Marketing Speak 99. Making Data-Driven SEO Decisions with Bill Hunt
Today, I’m joined by the remarkable Bill Hunt, the President of Back Azimuth Consulting and a true expert in SEO. He consults with high profile companies and has his own suite of tools. He also wrote the book on Search Engine Marketing. He shares advanced SEO strategies and best practices for site migration, increasing search yield, finding more of those “not provided” keywords, and advanced search operators. If this sounds like your cup of tea, you’ll enjoy this episode as much as I did.
Find Out More About Bill Here:
Back-azimuth.com Hrefbuilder.com Whunt.com @billhunt on Twitter Bill Hunt on LinkedIn
In This Episode:- [01:07] - Stephan starts off by geeking out a bit on SEO, pointing out that there’s too much emphasis on the fundamentals.
- [01:46] - In terms of data mining, how do you make data-driven decisions that are based on more than a hunch? In his answer, Bill talks about some of the things he does to offer value to people.
- [07:28] - Stephan goes back to recap a few of the things Bill has been saying to ensure they’re clear for listeners. Bill then clarifies and elaborates on some of his earlier information.
- [10:04] - One of the amazing things that Google is willing to give users is impressions. Bill then describes how to do what he calls the “poor man’s yield analysis.”
- [12:45] - Bill discusses the importance of a statement answering the question “why us?” This should be shorter than an elevator speech.
- [15:39] - What are some of Bill’s other favorite search tips and tricks to find out what’s going on with your SEO?
- [17:47] - Stephan asks Bill a little bit of a trick question about how you tease out the HTTPS URLs. In his answer, Bill talks about canonicals.
- [21:48] - What do you do when your canonical is not getting obeyed?
- [23:32] - Stephan talks about what he finds when he audits clients’ websites. He then uses the example of a specific client, and Bill offers his advice for the situation Stephan described.
- [26:14] - Stephan points out that XML sitemaps are supposed to only have canonical URLs in them.
- [30:56] - What should listeners pay attention to with regards to HTTP migrations?
- [34:12] - Bill discusses chains of redirects and what he would recommend that listeners do about them.
- [37:17] - We learn about the benefits of using a 410 instead of a 404, with Bill describing the intended uses of each.
- [41:36] - If you want to reduce the amount of wasted crawl equity or crawl budget, would Bill recommend disallows, noindexes, or 410s to carve pages out of the search results? He likes to do a plain noindex nofollow, he explains.
- [44:35] - Stephan describes a common approach that he thinks is a huge mistake, which is to disallow these pages. He and Bill then discuss this.
- [48:39] - Bill discusses whether link sculpting is still possible.
- [51:30] - We learn about the benefits of being able to have a cascading drop-down and the impact of hamburger menus.
- [55:04] - We move into the lightning round. What’s Bill’s take on iframes from an SEO standpoint?
- [55:27] - What’s Bill’s take on 302s versus 301s?
- [56:58] - Is there a tool to track how many clicks away your pages are from an outside link source?
- [57:53] - Are there any URL best practices that Bill thinks are no longer relevant or no longer true?
- [59:24] - Bill elaborates on what he meant by saying that there’s no need to localize URLs.
- [60:58] - Does Bill have any favorite tools for log analysis and looking at what spiders (like Googlebot) are doing?
- [62:38] - Bill talks about where listeners can find him.
Back-azimuth.com Hrefbuilder.com Whunt.com @billhunt on Twitter Bill Hunt on LinkedIn Search Engine Marketing, Inc Data mining Marcus Tober “(not provided)” on Google Analytics Google Search Console Canonicals UTM codes XML sitemaps Redirect chains Tag pages Schema Breadcrumbs Link sculpting Hamburger menus HTML element Christoph Cemper on Marketing Speak LinkResearchTools 302s versus 301s Googlebot Sawmill Botify