On 19th of April, Marc Phillips, Director of SearchForecast overviewed the working methodology of how ZScaler.com was optimized in a webinar. ZScaler is a unicorn technology company based in Silicon Valley having raised over $150M at a $1+ billion valuation. In 2012/2013, SearchForecast were engaged by ZScaler for 18 months to provide search engine optimization and content updates.
The original recording was corrupted on GoToWebinar.com platform. The below webinar recorded was recorded today.
Our team at SearchForecast have spent hours each day over the past 20 years crunching quantitative data, looking for trend lines, inflection points or identifying patterns to uncover risk. Yet at a recent trip to the local stationary store in Menlo Park in the hub of Silicon Valley, the shop assistant said that 3 people buy the yellow smiley face ‘Emergency Affirmation’ for every one blue ‘Fail’ button.
Therein lies the underlying trend line in the world of seemingly endless bad news, optimists are 3x the pessimists.
It doesn’t happen often and it’s unfortunate yet high bounce rates on Pay Per Click advertising can impact on content optimization. That is, web pages optimized for keywords can be negatively impacted in organic search engine results listings if there is HIGH bounce rates from pay per click advertising.
We have experienced this on several websites in 2015. It occurs when bounce rates on Google Adwords is 95% and above. To prevent SEO and content optimization efforts being adversely affected by high bounce rates on landing pages used in Adwords, follow these best practices:
1. Do not use the home page of the website as the landing page for Google Adwords
2. Ensure Page Speed is above 80/100 for the entire website
3. Avoid excessive code errors in HTML
Building a business in Silicon Valley is exciting. SearchForecast knows the start up company go to market as we are part of the acceleration of many VC backed companies which have doubled since 2009 to 2014 according to the leading venture capital firm Andressen Horowitz’s recent presentation.
I’ve spent a lot of time around 425 University Avenue, Palo Alto here in Silicon Valley. Enroute to Cafe Venetia for coffee last week, I was approached by a BeamPro outside there store and filmed this video. (Click this link to play video of BeamPro in Palo Alto). A slightly better use case can be watched here on how BeamPro has removed conference calls from this company.
Having lunch last year at La Joya in Palo Alto on University Avenue, a slightly unshaven Sergey Brin and wife were lunching. He was sitting in a restaurant in the heart of Silicon Valley – the only person wearing Google Glass. They cost $1500 to $2000 to buy a pair. That was the problem why no-one bought them. That and you looked pretty silly in them.
As of this week, Google will start adding the words “mobile friendly” to the text in their search results pages on mobile devices. I’ve attached the screen shot they published of how they’ll do this. The reason SearchForecast is being so insistent with clients to highly prioritizing their image sizings, link spacing, text font readable with no zooming, view port best practice and resizing/reordering designs is because most of our corporate lcient websites have 35% to 50% of users coming from a mobile device.
We want our clients to avoid a slump in traffic as Google will start dropping sites that aren’t friendly and mobile compliant. I’ve seen them do this before and they are ruthless. You’ve been warned.
Not that there was ever really any way to optimize a Facebook page for higher rankings as you would a website on search engines like Google, Bing, etc yet its now official – Facebook has killed their version of content optimization. Thank goodness, now clients can stop pretending Facebook matters when this social channel never did drive any meaningful referral traffic to their websites. And if you don’t believe me, look inside your Google Analytics > Acquisitions > Referral > Channel > Social and see how little users as a percentage of overall traffic social media drives!
Facebook kills SEO
Social networks have always baffled me. I have 4 accounts on Facebook. One I have 300 friends I’ve never met. Facebook is real but the vertical ones, particularly those which are private social networks, are an oxymoron? I chuckled to myself at this bag cover on my flight to Los Angeles this morning. I know a tonne of lawyers and they don’t like to hang out with each other generally.
Oh, I’m in LA today as I was invited down to present to a room of lawyers at a lawfirm !!
Social Network Oxymoron
SSL Updates by Google are not about SEO. I believe Google are pushing for sites to implement a Secure Socket Layer Certification from a security perspective to protect hackers who use their browsers (Chrome) to hack sites.
The recent SSL announcement is a long bow drawn by SEO agencies to suggest their is another algorithm change. It really isn’t. We have worked with top clients like Skybox Security, ThreatMetrix, ZScaler to name a few. We’re all aware of the massive rise in identity theft and efforts to protect online consumers. With Google Wallet, Google Apps, etc, – Google want a more secure web period and their motivations are not about giving sites more traffic if they include an SSL, rather it’s to protect users data from being hacked.