L.9.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

Specific learning outcomes:

● Understand SEO and its key developments.

● Gain insight on how to pursue on-site and off-site SEO.
● Gain experience in conducting keyword research.
● Become familiar with SemRush Keyword Research tool

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING?

- Search engine marketing: a key technique for generating quality visitors to a website,

- Search Engines:
● People turn to a search engine when seeking a new product, service or
entertainment.
○ e.g. Google, Bing, the Google-owned YouTube, which is the second largest search
engine by volumes of searches in many countries, or other regional search engines
● Navigational (or brand) search: People also turn to search engines when they are
familiar with a brand, shortcutting site navigation by searching for a brand, appending a
brand name to a product, or typing a URL into Google.

- As reaching an audience during their consideration process for a product or when they are
locating a brand is important→ SEM has become a fiercely competitive area of digital
marketing
- There are 2 main types of SEM:
1. Search engine optimisation (SEO) or ‘organic search’
● A structured approach used to increase the position of a company or its
products in search engine natural or organic results listings (the main
body of the search results page) for selected keywords or phrases.
○ Natural or organic listings: The page listing results from a search
engine query, which is displayed below any ads, in a sequence
according to the relevance of the match between the keyword phrase
typed into a search engine and a web page according to a ranking
algorithm used by the search engine.
● Involves achieving the highest position or ranking practical in the natural
or organic listings, below the ads on the search engine results pages
(SERP) across a range of specific combinations of keywords (or keyphrases)
entered by search engine users.
○ SERP: the page(s) containing the results after a user types a key
phrase into a search engine. SERPs contain both natural and
organic listings and paid or sponsorship listings.
● As well as listing pages that the search engine determines as relevant for the search
performed based on the text it contains and other factors, such as links to the page,
the SERPs also contain other tools that searchers may find useful. When
these were first introduced, Google labelled them ‘universal search’ or
‘blended search’. Today, we simply talk about specific SERP features with
different labels.
○ SERP features: Organic search engine results listings incorporate other
relevant resources, such as “search snippets” related to a query, such as
images, videos, related questions, local retailers (in Google My Business),
and news.
Knowledge graphs Search snippets
 2. Paid search (pay-per-click) marketing (PPC)
● Similar to conventional advertising
● A relevant text ad with a link to a company page is displayed on the SERPs when
the user of a search engine types in a specific phrase. A fee is charged for every
click of each link, with the amount bid for the click mainly determining its
position. Additionally, PPC may involve advertising through a display network of
third-party sites (which may be on a CPC, CPM or CPA basis)
● A series of text ads (i.e.',' sponsored links’) are displayed above or below the
natural listings
● Researchers preference to click on the natural listings; a sufficient number do click
on the paid listings (typically around ¼ or ⅓ or 1/2 of all clicks) such that they are
highly profitable for companies such as Google,
● A well-designed paid search campaign can drive a significant amount of business
for companies.
● There are also opportunities to create awareness and response from pay-per-click
ads displayed on third-party sites, as we will see in the section on paid search
marketing

EXAMPLE
 The importance of effective search engine marketing

- Generating the highest rankings for a company in the search engine results pages (SERPs) can
generate many more visits because of a higher click-through rate.
- Note that click-through rate according to position will vary dramatically by type of keyword,
such as brand or generic keyword, but this research is based on 10,000 keywords across 250
B2C and B2B companies

WHAT IS SEO?

Metaphor: you have rented this place, ordered food and decorations for your party and on the day, no
one turns out. You decide to wait but still nothing. Then, you realised that you have not sent the invite to
your guest → The same happens to when you develop a website, you think that people will automatically
visit your website without the invitation for them to come

● SEO is like the invitation that you provide to your guests to come to your party
● Designing the website and having a nice website layout is not enough to generate traffic to your
website → A proper SEO strategy is needed to bring people to visit the website
WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION?
- “Search engine optimization (SEO)
● “Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of
traffic to a website from search engines via “natural” (organic) search results.
Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks,”
the more searchers will visit that site.”
● “A structured approach used to increase the position of a company or its products in
a search engine’s natural or organic results listings for selected keywords or
phrases.” (i.e. how you can use keywords to rank higher in search engine results page,
which turn in higher (quality) traffic)

- Improving positions in the natural listings is dependent on marketers understanding the

process whereby search engines compile an index by sending out spiders or robots to crawl
around sites that are registered with that search engine.

- The technology harnessed to create the natural listings involves these main processes:
1. Crawling.
● Purpose: identify relevant pages for indexing and assess whether they have
changed.

● Crawling is performed by robots (bots, sometimes known as ‘spiders’)

○ Robots or spiders: spiders are software processes, technically known as
robots, employed by search engines to index web pages of registered sites
regularly. They follow or crawl links between pages and record the
reference URL of a page for future analysis.
● These access web pages and retrieve a reference URL of the page for later analysis
and indexing.
● ‘Bot’ and ‘spider’ give impression of smt physical visiting a site BUT bots are
simply software processes running on a search engine’s server the request pages,
follow the links contained on that page and create a series of page references with
associated URLs. This is a recursive process, so each link followed will find
additional links that then need to be crawled.

2. Indexing.
● An index is created to enable the search engine rapidly retrieve of relevant pages
containing the query typed by the searcher.
● Rather than searching each page for a query phrase, search engine ‘inverts’ the
index to produce a lookup table of documents containing particular words.
● Marketers can use Google’s Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) to
understand which pages are indexed and get recommendations about potential
duplicate content.
● Index information consists of phrases stored within a document and also other
information characterising a page, such as the document’s title, meta description,
Page- Rank, trust or authority, spam rating, etc.
● For the keywords in the document, additional attributes will be stored, such as
semantic markup (<h1>, <h2> headings denoted within HTML), occurrence in
link anchor text, proximity, frequency or density, position in document, etc. The
words contained in link anchor text ‘pointing’ to a page are particularly important
in determining search rankings.
○ Link anchor text: The text used to form the blue underlined hyperlink
viewed in a web browser defined in the HTML source.
■ E.g, a link: Visit Dave Chaffey’s Digital Marketing site is created by
the HTML code: <A hre‚²“http://www. smartinsights.com”µVisit
Dave Chaffey’s Digital Marketing site</A>.
 3. Ranking or scoring.
● The indexing process has produced a lookup of all the pages that contain
particular words in a query, but they are not sorted in terms of relevance.
● Ranking of the document to assess the most relevant set of documents to return
in the SERPs occurs in real time for the search query entered.
1º) First, relevant documents will be retrieved from a runtime version of the index
at a particular data centre,
2º) A rank in the SERPsfor each document will be computed based on parsing
many ranking factors, of which we highlight the main ones in later sections.

4. Query request and results serving.

● The familiar search engine interface accepts the searcher’s query.
● The user’s location is assessed through their IP address and the query is then
passed to a relevant data centre for processing.
● The ranking then occurs in real time for a particular query to return a sorted list of
relevant documents and these are displayed on the search results page

STAGES INVOLVED IN PRODUCING A SEARCH ENGINE LISTING FOR THE NATURAL LISTINGS

VIDEO: WHAT IS SEO?

- There are many elements that need to pay attention to rank higher on the search engine results
page.
MARKET SHARE OF SEARCH ENGINES: UK

- To put your SEO, the contextual information also need to be considered

- E.g. if companies are more concerned about users located in the UK. The 2 most used Search
EnginesEngines are Google and Bing, hence need optimise your search engine based on those 2
search engines tools
- But inChina China the main search engine tools are others.

MARKET SHARE OF SEARCH ENGINES: CHINA

SEARCH ENGINE RANKING FACTORS
- Google uses more than 200 factors or signals within its search ranking algorithm. Include:
● Positive ranking factors → help boost position
● Negative factors or filters → used to remove search engine spam (i.e. webspam) from
the index when SEO companies have used unethical approaches

- At a top level, the 2 most important factors for GOOD RANKING POSITIONS in all the
main search engines are:

1. Matching between web page copy and the key phrases searched.
- The main factors to optimise on are ‘related keywords used on page’, keyword formatting,
keywords in anchor text, and the document metadata, including page title tags.
- The SEO process to improve results in this area is on-page optimisation
● On-page optimization → writing copy and applying markup such as the <title>
tag and heading tags <h1>,<h2>,<h3> to highlight relevant keyphrases within a
document to search engines.

2. Links into the page (inbound or backlinks).

- Backlink (or inbound link): hyperlink that links to a particular web page (or
website), typically used to mean linking from another site.
- External link
● Google counts each link to a page from another page or another site as a vote for
this page → Resulting in Pages & sites with + external links from other sites
ranked more highly.
● Link’s Quality is also important → if links are from a site with a good reputation
& relevant context for the keyphrase = + valuable.

- Internal links are also assessed similarly.

● Link quality tends to be higher for links with relevant anchor text from within a
relevant article

- Processes to improve this SEO aspect → external link building and internal link
architecture.
● External link building: A proactive approach to gain quality links from
third-party sites. It can be considered to be an element of online PR since it
involves getting your brand visible on third-party sites and creating backlinks
related to your site.
● Internal Link Architecture: structuring and labelling links within a site’s
navigation to improve the results of SEO.

- To reduce the impact of webspam, search engines introduced nofollow tags, which
means that links added to comments in blogs and social network updates have
a limited impact, although it seems that many search spammers aren’t aware of this.

● Nofollow and dofollow tags: Appended to a hyperlink, it allows webmasters to

control whether search engines follow a link or not.
○ Follow tag: natural type of link is sometimes known as ‘do-followed’
■ E.g., the following URL on a page of another site allows
search engines to visit Smart Insights’ website and credit the
website with the link; each link is scored by the search
engines, supporting SEO:<a href = “http://www.
smartinsights.com/” title=“Smart Insights”>Visit Smart
Insights</a>
○ Nofollow tag: s a basic piece of HTML (Hypertext Markup
Language).
■ Here’s the same hyperlink, now including a nofollow tag
(highlighted in red): <a href‚ “http://www.
smartinsights.com/” title=“Smart Insights”
rel=“nofollow”>Visit Smart Insights</a>.
 - Some have suggested that SEO has become less important, but the reality is that SEO has always
involved a combination of technical SEO to ensure pages are indexed, development of content
and working with other site owners.
- With the growing importance of sharing links through social media, search engines can
potentially use the number of social mentions on a page and across a site to determine ranking
positions (Soames, 2010).
- If companies can get influencers to recommend their content or offers through social networks,
this can have the dual effect of reaching more people through their social graph and improving
rankings.
● Social graph: A term popularised by Facebook in 2007 when describing its Facebook
platform. The social graph describes the relationship between individuals linked through
social networks and other connections such as email or personal contact.

Content marketing (C.8)

- The best, scalable way to gain quality backlinks is through content marketing
- Involves developing quality content and then working with partner sites through a process of
‘outreach’

Advantages SEO (targeted reach & low cost) Disadvantages SEO

- Significant traffic driver. Search - Lack of predictability. Compared with other

marketing can attract a significant proportion media, SEO is very unreliable in terms of the
of visitors to the site if companies are return on investment (it’s difficult to predict
successful in implementing it. results for a given investment and is highly
competitive).
- Highly targeted. Visitors are searching for
particular products or services, so will often - Time for results to be implemented. The
have a high intent to purchase—they are results from SEO may take months to be
qualified visitors. Registering with Google My achieved, especially for new sites.
Business enables businesses with a physical
presence to gain visibility in Google Maps - Complexity and dynamic nature. The search
SERPs features. engines take hundreds of factors into account,
yet the relative weightings are not published, so
- Potentially low-cost visitors. There are no there is not a direct correlation between
media costs for ad display or click-through. marketing action and results ( ‘it is more of an art
Costs arise solely from the optimisation than a science’). Furthermore, the ranking
process, where in-house staff or agencies are factors change over time.
paid to improve positions in the search results.
- Ongoing investment. Investment is needed to
- Dynamic. The search engine robots will crawl continue to develop new content and generate
the home page of popular sites daily, so new new links.
content is included relatively quickly for the
most popular pages of a site (less so for deep - Poor for developing awareness in
links). comparison with other media channels.
Searchers already have to be familiar with a
brand or service to find it. However, it offers the
opportunity for less well-known brands to ‘punch
above their weight’ and to develop awareness
following click-through.
BEST PRACTICE IN PLANNING AND MANAGING SEO
- 6 of the main approaches used to improve the results from SEO covering different
search engine ranking factors.
- NOTE: SEO is one of the most cost-effective techniques. It is a technical discipline and the
techniques used change through time. Hence, it is often outsourced to specialist SEO agency,
although some companies believe they can gain an edge through an internal specialist who
understands the company’s customers and markets well.

1. Search engine - When a new site is launched, its pages need to be crawled for it to be included
registration within the search engine index and potentially get visibility.
- Google advises new sites should be registered by submitting new and updated
URLs to verify site ownership on Search Console.
- Most existing companies and startups will be included automatically in the
search index since the search engine robots will follow links from other sites
that link to them and do not require submission service.
- New sites should seek to gain relevant backlinks to boost their authority in
Google’s eyes.
- Google sandbox effect → when new sites are placed by Google in a review
status. Its existence is denied by Google engineers and explain that it is a natural
artefact produced by new sites having limited links from other sites, history and
thus reputation.
- ↳ constraint ! to be remembered when creating startup companies or separate
unlinked microsites for a campaign since you may have to rely on paid search to
gain SERPs visibility.
- Businesses with physical presence should register on Google My
Business to be disciplined prominently in Google Maps SERPs feature.
- Local SEO involves creating visibility for geographically constrained searches
by improving the quality of images, product listings, reviews and backlinks for
retail locations.

2. Index - Search engine robots may visit the homepage of a site but may not crawl all
inclusion pages or assign them equal relevance.
- So, when auditing sites as part of an SEO initiative, SEO agencies will check
how many pages are included within the search engine index for different search
engines. This is known as index inclusion.
● Index inclusion: Ensuring that as many of the relevant pages from
your domain(s) are included within the search engine indexes you are
targeting to be listed in.

Reasons for non-gaining complete index inclusion include:

● Technical issues: e.g., SEO-unfriendly content management systems w/
complex URLs),
● Pages identified as webspam or of less importance, or considered to be
duplicate content → contained in the supplemental index in Google
and don’t rank highly. In these cases
○ sometimes best to use a specific ‘canonical’ meta tag, which tells
the search engine which is the primary page
○ For multinational company with different content sites for
different countries then it can be challenging to deliver the
relevant content for local audiences, with use of regional
domains tending to work best. BUT there are specialist
techniques such as hreflang code markup, which can be used to
tell Google which country and language a page is intended for.
 - To check index inclusion, companies can:
● Use web analytics referrer info to find out which search engines a site’s
visitors originate from, and the most popular landing pages
● checking the number of pages that have been successfully indexed on a
site
○ for example, in Google, the search
‘inurl:www.smartinsights.com’ or ‘site:www.smartinsights.com’
lists all the pages of Dave’s site indexed by Google and gives the
total number in the top-right of the SERPs

● using Google Search Console – a free service that site owners can
register with that shows pages indexed and potential webspam
problems, such as the penalties that may result in reduced search
rankings.

3. Keyphrase - Keyphrase: the combination of words users of each search engine type into a
Analysis search box that forms a search query.
- The key to successful search engine marketing is achieving keyphrase
relevance, since this phrase is what the search engines strive for.
- Notice that we say ‘keyphrase’ type into a search box (short for ‘keyword
phrase’) rather than ‘keyword’, since search engines such as Google attribute
more relevance when there is a phrase match between the keywords that the
user types and a phrase on a page.
- Key sources for identifying the keyphrases your customers are likely to type
when searching for your products include:
● your market knowledge
● competitors’ sites, keyphrases from visitors who arrive at your site (from
web analytics)
● the internal site search tool
● the keyphrase analysis tools such as the Google Keyword Planner.

- When completing keyphrase analysis we need to understand different qualifiers

that users type in. Here are examples of common types of qualifiers for ‘car
insurance’:
● comparison/quality: compare car insurance
● adjective (price/product qualifiers): cheap car insurance, women’s car
insurance
● intended use: high-mileage car insurance
● product type: holiday car insurance
● Vendor: Churchill car insurance
● Location: car insurance UK
● action request: buy car insurance.
4. On-page - Although each search engine has its own algorithm with many weighting factors
optimisation that change through time, there are common factors in the match between
search terms entered and the occurrence of the words on the page that
influence search engine rankings.

1. Occurrence of search term in body copy

- The number of times the key phrase is repeated in the text of the web page is a
factor in dete mining the position for a key phrase, but it is less important than
when search engines were first developed, as discussed by Fiorelli (2014).
- Copy can be written to increase the number of times a word or phrase is used
(formerly known as keyword density) and this can have a limited impact to
boost position in the search engine.
- Note, though, that search engines carry out checks that a phrase is not repeated
too many times (such as ‘cheap flights ... cheap flights ... cheap flights ... cheap
flights ... cheap flights ... cheap flights ... cheap flights ... cheap flights ... ’ or the
keyword is hidden using the same colour text and background) and will not list
the page if this keyphrase density is too high or it believes ‘keyword stuffing’ or
‘search engine spamming’ has occurred
- Today, other ranking factors such as anchor text of backlinks pointing to the
page from other pages and other sites, and the natural occurrence of synonyms
within the page body copy, headings and title are more important.
- User behaviour signals are also signals are also important, so Google favours
pages that engage visitors for longer and so have longer dwell times or lower
bounce rates compared to other pages
- These other factors include:
● requency (which must be not too excessive, i.e. less than 2–4 per cent);
● occurrence in page title and headings, marked in HTML code as <title>,
<h1>, <h2>;
● occurrence in anchor text of hyperlinks;
● markup such as bold;
● proximity of phrase to start of document and the gap between
individual keywords;
● links out to other related sites;
● alternative image text (explained below);
○ Graphical images can have hidden text associated with them that
is not seen by the user (unless graphical images are turned off or
the mouse is rolled over the image) (unless graphical images are
turned off or the mouse is rolled over the image) but will be seen
and indexed by the search engine and is a minor ranking factor,
particularly in images linking to other pages.
● document metadata (explained below)
○ ‘Meta’ refers to information ‘about’ the page that characterises it.
○ The 3 most important types of metadata are
■ Document title: <title> tag: he most important type
of metadata since each search engine places significant
weighting on the key phrases contained within it and was
the call-to-action hyperlink until 2021, when it was
replaced by headings (Google, 2021). If it contains
powerful, relevant copy, you will get more clicks and the
search engine will assess relevance relative to other pages
that are getting fewer click
 ■ ‘descriptions’ meta tag: A meta tag is an attribute of
the page within the HTML <head> section, which can be
set by the content owner. It doesn’t directly affect rank-
ing, but a compelling description explaining an offer can
boost click-through rate, so is good practice. If it is
absent or not relevant, Google will display relevant
‘snippets’ from within the body copy, but it is best to
control messages and this can help identify the page as
unique to prevent duplicate content problems. So, the
page creator can modify this to make a stronger call to
action in the search engine listings,

■ Keywords Meta Tag: The keywords meta tag is used to

summarise the content of a document based on keywords.
Some unscrupulous SEOs can still be heard to say to
potential clients ‘we will optimise your meta tags’. But this
is not significant today since the keywords meta tag is
relatively unimportant as a ranking factor (Google has
never used them), although these keywords may be
important to internal search engines

● Semantic markup. To better manage the interrelationships between

different data on the web, the W3C has introduced specific HTML
markup in a format defined as m­icroformats which can be used to
reinforce the semantics or meaning, of the information on web pages so
that it can be better understood and managed by search engines. These
are particularly important in some markets since they give more
prominence to businesses in the search results. Include:
○ local business information such as names and addresses;
○ product details such as pricing, size;
○ reviews and ratings awarded for articles, products or service
quality

5. External - Boosting external links from other sites is vital to SEO in competitive market -
linking on-page optimisation is insufficient. However, link-building is less easy to
control and often neglected. The number and quality of external links is still
recognised as an important ranking factor and this is similar for other search
engines. Links shared through social media are now also used as ranking
factors.
- Generally, the more links a page has from good-quality sites, the better its
ranking will be. age an is one factor that helps Google deliver relevant results
since it counts each link from another site as a vote. However, not all votes are
equal – Google gives greater weight to links from pages that themselves have a
high PageRank and where the link anchor text or adjacent text contains text
relevant to the keyphrase
- While natural links will be generated if content is useful, a proactive approach
to link building is required in competitive markets
6. SEO for - Google has taken many steps for ensuring a good mobile experience to its search
mobile engine users.
devices - Points marketers should consider since they may lose visibility or miss out on
opportunities;
1) Page download speed: With much of the world still not using 4G, 5G
or broadband,Google assesses page download speeds, publishes
benchmarks of the Core Web Vitals measures we outlined in Chapter 7
and may penalise particularly slow sites.

2) Mobile rendering. Google provides developers with testing tools to

ensure all sites render so they are usable on smartphones and tablets as
well as desktops.
● Google has recommended the mobile-responsive design
approach.
● Pages that don’t follow mobile design standards may lose
visibility.
3) Pop-ups and interstitials. Pop-ups and interstitial promotions are
displayed on some sites when a page loads
● E.g. retailers and publishers encourage site visitors to sign up to
an e-newsletter.
● Google has advised site owners that these shouldn’t be used on
smartphones and that it may penalise sites that display these.
4) Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs).
● These faster-loading page formats, which are served from
Google’s servers rather than a company’s server, are used by
publishers and in some other sectors.
● A related technology is Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), which can
be used alongside AMPs and are designed for rapid serving of
content without the need for a native mobile app from an app
store.

KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN SEO

1) GOOGLE ALGORITHM UPDATES

- Google’s algorithm updates→ great impact on how these websites kind of looked at SEO

1) PANDA ​ ● Before Panda

○ Webmasters (owners of the website) used to identify the key
keywords that were highly used by their users and then started
to develop content heavily using those keywords. At first, it was
successful as it enabled them to rank higher in the search results
pages. However, there was keyword stuffing (using this
keyword in a high but unnatural manner), reducing the
quality of the website as well as the end users (since it
repetitively use keywords in an unnatural manner)
○ They also used another technique to rank higher in those search
engines which was ‘little content to ad ratio’ (website with
little content but with a lot of display ads)

● After Panda
○ With the introduction of ‘Panda’, they wanted to increase the
quality of the website that they are offering to their end
users; therefore, they penalised all these websites that used
either keyword stuffing or little content to ad ratio,
making those companies to lose their traffic overnight
○ e.g.This is the case of a website called Yellow Page (used to have
a list of companies and their contact details and around their
website you can find a lot of display ads)
 2) PENGUIN​​ ● Before Penguin
○ Webmasters used to create links to their website by other
websites that are irrelevant to their product (They have
created bogus backlinking

● After Penguin
○ All websites created using bogus backlink (“fake”/ not
relevant links) were penalised and lost their traffic

3) HUMMINGBIRD - NOTE: not just an update, total transformation of Google

Algorithm since this algorithm can provide the users more precise
results based on their queries
E.g. looking at the elevation of the Everest mountain

● Before the Hummingbird algorithm

○ Google will give me all the websites that are putting either or
both (‘Mountain Everest’ and the elevation) without giving the
extra number of the elevation and what is the height of the
mountain Everest

● After the Hummingbird algorithm

○ Google can interpret better the query of the users and give
more precise results and only provide the website that has
the height of the mountain in this case

4) PIGEON - More related to location

○ Basically, if you are looking for the best pizza, it can detect
where’s your location and provide you with the pizza places
around you

- All these algorithm updates have had an impact on how companies develop their
strategies related to SEO

2) MOBILE-FIRST INDEXING → Another key development in SEO

- Mobile-first indexing: means Google predominantly uses the

mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. A
well-thought-out mobile-friendly website could drive a
noticeable increase in organic visibility. Mobile-first indexing
started in 2019.
● Google has confirmed, “If you have a responsive site or a
dynamic serving site where the primary content and markup
is equivalent across mobile and desktop, you shouldn’t have
to change anything”.

- ↳ This is consistent with the research that people are using more mobile phone for search
3) VOICE SEARCH:
- Voice Search: relates to searching or making an inquiry on Google using voice.
● Companies must have a voice search strategy. They must
1. optimize their websites with appropriate (long-tail) keywords (higher
than 3 words) and
2. Keep their Google My Business profile up to date.

● E.g., if someone gets a flat tire, Bridgestone wants to be the one that comes up first
in voice search results. “Where is the nearest tyre center?

- ↳ Consistent with the Research that has proven that people are using more voice search in
their search daily
VOICE SEARCH
- increasing reliability and accuracy of voice search technology have played a massive role in its
adoption
- Voice search SEO continues to be a hot topic in the world of digital marketing. 27% of the global
online population uses voice search on mobile devices. A

What Do People Use Voice Search For?

● Asking for directions
● Checking the time
● Dialling someone
● Dictating text messages
● Finding movie times
● Getting help with homework
● Playing a song

VOICE SEARCH OPTIMISATION:

- very different compared to searches done via typings
- Created new and exciting challenges for SEO experts regarding optimising their clients websites for voice
search.
- Tips for voice search optimisation include:
1) Optimise for Long-Tail Keywords:
● People interact with voice assistants (e.g., Siri) like in a conversation, asking questions
in complete sentences. Follow-up questions also similar to as in a conversation
● Tools like Answer the Public can help identify common questions and long-tail
keywords.
● Hence, write content in a conversational tone to reflect how users are going to search.
2) Optimise for Localised Search Queries
● People using voice search are more likely to target local businesses.
● Incorporation of your location details into your content helps voice searches display
your business to nearby customers
● One of the best methods for optimising local search → Google My Business listing.

3) Include Featured Content:

● ​Apps like Siri or devices like Google Home, voice search will answer audibly if possible.
● Featured snippets are primed for voice searches to use in text-to-speech answers.
● Google Home and other related apps will even site you as a source and provide a link to
your website

4) Help Voice Searches Assemble a Quick Response

● The queries are often conversational (with long-tail keywords) → anticipating those
questions is !.
● Best way to optimise for this type of search→ providing concise answers to common
questions.
○ Consider simulating expected queries in your H2 headers and open that section
with a concise yet comprehensive answer.
○ Keeping a record of your most frequently asked questions is a great strategy to
rank for voice search results.
5) Create Readable Content
● Providing engaging, informative, grammatically sound content is the best way to play the
SEO long game.
● Content that satisfies user intent will get preference from SEO voice search.
SEO FUNDAMENTALS
- There are 2 key strategies in SEO
1.ONSITE 2. OFFSITE

- Focus on how keywords can be develop - How other companies are linked to
on the web page to rank higher in the your website in order to rank higher in
SERP SERP
- I.e. optimising both the content and the - I.e. building authoritative external links
HTML source code on your own website that point back to your website for
credibility.
- what a site ‘says to a search engine.’ - what ‘other sites say’ about a site.

- On-page and off-page SEO work together to improve your search engine rankings
- However, it is advised prioritising on-page SEO before focusing too much on off-page
optimisation.

. ONSITE SEO
- On-page SEO: the act of optimising content and backend aspects of your website to
improve web page rankings by driving organic, qualified, and targeted traffic to your
website
- Crucial role in the success of your website.
- A well-crafted On-page SEO strategy makes it possible for your website to be found
organically on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and generate quality traffic.
- Can ultimately increase brand awareness, grow your customer base, and drive more
conversions.
ON-PAGE SEO CHECKLIST

Content - Key when it comes to rankings

- Content must be well-reasoned, well-written, and inherently valuable
to potential visitors
- If NOT → affect bounce rate and search ranking

Keywords - (On-page) SEO cornerstone

- To↑ search rankings→ you want to make Google’s job as easy as possible.
- Appropriate keywords help Google better determine what your page is
about and what value it holds to searchers.
- Google is constantly learning and better understanding nuanced language and
search intent, shifting the SEO focus toward long-tail keywords that
encompass more detail and specific keyword phrases.
- The key to successful keywords is→ targeted phrases your audience will
be searching for, and Google is waiting to pick up on.

Performance of - Perfect page performance is key

your website and - Convenience→ if the page is too long to load or doesn’t render correctly, we
its pages will quickly move onto something different, affecting the page’s bounce rate
and rankings.
- Search engines value page performance as one of the highest ranking
factors.
- Attention to image file size, redirects, the amount of CSS/JavaScript, and
mobile responsiveness will help clean the website up and run it more
efficiently.

TITLE TAG (title of the page)

- Title tag of a webpage shows up at the top of the browser when one navigates the page.
The title tag is also displayed on the search engine results page (SERP).
- Title tag need to respect certain parameters
- Parameters:
● Unique for every page on the website
● Relevant to the page that the title tag relates to
● Approximately 69 characters or less
● Given weight from left to right
META DESCRIPTION TAG (comes under the title tag)
- Meta description tag: is displayed as part of the
search snippet in a search engine results page
(SERP) and is meant to give the user an idea of the
content that exists within the page and how it relates to
their search query.
● There’s a strong call to action when it comes to
a meta description tag
● Even though you develop your own meta
description tag, ig Google thinks that there’s a
better description of your website then Google
may change it automatically ↴

- Caveat: Google can display a different description if it thinks it’s more relevant.

- Parameters:
● Unique for every page on the website
● Relevant to the page that the description tag relates to
● 155-160 characters or less
● Call to action

Note: The meta description tag does NOT have a direct relation with ranking. But if we have a
compelling description tag, it will make users want to click on the link.

E.g., If we rank no. 7 in search, and if we get a disproportionate number of clicks because of our
description tag, then Google will start increasing our ranking because it will think that our website is
more relevant. So the description tag can have an indirect effect on ranking.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator) (address of the website)

- URLs : are web addresses, and the words in the URL receive heavy weighting in the
calculation of relevance so that the target keyword phrase (of your business) should be in
the URL.
- Using the right keywords are very !
- E.g.:
● http://www.janeshandmadeearrnings.com
● http://www.janeshandmadearrings.com/drop-earrings.html → category page, tell drop
earrings.
http://www.janeshandmadearrings.com/drop-earrings/silver-drop-earrings.htm →
sub-category page to sell silver drop earrings.

HEADER TAGS
- Header tags: relate to the words used for headings and
subheadings on a page.
- It needs to be relevant (to the users and the keywords they are
looking for) and play a role in ranking.
- Using header tags has the dual benefit of making a website’s
content more easily browsed by users and giving search
engines stronger clues as to the topic of its content.
MAIN CONTENT (need to be developed based on relevant keywords)
- Search engines read every word instance on a web page to determine what the web page is
about.
- A website wants to use its target keyword phrase at least once in the main content of the
page.
- Caution!!!: Inserting the keyword phrase too often is known as “keyword stuffing,” which is
a black-hat SEO tactic

Here are ABC company, digital marketing is our core strength. We believe digital marketing is the
future of g rowth and profitability.The right digital marketing strategy can create higher leads and
generate more conversions. Call us at +443322112200 if you need support in digital marketing.

- Digital marketing is used in a very heavy and unnatural, repetitive way making the content
really heavy on the users (e.g. of keyword stuffing punished by search engines)

IMAGE AND ANCHOR

- Image alternative text and file name: Search engines cannot “see” images. So we must
describe and label them appropriately.
● Image included in the website needs to be labelled correctly by using keywords that
are appropriate to your company but also highly used by the end users

- Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink (i.e. a clickable text that is linked back to
another element or website. Anchor text also needs to be labelled correctly). SEO best practices
dictate that anchor text be relevant to the page you're linking to, rather than generic text.

- Question: where can you find the alt text?

KEYWORD TARGETING
- Important part of SEO
- Keyword targeting relates to choosing appropriate, relevant keywords on our website
to rank well in search engines.
- The goal of SEO is not to rank well for a single keyword but to rank
well for as many keywords as possible.
- E.g., If our website sells furniture, we don’t just want our website to rank
high when someone searches for furniture; we also want to rank high
when someone searches for home furnishings, couches, recliners, coffee
tables, and so forth.

- Keyword targeting approach:

● The choice of target keywords needs to take into consideration
the following:
1. Relevance: Focus on keywords that relate to companies’ products,
services, and benefits.
2. Traffic: target keywords with higher search traffic.
3. Competition: If many competitors are targeting more generic keywords (e.g.,
watches), it will not be feasible to target those keywords. Instead, the focus should
be on specific long-tail keywords (e.g., silver waterproof watches).
4. Current Ranking: Improve the ranking of current keywords with SEO efforts.
E.g., a website that currently ranks for five search keywords, and their rankings for
those five keywords are 1, 7, 14, 25, and 157. On which keyword should they work
to improve ranking?
● It would take you less effort to work on the 7 and 14 ranking keywords to
bring them to the 1st or 2nd as they require less effort, whereas the 157
need a lot of work to bring it to a higher position.

Use Case: traffic

- TNS case study

- Consultancy agency based on management
- They discovered that they have really good search engine optimisation because they are
ranking very high on ‘insights & strategy’
- They were really happy on their search engine optimisation strategy bc they came on the
top of the list when user were looking for insight and strategy
- But actually they discovered that no one is looking for ‘insights & strategy’ to find this
company, that is, there is no traffic when it comes to these 2 keywords.
- So, even though they were ranking high on these keywords, no user were using these 2
keywords. Hence it is useless search engine optimisation strategy

3. Related to competition
● A SEO strategist would suggest to select keywords such as “marketing strategy” (high research
but not high competition)
MAPPING KEYWORDS TO PAGES
- After choosing the keywords, the next step is to map them according to different
pages.
- Search engines calculate the relevance of a keyword phrase to a webpage, not a
website.

WEBPAGE vs WEBSITE

- Website = book
- Webpage = book chapter
- E.g.
● Website: URL: https://es.wikipedia.org
● Webpage: URL: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinc

- Obviously, each keyword would be more appropriate to a certain page of your website
- We must match each keyword phrase to a page within a website. In general, we want to
match
● Broader keyword phrases with higher-level web pages (homepage or
category pages) and
● More specific keyword phrases with lower-level web pages (subcategory pages
or product pages)
● General Rule→ The higher-order keyword would be on the home page and most specific
ones are related more to product pages or subcategory pages

EXAMPLE
KEYWORD RESEARCH
- For identifying appropriate keyword for your company and your product or services offerings →
need to conduct keyword research
- Keyword research is a practice SEO professionals use to find and research actual search
terms that people enter into search engines. This process helps SEO professionals to
achieve better rankings in search engines and produce better content.

KEYWORD RESEARCH IS MARKET RESEARCH

- It tells us what people are interested in and in what relative numbers.
- Better yet, it reveals the actual language people are using when they think about those
topics, which provides us with insight into how to converse with them.

KEYWORD RESEARCH IS MORE THAN JUST TRAFFIC

- Tap into new markets
- Identify and explore a popular (or profitable) product/service (e.g., university discovered that
many people were looking at MSc. Digital Marketing so they decide to develop the course).
- Post topics people want to read about on your blog. (e.g. you have a blog and you can develop
insight about what people are interested to read)

KEYWORD RESEARCH:
- Divide keywords into head, body & (long) tail.
● Generic→ 1 word phrase which are very high in
competition and high searched by users, costly
○ E.g. “logistics”
● Body → 2 - 3 words keywords, less frequently
searched than the generic one but are medium in
terms of competition and cost.
○ e.g. “logistics management” or “logistics
management software”,
● Long tail → more descriptive keywords
Gives more instruction to the search engine
results in terms of what the user is looking for. Very precise, relatively lower in
search frequency and competition and less costly.
○ e.g. “logistic management software case studies,"Long tail accounts for 70 % of all
searches.
- Ideally, we should focus on a “collection”of short, body, and long tail keywords to
optimize our website.

KEYWORD RESEARCH LEADS TO GOOD CONTENT

- After conducting and generating these keywords, ‘themes’ need to be developed based on the
same content of each page and assigned to each of the components of that page.
- “Themes” of keywords are used to develop good content for each page.
- Keyword research drives content creation.
- Outcome: People will consume our content and want to engage and share it because it is
relevant to them.

KEYWORD RESEARCH PLACEMENTS (SUM ABOVE)

- Meta-Title Tag
- Meta-Description Tag
- Page URL
- Heading & sub-heading tags
- Within the body content on the page
- As anchor text from other pages to the relevant page
- Image file names
- Image alt tags
HOW TO DO KEYWORD RESEARCH?
- Using Semrush

- Free version limited to 10 keywords per search but still useful for SME with limited resources for
the paid SEMrush version or Google Planner but still insightful

KEYWORD STRATEGY WORKSHEET

KEYWORD RESEARCH WORKSHEET

- Good and systematic way of how to develop keyword research

- Can start by all keywords generated by SEMRush
- Then look in SEmrush and see how many search volumes happening for each keyword , then
relevance (a more subjective item bc you need to evaluate it based on the perception of the
people/users, how they evaluate if these keywords are relevant or not); then, competition level
(which is how competitive the keyword is; some keywords are highly competitive and requires a
lot of efforts in order to rank high on those); and competition (INTITLE) which is about how
many websites are using that kind of keywords in their title; then you can assign the landing
page of the keyword
- NOTE: keywords are generated by going to your stakeholders (customers, employees) and ask
them, “how would you look for this?”
 - Tedious but highly useful tasks
- Takes 2-3 weeks but gives good data for 1-3 years (still need to update keywords research)
- After having all words, delete irrelevant and select relevant hat have medium to low
competition, and assign the to the combination of the keywords wanted to use on your website
and assign them to different pages based on their themes

Keyword strategy worksheet

- Discovered demand for Marvel socks, so it would be good to offer those as well.
 Class task: Keyword research

- As an SEO consultant, you must advise the owner of an Indian restaurant in Newcastle on the
relevant keywords for their website.
- Conduct keyword research to generate 3 relevant keywords the owner can use to g enerate
traffic to their website.
- Consider average monthly searches and competition level as part of your analysis.
- Log into https://www.semrush.com/analytics/keywordoverview/?db=uk

Creating SEO-Friendly Content for Your Target Audience

- Content plays the biggest part in your on-page SEO since potential visitors use search engines to find
answers to their problems, and it is your content’s job to give them the answers they need. That’s where
keywords come in.

- Keyword research helps you to understand what your target audience is searching for online.
● online tools that can help with keyword research → Semrush, Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner.
● Look for a combination of high-volume keywords and low-volume keywords to include in your
content to increase your chances of success.
- From there, create customer-focused content that is unique and solution-based.
- !!! Amount keywords used !!! → Avoid keyword stuffing since if detected by Google = penalisation for
unnatural keyword usage

- Creating a Clear Heading Structure

● Good page layout and heading structure is ! for the user experience.
○ A clear heading structure set out on the page, the content will be easier for users to read and
understand
● Try to use relevant keywords in the headings where you can. Visitors are more likely to stay and
read your content if their search terms are clearly visible in headings and subheadings.
 ● H1 and H2 headings:
○ Do not appear on the SERPs, but they do provide contextual cues as to what a web page
is all about. The “H1” and “H2” refer to how these headings are marked up in HTML code.
○ H1 headings are generally top-level headings such as blog post titles, and
○ H2 headings are the content subheadings, useful for breaking up big blogs of text.
● Heading structure should always follow a clear order to avoid hierarchy issues.
○ E.g. An H2 should always follow an H1, an H3 should always follow an H2, and so on.
○ The Headings Map app can help to detect issues with heading structure hierarchy.

- Implementing Internal Linking

● Useful for user but also great for SEO
● If a specific page on your website receives a lot of links from other pages, this will indicate to
Google that it is a high-value page, which can help to improve its search rankings.
● Consider where you choose to insert your internal links.
○ Near the beginning of the page will have more impact than those at the bottom
○ The same rule applies to keywords.

- Optimising Images with Alt Text

● Website images provide a great opportunity to gain organic traffic to your website.
● Every picture or image on your website should implement alternative text (alt text).
○ Alt text: the written copy that will appear if the image does not load, and what will be read
out by a screen reader for the visually impaired.

● Good alt text is both descriptive and keyword rich.

● Inserting relevant keywords into brief, yet descriptive text will help search engines understand your
content better.
● Most website content management systems, such as WordPress, allow you to edit your alt text
simply by editing your image and filling in the alt text field.

- Creating Meta Descriptions & Tiittle Tags

● Every webpage on your website should include a well-written meta description and title tag
● Meta descriptions and title tags help search engines understand the content on your webpage.
○ Title tag: the HTML element that specifies the web page title.
■ no more than 70 characters long
■ always include a keyword and the website name.
■ Although they don’t have a direct impact on your search rankings,
■ impact on click-through rates, which can indirectly impact rankings.

○ Meta description: located under the title tag and URL. It provides a brief, descriptive
summary of what your page will be about.
■ Each meta description should include a relevant target keyword and a call to action,
so that visitors are driven to visit your page.
■ Try to make full use of the ideal 160-character length to fully optimise your meta
description.

- Optimising URL Slug

● URL slug: is the address of a specific webpage
● Slug comes after the main website address (e.g. pureseo.com/seo)
● Optimising URL slugs is an important part of SEO strategy, especially for companies that create
ongoing content (e.g. blogs)
● URL slugs should be kept brief and incorporate target keywords to improve SERP rankings.
● Hyphens are used for separating words, and only the most important words are included in
the URL slug
2. OFFSITE SEO
- More related to backlinks and creating links from third-party websites to your website
- Not directly in your control but rather in Google’s court.
- Off-page optimisation: concerns itself with rankings factors, such as domain authority
and backlinking that are separate from but funnel back to your website.
- You have less influence on the performance of off-page SEO→ it is not less critical
- Not directly related to your pages BUT, off-page SEO will help raise your website to the top of the
search results.

OFF-SITE TECHNIQUES FOR WEBSITE TO RANK HIGH

Dominant - Domain authority is the judge of off-page SEO

Domain - Domain Authority: it is a number assigned to websites and used by
Authority search engines to determine the likelihood of a site’s ranking in search
results.
- Simple formula → the higher the authority of your site, the higher the chance of
reaching the top of the search page.
- A few factors contribute to this authority score:
● how long you’ve held the domain name and the number of
backlinks and 404 errors found on the site.
- Ensuring your website is technically sound can maximise domain authority and
improve your ranking.

The Quest for - Backlinks are the bread and butter of off-page SEO
Backlinks - Backlinks: links on other web pages that direct back to your website.
- Google will rank your domain authority and boost your rankings more if
trustworthy sites link your content.
- The quest for backlinks can be a long and treacherous road, leading many to
questionable paid link-building tactics.
- However, these aren’t necessary and organic approaches to link-building
can be just as effective.
- Consider trying any of the following to start generating backlinks:
● Guest blogging.
● Participating in a podcast.
● Hosting in-person or online events.
● Actively participating in industry forums

Shareable - It bears mentioning again that content is king.

Contents is Still - Creating helpful content worth sharing is one of the best ways to generate
King backlinks and get social media buzzing.
- Quality content cuts through the noisy online market and allows your website
to stand out to both searchers and Google.
 TYPES OF LINKS
- 2 forms of link that can be created
1) EDITORIAL LINKS 2) MANUAL LINK 3) MANUFACTURED
LINKS

Produce valuable content so Another way to create link

that third-party sites use that is easier to acquire
our content and link to our than editorial links
website
(i.e. When you can develop some ● Submitting (the profile)
insightful info very useful to to online directories;
other users that they link back websites catalogues
to your website.) (e.g., Yelp)
● Visual content (e.g., ● Creating local NOTE: manufactured links are
infographics) business profiles on bogus
● Expertise knowledge search engines ● (some websites would put
(e.g., future of AI in (Google My Business, backlinks in the) Blog
marketing) Yahoo Small Business, comments with
● Videos Bing Places) backlinks to own
● Press releases (e.g., ● Creating business webpage (thinking they will
about new innovations) profiles on social rank high on the search
media (e.g., FB , engine results page BUT it is
LinkedIn, Pinterest) penalised by the updates of
the algorithms)
● (some websites would put
backlink in the) Creation
of a secondary site to
create links (BUT also
penalised by algorithm)

Example of Editorial Link: Statista

● All the websites interested in such information can use this infographics in their website but they
would link back to Statista.
● This is how statista can generate backlinks to their website

Other content that can attract backlink is expertise knowledge

● E.g. the uni develops an article about the future of AI in MKT and then, there are other websites
interested in that information that can link to the website of the university.
● This is how uni website can generate backlinks
POPULARITY METRICS OF LINKS
- Metrics to evaluate the popularity of the links:
● Total number of backlinks: the more backlinks, the greater the popularity.
● Backlinks from related/relevant websites: Backlinks must come from relevant
endorsers
○ for example, the webpage of a research article linked to Financial Time’s website.
● Link neighbourhood (collection of spam websites): Avoid being classified as a spam
website (since penalised by algorithm). Usually, spam websites have many backlinks to
other spam websites (like a neighbourhood). Focus on links from credible websites.
● Link freshness: A high-quality website will continue to receive new backlinks to remain
relevant and valuable.
● Link diversity: evidence that a page’s backlinks come from different websites endorsing
the page.
● Social sharing: People sharing a page on their social media accounts brings positive
endorsement.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS (GMB)

- GMB is one of the most powerful tools developed for local SEO
- Google My Business Listings: the little cards and business listings that pop up in search
results in Google and Google Maps.
● You’ve likely run into some of these listings and may have even used them to help you find
restaurants, stores, and other locations to visit. Also a helpful tool for finding reviews too.
● This is what makes Google My Business Listings (GMB) such a critical tool for businesses,
as using GMB allows you to customise the listing and improve the way people
find and research your business.

- GMB is an efficient way to make your business information accessible to those looking for
it, utilising reviews to improve local SEO and increase sales

- Significance of GMB Listings:

● The goal of SEO is always visibility.
● more people will be finding your business through Google Maps and organic searches.
● When are you open? How do I contact you? Where are you located? What’s your
reputation like? These are the things that people need to know about your business, and
GMB helps you make all these answers accessible to those looking for them
● It means using your online footprint to address positive and negative reviews to establish
and manipulate your online presence.

STEPS to increase LOCAL ranking w/ GMB

1) Claim and verify your listing.

Next.
● Ensure all Details are up to Date
● Add a Business Description
● Add Interior and Exterior Photos and Videos

2) Encourage and respond reviews

3) Publish Google Posts