Ross’s session was about how to compete with major brands organically.
Research that his team conducted through a twitter poll found that agencies took over a week to do an technical audit of site as small as 1000 pages. While implementation of changes off the back of an audit could take as long as a month.
His solution was to make changes faster.
He found buying every member of his team headphones increased productivity and the amount of slack chatter went down across the team.
Tools
It’s important to monitor for mistakes so there are no surprises, Little Warden is a recommended tool that sends emails if domain variants and cannonicals for instance are not correct.
Content king is another recommended tool that crawls a site daily to check and see what’s changing and will catch mistakes.
Timing
Ross also suggested fixing issues like broken links and pages immediately when you find them and not waiting to conduct a full audit and find every issue with the site before fixing any of them – there is no time like the present.
Orphans & weak pages
Orphan pages are those with no links to them, Ross categorises orphan pages with weak pages and highlighted these as weak points in a site that drags the whole site down. Identify all site pages with no links and target them specifically to improve.
Content gaps
Content gap is often a topic that agencies try to be too granular with, focus on the keywords that make the most money and identify any gaps around these important keywords that need to be covered.
Link Strategy
Ross plots link opportunities on an algorithm risk vs flop risk, whereby PBNs are a high algorithm risk if Google identifies them there are issues compared to high flop risk associated with regional and nationals press. With link opportunity, they target a 70% high flop/ low algorithm risks such as nationals, 20% neutral which niche publications fall more into and 10% high algorithm risk and low flop risk.
Chasing for links
The strategy is to get a brand mention in the content that you are submitting, then once published rather than chasing the journalist chase the I.T manager as they will be responsible for linking out and changing this on a site not a journalist, Ross has had recent success with this for BBC.