Curious and driven, our award-winning SEO team stays up-to-date on the constantly changing SEO landscape—including algorithm updates, voice search, and myriad other shifts—through continual learning and adaptation. Fresh from Pubcon, a full-stack conference in Las Vegas (where we won another top award!) two members of our SEO leadership team deliver their top takeaways on the most efficient and creative ways to improve SEO strategies right now.
From John Morabito, SEO Director
Day one offered an eight-hour workshop with Eric Enge and Bill Hunt. Hunt, an accomplished author on SEO, discovered pages on a client’s website that had not been indexed. By submitting those pages to Google through Search Console, Hunt was able to massively increase traffic and revenue for the site. Here is what I discerned from that seemingly simple real-life example:
- Google doesn’t care about you or your site. Furthermore, Google has no obligation to find your brand’s pertinent SEO material. Instead, it is on the brand to make the correct resources available at all times, ensuring that Google has what it needs so that a website can stand out from an SEO perspective. If a brand site presents any roadblocks in the form of missing links or technical challenges, Google will not index the content, and the site will suffer.
- While this may seem basic to seasoned SEOs, submitting pages to Google actually does work to have them indexed.
- Paying attention to the number of pages indexed can reveal gaps that lead to important traffic and revenue.
During the second day of Pubcon, the keynote speaker was Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trend Analyst for Google. Illyes noted that if a website has seen drops in organic traffic recently, it isn’t necessarily because that site is underperforming. What is really happening is that other, more relevant websites are being promoted instead. While this power seesaw is something that SEO professionals have long theorized about, only recently do we have confirmation that this is the reality. So, if you have seen a drop in your organic traffic recently, it might not be because you are doing something wrong, but instead because Google is fine-tuning for greater search relevance.
From Simon Dreyfuss, Associate Director of SEO
On the second day of Pubcon, President and Co-Founder of SEO-PR, Greg Jarboe, discussed fully optimizing lead generation websites and the importance of quantifying revenue. Jarboe’s talk revolved around a case study: his work in organic lead generation for Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations. Jarboe began his campaign by crafting a Google Survey to understand which professionals were most likely to apply to the educational program. He then applied that data to a very specific landing page and press release and used Google’s campaign URL builder tool to add campaign tracking parameters around users who entered through that landing page organically. Another, complementary press release was the final step, a content piece that he placed on the Rutgers website and shared with relevant, niche-specific journalists. This fascinating approach to SEO, ingrained in PR, drove extremely high conversion rates for Jarboe’s client and offered a master class in SEO lead generation.
We learned a lot at Pubcon 2019, including confirming our instincts on how Google is evolving as well as how creatively blending SEO and PR can drive leads and grow sales for both emerging and enterprise brands. If you'd like to discuss further or ensure that your brand is doing everything that it can in order to be best-in-class for SEO, connect with us. Not only are we passionate about building brands through strong strategies and effective tactics, our SEO work drives an average of 60% of the total traffic and 40% of all conversions for our clients.
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