WHO IS THE SMARTEST SEO IN THE WORLD?

November 19, 2019

David Jackson disguised as the smartest seo in the world

If you Google him (David Jackson Manager, Web Site Strategy – SEO), you will find many other David Jackson’s pretending to be The Smartest SEO In The World. Some are in web design, some in SEO, must be the greatest name to have in digital marketing. Through his work in Search Engine Optimization over the past 24 years, with a specific focus on Google search results, David Jackson is awarding himself the title of “Smartest SEO In The World”. He should have been the in the top 5 organic results… out of 1,320,000 search results.

HOW THE SMARTEST SEO IN THE WORLD BEGAN?

Britney Muller
Britney Muller deems herself The Smartest SEO in the World.

Back in July 2019, a top seo scientist Britney Muller posted an article claiming SHE was the smartest SEO in the World. This created a stir in the SEO industry and a lot of buzz for Britney. Rightfully so and well deserving of course. Britney is an SEO Scientist at MOZ. “When I heard her speak at Driving Sales Conference in Las Vegas I was impressed at how she understands the algorithm updates and attacks not only on page seo but off page SEO” says David Jackson. Britney has also written a Beginner’s Guide to SEO. 

David attributes much of his soon to come fame as “The Smartest SEO In The World” not only to his passion of web design but the ability to help people achieve their dreams. Whether a person is building a business or buying a car, David’s efforts as a Smart SEO’er help people turn their dreams into reality. 

SO YOU WANT TO BE A SMARTER SEO?

In all his wisdom, David recommends following those who support the SEO Community. A great place to start is on Twitter. Here are just a few people I follow:

Google:

Bing:

DuckDuckGo:

Smartest SEO in the World

The best way to become a smart SEO is to pay attention to thought leaders in the industry and adapt what you learn for your own SEO strategy. But, be more like David Jackson.

HOW DID DAVID JACKSON GET THE TITLE OF THE SMARTEST SEO IN THE WORLD?

Here is a bullet list of areas to focus on so you can be one of the seo experts, just like David:

  • Don’t try to trick the Search Engines. Write for the human to read it and not search engines. Make it conversational and natural. Include the geo location for local seo. Format for content marketing like sub headings, bullet points.
  • PAGE URL: Be conscious where you save the page. Don’t just save every page in the root folder. Be sure to use specific/relevant folders
  • META TITLE: Don’t put the dealership name. Put important keyword phrases & include the City, ST. Keep it under 65 characters or 600 pixel width.
  • META DESCRIPTION: Make it describe your content and be conversational as it is the 2 lines of text in the SERPs. Include the City, ST info to increase the likelihood of getting clicks from local users. Keep it under 160 characters and 920 pixel width.
  • H1 HEADING: It’s the large headline at the top of the page. Make it conversational and summarize the page. Make sure City, ST and target keyword phrase is included.
  • IMAGES: Every image should have an ALT & TITLE  attribute. Include the City, ST also.
  • SITEMAPS: Choose XML & HTML sitemaps so Search Engines can crawl the pages naturally.
  • SCHEMA: The whole point is to communicate better with search engines like Google. When Google understands entities on a deeper level, it serves better results to searchers.
  • Check monthly for broken links when doing your site auditing. Internal and external links.
  • Link building: Use citations to get your site listed and reach out to your local community for link building opportunities Getting links from events you sponsor are free seo.
  • Perform Keyword Research and use People also ask, Google Suggestions and Searches related to
Google Suggestions
People also ask
searches related to

When you do SEO right, you get rewarded, and that is the best bragging rights you could ask for.

This video is David asking Google Assistant “What’s the residual value of my lease“. The result is a page on lhmauto.com that David has ranked on Google in the Answer Box position 0. This also means that it gets Google Assistant responses. This hard work was a combination of great content, technical SEO, FAQ schema mark up and more.

Other Smart SEO Resources

Meta checkers
https://totheweb.com/learning_center/tool-test-google-title-meta-description-lengths/ 

https://www.webyurt.com/tools/meta-title-counter 

Schema Generator

https://www.rankranger.com/schema-markup-generator

Optimize images then use squoosh.app to further optimize

Google 

https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/

https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/

https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

More complicated Schema Generator
https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/u/0/

Increase in SEO Queries

April 5, 2020

It is interesting that some will minimize or misunderstand the importance of SEO in marketing. Without good SEO you cannot have great SEM. Especially in times like we are currently in now, there are some that will look to cut SEM. And that might be appropriate, but SEM spend is based on demand, so be tactful if you are cutting SEM budgets. But what is more interesting is that in the U.S. there has been a big increase for SEO queries over the past 90 days. This timeframe coincides with the Coronavirus COVID-19 timeline. Are smart businesses realizing that their SEO efforts can go much further than a short term SEM plan? Could it be in a time SEM is getting cut, SEO is arguably more important?

One tactic to keep in mind is Googles guidelines to write content for E-A-T, also known as Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Your content HAS to be “trustworthy.” So, the more trust you can build with your web site content, the more likely users will click on your content in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

If you build your content with Trust in mind, Authority will come with it. This will eventually end with you being the Expert in that subject matter.

Be sure to update or replace old content with new content. But don’t just replace 2019 with 2020. Read your own content and ask yourself if it is up to date as well as Authoritative and Trustworthy.

Here are a few tips for managing your online brand during COVID-19:

If you are an essential business and open:

  1. Update your Meta Description to include a “We Are Open” or “We Are Essential” Message in the front of your description but do not go over the maximum character count (about 160 characters) or pixel width (about 920 pixels).
  2. Update your GMB description to also include “We Are Open”.
  3. Remove any videos of handshaking or crowds of people in the showroom and replace them with current messaging of social distancing. For Dealerships, this could be sales people on the phone or computer, consumers at home shopping for vehicles. A vehicle being delivered to a customers home. For restaurants it could be a consumer ordering food online with the meal being delivered.
  4. Create 6 second bumper ads. Bumper ads use target CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) bidding. Your pay each time your ad is shown 1,000 times. Use Retargeting and display advertising.
  5. Update your Google My Business (GMB) listings. Add a GMB Post that you’re open, Add your ability to order via online services, Use a CTA of Call Now in your Post to encourage phone calls. If you have adjusted hours, make sure these are reflected in your listing. These are most important as consumers will see these hours before ever visiting your web site. If you are temporarily closed, use the new GMB feature to let people know. This will not harm your rankings when you do open back up. You can choose to use the new COVID-19 message post also. No image, just text with a CTA. I suggest a Call Now button.
  6. Add your new photo’s and videos to your GMB photo section. GEO tag your images with software to help boost your GMB local profile.
  7. Lastly, use UTM’s in your GMB links. This way you can separate your GMB links from regular organic traffic.

Here is GMB’s new COVID-19 Post feature.

Target new keywords especially in this current environment where people are buying online. Here is “buy online”

And here is “Delivery”

All advertising channels require one thing done well, A good SEO plan. Make sure your web site landing pages correspond with all marketing messages. Don’t just land your traffic on the home page. Select a good landing page or create one if you don’t have one.

Be safe, be smart, be productive. SEO is not dead.

The basics of a UTM

November 24, 2019

What is a UTM and what does it do? This infographic is here to help you to implement UTM’s and understand why.

You can use UTM’s to track difference sources of traffic where sites link to your site.

For your Google My Business (GMB) listing, it’s highly recommended that you use a UTM of google_my_business or similar for your web site link. This will differentiate the organic traffic from your general organic traffic to where you can see GMB listing clicks under medium=organic and source=google.

Here is a great chrome extension you can use to build a UTM on a certain page.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/utmio-google-analytics-ur/eoaapiimcaimddnfhfnifgkinmpcbccp

Here is the Google UTM/Campaign URL Builder: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/ this one requires an extra step of copying your url then navigating to this builder to create the UTM.

To measure the performance of your UTM’s use Google Analytics.

You can use UTM’s in email marketing also. If you want to track which elements of an email get clicked more use a UTM of utm_content= this way you can improve your click thru rate by measuring which call to actions work better. If one design or call to action performs better, you can make improvements.

To see the performance of your campaign navigate to Campaigns and add a secondary dimension of ad content. This way you can see the different clicks from the same campaign.

Use lowercase for all UTM’s of source & medium. This is the default setting for Google Analytics. If not, organic and Organic will be two different mediums. Google and google will be two different sources.

Start your first utm with a question mark and each addition utm is added with an ampersand. Here is an example for GMB web site link.

For your Google My Business (GMB) profile use the following UTM’s:

Website Link (All lowercase)

  • source=google
  • medium=organic
  • campaign=google_my_business

Menu Link

  • source=google
  • medium=organic
  • campaign=google_my_business_menu

Appointment Link

  • source=google
  • medium=organic
  • campaign=google_my_business_appt

GMB Post

  • source=google
  • medium=organic
  • campaign=google_my_business_post

Products

  • source=google
  • medium=organic
  • campaign=google_my_business_products

At the end of your campaign UTM, you can add an additional unique identifier for each post, product or service you add to your GMB listing.

?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=google_my_business

Basics of a UTM
The Basics of a UTM

Site Speed Tips & Resources

October 21, 2019

Here are the resources covered.
Custom interactive report: (Must be logged into MAO gmail account)
Select your store, device, region, date range
Clickable elements to separate by device, landing page, browser, etc.
Top 10 pages, Top 10 Cities, slowest pages, fastest pages
https://datastudio.google.com/s/vleUj8SRc1g

Run 3rd part test (click advanced, select mobile iPhone, 4G connection, 3 tests)
https://www.webpagetest.org

Image Testing – run a quick scan of your images for further optimization ideas
https://webspeedtest.cloudinary.com


Image compression tool, quick and easy. DDC will only accept certain file types, so keep it simple to MOZjpeg)
https://squoosh.app

google site speed reports
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
https://web.dev/measure

Minimize the amount of widgets if possible. Use this simple code on images, youtube embed iframes and other iframes below the fold. loading=”lazy”

chrome is launching native lazy loading with its chrome browser.

lazy loading example
Image Lazy Load tag

The loading attribute supports the following values but we only need lazy:

auto: Default lazy-loading behavior of the browser, which is the same as not including the attribute.
lazy: Defer loading of the resource until it reaches a calculated distance from the viewport.
eager: Load the resource immediately, regardless of where it’s located on the page.