Huge SEO Success Stories & What We Can Learn From Them – Marcus Tober

Bringing findings from Searchmetrics, one of the most important SEO platforms around, Marcus Tober took attendees through examples of successful SEO strategies from some of the biggest digital companies on the planet, including Tripadvisor, Nerdwallet, and Moneysavingexpert.

Overview

• Speaker: Marcus Tober
• Company: Searchmetrics
• Website: https://www.searchmetrics.com/
• Twitter: @marcustober
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcustober/
• Link to the slides: https://www.searchmetrics.com/news-and-events/brightonseo-april-2019/

What was the talk about?

Succeeding in SEO involves a lot of research and comparison, with leading sites having a lot to teach us. By looking closely at hit campaigns, it’s possible to glean valuable insight about what you should be targeting and how a modern SEO campaign should be run.

Marcus Tober telling us that simply having more content doesn\’t automatically mean better rankings. You can have 3,000 words per page, but, if they aren\’t dealing with the user\’s search intent, they will be outranked by content that does #content #ux #BrightonSEO pic.twitter.com/wUjjUUyEBI

— equator agency (@equatoragency) April 12, 2019

Fave quote

“SEOs are often in the space to find excuses. “Ah, we’re not ranking that well because of this and this and this…” This is actually your own mess. You can’t find any excuses. It\’s your mess, so you have to clean it up.”

Potential impact on the industry

Researching competitors isn’t about finding justifications for your relative failure. It’s about seeing how good your work needs to be, and rising to that standard. Optimise your performance, stay ahead of the curve, and infer the industry-specific ranking factors that offer the most value to you in particular. Fail to adapt, and your business will fail (no matter how big).

Key takeaways

• We need to stop getting distracted by DA, pages indexed, etc.
• UX is vital, and SEO is moving towards product management (UX, SEO, and business).
• First Meaningful Paint in Google Lighthouse is very telling.
• Internal links are hugely beneficial.
• Always minify CSS + JavaScript.