Author: Anthony Walker

Back in 2009, Moz did the first Google Ranking Factors list, but they last updated it in 2015 ¹. The best we have for 2019 is the list of “200” items at Backlinko ². I bet most SEO researchers don’t actually want to share their pot of gold publicly. But besides that since 2009, the number of websites has grown from 238 million to 1.94 billion ³.

Google in the same period has hired over 75 000 staff and now has 2 billion lines of code. Each block of say 100 lines of code in itself could be a ranking factor. Something as simple as how Google knows what timezone you date stamp is in when you don’t give it could be a ranking factor if your article ends up elsewhere on the internet. (relates to how they detect duplicate content). Then throw in a few AI bots running in the Googleplex and you have thousands of ranking factors. Not even Google employees know them all for sure, although they can go and figure it out when unexpected things happen.

Then we are all thinking 2 dimensionally, Domain Authority and Page Authority. But what about context, keywords, search intent, website location, searcher location and time. It’s a multidimensional organism.

I have been shocked to see how many Search Engine Optimisation startups there are, where the founder and sole employee is recruiting experts to help them rank. This is bad for the industry as when things don’t work out and clients have paid thousands of dollars it does not look good on the industry. It is, however, good news for websites wanting to get to number one, the beginners are going to charge low fees and get poor results, leaving more number one slots available and push up the price for decent SEO.

It’s a money game whoever can throw the most at SEO and SEM wins, But should it be like that? It never was in the beginning and it is causing really good resources and projects that are underfunded to fall by the wayside. Do you exist or is your reputation any good if you’re not on page 1 of Google Search Results?

Anthony Walker

Anthony is a Digital Marketing and SEO Expert with extensive experience. He has worked for financial services companies and web hosting business and in those roles has created many very successful online business and brands. He has a wide range of Business, Marketing, Financial and IT experience.

I am entirely astounded how many people, even those working in the Search Engine Optimisation industry, don’t get the obvious. I have folks whining that they are no longer in position #1, but they don’t have contact details on their site, have only 1 page of long-form copy, no other content, no blog, no about us page, and they have ads all over the place. I mean come on, how they got to #1 in the first place is the mystery not why they are no longer there.

Then I see other requests when clients are saying “give us proof” in the form of a link to a Google site or a video as to why what you want to do to our website is going to send our rankings up and not further down. If everyone had proof we would all be at # 1, oh right sorry we would all be tied for first place, and Google would crash 🙂

Perhaps the problem is that experts like myself keep writing on the topic of SEO and there are so many articles folks are not finding the good stuff, or are reading too much and not retaining it all. I do think that doing SEO needs a certain about of logic and a good deal of gut feel. Google will not tell us the recipe for their magic sauce, but we can infer certain things from what they do tell us, from experiments that we or others do and just good old computer logic and common sense. I have not seen many SEO 101 courses to know how good the material is, but I do have to wonder what they are teaching.

So what are the 14 pieces of content you need to have on your site to rank better?

1. Contact Us page – with a phone number, address, email address, contact us form and perhaps a map
2. About page – Give some details about the history of the company, who the key people are, with photo’s and links to their social media profiles
3. Terms and Conditions – especially if you sell anything
4. Privacy Policy
5. User reviews – if you sell a product or service, use a service to do it for you but embed it entirely on the site (not iframes)
5. As little ads and popups as possible, none is best
6. Links to your social media sites – Yes get them and use them.
7. Call to action … encourage people to click through on your site, 1-page won’t do it, and you need a good reason for users to want to click to the next page
8. Knowledge Base or FAQ
9. Make sure the spelling and grammar are 100% correct. Forget using any AI Content spinners, if you have then you better re-write that content by hand using someone with impeccable grammar and spelling abilities.
10. No blank pages, try and get a decent amount of text on all your pages. Google loves text, and they would after all not exist without text.
11. Keep it clean, no swear words and stay away from risky comments
12. Keep as much as possible on your site, don’t use Iframes and don’t have parts of your website on different domains.
13 Check all your links and menus and make sure they go to the right places.
14 Content …content … Content. Write stuff you know about.

So there you have it, my 14 point checkup for the content on your site. It’s not even rocket science SEO tags and such, its easy to do but so many people don’t do it for some reason. If you fix all 14, you will undoubtedly go up in Google’s rankings for your keywords. Let me know how it goes for you in the comments below.

Anthony Walker

Anthony is a Digital Marketing and SEO Expert with extensive experience. He has worked for financial services companies and web hosting business and in those roles has created many very successful online business and brands. He has a wide range of Business, Marketing, Financial and IT experience.

Anyone noticed how Google has been taken over by “content” supplied by SEO experts? Its become so blatant of late I am considering finding a search engine that applies some anti-SEO logic to find some good information, trouble is they don’t exist yet.  The articles seem quite well informed and contain good information in many cases, but they are loaded with product advertising. Sounds harmless enough, but it is, in fact, a serious threat because it stifles creativity and inhibits our ability to find the multitudes of truth and opinions that inevitability exists around any topic.  Alternative Search engines seem to be focusing on the easy things like privacy, but in reality, we need a different strategy and thought process on what search engines are and how they should be finding the true gems of information in the midst of a sea of words. It has been suggested that searching Social Media as a good alternative, but even there its often difficult to find the needle in the haystack. I hope some innovation in this space happens soon if it does Alphabet may be the next Yahoo. Even GM thought they were too big to fail.  Don’t get me wrong, I do love Alphabet and Google and all they have done for the Internet, but right now they are going down the wrong road.

Just try searching for “how to spot SEO optimized content”, you get exactly the opposite of what you want.

Google’s parent Alphabet better take note that their strategy of promoting content is backfiring. Sure a huge amount of content is being produced, but it is not good quality. Now yes they do say they want “Good Quality Content”, but I am sorry to say that Google does not yet know the difference.  Even for SEO content they certainly don’t know their ABC’s, and with an almost limitless number of topics how can Google be expected to recognise it?

Quite why Google has not hit Quora with a penalty of some sort I will never know, but they dominate search results for a lot of technical questions I have, and the answers there are inevitably supplied by someone trying to promote their business, with content most likely crafted by some SEO Copywriter.   Even asking Google “Who owns Quora” serves up a Quora page littered with clearly SEO optimised nonsense and even quite a bit of text Spun by an AI bot. Can Google not yet tell the difference?

So how to spot the Search Optimised Content? Here are 10 things to look out for:

• Dominant Sites

Certain websites dominate search results, (and I’m not talking about Wikipedia here which still has an acceptable editorial standard by and large) I mentioned one above which although they often offer up answers, the blatant promotion of links and ads that are disguised to look more like content are annoying. Ad blockers saved us from one enemy only to deliver us to a new one. Which ones do you regularly find dominating your results?

• AI Spun content

Artificial Intelligence bots are being used to take an article from one source and we-write so that Google or anyone else can not recognise the source. Sadly in some ways and fortunately in others it clear to spot, because you end up thinking the person that wrote them does not have English as a first language, and indeed they don’t because binary is their first language.  So when you start finding reading some content gets annoying because of some very out of place phrases and sentences that don’t flow properly, chances are its spun.  Now we need to find a way to find the original source so that we can get to the true rich repository of knowledge.

• A vs B vs C

Looking to compare some products to see which is the best? So you go and search and end up on a well-designed site comparing exactly what you are looking at in a very neat way and then you start to notice that you are in fact on a site of one of these products that are being reviewed?  It’s somewhat of a good strategy to appear to be open an honest revealing who your main competitors are and having a nice table with lots of ticks. But are these really all their main competitors or have they only chosen the worst ones or better yet do they own all of them or have affiliate deals? You may never know, but these days any reviews that are top of the search results tend to be SEO optimised and most likely biased.  Do your research from multiple sources including forums and other sites.

• Looking to fix something, you find a great answer …. but someone is selling you

Have a broken phone or another device, some software problem? So you Google for some ideas on how to fix the issue and you get some great ones. As you start to read, you start to realise that they are starting to offer you their product as the solution to your problem. You have landed on a site that is doing great Content Marketing.  It could be a good solution, but you best check social media and decent reviews to make sure.

• Lack of contact details and business information

Another tell-tale sign you’re on a low-quality site is the lack of contact details. No phone number? No address? Only an email address or contact us form? Good quality sites will always have their full address, phone number, probably an about us page with some details of their history and should also have terms and conditions and a privacy policy. The presence of these are Google search ranking factors, but I think Google needs to score the lack of these as a negative rather than giving a positive to those who have them.

• Popups

We all hate them, as does Google, but somehow, they keep serving up sites with Popups on the first page of search results. If you see popups, then you should most likely not trust that site as a good source of information.

• Fake Reviews

One may think a good way to check out a company is to look at their Google My business page (Google Local) and see how many reviews they have and what the star ratings are like. Unfortunately, these are filled with fake reviews. No idea why Google has not cleaned it up as it should be easy to do with only location data in many cases. They are easy to spot. Generally, the reviews who only have 1 or 2 reviews may be fake, open them up and make sure the person lives in the same country as the business they are reviewing. (Obviously depends on the type of business). The best reviews to look out for are the ones tagged as “Local Guides”.

So there you have it, it’s not a new problem, and has been going on since Search started, Moz wrote about it in January 2011 How Organized Spam is Taking Control of Google’s Search Results https://moz.com/blog/how-organized-crime-is-taking-control-of-googles-search-results

See my article last week on how I think the Chinese are going to dominate in this area.

I hope the above tips will give you some food for thought and a new way to think of what you find when searching online.

Anthony Walker

Anthony is a Digital Marketing and SEO Expert with extensive experience. He has worked for financial services companies and web hosting business and in those roles has created many very successful online business and brands. He has a wide range of Business, Marketing, Financial and IT experience.

It was an interesting read to see Sean O’Keefe’s blog article “Inside Google Marketing: 3 ways we think about SEO” which had me wondering about quite a few things that were said there and in some other articles I have read lately. SEO seems to me to be less about what we know and more about what we feel because what we know changes every day and even Google contradicts itself on a regular basis and even in the same article sometimes.  To me, it seems to be better for us be like actors and put ourselves in the Google matrix and become some kind of Neo Google Ninja.

Another staggering thing I come across on a regular basis is how SEO experts miss things all the time. (Nobody is perfect least of all me), but gosh we have a list of 200 things at least that we need to get right and I think sometimes we focus too much on the wrong ones and along the way, some of the basics get forgotten. The Neo’s that are consistent will rule the roost in this ever-changing SEO landscape, and I think 2019 is going to see some major upheavals. I am predicting a Google war with China among other things.  To some degree, it has already happened, but with Trump’s trade wars on China, they are going to be looking for a way to get back at the US. Cyberops has always been one of the tools they use. Messing with SEO could just be a very targeted way to cause some trouble and Google vs PLA Unit 61398 (Chinese Military hackers) could get messy. I would be worried if was working SEO for any Fortune 500 companies and go and get me a copy of Hacking for Dummies on my Kindle, just so they can get some idea of what is coming at them.

It’s not all doom and gloom, its good news if your not a major US corporation because the focus is going to be elsewhere, so we won’t have any more cuddly bear updates killing our rankings in the SERPs for most of 2019. I have yet to see what exactly they are doing in this January update, there have been some utterances, but I guess most of the researchers are still taking a well-deserved break. It does seem Google is after more quality content … surprise surprise.  But this update is a wake-up call because for too long supposed white hat SEO experts have been getting away with a lot. I continue to be surprised when looking at even their own Websites what goes on and what has worked for them, and yes I guess I may also be pushing the boundaries cautiously as well, as I said nobody is perfect. But I think caution is something we must heed, the bigger the SEO firm the harder it will fall when 300 client websites need an overnight update. And yes I said we may get a break due to China, but that’s only from about March. Perhaps I am wrong, but it’s an interesting scenario none the less.

Here is the latest Magic Google formula:

Content + keywords + Tags + H1&2’s + SSL + robots.txt + sitemap + html validation + decent inbound links + decent outbound links + CTR = $2019 SEO Success.

Happy 2019!

SEO Luna Tick

Anthony Walker

Anthony is a Digital Marketing and SEO Expert with extensive experience. He has worked for financial services companies and web hosting business and in those roles has created many very successful online business and brands. He has a wide range of Business, Marketing, Financial and IT experience.

Click Through Rate (CTR) measures how many visitors actually click on links on your site and it is a very important metric for a lot of reasons. Traditionally CTR was a term used in internet advertising but at SEO grew it became a very important metric for the SEO community as well. As the SEO arms race has hotted up, Google has been looking for other good ways to rank sites, and user engagement is actually a perfect way to determine if a site is any good. Of course, people try to fake this by putting in automatic redirect and pop-ups and all kinds of click bait, but one should not under-estimate Google’s ability to detect these kinds of things and penalise a website for them. What to a client may seem like a clever idea from an “SEO Expert” may well be a very bad decision and clients end up throwing more money after bad to try and get results?

With SEO my strategy has also been to get the basics right, stick to the rules and then think a little outside of the box, but still with a white hat on. It has worked very well and one can sleep at night knowing that the next update from Google is not going to penalize my clients and send their revenues plummeting.

Things bring me back to clicks, which I think is so important as it measures a user’s interest and engagement through the whole process. First, the title and description in the search results have to entice the user to click on your site. Then your site has to give the user what they have been searching for and get at least another click out of them to move to another page on your site. Even better still there needs to be a conversion, collecting the users’ email address, creating a login for him and getting him to buy a product. Although not listed in any ranking factors, I’m fairly sure Google has ways to monitor each of these things. The fact that we all use Google Analytics goes a long way to helping Google collect more data to drive rankings.

Of course, with mobile being such a big part of search now, over 50% of clicks are actually taps and I do wonder if we should not have a separate TTR (tap through rate), which would be an easy way to measure the effectiveness of our persuasion architecture on mobile vs desktop.

But this is the huge thing, users are landing on our websites from different devices with vastly different screen sizes, hopefully, our sites are responsive and adjusting correctly, landing on one of many different layouts across hundreds of pages, but are we effectively keeping track of what they see? We need to because we need to ensure what they see is enticing enough to get that click and drive conversions. I’m sure Google’s new Optimize service will help, but for those with bigger budgets, there are some great tools available to help.

But all of this does say to us that for 2019 we need to concentrate on what our sites are saying (the content), how they say it and how it looks. It’s not a once of do it and forget it, it’s a contestant game of testing changes and tweaking to get the best results, get the clicks and get the customer conversions. In this new click economy, your competitor is just one click away and CTR in its various forms is as good a measure as it gets, and for SEO the relationship between CTR and conversions has to be the Kingmaker for sites to win the SEO arms race in 2019.

Anthony Walker

Anthony is a Digital Marketing and SEO Expert with extensive experience. He has worked for financial services companies and web hosting business and in those roles has created many very successful online business and brands. He has a wide range of Business, Marketing, Financial and IT experience.

Business exists for one reason only, to sell a product or a service to a customer and SEO is a tool all business need to achieve this goal.
In this modern technological rat race, where millennials only reading is social media,
business better take note that the size of printed directories has shrunk if not gone
out of business themselves. Traditional news media is fighting for its survival touting
the “paywall” as the saviour of their fortunes. Sadly with the declining rate of readers attention spans, brought about in no small part thanks to Twitters 160 character limit or Facebook used on small mobile screens, readers are drying up. Websites and content marketers better take note or they too will be assigned to the same fate.

SEO is now more about relevancy, attention span and persuasion architecture than it ever has been in its short 20 years history. Sadly search engines are not really keeping up with an arms race they created. Googling highly competitive keywords yields a litany of over optimised blogs crowded with ads that found their place in the sun using clever blogger outreach techniques or worse yet Private Blog Networks (PBNs). It won’t be long before Google cracks the PBN arms race and grey hat SEO hacks find the next loophole to play with for a few months, leaving their clients with sales that look like a weekend roller coaster ride.

SEO does work, but there is a rule book that has to be followed and then there is a bunch of other clever stuff that needs to happen, not in isolation but as an integral part of the business strategy. SEO is not an isolated tool that business can throw budget at in the hope of finding the right strategy.

So how do you win the SEO arms race in 2019?

1. Keep it natural

Don’t do some wacky stuff like buy links, put 100 irrelevant articles on your site
or pay folks to click around. Write good relevant content and keep it coming consistently. Put it where it can easily be seen by readers and search engines. I usually recommend at least 3 blog summaries on the home page of your site.

2. Reach out…and in.

Links still drive SEO more than Google would like to admit. But it’s pointless unless they are relevant and come from a good neighbourhood. So make some friends and get some industry links coming into your site and send some back out (even if they don’t link to you).

3 Get Local

The importance of Google My Business for those with real store front’s is critical.
In 2013 SearchEngineWatch found that 70% of Mobile Searchers Call a Business Directly From Search Results. If your business is not there, your in trouble. If you are there you better have claimed your listing and be watching those reviews. Above all don’t do crazy stuff like pay people to post fake reviews. It’s easy to spot and there goes your reputation and sales.

4 Get Crazy

Making it big on the internet takes a certain amount of dedication and zeal. Work out a plan, get excited about it and make it happen. Once the customers start clicking you won’t regret the time you spent.

5 Get Secure

Internet Security is one of the biggest challenges and threats we are going to face for the next 15 years. Do your part or risk losing face when you have to explain to clients why you are not secure. Get an SSL certificate, ensure its properly implemented, get virus checkers on your desktop and ensure your host is taking the right steps to protect their infrastructure and your site.

6 Backup

Make sure you backup your website. I would suggest you get your hosting provider to do this and store it for you, but that you should also make your own backup that you keep in a USB flash drive.

6 Get mobile

Responsive design has been a big buzzword used in the last 3 years, but with Google now ranking websites on how mobile fast and friendly they are, it is quite important to ensure your website works on a range of mobile devices. Check it yourself as sometimes designers get it wrong.

7 Get fast

Slow sites drive clients away and reduce SEO scores. Your site needs to be fast not just in responding to requests but also in rendering them on the desktop or mobile display of your clients. This means making good choices about who to host with, what resources to purchase, what services to use, design, APIs etc. While your hosting provider can do the basics many don’t know how to properly optimise a site for speed and often with a shared hosting plan it is not going to be optimal. Your best checking with a professional SEO firm to do this for you.

8 get friendly

Now you have some traffic on your site, but is your website language and design welcoming? Are your responses to clients helpful and in a friendly tone?

9 have fun

If you are having fun doing what you’re doing, you have a good chance of making a success of it and taking partners, staff and customers on the journey with you. If you are not having fun you should reflect why and fix it, before the fun gets even less. Customers like to buy from happy people and happy companies.

10 Get Ready

If you got the previous 9 steps sorted, then you better get ready for an influx of business. Too much business is a good problem to have, but it’s better if you can plan for it.

Anthony Walker

Anthony is a Digital Marketing and SEO Expert with extensive experience. He has worked for financial services companies and web hosting business and in those roles has created many very successful online business and brands. He has a wide range of Business, Marketing, Financial and IT experience.