This Week In SEO 81
SEO Strategy, AMP, Video SEO, & More

Real Estate SEO Strategies Applicable to Many Niches

This is a really solid, thorough post on how to be really intentional about your SEO plan. Though it is focused on the real estate niche, this can be applied to many different niches.

For instance: this bit about keyword intention is super critical to getting value from the keywords you target and rank for:

Try and stay away from “luxury” keywords, I understand the appeal but there’s a handful of issues with them:

Luxury keywords are brutally competitive. The more competition, the longer and more expensive it is to rank your website.

The quality of those keywords aren’t that great. You get a lot of window shoppers who just want to look at pictures – it’s not the best traffic.

It’s rare that someone will buy a $10m home from an internet search.

We’ve previously written about this: choosing keywords with buying intent.

I have seen people be very unenthusiastic about targeting a very clear buying-keyword with 500 searches/mo, compared to a very generic, not-at-all buying-intent keyword with 15,000 search/mo.

Like the wise philosopher STOCK PHOTOS once illustrated:

Follow the money!

Is Google AMP Worth It?

http://www.stateofdigital.com/google-amp-case-studies/

There’s been a lot of back and forth about whether or not Google’s AMP feature helps or hurts publishers.

Seems to me like it’s mostly early and they are still fine-tuning everything to try and take care of all the content producers…

Okay, but seriously this post contains three case studies focusing on how being listed in AMP has or has not helped with organic traffic.

News site case study results:

The vast bulk of a news publisher’s search traffic comes from Google News. You can argue for days about whether AMP yields more or less ad revenue than non-AMP, but without traffic your ad slots will go un-monetised. So, if you are a news website AMP is not optional. Failing to adopt AMP means your competitors will scoop up all the mobile traffic and you are left with the scraps.

Cool. Here’s the results for a lead gen site:

Implementing AMP on this page has resulted in 27% more traffic from mobile devices. But for a lead gen website, traffic is just part of the equation. The next question is, does the added AMP traffic result in more conversions?

This lead gen site saw 18% improvement in goal conversions from organic search after they implemented AMP on their key landing pages. The AMP traffic doesn’t simply bounce, it really engages with the site and contributes to improved business outcomes.

And finally, and ecommerce site:

The site saw a strong uplift in traffic from mobile devices after they implemented AMP, but this also corresponded to lower engagement metrics: a higher bounce rate and less time spent on the site.

Interestingly enough, the ecommerce conversion rate improved after AMP was implemented, but the average order value dropped significantly.

An Introduction to Video SEO

https://www.portent.com/blog/seo/video-seo-2017-best-practice-guide.htm

I don’t do a lot of video SEO — or any. I’m not super experienced and it doesn’t come up a lot in the scope of our link building service.

Don’t be sad, though! Other people are good at video SEO. In this post, the Portent team give a nice intro and overview of video SEO.

Not a post that lends itself to being summarized–go check out the whole thing (if video SEO would be helpful).

Keyword-Targeting Decisions

https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/keyword-targeting-seo-related-topics/

This dilemma, I am sure, has come across your desk at least once. Which keywords go together, which should you write completely different articles for?

This is a good rule-of-thumb for creating content you’re trying to rank well:

The key is to write about the topic, not just a specific phrase. When you cover a topic more broadly, you’re naturally targeting many of the phrases related to that topic. If successful, the page will rank for many phrases, all related to your topic.

Get Your …Sitemap Together

https://moz.com/blog/xml-sitemaps

Basic premise of this article: Sitemaps are important, but you’re probably not using them correctly.

Google engineers certainly understand that every site has a certain number of “utility” pages that are useful to users, but not necessarily content-type pages that should be landing pages from search: pages for sharing content with others, replying to comments, logging in, retrieving a lost password, etc.

If your XML sitemap includes all of these pages, what are you communicating to Google? More or less that you have no clue as to what constitutes good content on your site and what doesn’t.

It’s good to understand the WHY of sitemaps, so you can implement them properly. They aren’t just an item to be checked on your “Is My Site SEO’d” checklist.

This article is a good overview of the how and the why so you can get your site zipped up nice and tight, in an easy-to-read package for Googlebot.

This a a great beginner/refresh post, so definitely give it a look.

Rapid-Fire SEO Insights

The winner of the WIX SEO competition explains his strategy:

– exact match domains are effective
– multi-language site (increased queries/clicks)
– creating buzz (and evangelists) through social media
– differentiating from competitors by using a newGTLD (.tech)

HTTP/2 isn’t the future–it’s the present:

HTTP/2 can be used starting today on your web applications and can only be good (for your users mostly) but also for your application on multiple things: performances, SEO, encryption.

^ very app-focused, tech-heavy articles, but good to keep on eye on these things.

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Sean Markey

Obsessive consumer of SEO news and strategies, writes the This Week in SEO column. Loves playing drums and writing fiction. Bets you he can throw a football over them mountains.