about his SEO knowledge. His answer: Content is king and currently he is reading a book about content creation and semantic search.
While he was talking I wrote a short poem, an SEO poem on a piece of paper and after he stopped talking paused I simply asked him: Can go and upload this poem to the Internet, on the Internet. He was like confused obviously: Omi what do you mean? And I was like: Well, you’ve just told me that content is king. So upload this poem on the Internet and make me famous. I wanna be the King of the Internet. Of course again confused And he said something like “But Omi I need a website”. End of story.
A lot of people come to me. A lot of companies and tell me: Omi, our website is beautiful. Our pictures are amazing. We publish content on a regular basis but somehow we are not ranking well. Why?
I said it before and I would say it again: Yes, content is King. But every King needs a castle, a home to live in. Technical SEO is this castle and by analysing your server logs you basically know whether you’ve got a solid structure or not.
If every time when the Googlebot comes to your website it can’t understand the structure of your website if every time when the Googlebot comes to your website and ignores strategic sections of your website your content counts for nothing. Shall I repeat this one? Your content counts for nothing.
Sorry, I can see a lot of fo people tagging me.
The only way for the Googlebot to understand what’s on your website is to literary come and crawl all your pages. Now some of you may say ‘But what is a log file?’ This is a log file. I know it’s a bit confusing but in all honesty, you don’t have to be very technical unless you wanna be an SEO Geek to benefit from the data, from the information, from the wisdom coming from the server logs. From the server logs.
So to make all these very simple I will give you another story.
Six months ago a company came to me and asked me to analyse their website and give them some recommendations for improving their rankings.
Obviously, I started crawling their website and the first thing I saw was half a million pages but only roughly 20 000 of them active pages. You all know this website. I’m not gonna mention the name because of the NDA but you’ve been there at least once for the last one month.
Half a million pages but only twenty thousand of them active pages. By active pages, you know what I mean pages that get organic traffic.
So I’ve started analysing their website, I’ve started crawling it and of course analysing the server logs so this is what I see. OnCrawl.
154 orphan pages. Yes, 154 000 orphan pages. Some websites don’t even have 154 000 pages. Out of 154 000 pages only 3 000 of them active pages.
Now, what are orphan pages?
Chelsea: Omi, what’s an active page? How do you qualify that?
Getting organic visits.
3 000, remember this number.
So what are orphan pages?
Orphan pages are pages that not linked from anywhere in your website structure.
This is the definition you see online.
What is my definition for orphan pages? Omi Sido’s definition for orphan pages. Stop hurting your SEO. Please.
How do we find Orphan pages?
The only way to find Orphan pages is to crawl, fully crawl a website. Take all the log file data, combine it together and analyse it. In this case out of 154 000 pages only 3 000 active pages. I had no choice but to literary delete all inactive pages. And I know it sounds a little bit harsh.
Then I continued analysing this website and I find that the bot is spending a lot of time, literary stuck in a section full of non-complaint pages instead of crawling the sections with complaint pages. Remember my what I said earlier about the strategic crawling of your website. I had no choice but to delete another big chunk of this website.
And then what I call duplicate URL crawling. By analysing this website I realised that the bot is spending a lot of its resources crawling pages with parameters even although they were properly canonicalized.
We had to literally reshuffle the whole navigation and stuff like that.
And now have a look at this picture. Yeah, this graph.
Pages crawled and not crawled by depth against SEO visits distribution by depth.
As I told you earlier you don’t have to be very technical to understand the importance of analysing your log files.
Have a look at this section of the graph. Only 49% are crawled. Yet, this section gives the most SEO organic visits.
By the way, I don’t like calling them organic. For me, they are just SEO visits.
But anyway.
Very strange for this website page depth five is giving more organic visits than those two. So I had a lot of conversations basically the idea was what’s gonna happen if I literary delete this group. What’s gonna happen if I force the bot to crawl this section more often and index more pages? What’s gonna happen if I actually combine those two without deleting this one or I combine those two? Notice this is only 19%. I hope you can see it from far. Nineteen percent.
You have to really think how you wanna spend your Crawl Budget.
We deleted, in all honesty, we’ve deleted more than 60% of this website went to the bin.
Just for clarity. These 60% any of these is unique content stuff like that. You are not suggesting
No, I am not suggesting that. Normally Orphan pages that are not visited by anybody even the bots are.
So ok. So to explain. Let’s go a little bit to Oprpahn pages. Normally those are development mistakes, expired product pages. Do we agree on this one? Ok, thanks.
So we’ve deleted. It’s ok. No, no of course yeah. The point I am trying to make and thank you very much because many people don’t actually know what Orphan pages are. You are absolutely right.
We’ve deleted more than 60%. More than 60% of this website went to the bin. Yet, six months down the line this client sells more products than ever. I didn’t say visits I said money. They sell more products than ever. Now that the bot is allowed to crawl the good pages more often resulting in more pages present in the SERPs and-and in a better position.
Some of you may say ‘Omi, this is a big website. They had a literary room for deleting pages’ and in fact, I have a lot of clients coming to me telling me ‘Omi, I don’t care about analysing log files because I only have 10-20 thousand pages’. So let me give you a quick example of a relatively small website.
This website was about to be migrated 6-7 months ago and I was asked to analyse it.
22 000 pages in the structure. 8 000 orphan pages. 8 thousand. After finding this one they nearly fired the whole Digital Marketing team. Thank God they didn’t. I’ve got more followers on LInkedIn.
23% are only bringing 3% of organic visits. Literary. Three percent of organic visits. Is it worth keeping those pages?
On the other side in the previous example – sorry I can’t find it now – in the previous example the Orphan pages were actually bringing 37% of organic visits. Why are you not linking to them?
Internally linking to them first so your customers can find them when they come on your website and second you can improve their SEO value so they bring even more visits in the future.
Guys, I hope I gave you, I’ve given you a good idea of how to.
Girl: I have a question.
Omi: Of course.
Girl: Have you done any analysis of incoming backlinks to those pages that you.
Omi: Yes, you have to do that. You have to do that.
Girl: How to do that all feed into the whole process?
Omi: With the example, I gave you there were no literary no backlinks. But you have to do that, you know.
Guys, I hope I’ve given you enough information but by all means, ask questions.
Nick Wilsdon started his online career in 1998, giving his first SEO seminar two years later in Brighton. After moving to Moscow, he became an expert on Russian search, working with gaming clients across CIS markets. During this time he was involved in the Russian start-up community, working with Yandex, RF parliament members and the US State Department.
Since his return to the UK, Nick Wilsdon has held the ‘head of department’ roles at Arena Media, part of the Havas Media Group and within the Dentsu Aegis network.
As the SEO lead at Vodafone Group, he is standardising and improving online performance across 22 markets and 55 partner markets. He is particularly interested in mobile SEO, cross-channel campaigns and joining up the dots in a logical way.
What is the Benchmark Search Conference?
The one-day event features world-class speakers that cover all of the need-to-know search marketing topics to develop and advance your brand’s search engine presence, including:
Organic search (SEO) – how to achieve and maintain your brand’s ranking in natural search engine results and ensure your customers can easily find you.
Paid search (PPC) – driving targeted traffic to your website by showing ads in search engine results when people search for related keywords.
Social media – enhancing brand awareness and advocacy to support your search visibility; your social authority is increasingly considered by Google as a ranking factor.
Content marketing – how to be smart with your content campaigns to build trust and credibility by returning relevant answers to search queries, and earning quality backlinks.
Who’s behind Benchmark?
Located in North West England, Click Consult is a multi-award-winning search marketing agency with a focus on organic (SEO) and paid search (PPC). With over 70 professionals employed and a portfolio of over 60 clients from across the UK, Click Consult works with businesses looking for a measurable return from their search marketing budget.
Click Consult also provides a range of other services, including content marketing, inbound marketing and conversion rate optimisation (CRO), as well as international and multilingual search. The company is Google AdWords and Microsoft adExcellence certified and is on the Recommended Agency Register.
Learn how a messy server can sabotage all your SEO efforts, how to check current server configuration and how to improve and get the maximum from them.
Who is Petar Nikolow?
Peter does software development for his own company MobilioDevelopment. He built his first website in university in 1997 and since then has been involved in websites and applications. Now he thinks the “Less is more” principle needs to be applied to the current web too.
BrightonSEO – is a major search marketing event in the UK. One of our favourite events of the year, This is a superb conference for search marketing professionals, novice or expert.
BrightonSEO is a chance to learn from some of the best minds in search, and then rub shoulders with them at one of the friendliest, and largest, gatherings of Digital Marketers in Europe.
Mobile-First indexing is about a whole new index where URLs are not required to compete. Competition is more driven by markup, feeds and potentially Google-hosted options like actions & database information from Google Firebase.
Who is Cindy Krum?
Cindy Krum is the Chief Executive Officer of MobileMoxie, LLC (Previously Rank-Mobile LLC). She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, speaking at national and international trade events about mobile web marketing, social network marketing and international SEO.
Cindy Krum also writes for industry publications, and has been published in Website Magazine, Advertising & Marketing Review, Search Engine Land, ODG Intelligence, and quoted by many respected publications including PC World, Internet Retailer, TechWorld, Direct Magazine and Search Marketing Standard.
BrightonSEO – is a major search marketing event in the UK. One of our favourite events of the year, This is a superb conference for search marketing professionals, novice or expert.
BrightonSEO is a chance to learn from some of the best minds in search, and then rub shoulders with them at one of the friendliest, and largest, gatherings of Digital Marketers in Europe.
Tips & tools to successfully implement AMP in common scenarios.
Whos is Aleyda Solis?
Aleyda Solis is an International SEO Consultant – a service that she provides with her boutique consultancy, Orainti – a blogger (Search Engine Land, State of Digital and Moz), speaker (with more than 70 conferences in 18 countries in English and Spanish) & author (of “SEO, Las Claves Esenciales”).
After working in different SEO roles at European and American companies, both from the agency as well as in the in-house side, she founded her own consultancy to help from startups in competitive industries to multinational companies with complex Web environments to grow their search visibility & achieve their SEO goals with strategic, technical & in-depth SEO consulting.
BrightonSEO – is a major search marketing event in the UK. One of our favourite events of the year, This is a superb conference for search marketing professionals, novice or expert.
BrightonSEO is a chance to learn from some of the best minds in search, and then rub shoulders with them at one of the friendliest, and largest, gatherings of Digital Marketers in Europe.
