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Hello and welcome to episode 21 of the search with Canada podcast recorded on Wednesday, the 31st of July, my name is a Eskimo and I’m here to help you with search in this week’s episode. We’re going to be hearing from Lucas elisany, a renowned and experience SEO, who came and gave a great talk assertion orange for earlier this year. So you start off by giving us a great.

Thought into what he calls the snapshot method, which is really useful for those of you who want to do some keyword research, so it’s helpful for both SEO and actually PC as well. And he also talks about the tricky process of Link building competitive Gap analysis. And I’ve struggled with these before. So, it’s actually so useful to hear him speaking. And finally, he gives out some great advice about what tools to actually be using as well. And then rounds up by talking about some great plug-ins for WordPress sites which can boost your website’s performance. I found this talk of great learning experience for me and I took a lot away from it and I hope

Hope you do too. So without further Ado, here’s Lucas.

So my name is Lucas Allison, I was working last six and a half year in Newsweek zoopla. So first you switch and then the black wire do switch. And we become like one big family, six and a half years is quite long for an SEO in one company but I had a reason to leave this end of this year, I become a father. So my little daughter is two months, we waiting on to, she will be three years old.

Because I must hear my wife is ppc’s will be email marketing. Definitely. So the first, the first skill I’m going to teach her is how to use Excel and and yeah. And I was working also with lots of other customers. I’m still working. My my schedule is quite quite busy everyday. Mainly thanks to Hangouts. I can I can remotely work. And yes. And today, I just wanted to show you a couple of tactics that I was

Implementing during my time in use, which is applying before and that’s our tactics that you can take from this event and Implement even tonight or start implementing from tomorrow. So, the first one, I call a snapshot approach to keyword research and how it works. This is kind of I discovered and I started maybe that I didn’t discover the but I started working long time ago just because when I was joining a company I was oh

Is, you know I thinking that very quickly. I need to prove that I was not only good on the interview but I’m really good and I co and I agree with Mark, that is always challenging to convince the developers. That’s why I learn how to talk to developers a bit different language and to marketers with a bit different language. And so first of all, I just wanted to mention we search metrics, raise your hand. If anyone knows searchmetrics good? Search metrics is a great tool kind of industry standard and not very expensive. I think Ben

Basic version cost less than hundred Euro and now let’s go back to 2012 on a journey. You switch. There was very little belief in a CO those days. There was no proper tracking and so on, and so on, by the way, I learned a long time ago before joining us, which how to use analytics properly because that helped me to protect what I’m saying, what I’m talking to developers based on numbers. So I could pull the data and say, like, listen, this is where we begin. And this is where we are, and they’ve been like, yeah, but

Statement up. Yeah, but it didn’t cannibalize the growth and this way we started to be on the same page. So imagine I’m joining you switch and they saying like Lucas, we don’t believe in SEO and I was like, give me three months and you know, first thing you can pull, lots of information from to like, such Matrix or cysts, tricks or semrush or spyfu and I pulled the data, and I was like, Hey, searchmetrics, show me where we are already ranking? Where, where are the keywords that delivering traffic? And I saw

This lots of keywords different keywords because you probably know you switch like money Supermarket. Go compare is dealing with different verticals, credit cards, Insurance got Broadband mobile. So there was lots of keywords and I was like, okay, this is nice set, but obviously, I have many keywords which are on position one already. So there was a built-in filter. There is a built-in filter and I said searchmetrics, I like this but show me keywords which are ranking between position 2 and 10 and we’ll search volume thousand to twenty thousand.

Thanks to that. I could deal with keywords, which are already on the first page, but not first. So not too low, and not too. And not one. And also, I excluded all third-party brand names, like, ee or T-Mobile generally, you know, if someone is typing, he probably is looking for a web, Zu website, not usage. So, I get another list, much more nice. And now how I started thinking about dealing with this data,

Let me go into this chart. This is quite a chart and it shows what we call organic distribution model through the positions. And now, it’s really not about how much you see the percentages. It’s never like when you are first, you have 18.2 percent click-through rate or when you are a second, you have ten percent click-through rate is something else I wanted to show you. It’s a massive difference. If you are ranking here between position 5 and 10 and massive different, when your uncle,

Here position three or two or one.

So it’s very, very important to fight for this position, one or two, if you really cannot be first and I have a bit of math, think about this, if we will take keyword, which is here, best Simoni deals, 18,000, 841 searches a month, you know, UK is very famous of all this price comparison website. That is not that popular in Europe, as far as far as I know, and

So many searches. Yeah, so people are looking every month 18,800 41 times by average for best Simoni deals.

And I can do a little estimation, I can say, okay, if I would be here on position to 10% x 18 thousand eight hundred forty one, I would get roughly around 1800 visits or 1800 points score, whatever you want. And then if I will be first, my score is going to 3294. So it’s almost double. So it’s really worth to work hard on this to be on the position one for. So

The keywords and I stopped at building a metrics, which I created here. So TI, this is traffic index, TI Max is that SEO Utopia, if I would be in position 1 and then finally TI difference is the difference between where I am right now and beef and where I could be on the position one here, is that data you saw on the chart, click to rate,

And this is my spreadsheet. And before you will be scared at, this is too much information. I have a link and you can download, I don’t a spreadsheet for company called Pimlico plumber’s and I just pulled the data from such metric. So we can see you can play with this. Maybe you can even recreate this, or send me some questions. And if you sort this by search volume, like we were doing this long time ago, you will get different keywords, then if you would sort this by tid if so the potential and you can

That Nokia phones or o to refresh, not O2 as a brand or to refresh or compare mortgages cheap loans, and so on. And so on, that are cured, I should start working on.

And this is the link. You can take a photo if you want or you can write down its my sounding. The lesson dot U k– /. Snapshot if you go there there is a link to Excel file and you can download this and voila.

Now, when you optimizing for this keyword, where to focus on old old traditional SEO title tag modification at strong tax at alt tags. Make sure that your images file name is not a random characters or random numbers dot jpg. Make sure that this file name is also a keyword Rich additional paragraph of text if you see that. There is a text but not long enough or not covering topic good enough.

And and and write additional paragraph. Covered this topic better than your competitors headers modification. And think about this, I show you this key words and they’ve been attacking completely different part of the website. So if there would be one or two verticals which are too difficult to deal with like credit cards or car insurance, I may be a very successful with loans with mortgages and then I can go back to credit cards and coinsurance internal links with keyword Rich anchor,

Oops.

When to use this, when you starting working on organic performance. So when you getting into organization or when you have new client in your Agency for website with established history of ranking in serbs in search engine results Pages, this is not a tactic for a new website. When you quickly need to prove that SEO is worth like, you know, I’m always kind of rise in this kind of feeling that I need to prove that that

Was the right person. I don’t want to make anyone think that I failed. I don’t like to do excuses. That’s why I’m using this. When I quickly want to prove and conclusion, first, you dealing with keywords that already ranked you leveraging, quality traffic. Because if this keyword ranking already in top top 10, that means that Google is thinking that they are relevant. You utilizing multiple URLs and finally, you playing search engine game. So, Google is your game master, you just following Google as

Are you treating Google as your advisor?

Finally, you delivering a quick result. So that was tactic. One tactic to that’s link building through brand tracking. Raise your hand if you using any brand tracking software so far, okay, we have three people

So,

There is a couple of software’s which allowed you to track your brand mentions across the online environment. Doc Walker, brand24 fresh, web Explorer, and Google Alerts except of Google has never worked. But anyway,

And I’m using brand24 and a bit of story, like my name in surname. Yeah. So is Luke has a lesson for a difficult and only my mom. And my dad probably can spell this. Like, when I moved to London in 2007, from Poland, where I was born with Polish, the Polish name and checks are named. What could go wrong? I win zalenski zeleny, the Le Salon Z and so on and so on. I was even thinking to change this. I wanted to have like this a bit of sophisticated name and come on, son.

And I was thinking that I will change this to Archibald Smith, but then I realize that there was an Archibald Smith, he was living in 19th century. And this guy is number one in the key pedia. So I was like a triple. I won’t beat you. So I will stay with my new cars, a last name. Then, when I, when I discover brand24, I was thinking, like, hold on, let’s try and I put my name and surname, with Polish car, crazy characters, without with space without space with typos, I created this project end of

2013, and it’s still running. And what it give me every time when someone is mentioned by name and surname, I first assume that there is no other Lucas last name. If I would be John Smith, that would be different story, but Luca jealous nature is only one and I can react. I can contact, whoever mentioned me, especially, that’s our bloggers, and so on. And so on, if your brand is a common name, like cheap flights, you will have a problem holiday rentals. But if

If your brand is like Adidas or like you switch, for example, or like zoopla that’s the word, which is kind of reserved for that specific organization, that specific website and you can start tracking mention and then reactive. So, I created this project and I mean able to see lots of websites that mention predominantly Twitter, then I had some Facebook mentioned, but there was block, there were news. There were some videos on YouTube and others with being undefined.

And I could go and I could see addresses of the website that mentioned my name and one day. I was like, shocked. He like like this, this lovely lady because I saw this, I was like, what’s going on here? What is this language? And then our first first reaction was like us. Probably like a spambot and there’s like no sorry, maybe not. And I was like hold on. That must be a Bulgarian Russian that was Russian. I can’t speak Russian especially after a couple of shots because I

Have neighbors, who speak Russian, and I speak Polish, and polish and Russians quite similar, especially when you partying together, but I cannot read this, and you probably know why.

And I was like, hold on. What’s going on here? It’s my photo and the text. And what I notice, this guy’s found my article on LinkedIn copied this translated to Russian put on their website, but thanks God, they wrote look at, it has no of Latin. Alphabet here, and brand24 been able to catch this. So what I did here was a link to LinkedIn. I just approved. And I was like guys, thank you very much for mentioning me and so on and so on. I’m really, I’m really pleased, but if any chance could you change this

Ink from LinkedIn to my website. There is no, okay, no problem, no problem, my friend and I was like super cool. So then I started thinking, I said I started thinking that well any to every time there is a my mention like that without any link, I still can approach that person and say like Luke. Thank you very much for mentioning me that I’m really pleased. By the way I posted a link to your article on my Twitter and on my Facebook and by the way maybe we can

Can have a link to my website. No problem, 9 of 10 times, there is no problem. First of all, I’m approaching second of all, it’s a bit of psychological. The game, you saying thank you and you gave something you posted on Twitter and so on and so on. And you not doing this, like if you will put a link, then I will post on Twitter because that would be quite grey if not black. So yes. So this is brand24 talk Walker and so on tactic three Gap analysis.

What is gap analysis? This is a screenshot from semrush sem Rush. Anyone is using a CMS raise your hand. Whoa, nice good. SMH is great too, and this is one of the approach I have when I’m helping with a Content marketing. So here is a two domains, her two, domains Telegraph and independent. And I said, hey Samra, show me common keywords that these two guys are ranking in Google Chrome youkai and this is completely

Which data is Facebook, YouTube, daily May our goes porn and right move and that means nothing. But if I would, like to write something and now greetings to Craig about Scotland, which I really like, then I can say, hey, show me what Telegraph and independent our ranking together between position 1 and 1 and 10, and contain the keywords need to contain words, Scotland, and I have a bunch of results here election results, in Scotland, Scotland.

Independent pattern of the in Scotland and you can see positions and the search volume. And I know that these guys were writing about this, I can do something much more complicated than that. This is how I was working for you switch. Again, this is not confidential data, but I blurred this competitors because you don’t need to know that I’m talking about money supermarket. And so,

So I put competitors here and usage and I said, semrush show me this keywords that might three competitors simultaneously ranking in Google co uk and use, which is not. So first of all, if three of them is not a ranking, are sharing some keyword bucket that must be pretty relevant. That’s our no chance that these random bucket. And then if I will not do this and I will say and show me only this keyword which are ranking in top 20, then it’s even more relevant.

And what is? So this is very interesting. I saw this. So first, competitor, second competitor, third competitor. And you switch. And I could see, mortgage insurance, mortgage calculation, calculation, mortgage, calculate mortgage simulator. Do we see a pattern here? Of course, mortgage calculator, a very important to some people are saying that in this country looking at the property properties, like national sport. And I agree, I’m looking on the properties every

Couple of days in the bed, doing some calculation, people are typing mortgage calculator and we are not ranking and this is very important signal right now because I can go to my developers and say like guys, stop doing everything. What you doing? We doing mortgage calculator and I can go to my copywriters and say like guys stopped working. We are writing now about mortgages and mortgage calculators.

And I could Define keywords, which are more or less, okay grammatically. And then I could send this to my copywriter saying, like, listen, I want to have a Content, 800 words, H1 mortgage, calculator, H to calculate your mortgage meta description, title tag, and the URL Helix a URL. And the here, for example, link to my competitors and they can see what competitors are writing, how they write in tone of voice, and they sitting and the writing

Like this guy, I’m dealing with answer boxes. Anyone knows what his answer box or featured sympathizer hand. We have couple of people. Perfect perfect. So answer box has been probably invented in 2015, and I hired to my team in my previous company as guy, who was dealing only with this. So answer boxes are these little Snippets here which are appearing above organic results. And first,

Paul, when you appearing here, you still appearing in the traditional organic result. You switch. You switch same page and also you can add PPC and you will be securing three spots. So it’s like a win-win. What is a smart meter and that was the question and we were not ranking there. We had like this answer very fluffy way. Very flowery words like well generally, Frankly Speaking and I was like, no, no, no simple English, simple English because there is no way to Target.

No way to tell Google, hey, I want to be in answer box, except of giving Google a Content that AI of Google or whatever you want to call this will understand. And if you want to know what is the simple English? If you go with any popular keyword in Wikipedia, then you can go to English or language or simple. English is this kind of English that I could speak when I came to London. 2007. Yeah. So so Google probably is better to understand the

People simple language and we rewrite this paragraph and we wrote a smart meter is a new kind of gas and electricity meter that can digitally signed meter readings to your energy supplier. Simple honest direct and this paragraph was the first one on the page and when we added up this, that was 24 hours and we started to run under another example. What is dual fuel dual-fuel? Simply means and so on and so on and that was taken from the third paragraph. So we don’t see

You’re like consistency, Google may take second third or fourth paragraph.

How to get there. First of all, you need to run quite high with Organic results, predominantly position 1 to 5 and the keyword need to fire this answer box. When these two conditions are are fulfilled then you can go and start playing with headings with lists writing additional paragraphs adding divs trying to split content into paragraphs with two. Three sentences no more than that and so on and so on frequently featured simple

Have 350 characters. And then finally, obviously, image alt tag should have this keyword or question in the old pack. Now, keyword, that featured women answer box, may, may change weekly basis daily basis. You can be at morning, you may disappear at evening and next day, come back and so on and so on, Google is doing lots of tests and so on and so on, but elements to focus on its as always.

Page title meta, description page, URL, H1 H2, H3, H4 tags, and all these things, which are strict related to content. Now how to find keywords that fire answer box. So we can start typing like I wrote shortbread recipe and I had a shortbread recipe here, which been taken from food, BBC, food, web site or Champions League groups and you have a really sweet table which been taken directly from the BBC Sport.

Uk water rights again I guess. And we’ve been with you switch here, but there is more sophisticated method. Again, we going to sem rush and you can write your competitor or a big website like bbc.co.uk/topgear here in this table. You have featured simpad and they saying. O Point forty eight percent of all keywords. That semrush found BBC ranking in Google co uk is firing this answer box. Oh, Point 48.

Arson. That’s not much but if you will do quick math, 3 million 700 thousand keywords when I was doing the screenshot x o Point, forty eight percent is 17,000 760 keywords that fired this answer box and why it’s so important to be in answer box. We are doing some tests. Click to rate can be 50 or 60%? We remember this chart, I showed you in the beginning, on the position one that was 18%, okay? Sometimes you may have 20 25 for brand keywords, maybe 50.

But you may have this also for good generic keywords, you may get 50 60 percent, click to rate on generic keywords and you can measure this in the search console.

So answer boxes went to use when you’re dealing with established website. Again, this is not for a new website when you’re dealing with industry leader. So this is an answer for we are leader. We cannot grow and we cannot get more traffic. Well, maybe you can through answer boxes, conclusion, refreshing content is always good. Even if you will fail to get to answer box, you still doing great job. You refreshing content. You you updating content answering question that customer may ask you and

Answering questions that customers. May ask very often. This answer boxes. The featured snippet appearing on the question type queries. And again, you playing such engine game, delivering, significant impact on click to rate, finally is better to be in answer box than not to be sometimes people are saying, well, if my website will be there in Google, no one will click because they will read content straight away. Seriously, this is 350 characters, the only type of the website, I can think about that wouldn’t like, to be there with

Answers that’s our dictionaries. That’s why when I’m typing sometimes how to say this or that in English, there is this meta description which is always like going around. Well so you looking for that word that you want to translate to English and so on and so on and I need to click to see dancer

One of the last tactic, I think this is one before the last plugins who is using WordPress Riser hand. Perfect you, I hope you will find this very useful. Couple of plugins that I always recommend to use. The first one is one signal that Sardis, push notifications that you can send every time you posting something new on your block. So one signal plug-in is working close to one signal.com, you need to create their account and then you need to Simply add like a API ID and

And so on very straightforward, I have two charts here, zelazny UK my website, and then there is my baby second baby. After my daughter, social media dot PL, I’m very proud of this domain and every time someone is visiting there is like pop-up. Hey, would you like to subscribe? They can click. And then every time I will post new article, then they will get a notification when you install one signal. There is this little checkbox. And when you check this, then every time you posting, I’m sorry, this is in Polish.

But every time you posting something new, there is this nice pop up and that, increase your direct traffic, another thing W paco2 Linker, a very important plug-in to build a network of internal links. You can Define anchor, text, that consistently will be linking to other page, or even outside your website. So again, this is social media PL. And I said, every time there is what Twitter linked to this URL. Every time there is word, Facebook link to this URL. And every time on every article, I

Facebook. It will be consistently linked to a Facebook, FAQ, every time there is what Twitter, it will be linked to another article. And this is how it works, is on the Fly. And if I would not like to change this on some point, I can just go to the settings of this plug-in and change this.

Smoosh image compressor, if you care about page speed which is one of the most important factor you definitely want to make sure that your images are properly. Compressed this plug-in is commercial but the free version also will do a lots of and yeah.

Gonzalez. Another plug-in to make your website faster $20, but worth to check, and obviously the creme de La Creme out optimized. If you not using out optimized yet, when you will get home, please install this and just take three checkboxes. Optimize my HTML CSS and JavaScript

This is how it looks.

Then a little controversial, I think I agree with Mark because there is many examples that maybe you heard that something is not working and then it works for a 4-2-3-1, every 404 page, you redirecting on the homepage. Some people are saying that it may generate soft 404s. That this is not good and so on. And so, I’m using this with passion and generally never had any problems, but obviously, it’s good to install this activate and see in search console. If you have any errors, what this plug-in

He’s doing everywhere. That doesn’t exist will be redirected 312 your home page and when I bought social media dot PL, I bought this without content, so previous backlinks that in pointing to this website, where pointing to not existing articles instead of picking up every link. I just installed this and said, like, you know what, everything, all this link juice move to the homepage.

The last one depending on copy. If someone is highlighting a piece of text from your website, click right mouse. Copy that plug-in will add link where this content been taken from lots of big Publishers are using this to leverage organically, backing profile, and the last one Cloud anyone is using side ground

Good choice. So why am I talking about side ground General. I am a big fan of side gun, but if using wpengine, we still friends, you know, siteground WP engine and lots of this optimized forward pressure optimized for Magento optimized for specific CMS server. Provider, cloud provider are giving you lots of options that you may not be aware. And some time ago, siteground was a Giving Tree for level of caching,

And this level I was only possible if you added a special code and I discovered this and then I went to GT metrics and I don’t some tests the same website was loading in 8.4 seconds and then after activating for level of cache 3.1 and then the other website 8.7 and then optimized 3.4, you can see that the size and the re number of requests. Even their performance score were as bad as they’ve been before but the full

Full load time when massively up. They stop serving those but then they started giving options to move your website to PHP 7.2 and so on and so on. So why I’m saying about this is mainly when you will have some time, go to your settings of your server provider, see what is there to make your website performing better? And then wrap up and takeaways always, use fasting optimized, hosting provider can be WP engine can be even host.

Or maybe I was using long time ago, are you on WordPress test different plugins and make sure that you’re not testing too many plugins the same time because then you will not be able to identify which plug-in is working. I had this problem. I started installing lots of plugins with been optimizing pagespeed the same time and you know what? I get I get to 20 seconds bloat and it was still loading. So plug in started fighting between each other. Try to rank in answer boxes because it’s better to be there than not to be there.

And your competitor is a great source of data. If you have a market leader, you can follow is great because this market leader is showing you you the puff one day you will take over this market leader. But for now, you can see what they writing about. Where are the gaps? What keywords you should Target a minute targeting and so on and so on and I have three screenshot with results. So the first one this is the website which been performing kind of stays steadily. This is the same like Mark was showing search engine.

Such such metrics. And there was a couple of things that in blocking the performance. When I’ve been able to unblock, this mainly moving content from sub domain to the main domain. Then this visibility boosted, you would think that moving block from sub domain to the folder would only transfer this traffic into the main website, nothing like that. The subdomain had lots of links. When I move this to the to the folder, there was kind of synergy and it completely skyrocketed. This is

Other websites table over and over and over optimization. And so on, and so on. And finally, my baby social media dot p l. So, this is what I acquired this website before, the guy was, the guy was writing nice articles, but he didn’t care about the CEO. And I could see that there was lots of potential and I’ve been able to, to generate really nice traffic on this. So once again, thank you for having me. That’s it. And yeah, I hope to see you again and that was Lucas Celeste.

I hope you enjoyed that talk and learn some new things. We actually have another search nourish event, coming up later this month, actually on the 29th of August and here will be getting some more great talks, just like this one. So make sure you get your free ticket from search Norwich. Not all will also have all the links to any resources in the show notes at search dot with Candor, dot Co dot U k–. And as always, this will include his slides and video of the talk as well. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is a – Kumar and I hope you all have a great week.