Copy The 3 Pillars of £50m+ SEO Campaigns

By the end of this video, you're going to know which of the three pillars of SEO to prioritize over the next year to put your time and budget into. And this is relevant whether you're using an in-house SEO team or an agency. And you'll even be able to use some of the stuff we're talking about today to put them to the [music] test. And as a little ninja bonus, we're going to be sharing a tool with you that makes one of these pillars about 10 times easier, if not more. But where has this information come from? And why should you listen to us? Well, over the last 10 years, we've worked with countless national and international enterprise brands, including those like The Ordinary, who, by the way, we just won a global search award for for best Canadian SEO campaign. We did also win another four global search awards, but who is counting? Me, I'm counting. And over that time, we found that these three pillars are the things that we consistently work on for clients. So, what we're going to do in today's video is we're going to share exactly what we do in each of these areas so that you can take these lessons and deploy them in your business. Whether you're a market leader looking to cement your dominant position or you're a challenger looking to chip away at those market leaders, there are times when today's video might feel a little technical, but stick with it because every time we talk about something technical, we're going to give you a simple way to get you like 80% of the way there. Pillar number one is technical SEO. Yep, we're going straight in. One of the most important areas of technical SEO is site performance and loading speed. Google has been relentless in forcing website owners and marketers to improve the loading speeds of their websites over the last decade plus. That's because Google has the data. It can see how much more people prefer fast loading websites. And that's why page load speed is such an important ranking factor. And once you get to enterprise level, optimizing for page speed can sometimes be the difference between dominating the search results and not as we'll see. Now, of course, you're going to work on page speed anyway because it impacts your conversion rate so much. Check out this data from Cloudflare where it shows as page load time increases, conversion rate drops quite significantly. And there are well publicized case studies like here Walmart found that every 1second improvement in page load time yielded a 2% increase in conversions. I don't need to tell you that at a company of Walmart size and scale that is absolutely huge. But guess what? If it applies to Walmart, it definitely applies to you as well. Now, as we said before that as your site gets larger for enterprise businesses like Signas that might have 18,000 pages, improving page load speed across all of this can be really complex. So, what do you need to do? Well, Google gives us page speed insights, which is basically Google's view of our website speed. I've just stuck in Rocket Mortgages website here and you can see that on the whole Google is pretty impressed by the speed of this site. These core web vital section up the top here which we're going to come back to in just a minute. The Rocket Mortgage site is passing it. We go down here we've got some some performance issues and to be fair it's very rare to see a site that's smashing it out the park in every area. The Rocket Mortgage site on the whole ranks really well but even this isn't perfect. And Page Speed Insights even gives you specific recommendations that you can follow. Now, a lot of marketers will look at this and go, "I don't even understand what those words are individually, let alone when they're linked together. I don't know what to do with this." Well, luckily, there are a bunch of website speed tools out there. One of our favorites for the sites that we build on WordPress is WP Rocket because it handles a lot of this stuff straight out of the box. I'd say probably 80% of the page speed stuff, it just kind of takes care of automatically, even if you're not an expert. So, we actually love WP Rocket so much, we've partnered with them on this video. You can get a trial of WP Rocket for your WordPress site at exposure.ninja/wprocket. Now, let's take a look at exactly how this works on a website. So, here we are on the Pyramid Eco website. Pyramid Eco being one of the companies that we own, and we've got the WP Rocket plugin installed. Now, WP Rocket does things like page caching [music] and preloading. There's also browser caching, and it does all this right out of the box, meaning almost instant page load speeds for your users. Now, you don't need to be technical to set this up. Literally, you install the plugin and it does most of this straight away for you. You also get gzip compression, which compresses files before they're sent to the browser, reducing their file size even more for faster page loads. And if you're using a content delivery network or CDN, something like CloudFare, WP Rocket works with that to give you even better speeds. Plus, you get assistance with your JavaScript rendering, another technical but essential part of Google's ability to rank your website. Now, if you don't understand any of what I just said, that's okay. And that's kind of the point. A plug-in like WP Rocket takes care of 80% of this stuff just straight out of the box for you. And as you can see, it also really helps with core web vitals. I've just stuck the Pyramid Eco website in here and we've got some really tasty scores. Why is that important? Well, there's a strong correlation between good scores in core web vitals and better ranking in Google search results. So, what is core web vitals? Well, there's basically three metrics. These are Google definfined metrics that seek to I guess understand a user's experience on your website. Now you know Google has always been terrible at naming stuff and to be honest this is a masterclass in Google naming. Core web vitals includes things like first content full paint, largest content full paint, total blocking time, cumulative layout shift which is how much your web pages layout moves as someone's scrolling down the page, and something called speed index. And what they're trying to do is understand when someone loads your page, do they immediately see some content or do they have to wait ages to see anything? Then when they're scrolling down the page, are things sort of jumping around and moving because they're still loading? And then when they're about to click a button, does it move because something's just loaded on top of it? So each of these areas has a color-coded score. Green is good, orange is needs improvement, and red is poor. You can also measure your own core web vitals in a bit more detail inside Google Search Console. For example, here we're looking at a site which has 159 pages that need improvement. And you can see individual pages here. And then if you want, you can go in and see individual pages and how they're scoring. It's not uncommon to find even massive websites that are doing pretty poorly with core web vitals. Here I am on eight website. Now this find a doctor page has according to our friends over at Seamrush about 14 12,000 visits per month [music] in the US alone. And yet on page speed insights, this page actually fails. So this is one of those areas that a lot of marketers don't really focus on, but actually if they improve this area, even if they're already doing reasonably well, they could do a lot better. Now, of course, using a plug-in like WP Rocket to speed up your website, doesn't just help with your core web vital score. If you use something like this that sort of out of the box makes for fast asset delivery, i.e. It can deliver the content, the files on your web pages to users more quickly. You get better rankings. You get more time on site. You get an improved conversion rate. Even better Google ad quality score, which can help your ads rank better or reduce your cost per click. Now, of course, there are a ton of other areas of technical SEO. Page speed is just one of them. Some of the things that we've covered in previous videos include crawl efficiency, information architecture, schema markup, mobile friendliness, HTTPS security, canonicalization, href lang management for international sites, site maps and redirects. Basically, a lot of the stuff that when you stick it into a Semrush site audit, it gives you those orange and red bars. Now, technical SEO is a huge area and you can spend a lot of time and energy fixing all of this stuff. As you can tell, one of the most important things to think about is how you measure the improvements that you're making. Now, not to make this too much of a love fest, but this is another reason that we love WP Rocket. They've got this Rocket Insight section at the front of the plug-in, which allows you to see how your website is doing, and you can retest to see how each individual page is scoring after you make changes. So, what you can do is you can go into WP Rocket, make a few changes, and then retest each page to see how those changes have impacted your score. It's a really fast feedback loop that allows you to identify what's working for your website and this saves you having to go to different tools, wait for stuff to load as well. This is really quick to retest. These Rocket Insights metrics are powered by GT Metrics and you can see more data. If you click on see report, then it takes you to the GTMetrics page, which shows you a more detailed breakdown of exactly how that score has been arrived at. Now, having some sort of dashboard like this is really useful because it gives you early detection of any performance drops. If you want to dig into the data and get some more actionable insights, you absolutely can. This can help you identify the top issues that are leading to you not getting the score that you want. There's this really useful visualization of your pages load times and the different components that make that up in this waterfall. And of course, because it wouldn't be an Exposure Ninja video without talking about the importance of AI search optimization, all of this stuff is just as important for the new era of AI search as well as regular traditional Google because all of these AI tools are doing web search and they're navigating on websites. So speed is just as important whether we're optimizing for a human or an AI. Okay, second pillar, on-site SEO. Basically, this is about the content on your website. Now you know that you need to have good quality website content. Obviously the complication for a lot of 50 million plus brands is actually unifying their team around a common purpose. Topically relevant content that helps move users down the funnel towards purchase. That's a lot easier said than done. So what does it mean and how do you do it? Well, gone of the days where brands would just publish vast amounts of information on anything that might be tangentially relevant to their business. What on-site content is really about now is educating consumers on the areas, the products and services that you sell. That's a great way to establish your expertise whilst also building in your value propositions into the content that people are reading, eventually pushing them towards some sort of call to action to take the next step with you. And this is exactly what Rocket Mortgage does. They've got this amazing learn section of their website which is devoted to teaching people all about the various aspects of mortgages to help educate them whilst also subtly dropping in a few rocket mortgage calls to action along the way. If it works for people, by the way, it also works for AI tools after some content optimization tweaks. Now, of course, we need to find that balance between what Google wants to serve its users, what AI tools want to take their information back to their users, and what the users themselves actually want. If per chance a human happens to fall upon your website, how do you do that? Well, topic relevance is really important. Creating about the stuff that you actually know about and that is super relevant to your business and demonstrates your expertise. Then cross-link between different topics to make sure that your users can find their way around your site and build up that picture of this is a brand that really knows it stuff. Another element of on-site content really important to consider to bridge all of these gaps is EAT at scale. This is about demonstrating experience, expertise, authoritiveness, and trust. I'm going to show you an example on a much smaller business uh scale, but this works just as well for businesses of any size. Our client age care bathrooms we produce a lot of content for. This is really helpful. It's good at demonstrating the experience that the business has talking about different cases, studies, and examples. It also establishes Sam, the writer and the sort of face of the business as a real authority. So that when both Google and AI tools and humans look at this content and look into SAM, they go, "Okay, right, this is clearly an expert on this topic." There's a bunch of stuff that you can do off-site to back this up. For example, we did a yuggov study with age care, which got picked up on sites like Yahoo Finance. Again, all of this really helps to establish age care and SAM as a real authority on this topic. Also important to think about content hierarchy. What does this mean? This is about how you structure your content to make sure you've got clear headings, subheadings, things like lists, FAQs, and schema as well. We work with Zoo Case. We've helped them dominate in AI search, increasing their traffic from AI by 243%, which includes creating and boosting this type of hierarchy optimized content. It's part of the reason why when you ask ChatGBT or Google's AI mode for the best iPad case, Zugu consistently comes out on top. Another area of on-site optimization that's really important to focus on is internal linking and ideally having a strategy for this rather than just doing it ad hoc. Now, you may have heard us talking about topic clusters before where we'll have certain themes of content that we publish on a website. There'll be a pillar piece of content and then there'll be lots of related pieces around different topics around that pillar which are all internally linking to that pillar piece. It's one of the things that we help DSLD do. come up with a structure for massive amounts of content on their website. And one of the reasons that we just won a global search award for [music] best US SEO campaign for this client. Okay. Pillar number three, off-site SEO. For enterprise brands, off-site SEO isn't just link building. Increasingly, particularly for AI search, this is about brand building. This is about establishing what you want to be known for and then making sure you're seen for that thing across the internet. So, how do you do that? Well, digital PR is one really powerful way. Let's go back to this age care example. So, by getting them featured on sites like Yahoo Finance and other sites across the internet talking about the topics that they are most powerful for, they begin to establish in the minds of these AI tools and search engines what they want to be known for and their area of specialtity. This was quite an ambient concept with traditional search and we didn't really have any proof that it was having an impact. But with AI search, it's much more transparent because when you ask an AI, what is this business known for? Or can you recommend me a business which is really good at this? Whether you ask that question directly or whether that comes out at the end of a long conversation, the AI is looking at a much broader range of content on the internet to answer that question. It's scanning through sometimes dozens or even hundreds of pages to give you an answer and say, "Age Care Bathrooms is a real consumer champion for the over 50s." it understands this audience. We've been doing this for years to influence the human perception of our clients. There's an example video which will be linked somewhere here where we helped a SAS business to a $33 million exit by taking this sort of approach. But that was like 6 7 years ago before any of this was being implemented by AI tools. That's because establishing brands and establishing the people who lead those brands [music] as thought leaders in a topic has always worked. But now we have AI tools which can also do that level of research and analysis. But this time in a split second, it has become even more important for brands to think about digital PR. Getting them out there and getting a consistent message seen across different authority sites on the internet. Now, sometimes what your brand is known for isn't actually what you want to be known for. So for many years, Exposure Ninja worked with really small businesses, literally one woman and one man bands. But over the last 5 years, we've actually picked up a lot of much larger clients instead. Still, when you ask the AI tools about Exposure Ninja, it would often say, "Oh, yes, Exposure is an agency for tiny brands and small startups." So, we needed to update our reputation online so that the AI tools would know when to recommend us and the types of conversations to seed our brand in. That meant doing lots of outreach online, getting lots of coverage for topics other than small business, and updating the content on our website. All of these signals when combined mean that when you ask Google Now, who are Exposure Ninja? We're an agency that helps medium, large, and enterprise businesses, which is much more relevant to our current positioning. But a year ago, it would have said Exposure Ninja is an agency for small businesses because that's what a lot of the historic content said about us. One of the side effects of all of this is that off-site SEO is now more than ever about the quality of the recommendations, the features, and the mentions that you're getting. The just sheer quantity. The days of buying, you know, 10,000 links on tiny little websites are over. I mean, they've been over for a long time, but they're very over now because these AI tools just simply aren't looking at those types of signals. Instead, increasingly, you'll see AI tools prioritize high reputation third-party websites when answering questions about your brand. Going back to this Zugu case example on Google's AI mode, where's this recommendation coming from? Yes, there is reference to the Zugu website in here, but most of the content, most of the recommendation signals are actually coming from high authority third-party websites. So, that's really where you want to be focusing on. That doesn't mean you have to just go for top tier publications. You can go for high authority sites in your niche or in your industry. But it does mean that getting a thousand links from spammy mumblog.biz in the comment section probably isn't going to move the needle with your AI search optimization strategy. So there you have it, the three pillars of a modern SEO strategy. And all of this is relevant for AI search optimization. Of course, there are additional bits that you need to work on specifically for AI search optimization, but all of the stuff that we've covered today in these three pillars helps contribute to a really good traditional search visibility as well as getting you an excellent start with AI search. Don't forget, if you want to check out WP Rocket, you can do so at exposure.ninja/wprocket. It handles the majority of that first pillar for