BrightonSEO is one of the best conferences in the UK and in Europe. It is the place to learn about news and what you should be doing in online marketing, not just SEO, but paid search, competitive analysis and social media. Read some of the takeaways from these speakers at BrightonSEO.

Driving Meaningful clicks with enriched SERPs

Izzi Smith from SixtUK and SixtUS,  was first up on the main stage at Brighton.

Izzi said that 72% of searchers on mobile resulted in no clicks and 34% on desktop because of these enriched SERPs.

In 2019, you need to focus effort on:

• Enriching your snippets and SERP feature presence to increase CTR
• You need to bring the right kind of clicks
• Avoid time wasting on no click queries

There are a lot of searches that are satisfying on the SERPs.

Then Izzi started to talk about CTR as a ranking factor.

When you click a link on Google, Google will factor this in for rankings, BUT are many different schools of thought.

Even if CTR is not a ranking factor need to spend time on it

If it was a ranking factor then:

• Google would not tell you
• People would manipulate it
• It would be far too unreliable.

Your job as an SEO should not stop at ranking high for keywords. You need to bring relevant users to your site and have them fulfil a purpose.

• Satisfy users intent, not just CTR.
• Bring the visitors you want to your site.
• Using a rich search you outrank others. And it is good brand awareness.
• There is a lot we can learn about searcher intent from SERPs.
• Search intents in their purest forms:
• Transactional – carrying out a specific action, spending cash money.
• So SERP feature is paid shopping and knowledge graph

Answer

• Need fast answer
• SERP feature is knowledge cards, panels and featured snippets

Research

• Looking for more information.
• SERP feature is a featured snippet, carousels

Local

• Looking for a service or geo- modifiers

Visual

• Videos, inspirations and how to
• SERP feature, images and videos

Fresh news

(so many slides)

You need to identify intent based on the SERP features not just keywords.

Do not forgot to combine intent either.

Stop wasting time chasing the no click queries.

SO avoid pure answer intent like when was Jurassic park released.

When it comes to 2019 Keyword targeting strategies

• Forget pure answer intent no click queries
• Check if the intent can be met directly in the SERPs
• Mid to Longtail is getting more lucrative

Understand how Google reports position data

• Aim to rank above the fold as a benchmark
• Be present and produce in local intent SERPs.

Getting into the local pack requires love

• The obvious stuff claim and create your GMB
• Enriched products (relevant images)
• Strong on page optimization
• Amount of reviews
• % of reviews responded to (esp negative)

Structure Data is your friend

• It provides machine readable meaning to our delicious content
• Structured data helps build rich results
• Bounce rate is less, then time on site more
• Structured data also feed into Google’s knowledge graph
• Own your entities

Build associates (entity carousels)

• Align your data
• Claim your knowledge panels via GSC
• Social Profile alignment
• Organization Structured beta on home page
• Band naming conventions

Target and win Featured snipes that have transactional intent

• Research and transactional, then you can drive traffic that will convert
• Use buzz words in the headlines, compressed and relevant images
• Comparison queries are perfect

Build out list with additional steps (eg to win tasty chicken)

Izzismith.com/slides/

[slideshare id=140618978&doc=izzismith-drivingmeaningfulclickswithenrichedserps2compressed-190412183543] 

You can provide on page optimization that help your page.

• What content is the PPC team using in their ad copy with a CTR.
• Mobile image thumbnails are on the rise, so in best now.
• HTML tables are epic for snippet optimization – help for enhancing classic snippets.
• Site links are a great, achievable snippet.

Incorporate SERP enriching strategies into content briefings and page templates

Emily Potter from Distilled was up next and gave us an in depth presentation about Featured Snippets.

Introduction

• Featured snippet is the small box that appears in the box when ask a questions.
• Why do people like featured snippet?
• So can go to the top of the SERPs, position 0.

Attempt 1

• First Emily went to find keywords with featured snippets.
• She went to research what is required into getting into the featured snippets.
• Lesson 1.
• Google is the enemy as they introduced an update and removed the queries for the featured snippets.

Attempt 2

Then Emily went to see what the competitors are doing. Are they answering the query better? What format are they using? Are they using headings?

Next lesson, Emily learned was that she does not like Featured Snippets because:

• They steal clicks. They are reducing CTRs.
• Featured snippets increase no click searches.
• Featured snippets create confirmation bias.
• They are unsophisticated. When enter “what is a mother’s Day message”, it says for you sister or friend.

So Emily set out to prove that featured snippets are over rated

Studies suck, they have misleading headlines. And Misleading percentages.

So Emily created her study

• Owning a featured snippet does not increase CTR.
• Data sours – STAT and Google Console.
• Included impressions over 60

Featured snippets improve CTRs.

Emily said she found that CTR increase lower than existing studies. Featured snippets work.

They do improve traffic.

Monday morning actions:

1. Find keyword you rank for with featured snippets (you can use a tool)

Avoid keywords with commercial intent because they are swapped out with Google Shopping

Flag where you rank higher

2. Look for low hanging fruit – steal headings (esp when you rank higher)

Join 2 points together with “However”

3. Add on-page content for well performing pages
4. Reformat your content to match that of current owner (turn paraphrase into lists, lists into tables etc)

Check out the slides for yourself on slideshare:

A structured Data Case Study – How to make your Websites Standout

Kenichi Suzuki came from Tokyo to share his tips on how to make your site stand out. He works for Faber Company inc, who make heat maps.

Kenichi went through different case studies of rich results and showed us the benefits from structured data.

Case studies

Rakuten recipe

After they introduced structured data, they saw a big increase in traffic and session duration.

Jobrapido

• Saw a 115% increase in organic traffic
• 270% increase of new users registrations from organic traffic.
• 15% lower bounce rate
• All this after implemented rich snippets

Brainly saw a 15 to 25% increase CTR after implemented rich snippets

Types of Structured Data for Rich results

• Articles, they can be seen as top stories in the carousel.
• Rating and offer, this was called rich snippets but now rich results it is called.
• Events – these are helpful those looking for activities
• Breadcrumbs is also rich results
• Restaurants lists – shows many results
• Structured data is used in image search. Images are given a badge that there is a receipe behind it.
• Badges are also given to products.

New rich results in the experimental stage

How To – Slack is taking part in this.

FAQ – it may seem similar to Q and A, but there are clear differences between them. FAQ need to use a single question per page. Q and A is more for quora sites and stack overflow.

What Structured Data does Google Support?

Bit.ly/StrucData1

Nearly 30 results are available and the number is expanding

Which Structured data is suitable for my site?

• Google gives the answer on the help page.
• If you have a static product then implement it for product and review

Hidden Benefits from Structured Data.

• Google supports all types of properties of schema.org
• Rich results are only a small part of the benefits you can obtain from structured data
• The critical role is to help Google understand your content better.
• Add as much structured data as possible (as long as it is closely related to your business)

For more information about Kenichi’s presentation, read his full deck on slideshare:

One of my favorite talks at BrightonSEO was Areej’s presentation on:

Restructuring Websites to improve indexability

Areej Abuali started her presentation by saying a client wanted to work with Verve because they are good at outreach and link building. But their website was struggling. They had seen a 80% drop in organic visibility year on year.

The client was a job aggregator site. It is important to fix the fundamentals, the tech first before doing any outreach. Therefore their plan was to spend 6 months on the tech and then work on the creatives.

Areej then shared what worked and did not work.

Initial findings

• Worked on a tech audit and link audit.
• 72% of backlinks came from 3 referring domains.
• No site maps
• Canonical tags not set up correctly.
• They are a job aggregator site, so the site is like a  search engine
• Every single search could be crawled and indexed.

Crawling and indexing not the same.

• Crawling is the process of gathering
• Indexing is then adding these crawl pages to the index.
• It was impossible to crawl the site. Returned 2.5 million URLs.
• If their pages could not be crawled then could not be indexed correctly.
• Crawling, indexing and ranking – needed to fix this.
• Google was wasting crawl budget crawling thin pages.

Needed to create customized framework on what to do and not to do

• Limiting indexable pages
• Or not limiting indexable pages.
• Areej would use search data and pass the search query through a keyword combination script.
• If the job is available then make it not crawled. If it is available then make it crawled.
• Keywordtool.io – use this tool.
• Set the search volume as 50. If the search volume is more than this, then the page is created crawled and indexed.

Recommendations

• Recommended to create the site maps and split them up. Make sure have blog site map in one.
• Also helped them sort out the content. Even if they were only indexing high search volume page, then changes to rank are minimals.
• They had the same H1, 2 and meta data.
• Competitors automatically generate optimised meta tags.
• They need to create pages targeting category search terms. They had no core content research. They wanted to see what content would work for them.

Four months later, the client confirmed all had been done.

• By that point we had started working on creating creative content and outreach
• BUT then the traffic dropped more.
• Areej went through the 50 list of recommendations and 29 were not implemented.
• Google was choosing only 20% of the submitted sitemap.
• Crawl bot is precious, should not be wasted.
• The client had added canonical tags and felt this was enough,
• They were basically asking google bot to:

1. Crawl pages
2. Find canonical tags
3. Then implement

But bots do not always do this.

You main goal is to maximize crawl budget, cannot do canonical tags to implement this.

So what did Areej do?

• Put a face to face meeting, discussed each task one by one.
• Re-priotised all tasks.
• Very good meeting but the implementation was hard.
• Maybe Areej should have delivered one single recommendation, then once it is done, then implement it.

Verve also did 6 creative campaigns for them. Got coverage on many sites but barely any impact. Client asked Areej why are the rankings not improving. Areej said cause of incomplete tech recommendations.

Getting the basics right is so fundamental in SEO. Areej will update us another time on the results, still work in progress.

To see her great slides, click here on slideshare.

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