The 5% - High Impact SEO Initiatives Here is a Reforge presentation and slides describing the highest impact SEO initiatives. If you're planning your 2024 SEO roadmap, I recommend using this as a guide. Video: bit.ly/3NtAsKq Slides: bit.ly/SEO-5percent Reforge Course: https://lnkd.in/dfvJwyyU Question Please add comments for what you have seen be the highest impact SEO initiatives. The 5% * The 80/20 rule states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes * In SEO and much of growth marketing, it's actually more pronounced that this * In SEO, I typically see that 5% of work yields 95% of the impact * If you publish 100 pieces of content, it's common for 5 of them to yield most of the impact * If you launch 10-20 SEO initiatives, most of them will yield no impact, and 1 of them will yield the majority of the impact * There was a recent publication of "15 most common technical SEO issues," of which only 1 actually yields impact and the other 14 yield no impact * The other 95% of SEO work is comprised of many initiatives that are correct but low to zero impact SEO Death Spiral Most engagements with an SEO agency or manager follow this pattern 1. SEO agency delivers a technical audit and SEO strategy with a long list of tasks, bugs, and data - sometimes a 50+ page pdf of stuff 2. Company is excited about all the data and findings, implements 5-10 of these 3. SEO traffic does not change 4. Engineer working on SEO no longer believes in the strategy and avoids working on the rest of the tasks 5. Company asks SEO why traffic isn't going up, SEO agency says "you didn't launch everything in my 50 page pdf strategy document" 6. Engagement with SEO agency ends after 12 months, finds a new SEO agency 7. Repeat cycle Zero Impact Tasks Here are some examples of tasks that are true but low to zero impact. * Title tag is too long (no such thing) * Meta description too short / too short * Missing alt text * Redirect chain * Page has links to redirect * Pagespeed - this is controversial but true - source: https://lnkd.in/gH7Pg-fv Attached are examples of high impact 5% initiatives. Methodology The only way to know what yields impact is the scientific method. 1. Perform rigorous analysis of past data 2. Develop hypotheses of what causes impact 3. Test and validate hypotheses 4. Reproduce test multiple times
Rick Woyde
5mo
I’m my experience SEO is a “bunch of singles strung together to create a lot of runs”. Sorry for the baseball metaphor. I can’t point to any one Blog Post or piece of content that hit it out of the park nor can I point to any single technical or programmatic action that was a game changer. But over time these things done reasonably well do grow your business. The SEO agency you reference can help small companies who don’t know where to start.
Good stuff... SEOs often focus on tactics not strategy, where strategy provides the priorities of what and when to drive the biggest impact. And the impact can only be measured against the *client* goals, not the agency's goals. I've overheard a number of times agencies saying "I don't understand why the client is upset, we've grown their traffic 25%!", not realizing that 'vanity traffic' doesn't matter to a client as much as lead flow, purchase volume, or sign up (whatever their metrics of success are!) And amen to topics vs keywords... goes way back to an article I wrote 10 years ago where I noted intent can only be derived from queries / topics, not keywords :-) https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2013/01/08/keywords-are-dead-long-live-user-intent/?amp=1 Cheers
Crystal Ortiz
5mo
I disagree that the "zero impact tasks" actually have zero impact. But in general, yes, I agree that all these items on your list are part of the bigger, more impactful picture. And yes, often we see select pages perform the highest/best in SEO, while the rest don't perform as well. They are part of the larger SEO ecosystem and have purpose, but may not have as high of impressions/clicks, revenue attribution, etc.
Ryan Edwards
5mo
the 20/80 or 5/95 rule only applies to Content Driven -this tactic became the standard tactic around 2016, it ie easy to do. What you are recommending let's call it "Research Driven SEO" (I am in a naming mood today) is part of the solution but if done too much creates a narrowing problem and drives you off a cliff. This happened a lot when Paid Search became programmatic and everyone adopted a strictly research approach to accommodate planning and projecting. Literally drove people out of business. What has consistently worked throughout the years is a balanced approach of the four primary SEO strategies: - Research Driven - Content Driven - Content Distribution (hint - no one talks about this right now but it is driving huge results) - Behavior Driven SEO is like weight loss avoid the gimmick strategies and new in 2024 stuff and you will win the long race.
Nik V.
5mo
Hey Ethan Smith this is fucking awesome! I actually started to preach about making an important list of tasks when you handle new accounts, and clearly, this methodology is in place, so there is no mistake with this! I am completely agreeing with this. Just one thing came to my mind: overall initiatives can be impactful in this way, but the problem that we need to be transparent about if we apply to reverse engineering and find one small detail (can be tech SEO, can be robot.txt directive, can be JS problem or even - listen to this keyword spam or anchor text dilution) however those tasks are small impact can be huge. I would just exclude that part from this phenomenal analysis as I would say that every and each detail in SEO matters just on SEO expert or agency is to detect all potential problems and then based on importance scale (this can only be a consequence of experience and knowledge of SEO expert) we can give this value of 5 or 20% of the impact that they will get for the account. In the end, the conclusion is to do the data analysis and watch for every detail and then apply fixes based on the probability that you will get the right 20% of the tasks that will have the biggest impact!
Jeff Enslow
5mo
Technical setbacks are always the bane of seeing impact from execution.
Greg Bessoni
1mo
Lots of great stuff here Than - we tend to do keyword research a bit different by focusing on lucrative searches and doing exhausting competitor analysis on actual ranking factors - less about a topical map if you will and more about ROI. Nevertheless, You please check out our keyword discovery feature and see how it plans into your strategy.
Wayne Niemi
5mo
Well said. Never skip a solid foundation.
Sameer Malhotra
5mo
Very well explained. I am in middle of receiving tech audits and implementing them. But what worked for us really well is content optimization. After making those changes in terms of having relevant content has yielded more results.
UXR-informed Growth Marketing • In search for a long-term marketing position (GMM/PMM/MM) • Marketing Consultant and Advisor • Venture Scout • ex @500startups
5moProgrammatic "unique" content is an often misunderstood topic. In the recent months, I observed that a huge portion of professionals understand that as fully automatized content - use some AI generator and pump out hundreds of content pieces. This is dangerously close to breaking Google's spam policy - every content that is solely created to manipulate SERP positioning. There is a difference between booking.com creating programmatic pages for their search listenings, and a sales SaaS brand pumping out hundreds of unedited fullly automatized posts. To add one, I think there is link building missing. It seems like that has become a forgotten skill. SEO was, when I started in blackhat stuff in 08 lurking the warrior forum, and is predominantly about links. But for some reason that proactive outreach activity is rarely mentioned anywhere anymore.