SEO This Week EP22 - Dominate Local Search, JSON-LD, and YouTube for 2017

1. SEO This Week Episode 22 Dominate Local Search, JSON-LD, and YouTube for 2017 olympiaseo.com/ 2/12/2017 It’s Time to Stop Doing On-Page SEO Like It’s 2012 If you’re optimizing a page to rank well for a keyword or set of keywords, you probably use some sort of checklist to make sure you’re doing the right things. The problem is, there’s a crucial set of flaws in how I’ve seen a lot of marketers and SEOs approaching on-page SEO. These five mistakes and biases are popping up too often in our field, so let’s address each with simple, tactical fixes. Read More Our Insights: On page is the foundation for which the rest of your digital marketing campaigns are built. If you get it right, your “house” will be up for quite some time generating traffic and sales through SEO almost on autopilot for quite some time. However, if you get your on-page optimization wrong, you will have a hard time ranking for anything, much less key terms with any amount of competition. Rand offers some really great advice that really says don’t rely on tools, use your common sense and make sure you do the basics. 9 YouTube Marketing Predictions for 2017 From the Pros Are you wondering how marketing on YouTube will change in 2017? As the importance of video continues to grow, many marketers are watching to see if YouTube will keep pace in 2017. Read More Our Insights: There are typically a lot of these posts created around the beginning of the year so I was a bit hesitant when we first saw it. However, the content in this one is actually pretty good, not to mention actionable, so I figured it would fit well here. Some highlights that I saw include the release of new social communication features some of the power users on YouTube are getting access to. This is a great idea on the part of the YouTube team in an effort compete with FaceBook, Twitter, and Instagram for your attention. 1/7

2. A Guide to JSON-LD for Beginners JSON-LD stands for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data, which consists of multi-dimensional arrays (think: list of attribute-value pairs). Typically, in terms of SEO, JSON-LD is implemented leveraging the Schema.org vocabulary, a joint effort by Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex in 2011 to create a unified structured data vocabulary for the web. Read More Our Insights: With the increased use of Schema in the web community it’s probably more important than ever for web developers and SEO’s to know at least the basics of Schema and using JSON-LD to implement it. This is a great tutorial for those that want to learn a bit about what we code nerds are talking about when we tell you we added Schema to your sites head in order to leverage the relevance that it provides the search engines (In English, we added some stuff to let Google know about you and your website). Local SEO in 2017: 5 simple ways to dominate local search Local competition is heating up … Read More Our Insights: As more and more business owners realize that search engine optimization is a great way to reach customers the competition level in search is getting stronger and stronger (at least in some markets). Not only do you have to compete with other business owners, but now you’re forced to compete with the likes of Thumbtack, Yelp, and HomeAdvisor for the valuable organic search space. It doesn’t help that Google clearly favors their sites over a real small business (they spend more on ad spend) so you have to be on your game in any local market in order to be in the top 3 where all the traffic is. This article highlights some important things you can do yourself if you have the knowledge to implement them. SEO Checklist: 21 Common Mistakes to Avoid With so much content being created, published and promoted online every second—as well as consumers becoming increasingly self- directed in their quest for answers—competition to capture your audience’s attention has never been more fierce. Read More Our Insights: If you wanted to write a post about how to do SEO and then one on how not to do it, you could do what this writer did. Essentially, take all the base elements of search engine optimization that are important to a local business and then tell a person that if you avoid doing it, it’s a mistake. Well no $%*&. This one made our list because it is a great example of how a business can write some content based on other content they did. Even better, it could be leveraged as a template for future articles and save you some time down the road. 15 Free Online Courses for Entrepreneurs 2/7

3. If you need help launching a business or bolstering your entrepreneurial skills, access free online courses from leading universities and industry experts. Read More Our Insights: If you are not learning, you’re dying. We shared this in hopes that maybe one of the courses listed will interest you, and if not, get you looking for something new to learn this month. The Single Advertising Factor That’s More Important than Demographics (And How Measuring It Makes All the Difference) When it comes to online advertising, no one is disputing that demographics are important. After all, they’re what powers your media buying and customer personas. The data you collect is meaningless without demographics to help you properly filter and segment it. Read More Our Insights: The folks over a KissMetrics never fail to publish great content and that’s why every week we end up with one of their new pieces in the SEO This Week Episode 22 rollup. This week we discover that demographics is important, but customer intent is a lot more profitable, especially if you’re selling via eCommerce. The article isn’t overly technical, however, it does provide you some food for thought and tips on researching the right information in your own market. 6 ways to grow your podcast audience with SEO Columnist Stephan Spencer explains the benefits of podcasting, as well as how to optimize your podcast for visibility in search engines, YouTube and platforms like iTunes or Google Play. Read More Our Insights: Taking on a podcast for your business is a big deal and one that you should not take on lightly. We have been taking our weekly SEO This Week videos and turning them into podcasts for publication like on our Olympia SEO SoundCloud channel. The end game is to take all these episodes and create a podcast for iTunes and Google Play. We have found that keeping up with it all can be a bit much, so like I said if you are going to do a podcast just know that it can be a bit exhausting to keep running, especially if you are going to do a weekly show. The Single Best Anchor Text for SEO That No One Is Talking About 3/7

4. After researching thousands of backlinks pointing to #1 ranked websites, this is the most important anchor text for SEO. Read More Our Insights: The single best anchor text for based on his tests it “Page Title or Blog Post Title”. Revelation, maybe not, since we have been doing it for years and it’s probably the most natural thing you can do. The problem comes when you do it so often that Google is wondering what is going on. They are important, but used in moderation, don’t skip the other 11 versions of anchor text that there are or you’ll send a really cool signal to Google’s team that something is amiss. P.S. These types of links can be built naturally using our branding networks that we create for each of our SEO agency clients. Google Search Algorithm Update February 7th We just had some Google algorithm update a week ago potentially targeting spammy links I believe. Read More Our Insights: You can read posts like this and learn who to stay away from when picking and SEO. If they are freaking out, they probably did something dumb in the first place that caused their sites to drop. We saw a drop as well, for our main keyword, however, that’s because we actually stop link building to our main domain and our competition didn’t. However, all our internal pages gained rankings and our clients kept or went up themselves. So don’t fret that Google made another change, it’s life, deal with it. The Keyword + Year Content/Rankings Hack – Whiteboard Friday What’s the secret to earning site traffic from competitive keywords with decent search volume? The answer could be as easy as 1, 2, 3 — or more precisely, 2, 0, 1, 7. In Whiteboard Friday, Rand lets you in on a relatively straightforward tactic that can help you compete in a tough space using fresh content. Read More Our Insights: If you have been around for a while this is pretty old hat for you, however, Rand provides some good food for thought if you are not leveraging content that talks about trends in a year, i.e. best web design in 2017 type stuff How Google’s Changes Impact Your Local Search Strategy 4/7

5. Local search strategy comprises a critical segment in the marketing for many businesses. It impacts both in-person commerce and e-commerce significantly. Read More Our Insights: While this article shows some ad examples that are being tested somewhere, we have not seen them in any of the markets in which we operate. However, the article does bring up a point that we have been stressing for quite some time: Use PPC and SEO together in order to gain the best intelligence and exposure in your market. Understanding the Micro-Moment and the Modern Customer Journey This will be your key to successful SEO in 2017. Why SEO – Top 15 Reasons to Focus … “I Want To Do” – Using… SEO Best Practices 2017: Seizing Opportu… Taking Your Marketing Channels and Creat… BrightEdge Support for Penguin 4. Read More Our Insights: We have actually built a few sites specifically for the purposes of targeting website traffic that is in line with the “micro moments” concept. These are people who have a problem right now and want it solved right now, so if you are into any business you need to figure out what micro moments apply to your product or service and create content that solves that, or at least how your product solves it. Do blank 404 pages hurt your rankings? I wanted to start a new segment of the week roll-up with SEO This Week Episode 22 because we are growing enough to be able to have intelligent conversations in our community without hurting others feelings (or out own) so we chose this topic. This question came up on a video from Josh Bachynski where he stated that Google was essentially treating blank 404 pages as a negative when grading your website. To summarize, he stated that if you don’t have anything on your 404 page beyond the standard messaging, it’s a bad thing and it could be hurting your whole website. However, clearly according to John Mueller from Google, they don’t read or even consider any content that you may have on your 404 pages. Personally, the only way I see it being negative is that the page was indexed before, threw up a 404 and then Google had to deindex the page, other than that I think Josh’s interpretation on this topic is off a bit. I asked him in the comments of his video for some clarification, however, I ended up being the one summarizing what they might do with 404 pages beyond what I believe they are doing which is deindexing the URLs that cause them in the first place and nothing more. 5/7

6. 6/7

7. Leave a comment below and tell us your opinion, Does a bare 404 page hurt you in Google’s eyes? Images from moz.com, socialmediaexaminer.com, searchengineland.com, toprankblog.com, practicalecommerce.com, kissmetrics.com, searchenginejournal.com, seroundtable.com, brightedge.com, ..Do 7/7