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SEO Trends, Organic Growth & Personal Branding With Craig Campbell

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SEO Trends, Organic Growth & Personal Branding With Craig Campbell

The game of search has evolved into something far beyond just optimizing your site for Google alone.

Digital marketers are pressured to deliver results and are often conflicted about which marketing channels to prioritize or add into the mix.

“You don’t want to focus on one way of getting traffic.” That’s the advice of Craig Campbell: a well-known SEO professional from Glasgow and PageOptimizer Pro’s #1 most influential SEO of 2020.

We had a chance to catch up with the man behind the SEO YouTube channel that welcomes you with “knowledge bombs that will make you money” – to get his take on the latest SEO trends, digital marketing tools worth checking out, and agency life.

Read on and glean new insight as he shares bits of hard-earned wisdom from his 20 years of experience in the SEO industry.

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Past And Future SEO Trends

Being in the SEO business for two decades, how much has the SEO landscape changed since you first became interested?

Craig Campbell: “While it has changed a lot in some ways, we still have the core fundamentals of content and links being massively important: the same way they were at the very start of my journey in this industry.

Sure, things have evolved a great deal, and the quality of content, the relevance of links, and a lot of other nuances are in place. But the basics are still very similar.

What I do love is that these days, the learning curve is a lot easier, and we have clever people all over the world creating amazing tools to help us with competitor analysis and much more.

Whereas back then, it was a lot of trial and error, embracing the changes and utilizing the tools to make the job a lot easier has helped a lot over recent years.

But I think, for me, learning how to do it the hard way, using my own brain and common sense, and not having everything handed to me on a plate … it really did help me learn.

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It took longer, but I won’t lie – it was a lot of fun, too. So these days, I find SEO a lot easier as I once had to do it the hard way.”

What do you know about SEO now that you wish you’d known when you first started?

CC: “I’ve been asked this a lot. I’ve enjoyed the whole journey. And I’ve made countless mistakes, but they have gotten me to where I am today. However, one thing I struggled with at the start was building SOPs and training my internal team to do the tasks I wanted to do.

For many years, I struggled to do this properly, and it massively hampered my ability to scale and contributed a lot of unnecessary stress to my life. So, learning to delegate and building SOPs [standard operating procedures] much sooner would have been good.

Other things, like trying and testing for myself and trying to read between the lines when I watch a talk or presentation, are things I wish I had done. I was a little naive back in the day and used to take things at face value and would simply add some of what other people had said without doing my own testing.

Like many others at the start of their careers, I didn’t know how good I was, but there becomes this part of the journey where you undervalue yourself or allow your prices to be driven down, and before you know it, you have a whole heap of clients who are paying you very little and wasting all of your time, energy, and resources.

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So, I wish someone had sat me down and tried to give me that advice. But unfortunately, we [were] all in a similar position when I started in the early 2000s – no one knew what they were doing, let alone their actual value.”

Where do you expect the SEO industry is heading in the next three years?

CC: “This is a question that is really difficult to answer; I’ve seen and heard people say things over the years like ‘voice search‘ is the next big thing, and ‘let’s all double down on that.’

We have seen people talk about ‘AMP‘ and many other things, including AI content and how we will replace content writers with AI. I don’t think a lot of these things have worked out too well.

And without being a specialist in technology and how all of these things are being developed, I don’t see any major dramatic changes over the coming years.

It’s clear as day that Google is trying to force the organic search positions further down. However, organic traffic still converts really well.

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But 20 years into the industry, I still see many websites and SEOs still not doing the basics properly. So, I think people need to level up on their processes and SOPs and how they see their website and start to treat them as a real business. I think that’s where people will see gains over the next few years.

Nothing massively new in terms of major changes to the industry; we do evolve, Google does bring updates out, and of course, those cutting corners or not doing the basics right eventually get penalized in some way, shape, or form.”

Marketing Tools And Channels To Drive Traffic

Is there one SEO tool, in particular, that you’d recommend for local businesses?

CC: “One tool, for local, is really hard. I use a number of tools for different elements of local, like Local Falcon, for checking out my Google Business Profile’s ranking positions.

I really do think even now, many small businesses don’t realize how much traffic comes from those map positions.

For sure, loads of people do it in our SEO community, but overall that’s, in reality, a small part of the world. I see so many businesses out there who are not even ranking those, let alone local landing pages.”

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How about a particular marketing channel that can be beneficial for driving organic traffic?

CC: “This is something I’m often missing out on. Platforms, such as Reddit and Pinterest, are ones I hear people getting amazing traffic from, but I’ve yet to dive into them properly.

I recently bought a Pinterest course to try and work out what people are doing on there to get all this traffic. But over the years, I have built up a good email list, always capturing people’s data – a very old-school way of marketing, but email marketing works really well even now.

Social media, in general – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok – are the ones I’m on.

Now, it has been reported that TikTok gets more traffic than Google itself. Not sure how accurate that statement is, but what I do know is that there are a ton of people on that platform, and it would be stupid to ignore it due to the sheer volume of people on there.

As an SEO, I’m always looking at ways to drive good traffic to my website, whether that be paid, social, emails, or retargeting via pixels. I think you need to try and grab what you can out there. You don’t want to focus on one way of getting traffic.

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YouTube, over the last few years, has been an amazing platform for me personally. When COVID hit, I took the opportunity to do a lot more video content, and that has worked very well in my favor.”

Taking The Leap To Build A Personal Brand

What should a digital marketer know about being in an SEO agency from Day 1?

CC: “I think they should learn as much as they can from agency life, see it as their apprenticeship, and learn as much as they can on the processes, reporting, how to retain clients, and all of the amazing stuff that agencies do very well.

But they should also know that there is a lot of fluff on the agency side and a lot of client deliverables that don’t always mean they are good from an SEO perspective.

I’m not saying every agency does all the fluff or offers substandard work. But I do see a lot of people who come out of agencies and believe in all the fluff that they are trained to speak to clients about.

So, I think, in general, they should know that playing the actual SEO game against what we tell clients is very often a different game. So, they should know the difference, which will stand them in good stead when they leave agency life.

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I have a very good friend whom I’ve watched grow in recent years. Ryan Darani worked for a big digital agency, and for sure, he learned some amazing things there, which still work very well in his favor (mainly from an audit, reporting, and technical perspective).

However, there were areas of weakness and some bad agency mindset that had to be ironed out now that he is a freelancer. He has adapted very well and is doing amazing for someone who went out on his own just two years ago.

But overall, grab all you can from agency life, particularly those SOP processes, reporting – all the technical stuff you can, as this is often something many people who haven’t experienced agency life fall short on.”

What’s been your greatest digital marketing achievement to date?

CC: “The best achievement, other than some of the website flips and money gains I’ve made on certain projects – which, of course, no one really cares about – would be making the transition from unknown agency owner into becoming a personal brand.

A lot of people think that it is an easy task. The reality is, speaking at conferences, being on video, and offering value upfront is a lot of hard work. Not just traveling to conferences but speaking in front of an audience took me outside my comfort zone.

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Being sat on YouTube, doing podcasts, and all of the other stuff was something I had never done before; and even in my school days, I hated speaking in front of an audience.

Watching many others build up personal brands while I was building my agency was great to watch, and I always had a [voice] inside me saying, ‘You can do this! Why don’t you go and do it? Why let anyone else get up there and get the exposure?’

You have to believe in yourself and make sure that you get yourself up there. While many folks will not want to do that because they are shy, an introvert, or whatever, when speaking to other speakers, they all have similar fears or get nervous before speaking.

And I, for sure, had serious nerves at the start of my speaking career, and it was amazing to push through and overcome those fears, and that was a massive achievement for me.”

Key To SEO And Career Growth

Can you share any SEO growth hack that always works for you?

CC: “For many years, I’ve always seen traffic work very well when sent to a video, blog post, page, or whatever. Even if we take LinkedIn, for example.

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If I do a post on LinkedIn, and someone in my network likes it, comments on it, or shares it, that post is then seen by their friends, which turns into more engagement, and then their friends see it and hopefully comment and like the post.

When Google sees something that is widely engaged, it ranks it well. The same goes for any social media platform when you want a post to go viral.

So, tip 1: Offer value upfront. Don’t put out bland, boring content; people will simply not engage. Try and offer some value upfront.

Tip 2: So, when I do a blog post, I will then send it to my push notification subscribers. It then goes out on social media. If it’s a really good post, it will also go out to my mailing list. I then also might do some paid social ads.

This kickstarts the post, article, or whatever you are trying to put out there, but you must utilize your own audience first and use a sequence of events to get traffic onto your articles, which in turn, if done well, should give you the lift you need to make the post viral to some degree.”

What advice do you have for those just getting started in their SEO careers or launching their startup?

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CC: “I see so many people early in their careers or when they launch a start-up analyze every single small detail before taking action. I’d highly recommend simply taking action. Why over-analyze things? Keep it simple and use common sense.

A bit of effort never goes far wrong in this industry, and it is always good to learn from mistakes you make anyway. Just start taking action.

I’ve made more mistakes than most, but as long as I learn from them, then it’s always a good thing.

You will never ever hit your goals straight off the bat; whether it’s your SEO career or a project you’re working on, things can be tweaked as you go. No one in this game knows 100% of what they are doing, so don’t be fooled by anyone suggesting that they do.

Read between the lines and never be scared to test and add your own mix to things.”

Check out this SEJ Show episode with Loren Baker, where Campbell shared his insights on domain leasing, link-building best practices, and a lot more.

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Featured Image: Courtesy of Craig Campbell/SEO Glasgow



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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.

What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?” 

Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

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GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!



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