Seo and Blogs - UVU Guest Lecture

Traffic from Search Engines

David Malmborg@davidmalmborg

About SEO.com

- #1 Ranked Company by Website Magazine

-The Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum selected SEO.com as one of the Top 25 Fastest Growing companies in Utah

What is SEO?

Stands for

Search Engine Optimization

• Top rankings get the clicks!

• Searches tend to:– View only first page– Click one of top 3 results1

– See leftmost content

1 Visual heat map legend: red areas = most looked at; purple = click-throughs; different screen size folds represented by solid red lines

Top 3

Left

18.2 billion searches

(last December alone)

- Comscore (http://goo.gl/CTjcK)

63% of people use mobile search before

purchasing offline in a store or from a catalog

- Lisa Barone, Outspoken Media (http://goo.gl/Lyq1n)

SEO Ranking Factors

• Title tags• Headings• Website structure• Content– Is keyword included?

• Links from other websites• Don’t go overboard!

How Much Traffic Does a Search Engine Bring to a Blog?

• 66% of the traffic to the SEO.com blog comes from Search Engines.

• My wife’s blog gets 46% from SEs, 37% from Referrals

If you always do what you have done, you’ll always get what you got.

Hard Work

Case Study500 Visits

2 Months Later…

20,000 Visits (4,000% Increase)

6 Months Later…

60,000 Visits

What they didn’t do

• No they don’t talk about Sports, Tech Gadgets, Celebs, Love, Music or Movies (AKA Pop Culture)

• No they didn’t jimmy rig themselves to the top of Digg, Reddit, Yahoo Front Page, or a major news site.

Who was it?

• Company: Lendio• Business Lending (Boring Topic)• This is traffic to their blog

What they did do

• Created Useful Content• Posted Consistently (4-5 times a week)• Interview Industry Celebrities • Ride the News (Pop Culture)• Invite Guest Bloggers• Start a Weekly Newsletter

Create Useful Content

Post Consistently

• At least 3 times a week. • Try to make a schedule– Monday: Podcast– Wednesday: Something Awesome– Friday: Weekly List of Links

• Monthly: Infographic, Interview, News releases, Announcements.

Interview Industry Celebrities

• Let people with a following promote themselves through your blog.

• Let them talk about themselves.• Let them promote it. • Their names drive traffic. That’s why they’re

celebrities

Ride the News (Pop Culture)• Tim Tebow• Super Bowl• Valentines• Holidays• 2012• End of the World• Presidential Bid• Movies• Music

Invite Guest Bloggers

• Let someone else create your content.• Let them promote it. • Benefit from their genius.

Start a Weekly Newsletter• Reaches an audience that is not on Social Media• Reviews the best blog posts• Continues the conversation with your audience • Keeps them familiar with your brand • Lendio is adding 5,000-10,000 subscribers every

month– 5,000 visits a month from the Newsletter

• Designed with Mobile in mind. (50% of Lendio’s customers look at the newsletter on the phone)

“The Content Loop”

Great Content

Newsletter/Social

Brand Introduction

Lead/Conversion

SEO Training/Resources• www.seo.com

• www.seomoz.com

• www.seobook.com/blog

• www.mattcutts.com/blog

• www.searchengineland.com

• www.searchenginejournal.com