Advanced SEO

Some SEO is straightforward and easy. Some isn’t. Here’s some Advanced SEO tips & guidance that covers topics beyond the basics.

Conversion rate optimization tips from some of the leading experts

It’s always been a kind of obvious concept – make your website better at selling to increase leads and revenue but it has evolved into a much more scientific and influential task than before with many really useful and dedicated tools available to the marketer to help with the process of optimising for conversions. For example, in 2016 there is no shortage of AB testing SaaS providers, some of the best being SiteSpect, Optimizely, Unbounce & VWO and the price of such services is far more amenable than it used to be.

Many of the best-known CRO experts and ideas are discussed in the following excellent webinar hosted by HubSpot. A transcript is also available below. Unfortunately, I couldn’t grab the name of the host so he’s referred to as ‘male speaker’!

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Bing Organic Traffic Drop – Showing As Bing.com Referral in Analytics

Update: This now seems to be a non issue as Bing, or Analytics, i’m not sure which, have made a change resulting in Analytics once again correctly identifying all Bing organic traffic as bing / organic from the 19th August.

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You’re probably here as like many webmasters and marketers you have noticed that recently there has been an apparent and significant drop in your Bing organic traffic showing in Google Analytics reports. The good news is that actually your site hasn’t had some kind of Bing ranking penalty, rather something is afoot that is making some of your bing / organic traffic actually register as bing.com / referral in your Analytics.

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Google cache not updating

google cache datesI noticed recently that many of the pages i’ve been working hadn’t been cached by Google for an unusually long time and that typically and probably not coincidentally those cache dates were mostly the 21st or 22nd October. I started looking at random other sites, big ones like booking.com and noticed the same thing there. Since then there has been the odd comment about it in Moz q&a’s and now it’s come to the attention of Search Engine Roundtable (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-cache-dated-19497.html) and I expect it will become a more mainstream topic in the SEO world.

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Recommended SEO reading & how to read it!

I’d be willing to bet that few of my friends or associates NEED to read relevant industry news and opinion as much as I do. Working in the industry is challenging and exciting, not least because of how rapidly changing, complicated and advanced it is becoming. If I don’t keep up with whats going on in the industry daily I feel like i’m out of touch. A little OCD maybe, but  whether you are a fellow SEO or site owner or marketer it’s important to keep up with the latest best practises and tactics that can improve your site or your clients sites performance.

In this post you will find:

  • Recommended reading for basic, advanced SEO and latest news
  • Recommended reading specifically for Worpress SEO
  • Recommended reading for PPC
  • Manageable ways to read SEO
Recommended SEO reading
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The long tail – keywords you really do want to rank for and why

Long Tail Keywords

So you really want to rank highly for a keyword but you just cant get there. Really annoying isnt it?! I wonder how many site owners forget to pick up all the loose change on the way to the pot of gold (so to speak). The reality is we’d all love to have those big keywords right at the top of Google (and im pretty good at doing it) but even more traffic and revenue is to be had from all the keyword variations that are much easier to rank for and which, accumulatively generate more visitors and business.

Focussing on maximising these ‘long tail’ keyword opportunities is a favourite strategy of mine and often it can blow clients competitors clean out of the water. By building out pages and often whole new directories gives a site so many more opportunities to rank well and outrank the competition.

Lets look at a made up example of how it can be done.

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‘Google Pirate’ or other ‘Brand’ update looming

I wrote earlier about what some were calling the Google Pirate update, which was affecting those sites with DMCA requests against them. Since then ive seen and heard of a number of sites which rely heavily on branded terms with severe ranking and traffic fluctuations from Google with ended as abruptly as they started. In addition to this theres a few reasons why I think that there is either a new update of Google Pirate 1.2 update imminent.

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The Google Pirate Trademark / DMCA Update, Info & Help

Fri 10th Aug 2012 a new but potentially site killing Google ranking algorithm update rolled out which went largely unnoticed amongst the SEO community. Without an official name (yet) the Google ‘Pirate’ update seeks to remove domains/urls from its search results, or in what seems to be alot of cases simply render those sites lower in its search results, that it deems is pirating other sites content.

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