Thread by @dunkhippo33

Some takeaways from @bernardjhuang 's SEO online event.

1) How to know if you should even do SEO?

You are 1 of 2 companies.

A) You are like a TripAdvisor (a content site) where SEO is the only thing that will allow you to win if you can do SEO better than your peers.

2) OR

B) You get "decent" CTR on Google AdWords (if you had the organic equivalent would it be worth it to spend time on?)

And you are post PM fit.

3) Even @bernardjhuang 's co is an SEO tool! And he is post PM fit. But working on SEO for his own company @Clearscope is not even top priority.

Other cust acq channels are higher priority.

4) GOOG has gotten smart & nuanced. Does your topic require recency, location, education?

E.g. if you are writing news, when you publish matters a LOT.

if your content is location based, you need to be local.

if it's on how-to content, the medium (such as video) matters.

5) Click-through-rate matters a LOT. Google will test your webpage for a particular set of keywords and seed your page at a certain rank.

If you do well relative to your rank, you will move up. Or opposite, you'll move down.

6) If your website is already credible, you will be seeded in a better position to start.

But it's possible to be a nobody and move up if you can keep CTRs up.

7) However, GOOG is smart about ppl trying to game the system.

Typing "click here" in the title is not going to help. They look for relevancy of your whole content as part of this.

You may be penalized if Google thinks you are gaming the system.

8) Google even looks to see if a user repeated the search. Ultimately, if your site didn't deliver what ppl are looking for, that will affect your rankings.

9) Don't focus on keywords. The old way of doing SEO was to try to game particular keywords.

You want to dominate on topics.

If you rank high for a topic, Google will be smart enough to rank you high for very related topics or auto-complete variations of that topic

10) You can use SerpAPI to see how you rank in different locations and can test your searches there.

11) Variations on the English language doesn't matter. E.g. American English vs British English.

SEO tools incl as his own @Clearscope may recommend a particular spelling but in the end, the variation of spelling doesn't have a strong effect

12) Ok - there was so much packed into this talk, I can't even tweet it all.

here is his presentation: bit.ly/seo-hustle

But, the video is WAY MORE COMPREHENSIVE! And we will be putting the recording out there soon.