SEO Tactics to Implement Tonight

Want more traffic from Google?

Then you’re in the right place.

Because in this talk at the Benchmark Search & Digital Conference, Lukasz Zelezny will show you how small and simple SEO changes can improve your traffic (and revenue) in no time. 

Most people believe that SEO is hard and complicated but this is not true. Basic SEO configurations are very easy to implement and sometimes this is all you need to do to for maximum exposure on all major search engines. 

It can be easy to get caught up in the latest SEO trends – mobile first, optimizing for voice search, using structured data – but you can’t take your eye off the ball.

In this talk, Lukasz will remind you of some of the important SEO basics that anyone can apply to help their site rank better in the search engine results (SERPs), many of which I bet you skip.

Key takeaways

• Calculating traffic potential using tools such as SEMrush is a great way to elevate your SEO. 
• To get quicker traffic gains, start targeting keywords that already rank (“low hanging fruit”).
• By tracking brand mentions you easily gain valuable backlinks. 
• Answer boxes can be a great way to get new, relevant traffic.
• There are a lot of WordPress SEO plugins that can save time and massively increase your presence in the SERPs.
• Cloud hosting can elevate your website performance to another level. 

Who is Lukasz Zelezny?

Lukasz Zelezny is an independent SEO Consultant and one of the Top 10 UK Social Media influencers.

Lukasz is a former director of organic performance at uSwitch/Zoopla.

who started his digital marketing career in 2005 and has since been responsible for the organic performance of a number of companies including HomeAway, Thomson Reuters, The Digital Property Group and Fleetway Travel.

Lukasz is a frequent speaker at the Benchmark Search & Digital Conference and other top online marketing events like ClickZ Shanghai China, ClickZ Jakarta Indonesia, SiMGA Malta, SES London as well as Marketing Festival in Brno, BrightonSEO and UnGagged in London.

To get in touch with Lukasz visit https://zelezny.uk/ or https://seo.london/

SEO Tactics to Implement Tonight | Lukasz Zelezny, SEO Consultant from Click Consult (Part of Ceuta Group)

Video Transcript: SEO Tactics to Implement Tonight

Little correction former head of SEO.

Not anymore. Right now I’m sitting in my little bedroom in Dagenham. Not nice area but I’m just doing SEO for my bedroom and today I have a pleasure and honour to be in front of you for fifth time in Manchester.

And I wanted to share with you some tactics that you can take home and implement tonight or tomorrow or afternoon into your business, into your agency into the strategy of your clients you’re working with. So, because I didn’t know that I have 20 minutes, and I provide 77 slides, so get ready.

So the first tactic I’m using is a snapshot. Snapshot is like one of my pillar when I’m doing an audit for a customer and what snapshot is in a nutshell, it is like I’m trying to identify as much of the keywords that already are ranking and corresponding URLs and how can I push these things up.

So everyone knows Search Console, some of you may know also Data Studio. And I’m not using Search Console anymore natively. I’m always connecting search console to Data Studio. Why? Because through API I have much much deeper view much more data. And here is an example I’m just connecting my little websites Zelezny.uk through search console and Data Studio. Then obviously I need to give permission Data Studio is asking Search Console if I’m all right. Absolutely. And I can start juggling with lots of lots of data. If you will go after this presentation or at night to Search Console, you will frequently see that the maximum rows you can export from search console is 999. And very often, this is only a fraction of keywords that delivering traffic, or impressions. If you go through the Data Studio, you will see 5, 10, 20,000 depends, you know how many how powerful computer you have, then you can start processing that file.

And I’m just creating a simple Data Studio, just one table. And I have all the queries, landing pages corresponding with queries, impressions, clicks, and click through rate. So the metrics we know from from normal classic Search Console. And that’s all I need because then the snapshot table is ready. And then I’m doing something which is ‘tricky sort’ I call this.

What is ‘tricky sort’? ‘Tricky sort’ is that I’m sorting twice this data. First I’m sorting by landing page and then immediately I’m sorting by either on impressions or clicks or clicks. If there is very little traffic to the website is better to sort this by impressions and use impressions are kind of guideline. If there is enough traffic you can go with clicks. And why I’m doing this? Because I want to group, I want to group keywords and corresponding URLs.

And now I prepared this lovely anim gif. It took me three hours but you can see how a nicely sorted in this currently have impressions and they will be always going down to zero and Monday will hit zero new URL appear there and he’s going to zero and then new URL and new URL and new URL. And then I’m doing something like I’m saying okay, right now, when I have this, I only want up to five keywords per URL, or 10 keywords.

I’m not going with 300 keywords per one URL and 200 keywords per second URL because I will never be able to start optimising one landing page for 300 keywords. I’m only using the creme de la creme, the five mess performing in terms of impressions or in terms of clicks.

And the holy grail of Excel pivot tables. I love them with passion.

And you can see that when I’m thinking about this, you’re not thinking about keywords. I’m thinking about landing pages in the first place. And I have this pivot here. And first of all, this is very interesting article, ‘Find the SEO clients’. And I have some traffic from keywords like ‘how to get SEO clients without cold calling’, or ‘how to find the SEO clients’. I wrote that guide and this guy is ranking somewhere in Google. I’m getting some clicks. And you can see that maybe clicks are not that crazy high. But there is a good beginning and I can see that the ‘how to get SEO clients without cold calling’.

Despite from the fact it’s extremely long phrase lots of people is using it and the click through rate is 7.34. I can also see in this pivot that I have aggregation of that specific URL based on this specific five keywords is having 5200 impressions 51 clicks and average click through rate is 1.59 and I can start prioritising and I can say to myself, okay, every day I will be optimising 10 pages. Monday 10, Tuesday 10. After a week I have 50 pages optimised. After a month I have 40. And after a year, God knows how many. And and you know, like there is absolutely no chance that you will not get extra traffic. And here’s another example, a snapshot method, a bit of inception. We just talked about this, SEO snapshot, metal SEO snapshot. You can see I have nine clicks 363. When I was doing this, this data it was some time ago. So the website was relatively new probably right now I would have a bit more.

And why am I doing this and how I can implement this and what is the outcome? I wanted to share with you an example. I wanted to be fully transparent. There is a website, which is called socialmedia.pl. I was born in Poland, as you can hear in my accent, but I’m trying I’m trying my best.

You know, socialmedia.pl is a very, very cool domain, I believe.

I haven’t told my wife for three months that I bought this because it cost me a bit but I implemented during that time, these strategies and I was thinking like when I will show her charts, then she won’t kill me. So, you know, we’re talking about Polish market and obviously, I can use SEMrush, I can use Search Metrics, I can use other tools but local markets very often have local tools. One of the local tool that is for Polish market is called pseudo is kind of like SEMrush or Search Metrics or Sistrix but only for Polish market. They expanding right now, but they have like a relatively big database of keywords there.

And take a look the blue line is number of keywords that been ranking in Social Media PL and the orange line is my competitor. And you can see here was an acquisition when I was trying when I was thinking how I will tell my wife, then is content marketing. It was doing good doing quite all right. And then finally, snapshot. And you will see like, Yeah, but this is number of keywords that is ranking in top 10 conditionals traffic. No problem. I’m trying to be transparent. So this is organic traffic. You can see that right now I have a monthly around 10,000. Maybe not that crazy amount, because this is just a blog but this is 10,000 of visits I may have an or my I may not have so I’m getting some leads from this. And it’s working quite well. And you have see you can also see the same kind of areas acquisition content marketing and snapshot. So as a conclusion, use keywords that already ranking quite well.

This is strategy for not not for a new websites. Its strategy for established website. For website with a bit of history.

I believe you have 12 months of the history. You leveraging quality traffic because you’re looking, hey, Google, show me what I’m ranking already. And I will get this and try to push this by bulk up. Even if you will push hundred keywords by one position, when they’ve been in top 10 obviously, the impact in traffic is tremendous. And you playing Google game.

The tactic two: keyword magic tool. Who is using SEMrush? Raise your hand. Wow, great. So I love the keywordmagic tool. And before I will go into details, I wanted to go through this keywords by intent. Probably all of you saw that pyramids and you know, awareness, interest consideration. Yeah, yeah. You know, for me, it’s like, you know what, this green part, this is where I am. And this is probably later when there is a retention and advocate. So I’m not slicing this deep often.

And then I was watching Simon Sinek presentation. Who knows Simon Sinek? Raise your hand. Great. And Simon Sinke have this presentation, and he’s saying ‘start with why’ – Simon Sinek Golden Circle. And this is when you thinking about establishing a company. So you not thinking about ‘what’, ‘how’. The ‘why’ is the core. Why are you creating this company? Why you would like to know why you would like to sort a problem? It’s a bit of philosophical question.

Now, this is when you’re establishing a company, but if you trying to put yourself into shoes of a customer, then the circle it looks completely different. I would never call this Lukasz Zelezny Golden Circle, but I call this SEO search volume Golden Circle. So that looks this way. And now, why is here what is here and how is here but the size of the circle represent a potential. The number of search the demand, and I was intentionally knowing that ‘how’ is this sweet spot of every strategy most of the strategies that I was implementing in recent years. But again, I know that someone would be able to stand up right now and say ‘objection, you have no data to prove’. And I was thinking, How can I prove it? So start from ‘how’ and I took two websites that, in my opinion, have absolutely phenomenal content marketing. First website is HubSpot. And when I analysed 1 million, over 1 million keywords in this data set 149,000 so way over 10% being keywords with word ‘how’.

And this is not a coincidence. They targeting these keywords because it’s high click through rate. Because there is demand. Because when people are typing question with ‘how’ they very likely will not get answered through the through the meta description is much more than that. So they need to click and I was like, okay, so I know one.

Another example Shopify, another one website which has absolutely amazing content marketing and surprisingly they also ranked in in SEMrush because I took this data from SEMrush in around 1 million keyword-ish and 90,000 so close to 10 person is with ‘how’. And then way way behind that ‘what’ and then finally at the end is ‘why’. It’s very rare that people are typing ‘why’ when they have a problem. So the customers rarely using ‘why’. The entrepreneurs when they established a business they need to start from ‘why’ but customer frequently start from ‘how’. And I’m building you are and and I can check in Polish language it’s also the ‘how’ equivalent is that popular.

So knowing that I can go to keyword magic tool and I can for example type of keyword ‘organize conference’ and I can start going into this, which is. Wow.

I was thinking that this is the laser.

This is not.

So there is the ‘Question’ and ‘All’. Yeah? You’re going into the ‘Question’ and you can see lots of questions. So the SEMrush intelligently is splitting keywords from non question and questions.

And ‘how to organise conference’ 90 searches, 71 ‘Keyword Difficulty’, not bad. Going deeper: London and you can also go with the keywords which contain word ‘London’ and some words that indicates that this is a question.

I was thinking like, okay, we have search volume, we have Keyword Difficulty, is there any keyword that is extremely popular? And nobody, nobody cares about this keyword, no one want to run. And I found. You know, what is this? How to Cook broccoli. So if you would like to start a website that will have quickly, lots of traffic, and you don’t want to spend any money and then put an effort build a website about broccoli. I don’t know how you will monetise this but that’s another story.

And then you know, I was thinking also like my, my background is working in price comparison. I was working in uSwitch. And you know if someone would come to me and say like, Lukasz, you know what, I want to start price comparison website. I would be like in England in Britain? Yeah. From scratch? Yeah. Are you crazy? Was like no no do me a keyword research. Ok, I was like ‘all right’.

So let’s say this guy is going into credit cards is super competitive, but we could go to keyword magic tool and say like okay, maybe I can find some keywords that have relatively high search volume and relatively low Keyword Difficulty. And here is ‘can you get cash back with credit card’, ‘how to pay off credit card’. So we wouldn’t go immediately into ‘balance transfer credit cards’ or ‘credit cards’ or like ‘best credit cards’. No chance to rank there. There is uSwitch, Compare the Market, Moneysupermarket, Go Compare, Money.co.uk and I could like go and this is only the first results Yeah, there is also the second page first and so on and so on.

But if we would go with this questions, we would potentially have a tiny chance to succeed. Can you pay taxes with credit card? I don’t know. But you know, we could write an article. So keyword magic tool questions and start from ‘how’.

Then finally tactic 3: brand brand mentions and links. And let me do one thing. My name is Lukasz Zelezny polish name, Czech surname living in Britain. What could go wrong?

Zelenski, Zelezny, Zelesznysz.

Everyone was spelling my name wrong. Even in Poland they were spelling this wrong. Yeah. So I was like, ‘you know what, it’s time to do something with this’. And no one could learn that. It’s very simple. It’s like Lukasz Grzegorz Zelezny. This is the pronunciation. So you know, like simple yeah?

And I was like enough. In 2007 I had this idea. I will change my name and surname and I will be like very unique name and very common surname, and I wanted to go with Archibald Smith.

But then I realised that actually Archie was alive in 19th century and he’s still first with his Wikipedia page. So not bad SEO for someone who’s dead for 100 years. I can see some similarities here. But, you know.

So I was like, no. And then I realised that oh my gosh, it’s a blessing when you have a crazy name and surname. Then that probably is not other guys who have crazy name and surname, and you can put at least different name and surname into brand tracker. So let’s see what people are writing about you. And I went into some research, and I went into what is available in the market: Talk Walker, Brand 24, Fresh Web Explorer and Google and that never works. But I couldn’t afford Talk Walker.

So yeah, where is the camera? I couldn’t afford Talk Walker, I will send this later, and the Brand 24 is really affordable. And this is very, very powerful. And I was like, Okay, let’s do some test.

So, as a key word, I set up my name, with with space, without space, with some type of mistakes and so on and so on. And what I could see that Brand 24 started aggregating tweets, Facebook messages that been published for, for open public blogs near news and so on and so on. And take a look I had in in one month something like 52 mention and the reach was for 73,000. Most like oh my gosh, so that’s great. What they can, what can I do with this? So then I created another project which was for uSwhich and then I started thinking ‘what can I do for this?’ with this because it’s not only like oh great 52 mentions Wow, super. Cool. Cigarette. No, it’s not like that. You need to do something. Yeah. So I was like ‘link building’. I can do a link building so whenever I saw uSwitch, uswitch.com or Lukasz Zelezny, I was approaching these people and saying like ‘Listen, thank you very much for mentioning me. That’s very kind but you know, any chance that this this this brand could be a link to our website’, most of the people will be absolutely fine to do this.

So this is one of the most effective link building, organic link building tactic I am using. And one day I was like that, because what I saw it really shocked me. I saw this and I was like what’s going on here? What is this language? And then I realised that that must be Russian. I speak Russian but I don’t read Russian. You probably know why. I’m more I have like neighbours who are Russians and more fluent on weekends when they sometimes inviting for a barbecue. So there is like a correlation between the amount of alcohol you have and how fluent you are.

At the end of the night, I’m completely fluid. But anyway, you can see that this is in Russian and then here is Lukasz Zelezny. And that wasn’t written in Latin alphabet, so Brand 24 catch this, and here is actually the link but this link was pointing to LinkedIn. And you know, linked LinkedIn what a pun. The dead you know, like, I was like, you know, LinkedIn probably have enough links, maybe guys, you can you can repoint that link to my website. They will be like ‘no problem’. So what they did they took my article without asking me, translated, posted this put my photo and link to my LinkedIn. I was like, almost perfect if you would link to my website that would be hundred percent happy. And they were like no problem. And then I was thinking like okay, so I can start using this tactic also to build links.

And that’s next next part of the presentation very quickly: the links and social profiles. Very often you have a companies like let’s say, like, like even like uSwitch for example, Compare the Market, Moneysupermarket, Zoopla, Rightmove, they have social profiles – Twitter, Facebook. And very often somehow other websites instead of linking to your website, they linking to your social profiles. So this is my other baby SEO.London – another domain I didn’t told my wife I’m going to buy and then later when I build the website, I told and then I had no links.

And I was like ‘hold on how my LinkedIn look like’? And I went to my LinkedIn and I found that there is lots of links from other websites pointing to this page. Again, nice, but I will not be serving as a free link builder to LinkedIn. And I would rather like this links to point to my website. So my idea was to repoint backlinks from my LinkedIn profile to my SEO.London website. And when I went to Majestic, and I put an URL of my LinkedIn profile, I saw that there is 20 domains and 141 links. I was like ‘Oh my gosh’ it’s like a like, like, like a Klondike. I can like dig and dig and dig into that.

And you know, sometimes I have like a night I have a cup of coffee, and I’m just sending emails to everybody and saying, like, ‘Hey, could you repoint that link? Could you repoint that link? So much fun. And, you know, here is like referring domains. So so you can see that. That’s our domains, which been pointing before to my to my LinkedIn, including, for example, my own website. So I sent myself email and then I replied. And the you know you have here like like this one Remoters. This is a website own by Aleyda Solis. I think she was also here once a speaker and and I saw that okay he was a LinkedIn and I asked her if she could add more websites so she added website and she link to my website.

Then another one is AccuRanker: again he was Lukasz Zelezny and that was before so I had the Zelezny UK. I approached them and say like listen I have that now new website SEO.London. Maybe you can change the Zelezny UK to be a co.london. And then you see how the link started going up. This is very early stage I had 11 domains. If you would put SEO.London to Majestic right now there is hundred domains and about 30,000 backlinks.

So I was I just get addicted and I went into my Facebook. I saw that there is also a couple of links that they can repoint. And then finally I went to my Twitter and I almost get the heart attack. 164 domains. Oh my gosh! I just locked myself in the room as my wife ‘don’t talk to me for next week. I will be repointing domains. 37,000 domains, yeah. Again, like not ever, you will not get the hundred percent success ratio, but you will get there. And even if you will report 20% or 30%, that’s valuable.

So again, like an one for another profile, and so on and so on. And then as a summary, how it works well? You mostly know, the social media profile owners. So it’s not like you’re pushing completely people out of blue. You probably know because they were doing a webinar with you or they were doing webinar with your brand, or they were somehow connected to your brand because of some reasons. It’s easy to switch because you just approaching and he just need to change it like a little piece of code is not like you’re approaching someone you’ve never heard about before and he was like ‘Hey, could you link to me’? And it’s kind of organic, kind of. You can save a lot of time. Yeah. So please, please try this.

Then the last one, I think or almost the last one is a merge. A very simple tactic and again, like an anecdote, merge the subdomains into subfolders. So I had a client who is who is actually from a not not not far away from from Manchester. And he had a situation that there was he came to me and there was a situation I don’t know, do you have the website that he had a blog on subdomain. And I said like ‘listen, we should move that blog from subdomain into subfolder’. May and he was like, Why? Because I was like, because your blog I have so many backlinks at the moment you have such an interesting articles. But Google somehow is treating this as separate separate instances. So he was like anything, it will help. I was like, yeah, and this is not simply like you move couple of thousand visits from subdomain to your subfolder there will be kind of a synergy. And then he was like, ‘you know what, no, we will do something else. We will move everything into root folder’. I was like ‘whow,okay’. So he wanted to move all the articles to the root folder. There will be no slash blog slash nothing like that. Everything is going to the root folder. So we did this, we move. And then we just couldn’t, he just had to turn off PPC, literally because he couldn’t process then that amount of leads.

So you can see where we started and how it started boosting. And knowing that I was like, Oh, my gosh, I have another client who have a forum. And the forum was on subdomain. And it was like, very old job, job, job offer portal. And we were doing everything. This website was so well optimised. And it still didn’t give him traffic here couple of years ago. And I was like ‘listen, we will move subdomain into subfolder. You have a forum there’. And he’s like ‘yeah, but I’m not interested’. I was like ‘listen, trust me, and then take a look. He boosted immediately, then it little fall down, but it never get back to where he was.

So whenever you have a client, who have FAQ on subdomain, blog on subdomain, news on subdomain, anything on subdomain with very little number of exception, always move this into subfolder. Or if you are if you want go completely like a month, even to the root folder. There is only one client, I decided to go all the way around. She had booking or she had a booking for kids, like daily activities. And now website was on WordPress. And this booking engine was like highly modified WooCommerce. When I have Word highly modified and WooCommerce in one sentence, then I’m just freaking out. And that was always crashing. So I was like ‘listen, let’s create a duplicate of the WordPress, and that will be on the subdomain that will be on the booking engine. If that will crash, we will not get conversions, but your SEO will not be affected’.

So we decided to split this. But most of the time, 99% of the time, I’m moving everything into one domain. So the results. So I just wanted to get back to this customer that moved that subfolder subdomain to subfolder and take a look. That’s him and his competitors. And that’s him after migration. And I really want to see the competitors who are like ‘wow, what, what’s going on here? Why we are?

I am like ‘call me’.

So thank you very, very much for being having me for a fifth time. My name is Lukasz Zelezny. And let’s catch up on LinkedIn.