SEO News

Where are companies going wrong with planning and strategy, and what could they be doing right?

Rishi Lakhani:

In the last couple of years, Google’s unprecedented attack on links has meant most types of links are becoming riskier to build. I think that businesses may be giving too much of a free reign to those that build links. 

I am still seeing legitimate sites building anchor text directory submissions, paid guests posts etc. What they should do is try and vet very carefully every link building strategy that their agencies and teams are building. 

When it comes to planning, most businesses should now allow for link removal and link assessment to be part of their strategy. For example, I use LinkRisk.com heavily when looking at clients’ profiles.

David Sewell, SEO Consultant at Fresh Egg:

Companies are often fixated on a handful of key terms – those that are most often typed into search engines, rather than those that make the most difference to their business.

To identify what matters most involves thinking beyond key terms, to the reasons why those terms are being used (and why they are being used in Google) in the first place.

Some companies are being forced, in some cases kicking and screaming, to turn attention away from key terms with the rise of (not provided) being reported in Google Analytics towards thinking more carefully about the audience and their intention when a visitor lands on a page. 

There are companies doing this right, but they are few and far between.

(CC images courtesy of marriageequality on Flickr)

Gary Moyle, Head of SEO, NetBooster:

Despite the hype around content marketing I think many companies are still failing to plan their online strategy properly and are either not producing content at all or are missing the mark.

Producing content that is useful to customers, accessible to search engines and aligned with search behaviour is a winning formula. 

Many of the challenges in this area relate to internal problems with lines of communication, awareness of natural search and lack of internal resources.

There is also a constant requirement to prove the ROI from content driven campaigns which is an area that many companies still struggle with. 

What goals and objectives should companies have when it comes to SEO?

DS:

Each and every business is different. The goals and aims should share the business focus, with all specialities pulling towards the same aim. This leads to working in cross-disciplinary groups on campaigns, rather than working in isolation. 

The SEO specialist is able to optimise content and delivery – ensuring that the necessary technical aspects of SEO have been considered, e.g. from basic tagging, to identifying trending topics and interests.

So a company goal for SEO should be to ensure the skills of the team are used optimally across all aspects of the business. SEO is not just a rank in Google, it is optimising other digital marketplaces where search takes place, including devices, apps and sector specific search engines.

GM:

Most of our clients have the objective of driving increased revenue via organic search and most of our SEO campaigns are geared towards achieving that outcome via a clear set of KPIs. However it’s important to set realistic goals and manage client expectations from the outset. 

Natural search is very much about the long haul and it’s important to educate clients that ROI is generated over the long term. Yes there will be quick wins, however, a well-planned SEO campaign will deliver a solid foundation for years to come.

Customer journeys are also becoming far more complex and purchasing cycles more involved. Natural search is a key part of this mix and understanding how to attribute this channel is vital in order to create accurate budgets, forecasting and objectives.

It’s also important to understand that organic search is no longer a siloed channel. SEO campaigns can help achieve multiple objectives. A good example of this is improving page speed which as well as helping organic rankings can also improve quality scores on PPC campaigns, increase user engagement for all channels and potentially reduce IT costs.

RL:

The easy answer here is growth in traffic of course. But the real answer can be much more complicated. The ideal objective should be to understand where the business stands when it comes to SEO.

Is it integral? Is it a key part of their mix? I think it’s time to really start thinking of SEO as part of the wider business objectives – from PR to content, to marketing to customer service. 

For example, we often talk about “content” but what is content really? I think content is anything that your customers interact with – so a well-built set of FAQs would be a great piece of content.

So would a detailed company PR section – after all, if you want media to link to you – why don’t more businesses have detailed PR sections on their sites? 

A lot of big brands have well known people at the helm of the business, yet very few have content around these key business people. Yet these would generate links and exposure, and would be great ways to build up a business’s legitimacy.

What are your preferred tools for benchmarking your current performance?

DS:

Google Webmaster Tools data shows accurate impression and clickthrough data. The drawback is that this information is not regionally broken down – and this is important to determine the impact of any work, at a campaign level.

Regional insights can be gained from Google Analytics and heatmaps using fusion tables – visualisation tools often make it easier to see change and create benchmarks.

On a technical level, a favourite benchmarking tool for basic onsite SEO is Semetrical DeepCrawl. This helps to keep content and site crawl issues in check.

GM:

Combining our own in-house expertise with the right technology is crucial in understanding campaign performance.  We make sure that we partner with the best enterprise level SEO platforms on the market.  

BrightEdge in particular has helped us solve the challenge of secure search and measure the business impact of content driven marketing campaigns.  The combination of ranking visibility, page level metrics and integrated search query data from Google is very powerful.

If there’s one key piece of advice when it comes to planning and strategy for SEO, what would it be?

RL:

Control. Control is everything in SEO right now. Control your SEO agencies, control how your PR agencies approach third party bloggers, control the flow of content development that isn’t just fluff, but helps the businesses wider goals, control the data flow so that you really understand how your results are interpreted.

Plan to control the parts of the equation that make up your SEO strategy and you should be better placed to deliver a real strategy rather than just paying lip service to the algorithm.

DS:

Focus on what the audience is looking for and where they currently go to find it. The best sites in your sector will be those that give a visitor everything they want in the easiest way possible. Planning for SEO means understanding how those needs can be best met in search.

It might be that onsite content is not the ideal way to reach the audience, and that partnerships or even a guest post is the way to attract the audience to your brand. The key piece of advice is therefore: understand the search behaviour of your audience groups.

GM:

Understand your customer’s behaviour and align your digital content strategy around those customer needs. This sounds like a simple piece of advice however you’d be surprised how many companies are still not doing this properly.

There are plenty of UK retailers producing content however there is often little or no thought given to relevancy and often basic optimisation (page titles, meta descriptions, copy, inline links etc.).

For example, many of the supermarket chains have well thought out offline editorial strategies based on a thorough understanding of their customer needs but are still failing to translate that to their digital properties.

Publishers that can integrate their online and offline editorial strategies whilst taking into account the complexities of natural search will enjoy a much better return in the long term.

Posted by Dr-Pete

Google’s recent SERP redesign may not seem like a big deal to the casual observer, but at least one change could have a real impact on SEOs. This post will explore the impact of the redesign on title tags, and define a new, data-driven length limit, but first, a new tool…

Title tag preview tool (2014 edition)

Pardon the reverse order of this post, but we wanted to put the tool first for repeat visitors. Just enter your title and the search query keywords (for highlighting) below to preview your result in the redesign:

Note: Enter keyword phrases as natural queries, without commas. This preview tool only highlights exact-match text (not related concepts) and is only intended as an approximation of actual Google results.

How the redesign impacts titles

Google’s redesign increased the font size of result titles, while keeping the overall container the same size. Look at the following search result both before and after the redesign:

The title on the top (old design) has a small amount of room to spare. After the redesign (bottom), it’s lost six full characters. The old guidelines no longer apply, and so the rest of this post is an attempt to create a new set of guidelines for title tag length based on data from real SERPs.

It’s harder than it sounds

You may be thinking: “Ok, so gimme the magic number!”, but unfortunately it’s not that easy. While we try to set a reasonable length limit as a rule of thumb, the reality is that Arial (the title font) is proportionally spaced. Put simply, different characters have different widths. For example, the following two titles are both exactly 40 characters long:

As you can see, these two 40-character titles cover a wide range. Let’s break down what’s going on here…

(1) Narrow letters are narrow

Ok, that’s probably obvious, but let’s just put it out there. The first title is full of lowercase l’s and i’s which take up relatively little space. Meanwhile, m’s and w’s take up quite a bit more space. In this font, three lowercase l’s are actually narrower than one lowercase w.

(2) ALL CAPS take up more space

Capital letters are wider than lowercase letters – again, not a big surprise. All-caps titles also tend to be hard to read and are the visual equivalent of shouting. In some cases, like “LEGO” above, capitalization is important and necessary. In other cases, like “BRIDGEWATER COMMONS”, it’s just noise.

(3) Width varies with the query

Google highlights (bolds) the query keywords, so a longer query will bold more keywords. Bolded characters take up slightly more space. So, even if you found a title that just squeezed into the width limit, the actual display of that title would change depending on the keywords searchers use to find it.

(4) Cut-off titles have less characters

Google is cutting off titles with CSS, and the browser appends “…” whenever a title is truncated. So, a title that’s just slightly too long and gets cut will actually be shorter than a title that barely squeaks in under the width limit, due to the additional space required by “…”.

Data from real-life searches

In order to really understand what’s happening to title tags in the wild, we need to collect the data. So, we set about looking at real searches to understand where title tags were getting cut off after the redesign. Before I get into the methodology, I’d like to thank Bernt Johansson, founder of Swedish SEO firm Firstly for his generous help in hacking together this particular jQuery monster.

We looked at page 1 search results for 10,000 queries. Since not all SERPs have 10 results, this resulted in 93,438 total search results. An encoding error caused some issues with special characters, requiring us to toss out some bad data – this left us with 89,787 titles to work with. Query highlighting was preserved from the original searches. This data was all collected from Google.com using English search queries.

Since Google is truncating the titles using CSS, we have to replicate them as rendered (not just look at source code). Once the titles were extracted, each of them was displayed in a browser (Chrome on Windows 7) at the same size and width as a Google desktop search (18-point Arial in a 510-pixel wide <div>). Then, a somewhat bizarre combination of JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX and PHP stored the display length for analysis. Due to minor variations, our display lengths could vary from Google’s by ±2 characters.

Means, distributions & confidence

Sorry, it’s about to get mathy up in here. Let’s look at just the titles that were truncated by Google, to find out how their lengths varied. This leaves 28,410 titles for analysis. I can tell you that the mean (average) length of those titles was 57.7 characters, but don’t run off just yet. If the distribution of these lengths was normal, then setting the mean as a reasonable limit would mean that half of the titles at that length would still get cut off. That’s hardly ideal. Also, this doesn’t account for the titles that weren’t cut off.

Just out of curiosity, though, let’s look at the overall distribution of cut-off title lengths (post-cut-off):

The good news is that this distribution is roughly normal, peaking at about 57-58 characters. Post-cut-off title tags ranged in length from 42 to 68 characters. Here’s a title cut off at 42 characters:

Again, all-caps titles take up more space, and the query (“anywho reverse lookup”) is fairly long. Here’s a title that makes it up to 68 characters after being cut off:

In this example, the query is short (“Giftster”), the title only has two capitalized words, and there are quite a few lowercase l’s and i’s in play. Keep in mind that all of the lengths in the graph above are after the cut-off. Gifster could probably get away with 1-3 more characters beyond what’s displayed. We also need to consider the pre-cut-off length and account for the ellipsis.

So, how do we turn this all into something that’s actually useful? What do we really want to know? Ultimately, we want to find a reasonable length at which we can be fairly confident our titles won’t get cut off. At each length, I looked at what percentage of titles were cut off. Since the distribution is fairly normal, longer titles were (as expected) more likely to get cut off. Here are the cut-off lengths at five different levels of confidence:

• 80% – 57 characters (81.6%)
• 90% – 56 characters (91.6%)
• 95% – 55 characters (95.8%)
• 99% – 53 characters (98.7%)
• 99.9% – 49 characters (99.9%)

Since character lengths are integers, we can’t hit the 80%, 90%, etc. marks right on the money, so these are the closest numbers (the actual percentages are in parentheses). Maybe I’m biased by my statistics background, but I tend to think 95% is a pretty reasonable level. Put simply, if all of your title tags were exactly 55 characters long, then you could expect about 95% of them to be left alone (1 in 20 would be cut off).

There’s no magic number

I feel comfortable saying that 55 characters is a reasonable title-length limit under the new design, but keep in mind that your title lengths may vary quite a bit. In addition, a cut-off title isn’t the kiss of death – Google still processes keywords beyond the cut-off (including for ranking purposes), and other formats, like vertical results and Google+, may display your full titles. Here’s an example from Google news vertical results:

In this example, the first news result actually displays the full title of the article, whereas the second result is truncated. Ultimately, if you’re really concerned about any given result, you need to see it for yourself. In some cases, a mysterious trailing “…” may even make a title more clickable (I wouldn’t bank on it, but it’s possible).

In many cases, like blog posts titles, it’s not worth going back and revising everything based on this new data. I’d look closely at your core pages, view the SERPs for your target keywords, and make sure that your snippets look the way you’d like them to. Use your judgment, and keep the guideline in mind for future SEO efforts, but don’t start hacking at characters. Google could change the rules again.

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As internet marketers, we know how to strategize and design beautiful and engaging online content. However, with the onslaught of content creation for SEO and traffic-increase purposes over the past few years, we can’t just make another infographic, or even another interactive visualization.

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