# Taking Down the Search Giants – Helen Pollitt – MicroConf Europe 2019

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_1oN-Xlqz0
Duration: 34 min
Language: English
Words: 6563
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/G_1oN-Xlqz0

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[0:00] [Music] I am Helen Paulette I have been working in digital marketing for over a decade and I am an SEO I'm lead SEO for my agency Avenue which specializes in SEO and PPC I have had the very good fortune of working for companies that have incredibly large marketing budgets for international hotel chains for car manufacturers for top ranking universities and if all of that sounds like I'm trying to show off a little bit just remember that it took me 20 minutes of intense searching and two phone calls to reception this morning to find the hotel room hair dryer so I don't believe I'm all that I am here to talk to you

[0:52] about SEO in particular and I feel that of the what roughly a hundred and fifty people who are in the room right now just a spoiler that number is going to go up every time I talk about this event I was speaking to 200 people yesterday morning anyway if there's 300 people who are currently in this room I reckon you sit in probably one of three camps you've either tried SEO in the past but you've not had much success because actually you know that your website although technically very sound is up against a lot of competition in the likes of Google it might be that you do

[1:30] know a little bit about SEO but you just don't have that time to invest to make sure your website is really ranking well maybe you know about SEO but you've not really had a go at it yourself before perhaps you're completely new to it you don't even know what the acronym stands for but you've heard it's free and you're a startup you love free or perhaps probably the largest group of people in this room right now are here listening to me giving this talk because there's a singletrack conference and you really didn't have any choice but just want to say if you do sit in group

[2:04] number three thank you so much for coming back and listening to this talk hopefully I will be able to give you something that is useful and of worth to you now if you heard giving my very elaborate introduction and thought that's great you've had a lot of experience with very large companies that's wonderful but actually I'm a start-up I want to reassure you that not so long ago I was sat in a conference like this one listening to a talented and engaging speaker like this one talking about their SEO success so those campaigns that they had worked on that had generated a lot of visibility leads and sales for their client and I

[2:47] remember sitting there thinking you look like you have your life together I bet you didn't spend 20 minutes tried to find a hair dry this morning and also this is great that you've had all this success but the campaign's you're talking about will have costs tens of thousands of pounds and my clients don't have that kind of budget so I do want to reassure you that yes SEO can be considerably easier if you do have large budgets and that's what most of your big competitors have got access to you but it's not impossible to do if you don't have large budgets now whatever group of attendees you fell into my three

[3:26] suggestions earlier I imagine that you have probably had some difficulty with SEO because of one of these four barriers you just don't have the time perhaps maybe you are the only person in your company or you're in a very small team because you're a start-up and you just don't have that time to dedicate to SEO you have no money you're a startup perhaps you just don't have the cash for the fancy SEO agency or the fancy SEO tools that you hear you really need perhaps you're just lacking the resources to be able to do the job well or maybe you just don't have the knowledge now knowledge in SEO is a very

[4:09] valuable thing I've been practicing it for very many years naturally a lot of the time it helps to get someone who's an SEO expert to assist you with this kind of thing but actually trying to hire an SEO is quite a difficult job I have hired many a SEOs in my time I found one who is particularly good so good in fact I married him just to make sure he couldn't join any other team so that's my tip number one a marriage contract is a lot harder to get out of than an employment contract so just keep that in mind hopefully there you're starting to see me is a bit of an

[4:40] extension of your marketing team so if you don't really have many people in your company who focus on marketing I like to think of myself as here to help you out so I'll be sending my invoice later but to start with I just want to really run through what SEO is because you might not even be familiar with the principles of it so let's start at the very beginning SEO stands for search engine optimization is all about getting traffic to your website that you've not paid to get there wonderful essentially it's about making sure your website is so good and answered someone's search query so well that Google cannot help

[5:18] but put you at the top of the search results now I do need to say that I'm saying Google a lot because I'm using a shorthand for most other search engines in Europe Google tends to be the search engine that is used the most it's not necessarily the case across the world but in Europe it tends to be Google that most people are using being any one news being don't lie come on some people use being but it's not a huge amount of people mainly we're using Google so I'll continue to say Google throughout this presentation but I just want to give you a little background on what SEO can get

[5:54] phew so search engine optimization as I said is all about making sure that the pages that you want people to find are findable through the likes of Google so I've highlighted in red at the top I'm about to use a laser pointer I'm really excited yes so here this box here this is all paid advertising so you have to be engaged in pay-per-click advertising in order for your website to appear here however this box here which I've outlined in green this is organic traffic that organics works that has got this website to rank in this position so you cannot pay to be here it's all about

[6:33] how relevant Google thinks you are to a particular search grade same again with here this isn't a paid for position this is because Google thinks this information is particularly pertinent to the search query that someone has put in again here this is paid for advertising as is this but this is all organic so you don't have to pay to be in those positions you just have to earn it through the merit of your website and finally all of this on this slide this is all organic listings so you cannot pay to be in this video carousel or what we call a featured snippet or position zero

[7:11] that's the little answer box that appears at the top of the search results when you type in a query that lends itself to a more complete answer something like how to tie a tie if you type that into Google you'll get that little knowledge box that runs through a few suggestions a step-by-step guide on how to tie a tie that you can't pay to be there that's all organic traffic and again that map pack that is organic traffic can't pay to be in that position there now I appreciate that those three slides were quite boring so here's a puppy to look at whilst I explain the

[7:43] next part so SEO largely falls into three categories when we talk about the sort of work you need to do in order to rank well in Google we talked about on-page optimization this essentially is making sure that your web page is so relevant for the source of search terms that people are putting into Google that you are going to rank at the top of the search results now making sure your web page is relevant falls largely into the category of understanding the user intent so what are people searching for to find out information about companies like yours what terms they're using to find web pages that cover the sorts of

[8:22] services that they're after so for instance if you happen to have a piece of software that you are selling that is essentially I'd know tinder for cats if that's what you're trying to sell at the moment are you talking about cats and dating and all that sort of stuff on your web page if you are then when people are starting to type in things like dating apps for cats then they're going to find your content I actually think tinder for cats is a really good idea my cats too young to date otherwise I probably look at same out myself but if you're still in the ideas phase of coming up with your own

[9:02] SAS startup then that's a freebie feel free to run with it SEO also falls into off-site work so this is where we are looking at making sure that your expertise and in particular industry is really showing through your website so if you think about it Google essentially is just a machine it's not a set of people who are going through and looking at your website and deciding whether you're very relevant for a particular search term it's oh it's a robot it's a search bot that is visiting your website and looking at all of the content on the page and thinking does this answer a user's query sufficiently but if I were

[9:37] to put it at the top of the search results and someone clicked on it that they would feel happy about landing on this page and part of the way that it understands whether you are relevant is through the keywords that you are using on your webpage but also how much expertise and authority you have within that industry and when we talk about off site or off page SEO we're looking largely at backlinks so when someone else's website links through to your website it's an indicator to the search that you are of interest to the audience or someone else's website it's almost like a third party voting system for the

[10:10] internet Google can see that a select number of other websites have linked through to your so it's kind of like a little voter confidence that your website's actually good quality enough that someone else would send their traffic through to your website so their visitors can get additional information now Google has very strict guidelines about backlinks and growing those that backlink profile you're not allowed to just buy links from other websites so if that was on your to-do list please take it off right now it's not gonna work for you in fact you can actually get penalized for doing that and you don't want a Google penalty what you can do

[10:43] though is start building those backlinks through creating content that is so share worthy that other websites want to link through to your content because they think you're a really good resource and that has a huge part of SEO but it's also quite expensive because you can imagine creating that content getting that content in front of the right people it's actually quite a time-consuming process another aspect of SEO that we have to keep into consideration is technical SEO so this is making sure that your website is actually accessible to the search bots that need to pull through it to understand how relevant and how authoritative is but also the kind of

[11:18] content that you don't want to appear in the search results things like your members login details for instance that's kept out of the index so people cannot find it through clicking on a search result so that probably sounds a little bit intimidating in a sense there's quite a lot of aspects that you have to take into consideration now just to make it worse I'm sure if you've had any exposure to SEO in the past you've heard that older websites rank better you've also heard that if you run PPC or pay-per-click advertising Google gives you a little boost up the search results organically as well and also that Google

[11:59] favors big brands so actually as a start up that kind of excludes you straight off the bat doesn't it because you don't necessarily have the budget for a big PPC campaign you're not already a big brand and you don't have a really old website because you're quite new and your website might be like no less than a year old thankfully though that's all hot garbage because these SEO myths although very prevalent are completely false so you don't need to worry having an older domain does not have a ranking impact at all on your website so I did a quick study I had a look at some search

[12:34] results I put in a phrase like file transfer software or something along those lines and you can see that at the top the number one ranking result organically has a domain that's 11 years old the one below it has a domain that is six years old but forth has a domain that's 20 years old so if Google are actually looking at search results based on the age of the website then surely that one that's 20 years old would be ranking first now I'm sure you're thinking okay that's a good indicator that maybe the age of my website's not gonna impact my rankings but correlation and causation you know what they say

[13:11] about that so I want to introduce you to this guy John Mueller John works for Google he's a webmaster trends analyst and he is our go-to guy with an ascendant SEO industry for asking questions about Google's rankings so actually how does the algorithm work what can we do to make our websites rank higher all those sorts of questions and John is really good in that he dedicates a lot of time to answering those questions often the same question over and over and over again and he's very good at making sure that we get the best information out there so he was asked recently does the age of my website have

[13:46] any impact on how well it's going to rank and he took time to thoroughly answer the question in a way that we would all understand and there would be no ambiguity there when he said no so there you have it no it doesn't have any impact on how well you're going to rank okay so next myth if you put the budget behind a pay-per-click advertising campaign within Google Google's going to bump you up the search results as a little favor to you also know there is no correlation that completely set for algorithms there's no impact whatsoever on you spending money on Google and actually ranking well within the organic

[14:24] search results now there is some interplay between PPC and organic traffic and there will be effects in other ways and that if for instance you are beating on your own brand term within a pay-per-click advertising campaign you might see fewer people arriving on your site through organic traffic onto your homepage because they've typed in your brand name because essentially you're being listed in Google twice on the same search results so there is some impact there but just because you're spending budget with Google doesn't mean they're gonna rank you better so good you don't have to spend loads of money with Google and the myth that Google always favors big

[14:57] brands the only thing I have to say about that is Google doesn't even rank itself well so you can see here that I've typed in what is Google Data studio now you may be familiar data studio it's a program I really like that Google runs that allows you to report on your data more visually it's a Google product but Google only ranks itself third and fourth for the search term what is Google Data studio so it doesn't even further its self within the search results it actually looked at the two competitors that sit above it and thought you know what their contents better than ours it's they're going up

[15:30] above us so those are the things that you're not ik up against with your big competitors in the search results now I do want to take a minute and think about the fact that you are startups and therefore a lot of you will think you know what I don't actually really have competitors we are so innovative and niche in what we do that actually we don't really have anyone that directly competes with us but I want to remind you of a little phenomenon that was out around sort of 10-15 years ago called Google working I didn't just wear it you it's it's the concept of can you put a certain search

[16:08] term into Google and get zero results now at the time that this was first popular I was school and I spent many a lunch break in my school IT room trying to Google whack and find a result that would generate zero listings and I couldn't because it's really difficult because actually Google is very very good at returning content but whatever search term you put in so although you might think you don't have any direct competitors so tinder for cats or instance might not have any other feline dating apps to compete with but it will have other competitors in the search results so if someone were to

[16:46] type in for instance is my cats lonely that would be a great search term for you to direct people to visit your tinder fur cats website for instance however you might notice things like cat advice websites or veterinary websites also ranking for that particular term so although there's no direct competition in terms of the product that you are offering you will always always always have competitors in the search results so you do have to take notice of the fact that people will be visiting their website instead of yours so I told you before that Google doesn't favor big brands but actually brand name does pay a part in who is going to be

[17:28] visiting your website so for instance if I type in black sleeved top clearly I'm not very ambitious with my clothing choices but this is a set of results that I got when I did this search back in the UK at the top there you can see Asda com followed by new look followed by H&M followed by pretty little thing now when I am looking to buy a black sleeve top I don't particularly want to go shopping at Asda sorry after I want to go to a shop perhaps I've been to before so I might ignore the Asda listing and click straight on to new look or H&M so

[18:01] actually although asura is ranking at the top of the search results it's not a guarantee that I'm going to click on the very first listing the brand name might actually pay a part in my choice so if the competitors in your search results are quite well-known in that industry then they may get the click even if you are out ranking them so that is something you need to be aware of and then there's brand Association actually if your industry is quite established you may have some players that are synonymous with that think about uber think about PayPal people might not be ready for an innovator within that space they may just go with

[18:38] what they already know therefore brand Association is going to be a bit of a barrier for you as a start-up think about Google when someone visits being normally they search for Google because they're actually looking for the Google homepage that's not very fair on being US sure some people do use it for things other than just getting to Google also digital PR I mentioned before that backlinks are hugely important to ranking well in the search results but if you don't have a massive budget because you're a start-up then you're not gonna have the time to spend on getting your content written in front of the right people and published with

[19:12] that link coming back it's actually quite an arduous process so digital PR although hugely beneficial is not necessarily something you're able to engage in but your big competitors might well be so they do have an advantage there and their marketing teams it might just be you and now me and your marketing team and that means that you're possibly up against competitors you've got huge marketing teams or agencies or people that are spending a lot of time dedicated to making sure their websites are well-functioning but also visible in Google you also might be up against more experienced management now I know a lot of you are on your

[19:47] second third fourth startup some of you are on your first some of you haven't even got there and you're just thinking about a start-up but think about your competitors their CEO might have been in the game for twenty years they might well be very well-versed in SEO they may well have built an SEO first website so thinking about SEO and everything that they do in all of the content they upload also they've got more money than you they're rich whereas you're starting out in this so actually you're up against some pretty stiff competition in the search results I feel really bad about that so here's another puppy to make you feel

[20:22] better now what we gonna do about this cuz this has all been fairly negative so far first step we need to look for your competitors weaknesses because they will have some if you think about yourself as a start-up and them as a massive big giant within the industry it starts to get a little bit clearer when you look at a bit of a gap analysis so start by looking at your resources what do you have to work with what are you missing do you not have enough time so you perhaps need to hire an agency do you not have enough resources at your disposal see perhaps need to hire an

[20:55] agency do you not have enough knowledge so you perhaps need to hire an agency do you not have enough money so you've got no hope of hiring an agency you need to take a stock of what you do and you don't have internally within on teams does anyone have experience of SEO is anyone a Content writer do you have a former journalist that you can talk to who might be able to help you with that backlinking what do you have or what do you not have and then you need to look at your competitors content gap analysis is probably the first place I would start to look if I was trying to outrank

[21:24] someone who has got a much bigger budget than me content is one of the primary ways that the search engines deem your website to be suitable for particular search query so you need to make sure that you have content on your site that is answering those search queries now something that a lot of larger companies don't have is that really specific niche content and you are experts within your field you know stuff that their marketing teams can't possibly know because you've been working in your field probably for a long time even if this is the startup that's in its infancy so what are people searching for

[21:57] that you can answer on your website that your competitors just have an answered yet another way that they are susceptible and vulnerable is in the size of their website so if they have massive big websites chances are they're not tailoring every single piece of content to meet those search queries actually they just got a lot of templated content on this especially if it's an e-commerce site then they tend to have a lot of templated content that means they're not necessarily getting the keywords onto the page they need to for those pages to rank or perhaps they've not written particularly engaging copy you have got to the advantage here because your

[22:34] website is likely to be a lot smaller and as you build it up you can keep these things in mind so that every single page you add to your website has a value from an organic search perspective also they might just have their content in the wrong format so I showed you earlier that you can have that video carousel in a search result so that if someone types in something that lends itself to a video answering their question rather than content make sure that you are producing videos if you can animations that kind of content that will rank within that video carousel box so that where your

[23:06] competitors have just gone for the straightforward content answering question you can actually just bypass them and get straight into that video carousel instead now I appreciate that that can be quite an expensive thing to do but actually one very good piece of video it can be used in many different ways you can use it on your social you can use it to help explain things about your product and it can be very very valuable also I showed you that position 0 featured snippet box that's where the answer to your question comes up in part in the search results so you don't even have to click through to the website now

[23:39] that can be a good thing for organic traffic and a not so good thing for organic traffic what you want to do is when you're trying to get your content into that featured snippet box is make sure that you've structure it in a particular way that means the first part of the answer is visible within the feature snippet but they have to click through to get the rest of it so if you think of something like a set of instructions make sure you only give instructions one to five and then make sure you have that and that's what will appear in your features snippet and then

[24:06] have a whole host of other instructions that won't appear in the future significant because it's only a certain links not there's someone if they do see your result in the feature sniffing I have to click through for the rest of the instructions now this is a bit of trial and error it takes time to get your page ranking in that position zero spot but you don't have to be the top number one result in order to get into that position zero so that is something that you can look to do to bypass your competitors who are at the top of the search results if your content is

[24:32] ranking sort of third or fourth but you know there is a position zero available for a particular search result then look at how you can structure that content differently to get into that position zero it's often about the layout so it could be that you directly answer the question the first paragraph or you have it in nice easy to digest chunks so you have an ability to format or a numbered list format but there are ways of getting into that search result and that is a good win if you manage to get there the other benefit that you have as a startup is that you are quick and nimble

[25:03] you're very agile and if you're a software company you might literally be agile which is great because I have worked with some massive companies who are very very slow I once well quite recently actually had to get access to a piece of software that the client had I needed one login one login it took over two weeks and ten different people in order for me to access that one login big companies are often very slow they have a lot of moving parts and oftentimes SEO is not at the top of their list so as an agile nimble company you've got a better chance of reacting to things a lot quicker that means you

[25:41] can be on top of trends whenever I talk to startups I like to say don't just look at what's trending at the moment but think forward into what might be trending in the future so if you are selling tinder for cats you might want to think about okay people might not necessarily be looking for dating apps for their pets right now but what might they be looking at in the future what content can I write now that has the time to start ranking so that people do actually start searching sorts of informational queries that my content is the stuff that they're finding because a lot of the time the

[26:15] big companies they don't have that forward-thinking then perhaps not even experts within the industry because if they've got a marketing team their marketers first not necessarily experts within your field so what can you start writing about in your website that gives it time to start increasing in the search results another good place to look is on Twitter social media what are people talking about within your industry that you can answer the questions of what are they asking what are they discussing because Twitter is one place that they go for information potentially but the search results is definitely another place they go so make sure that you are paying

[26:49] attention to what's been talked about on Twitter and creating content on your website that's about that theme as a start up your development process hopefully will be considerably quicker than the larger companies I have put requests through to big companies have taken over a year to get processed development keys are huge hopefully as a start-up you're either the developer yourself or you're working very closely with developers or you have a team of developers who answer to you in which case you can look at their priority lists you can talk to them about your needs for SEO and hopefully get things pushed through a bit quicker also as a

[27:27] start-up you have the advantage of being able to build SEO into your website if your website isn't even existing yet or it's still in its infancy then now is a great time to think about SEO because the way you structure your website the way you've seen your content the way you build internal links within your website all has an impact on how well your content is going to rank now websites have been in existence for 5-10 years they're stuck with what they've got they either go through a massive project to rebuild their website which has its own SEO implications or they leave it as it is whereas you and can start building

[28:01] your website with SEO in mind which hopefully in time will give you that benefit step three you need to start identifying your own secret weapons so if you are a startup that says a local community so for instance you have tinder for cats but it's only available in France then make sure all of your content is themed around France make sure it is the obvious choice of the search engines to serve for people who are searching for pet dating apps within France because then you are starting to build up that local relevance so this means things like including locally relevant terms within your copy getting backlinks from companies that also in

[28:40] your location just to give the search engines that real assurance that you are the best website to serve for that particular demographic and audience start developing your tone of voice so by this I mean what makes you unique because there's a start-up you're in a brilliant time to start thinking about how you position yourselves and in the search results that is incredibly important so these are just three examples of how and the particular brands have used their own tone of voice in their search results to include increase the amount of clicks that they get so even if they're not necessarily ranking in first place their meta titles

[29:15] their meta descriptions are so engaging within the search results that people will click through so fire box for instance their strap line there is shot a curated range of unusual gifts home decor techy gadgets food drink and unicorns that's quite unique to them I can't imagine other gift providers having that sort of terminology and tone of voice within their search results is something that's going to encourage people to click through to that webpage even if it's not in the first position highlight your skills and expertise you have got experience within your industry in some form or another otherwise I don't think you would just be starting

[29:53] up a company in that industry if you knew nothing about it highlight that within your website this goes really well to helping you become the spokesperson within your industry and if you become the spokesperson within your industry you are the person that the radio company's phone when they want to have an expert talk about a subject that's in the news or you are writing for some industry blogs then you're starting to build the ability to get those backlinks through to your website because you are becoming known in your own right as an industry expert people start coming to you wanting you to provide content you don't have to go

[30:25] to them trying to force your content on them focus on your niche if you're up against massive competitors their website probably covers a whole host of stuff that yours just doesn't need to make sure you are really really strong in your own niche don't try and compete with them against all of the content that's on this I all of the different areas that they are ranking for but just focus on your own particular niche that way you can end up with these hyper relevant backlinks because people will see use that subject matter expert and they will start linking through to you with really really relevant links and

[30:57] that again helps to cement with Google that you are an authority and expert within that area step 4 you really need to develop your plan so I've given you some guidance and the sorts of things you should be looking at but you really now need to look at actually for you what are your next steps and I would suggest that first off you need to add value where your competitors do not so for instance this could be that you are answering the questions that people are asking about your industry but they just cannot find any answers to a really good place to start is the likes of Reddit or

[31:31] Cora these are websites that people are going to to get answers that they just can't find elsewhere so have a look through the forums the subreddits are really pertinent to your industry and see what people are talking about see what they're asking because from there you can start writing content that answers those questions I would say that you can then direct people on forum and read it to those particular pages that you've written but read it in particular are really really against people being too corporate so you might get a lot down if you start trying to push people off to your website but it is a great place

[32:02] to do a bit of user intent research find out what people want to know that I just can't find elsewhere and start providing them with those answers so for instance people are asking on LinkedIn how to recall an email you didn't mean to send quite a common problem we all accidentally send an email before we finished writing it if you can provide content that answers that question directly you then have the ability to get into the features snip your position zero for that answer that way you're getting a huge amount of visibility right at the top of the search results without too much effort it's just content that you already know

[32:36] you don't have to research it necessarily it's stuff about your industry you can write it it doesn't even necessarily take an expensive copywriter to do a good job about it I would also suggest looking at other playing fields so I've spoken a lot about Google but there might be search engines that are more personal to your particular industry think about Trip Advisor if you're in the leisure sector actually SEO isn't just about the traditional search engines is about optimizing your content for any search engine where someone might be trying to find a website like yours so if you can't beat them in Google think about where you could beat them if you sell

[33:10] products for instance and you can't outright outrank Amazon for that particular product should you be serving your content in Amazon instead and finally if you are really really struggling to beat those big organic competitors let's start thinking about collaborating with them if they are within your industry but don't directly compete with you now think about talking to them about the possibility of sharing content on their site get yourself a backlink from them how can you work with them so that actually you're piggybacking off of their success so thank you so much for listening to me or 1000 of you who are currently in this room right now

[33:47] if you have any questions about SEO or tinder for cats or any other dating app ideas I have then please don't hesitate to get in touch with me and I will be hanging around after the talk thank you [Music] [Music] you [Music]

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