Maximizing the ROI and Client Retention through Effective SEO Strategies

Transcript

1. 1 1
2. 2 2 Download this deck: https://speakerdeck.com/ipullrank
3. 3 Salutations! I’m Mike King (@iPullRank)
5. 5 PAGE WHO WE ARE Over $4 Billion in Incremental Revenue Driven for Clients Based in NYC 9 Years Old 30 Employees Certified Black-Owned Business Network of 100+ Content Creators ABOUT IPULLRANK
6. 6 PAGE YES, I JUST SAID 4 BILLION DOLLARS IN INCREMENTAL REVENUE ABOUT IPULLRANK
7. 7 PAGE HOW WE ACCIDENTALLY DROVE $2.4B AND THE BEST SEO PERFORMANCE EVER FOR ONE OF THE WORLD’S BIGGEST BANKS The Results o Total Conversions Increased by +398% (176,936 Leads) in 2020 YoY o Total Keywords Ranked Increased by +209.6% o Top 3 Keywords Ranked Increased by +127.2% The Background Continuing our work with one of the world’s largest banks, we wanted to be sure that our Year One success wasn’t just a function of 2019’s favorable rate environment. Our SEO efforts directly impact visibility growth, which creates more opportunities to capture the growing search volume created by the favorable rate environment. That said, we recognized that lead volume would indeed fall, irrespective of the ranking performance, due to a potential drop in search volume if we didn’t expand the keyword universe. What We Did Using our comprehensive Keyword Portfolio , we built out a strategy to expand the keyword footprint that the mortgage team was targeting. We mapped the customer journey related to homeownership with net new keyword opportunities to existing pages via our content engineering methodology used wealth of new content assets and establishing a robust education center. To our surprise, COVID-19 created an even more favorable rate environment and that keyword expansion yielded even more explosive growth in Organic Search performance and generated leads. Every passing month and quarter yielded the best that the bank had ever seen on record. During a 6-month stretch, the company even decided to forgo their paid Search efforts because they could not keep up with the volume that we were generating. Our proactive approach to mitigating an unfavorable rate environment not only future-proofed the SEO program, but if had the side of putting the bank in the right place at the right time to capitalize during the pandemic Our Goals o Mitigate Losses due to potential unfavorable rate environment o Grow leads from Organic Search o Expand Keyword Universe o Increase Search Engine Visibility o Develop and Implement Content Strategy o SEO Site Audit o Keyword Portfolio o Content Audit o Content Recommendations o Content Plan o Content Creation Services Used FINANCIAL SERVICES CASE STUDY
8. 8 8 Let’s talk about how you can do that too.
9. 9 PAGE TODAY’S AGENDA Maximizing ROI & Client Retention with Organic Search How to Upgrade Your SEO Efforts Based on the Google Algo Docs Leak How to Prune Your Content for Maximize Your SEO ROI How to Use AI to Your Advantage in Organic Search
10. 10 PAGE Maximizing ROI & Client Retention with Organic Search
11. 11 PAGE ORGANIC SEARCH IS ALL ABOUT RELEVANCE, AUTHORITY, AND USER EXPERIENCE THE ART & SCIENCE OF SEO Authority is built on your digital relationship with your industry and company's zone of genius. Semantic connections and strategic linking (internally and externally) drive your authority, loyalty, and prominence in search results. Content relevance in SEO is not just about quality—it's quantifiable and crucial for ranking. By aligning your content closely with user intent and leveraging complex models, search engines measure relevance through mathematical proxies, not subjective assessments. We help you strategically tailor your content for relevance, visibility, and performance. User experience removes friction, drives engagement, and builds brands. It’s holistic and critical. The DOJ’s lawsuit against Google proves users interaction with your site affects rankings. We make content that impacts the bottom line. It not only gets people to click but also keeps them engaged. The result? A boost in your site's visibility, performance, and business revenue. USER EXPERIENCE RELEVANCE AUTHORITY
12. 12 If you’re not focused on measurement, you’re just doing a very expensive version of arts & crafts - Mike King, CEO of iPullRank
13. 13 13 Measuring SEO is Way More Than Just Rank Tracking
14. 14 14 SEO is a Game of Inches. You’ll Make a Lot of Tweaks to Get Results
15. 15 15 Effective Measurement Pipelines for SEO Look a Lot More Like This MEASUREMENT PLAN
16. 16 16 Annotate Algorithm Updates in Your Reporting You can pull the official updates from Google’s JSON feed: https://status.search.google.com/incidents.json
17. 17 17 Beyond that, there’s no difference from standard ROI calculations. The channel metrics give visibility into impact tactical efforts. But here are some non-standard things to consider…
18. 18 Incremental Non-Branded Organic Traffic ROI Increase in non-branded organic traffic: Non-branded organic traffic is SEO gold as it is one of the few metrics you can truly affect directly.
19. 19 ROI on More Qualified Traffic Increase in traffic quality: An improvement in organic traffic quality can be shown through behavior metrics.
20. 20 ROI as Function of Lowered PPC Spend Decrease in PPC Spend: Looking at the growth of SEO as mechanism to replace PPC is another effective way to measure the ROI of SEO.
21. 21 21 The Best SEO Starts with Personas, Not Keywords
22. 22 22 Content Needs to be Aligned with Need States, and Measured Accordingly Different content types serves different needs for different stages and should be measured as such. Loyalty stage keywords and content should primarily support retention.
23. 23 23 Map your keywords to Need States to Inform Content Strategy We map keywords to personas and to the stage in the user journey that they align with so that we keeping the audience in mind throughout the entire content strategy process. flowers when do roses bloom what flowers for a first date buying chrysanthemums flower of the month club
24. 24 24 Essentially, you need to Build a Journey Map and Align Keywords with it
25. 25 25 Strategically, that’s it. That’s the talk.
26. 26 26 Focus on What People are Thinking
27. 27 27 Get your keyword data from SEMRush
28. 28 Have Google do it For You If you use a quantitative approach, use Google’s behavioral data. Google’s People Also Ask data allows you to have automatically bucketed keywords based on user journeys and behavior. Keep in mind that users need states can change within the same session. Use AlsoAsked.com
29. 29 29 The Easier the Readability the More Money the Page Generates Historically, when we’ve compared Page Value to Reading Difficulty, the easier pages to read typically drive more revenue
30. 30 30 Improving Readability Always Improves Conversions With the advent of GA4 the Page Value metric is much harder to get, but not impossible. You’ll still want to cross-tab the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease metrics with ROI metrics to determine hypothesis of where to optimize.
31. 31 31 Get Your Readability Scores and Combine with Conversion Data Screaming Frog SEO Spider makes it trivial to capture readability scores about your pages.
32. 32 Retention in Search is All About Your Branded Terms You need to be what people find when people are searching for terms about complaints, upsells, and cross-sell opportunities.
33. 33 PAGE How to Prune Your Content to Maximize SEO ROI
34. 34 34 Pruning and Optimization Work Quite Well Together
35. 35 35 The only content you should be making
36. 36 36 We like automate to get to a Keep. Revise. Kill. (Review.)
37. 37 37 Content Decay The web is a rapidly changing organism. Google always wants the most relevant content, with the best user experience, and most authority. Unless you stay on top of these measures, you will see traffic fall off over time. Measuring this content decay is as simple comparing page performance period over period in analytics or GSC. Just knowing content has decayed is not enough to be strategic.
38. 38 38 It’s not enough to know that the page has lost traffic.
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40. 40 40 The Content Potential Rating (CPR).
41. 41 41 Content Potential Score
42. 42 42 Interpreting the Content Potential Rating 80 - 100: High Priority for Optimization 60 - 79: Moderate Priority for Optimization 40 - 59: Selective Optimization 20 - 39: Low Priority for Optimization 0 - 19: Minimal Benefit from Optimization If you want quick and dirty, you can prune everything below a 40 that is not driving significant traffic.
43. 43 43 Combining CPR with pages that lost traffic helps you understand if it’s worth it to optimize.
44. 44 44 Step 1. Pull the Rankings Data from Semrush Organic Research > Positions > Export
45. 45 45 Step 2: Pull the Decaying Content from GSC Google Search Console is a great source to spot Content Decay by comparing the last three months year over year. Filter for those pages where the Click Difference is negative (smaller than 0) then export.
46. 46 46 Step 3: Drop them in the Spreadsheet and Press the Magic Button
47. 47 The Output is List of URLs Prioritized by Action Each URL is marked as Keep, Revise, Kill or Review based on the keyword opportunities available and the effort required to capitalize on them. Sorting the URLs marked as “Revise” by Aggregated SV and CPR will give you the best opportunities first.
48. 48 48 Get your copy of the Content Pruning Workbook : https://ipullrank.com/cpr-sheet
49. 49 How to Kill Content Content may be valuable for channels outside of Organic Search. So, killing it is about changing Google’s experience of your website to improve its relevance and reinforce its topical clusters. The best approach is to noindex the pages themselves, nofollow the links pointing to them, and submit an XML sitemap of all the pages that have changed. This will yield the quickest recrawling and reconsideration of the content.
50. 50 50 How to Revise Content Review content across the topic cluster Use co-occurring keywords and entities in your content Add unique perspectives that can’t be found on other ranking pages Answer common questions Answer the People Also Ask Questions Restructure your content using headings relevant to the above Add relevant Structured markup Expand on previous explanations Add authorship Update the dates Make sure the needs of your audiences are accounted for Add to an XML sitemap of only updated pages
51. 51 How to Review Content The sheet marks content that has a low content potential rating and a minimum of 500 in monthly search volume as “Review” because they may be long tail opportunities that are valuable to the business. You should take a look at the content you have for that landing page and determine if you think the effort is worthwhile.
52. 52 PAGE How to Upgrade Your SEO Efforts Based on the Google Algo Docs Leak
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54. 54 54 Google Has Owned Everything It Would Need to Become SkyNet
55. 55 55 We Don’t Use Clicks in Rankings
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57. 57 57 We Use Clicks in Navboost aka GLUE -Pandu Nayak
58. 58 58 And then some internal developer documentation leaked…
59. 59 It Looks Like Google is Using Clicks After All…
60. 60 SEO and UX need to work more closely together With NavBoost, Google is valuing clicks one of the most important features, but we need to understand what session success means. A search that yields a click on a result where the user does not perform another search can be a success even if they did not spend a lot of time on the site. That can indicate that the user found what they were looking for. Naturally, a search that yields a click and a user spends 5 minutes on a page before coming back to Google is also a success. We need to create more successful sessions. SEO is about driving people to the page, UX is about getting them to do what you want on the page. We need to pay closer attention to how components are structured and surfaced to get people to the content that they are explicitly looking for and give them a reason to stay on the site.
61. 61 61 You Need to Keep People on your Website to Win at Organic Search
62. 62 62 Indexing Tier Impacts Link Value A metric called sourceType that shows a loose relationship between the where a page is indexed and how valuable it is. For quick background, Google’s index is stratified into tiers where the most important, regularly updated, and accessed content is stored in flash memory. Less important content is stored on solid state drives, and irregularly updated content is stored on standard hard drives. The higher the tier, the more valuable the link. Pages that are considered “fresh” are also considered high quality. Suffice it to say, you want your links to come from pages that either fresh or are otherwise featured in the top tier. Get links from pages that live in the higher tier by modeling a composite score based on data that is available.
63. 63 63 Google Stores Your Content Like the Wayback Machine and Uses the Change History Google’s file system is capable of storing versions of pages over time similar to the Wayback Machine. My understanding of this is that Google keeps what it has indexed forever. This is one of the reasons you can’t simply redirect a page to an irrelevant target and expect the link equity to flow. The docs reinforce this idea implying that they keep all the changes they’ve ever seen for the page. You’re not going to get away with things by simply changing your pages once.
64. 64 64 There Are No Character Counting Measures There is no metric in this dataset that counts the length of page titles or snippets. The only character counting measure I found in the documentation is the snippetPrefixCharCount which appears to be set to determine what can be used as part of the snippet. This reinforces what we’ve seen tested many times, lengthy page titles are suboptimal for driving clicks, but they are fine for driving rankings.
65. 65 Page Title Length Test Hypothesis: A page title that’s longer than the standard best practice will negative impact rankings for primary keyword target. Variables: • Control • Short page title • Long page title Metrics: • Ranking Increase
66. 66 66 There are Gold Standard Documents There is no indication of what this means, but the description mentions “human-labeled documents” versus “automatically labeled annotations.” I wonder if this is a function of quality ratings, but Google says quality ratings don’t impact rankings. So, we may never know. 🤔
67. 67 Measure Your Content Against the Quality Rater Guidelines Elias Dabbas created a python script and tool that uses the Helpful Content Recommendations to show a proof of concept way to analyze your articles. We’d use the Search Quality Rater Guidelines which serve as the Golden Document standard. Code: https://blog.adver.tools/posts/llm-content-evaluation/ Tools: https://adver.tools/llm-content-evaluation/
68. 68 Site Embeddings Are Used to Measure How On Topic a Page is Google is specifically vectorizing pages and sites and comparing the page embeddings to the site embeddings to see how off-topic the page is. Learn more about embeddings: https://ipullrank.com/content-relevance
69. 69 Content needs to be more focused We’ve learned definitively that Google uses vector embeddings to determine how far off given a page is from the rest of what you talk about. This indicates that it will be challenging to go far into upper funnel content successfully without a structured expansion or without authors who have demonstrated expertise in that subject area. Encourage your authors to cultivate expertise in what they publish across the web and treat their bylines like the gold standard that it is.
70. 70 Build Topic Clusters Well defined topic clusters can position your website and brand into an authority in your space and strengthen your entities in the eyes of Google. A site that focuses on a series of topics that are relevant to each other are going to benefit in rankings. Here are a few tools that can help you design and build your topic clusters systematically. Thruuu https://thruuu.com/keyword-clustering-tool Keyword Insights https://www.keywordinsights.ai/features/keyword-clustering/
71. 71 SEO should always be experiment-driven Due to the variability of the ranking systems, you cannot take best practices at face value for every space. You need to test, learn and build experimentation in every SEO program. Large sites leveraging products like SEO split testing tool Searchpilot are already on the right track, but even small sites should test how they structure and position their content and metadata to encourage stronger click metrics. In other words, we need to actively test the SERP, not just the site.
72. 72 Structuring SEO Tests Hypothesis: Define a clear and testable hypothesis. Evaluation Criteria: Determine key metrics for success (e.g., traffic, rankings, conversions). Control/Variables: Identify the control group and variables to be tested. Implementation: Plan and execute the test changes. Reporting: Regularly track and document the test's progress. Analysis: Analyze results and draw conclusions based on data.
73. 73 Test Duration • Dependent on how often Google crawls your site. • Run tests for a minimum of 30 days. • Ensure you have a sufficient data sample size. (If you have limited crawl activity, you need more significantly different variables.) • Consider seasonality and external factors affecting results.
74. 74 SEO Testing Tools • Spreadsheets: DIY measuring and reporting. • Pros: Cheaper • Cons: Difficult to create and maintain • SearchPilot: For executing and analyzing SEO tests at scale. • Pros: Best in class measurement. Algorithms that include complex variables. More accurate and scientific • Cons: Enterprise focused. • SEOTesting.com: For moderate SEO test management and insights. • Pros: Moderately priced. Great feature set and interface. Simple to use. • Cons: Not as accurate as SearchPilot for advanced orgs.
75. 75 PAGE How to Use AI to Your Advantage in Organic Search
76. 76 76 The Three Laws of Generative AI content 1. Generative AI is not the end-all-be-all solution. It is not the replacement for a content strategy or your content team. 2. Generative AI for content creation should be a force multiplier to be utilized to improve workflow and augment strategy. 3. You should consider generative AI content for awareness efforts, but continue to leverage subject matter experts for lower funnel content. GENERATIVE AI OPPORTUNITIES & THREATS
77. 77 77 Retrieval Augmented Generation
78. 78 78 It’s Not Difficult to Build with Llama Index sitemap_url = "[SITEMAP URL]" sitemap = adv.sitemap_to_df(sitemap_url) urls_to_crawl = sitemap['loc'].tolist() ... # Make an index from your documents index = VectorStoreIndex.from_documents(documents) # Setup your index for citations query_engine = CitationQueryEngine.from_args( index, # indicate how many document chunks it should return similarity_top_k=5, # here we can control how granular citation sources are, the default is 512 citation_chunk_size=155, ) response = query_engine.query("YOUR PROMPT HERE")
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80. 80 PAGE THIS GLOBAL ECOMMERCE MARKETPLACE INCREASED REVENUE 175% - $290M+ IN YEAR-OVER-YEAR GROWTH - WITH AI CONTENT The Results o 5.4M more Organic Search Sessions YoY o 43.5% improvement in the number of transactions YoY o 175% increase in revenue - $290M increase The Background A global eCommerce marketplace was setting the stage to go public. They wanted to strengthen their visibility in Organic Search, optimize their content at scale, and drive revenue ahead of their IPO. What We Did We initially identified many technical SEO quick wins, including broken links, XML sitemap canonicalization issues, missing structured data, and meta description optimization opportunities. After the quick wins were implemented, we worked with the SEO team on developing Al content that would strengthen their category pages and internal linking. We wrote a script to produce Al generated content and inject topically relevant internal links into the copy across thousands of category pages. The experiment produced a 167% lift in traffic. We designed and implemented a custom detailed workflow that allowed the SEO team to A/B test future hypotheses and implement them at scale after our engagement. Our Goals o Increase search engine visibility o Increase transactions from Organic Search o Develop workflows for SEO experimentation o SEO Audit o SEO Copy Brief o Content Audit o Content Plan o Link-building strategy Services Used GENERATIVE AI CASE STUDY
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87. Integrate Promptitude with Zapier or Make
88. 88 88 Blocking LLMs is a Mistake. Appearing in these places will be recognized as brand awareness opportunities very soon.
89. 89 89 What is Mitigation for AI Overviews? 1. Manage expectations on the impact 2. Understand the keywords under threat 3. Re-prioritize your focus to keywords that are not under threat 4. Optimize the passages for the keywords you want to save
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91. 91 91 We Can Also Show You Per Keyword How You Show Up
92. 92 92 It’s all about the Fraggles.
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94. 94 94 The Fraggles Show What’s Used for the AI Overview
95. 95 95 Scroll to Text
96. 96 96 Fraggles Relevance Relevance against the chunks to keyword: Relevance against AI Snapshot:
97. Check out MarketBrew’s Free Tool to Help
102. 10 2 Roll the Credits
103. 10 3 10 3 Let me guess…
104. 10 4 10 4 What Do I Need to Know? Align your keywords and content with the audience and their need states Don’t trust what Google tells you Prune your content regularly to maximize ROI Build custom indexes of best-in-class content to generate your content Test everything Don’t trust the best practices or what …This is how you’re feeling right now.
105. 10 5 10 5 What Do I Need to Know? Align your keywords and content with the audience and their need states Don’t trust best practices or what Google tells you Prune your content regularly to maximize ROI Build custom indexes of best-in-class content to generate your content Optimize fraggles to appear in AI search results Test everything
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107. 10 7 10 7 Get your threat report: https://ipullrank.com/sge-report
108. Thank You | Q&A mike@ipullrank.com Award Winning, #GirlDad Featured by Get Your SGE Threat Report: https://ipullrank.com/sge-report Download the Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/ipullrank Mike King Chief Executive Officer @iPullRank