This week, Distilled's Will Critchlow and I held our 4th "presentation-off" battle against one another as the final session of the London PRO SEO Training Seminar. We both put plenty of blood, sweat and tears into our decks and I think it shows. Enjoy:
A few notes from Rand's Talk:
- The Excel spreadsheet that I invite you to build off, expand and use to help predict the ranking elements for a given SERP can be downloaded here.
- The full slide deck from my talk can be found online at Slideshare here.
- While this process isn't foolproof, it allows any SEO to form their own opinions about the metrics and components that matter, then apply math to get a "best fit" based on that data. This methodology isn't foolproof, but for experienced SEOs who are deep in the analysis field and need to provide a roadmap of how to "beat the competition" and "earn top rankings" for particular keyphrases, it should be very effective.
- Yes - we are looking into building a tool inside the PRO Web App to do this for you (though it's likely a few months off at best)
- In my talk, I referenced Hubspot's growth. Dharmesh Shah wrote a blog post about it here, and you can find their Inbound Marketing Book here.
I hope you enjoy the talks and the Q+A. Feel free to cast your own votes in the comments, though, technically, I've already lost to Will by a fair margin in audience voting. I'll have to work harder next time!
Notes from Will
Firstly, I am never again going to try anything as crazy as auto-advancing slides for a 20-minute talk. It nearly killed me. I got the idea from the O'Reilly Ignite talks which I think are awesome - theirs are 5 minutes long with 15s slides - I went for 25s slides because I had some pretty complex stuff to get across.
Secondly, huge thanks to everyone who came, everyone who voted for me (those who voted for Rand; I saw who you were...), Rand for repeatedly being a great opponent and everyone who had a hand in the organisation (especially Lynsey - our superb events manager at Distilled). It'd probably also be remiss of me not to mention the awesome (and mildly NSFW) exclusive discount code from Christmas gifts site prezzybox.
Here are a couple of quick notes from my talk and the slides on our slideboom account:
- The slidedeck
- The Brylcreem ad in all its glory
- The OK Go music video I meant to mention
- The (now closed) Hacker News thread about fixing open source bugs that is the beginning of our soft-launch of our Hire Marshal web app for hiring (more on that soon)
Finally, we are going to be running more events including 1 day linkbuilding training sessions in London and the US. We'll have more information coming soon, but if you'd like to make sure you are the first to hear about these and our web training sessions, just drop your email address here:
I've got to be honest Rand, I voted for Will, though that may well have been some partisan UK voting.
Both presentations were excellent, throughly enjoyable and a fitting end to a superb couple of days filled with the finest SEO knowledge. Both also provided a lot of conversation in the pub afterwards as well!
Huge kudos to you on the presentation Rand, you could see the hard-work and industry leading thinking that went into it.
I think Will won mostly due the the fear caused by the picture of you, ahem, celebrating your Seattle victory...
Sorry to get off topic :). But HAS any one seen the huge google local business update? They dominate organic listings now (when they appear).
Whoa! That is a big update! Maybe it's a test?
when is the San Diego meet up? I have to request the time off and book a flight.
Thanks for this guys. Awesome
I have a query however: I didn't see the presentation, but having analysed your data, and yea I know we don't have all of the '200 Google ranking factors', it still seems unfathomable and even illogical that christmasgifts.com got #1 spot - given your point scoring.
I understand that the domain match, is pretty damn good, but the scores you give christmasgifts.com don't seem to justify it's number #1 position.
It seems to me, again, having run a number of my own tests across various market segments, that <title> and <meta desc> have a massive weight when there is exact keyword match subject to OnPage relevancy and relevant external linking - anchor text, high PR external domains, variety of linking domains.
Agreed - so, my point in the presentation was precisely around that. This methodology I'm showing is a framework, not a definitive answer. The idea is to use the system to build your own analyses and then have mathematics (preferrably via a machine learning system) work out the formula for a given query. It won't be perfect, but it will give you a directional sense of what matters and what you'd need to do to overcome.
Thanks Rand!
I wasn't there Rand, but I did view the slides, and I can totally understand the cognitive dissonance many of your fans must have been experiencing after Will flashed the picture of you in the blue.
I can totally envision everyone's thought processes... "Rand's presentation was excellent!...but I have to catch up on my sleep and if I see Rand again in that garb, the nightmares will keep me tossing and turning...I really like Rand...but I have an early flight home tomorrow...Well, then Will it is"
{edit] For the record, I would totally have voted for you. I sleep like a baby regardless of what scary pictures I've seen.
First of all: it was a pleasure to see the face-off live. Both of you were great, and great was to see you especially just before the "match", concentrating really like two 'actors' before the play. Something that gave me a really human image of you.
About the intervertions, I would underline the biggest lessons I've learnt from them.
These quotes show how both were walking on the same path. If you have the budget, whatever budget, the best investment is in being creative in most unespected possible way. Just that way you will be remarkable, noticable and different from the mass. This is a rule that is valid for SEO, but even more for business.
A lesson put in practice by SEOmoz and Distilled and that I took home within other great things I have learnt at ProSEO.
You were a tweeting hurricane on day two Gianluca. Hopefully you were sending them from a full sized keyboard and not a tiny handheld device. Thanks for some great #proseo coverage dude.
PS - Hope you get to catch up on your sleep.
Thanks GNC.
Effectively I was comfortably sitting on a proper desk and tweeting from my laptop :). First day that was not possible.
About the sleep... well, night time is getting closer :)
Luv the chart Rand, but found the audio quality very bad. :-(
As an attendee I can attest it was an excellent SEOslam. Both Will and Rand displayed method in the madness and vice versa, however if there were one theme that united both presentations it was the cow dressed as an elephant and Seth Godin's remarkableness that infused the thinking.
A very entertaining face-off, and although I imagine few SEOs get to play with truly huge budgets, there was plenty of food for thought and action.
I'll be revisiting these slides along with the pages of notes I made from an excellent event. I've written a quick round up of my takeaways on the whole event here: https://j.mp/Proseo2010
Thanks again Distilled and SEOmoz.
I like the idea of reverse engineering of particular keyword searches but actually using the spreadsheet to plug in your own data needs futher explanation of the process
I hear you - I'll try to make a more detailed post on the topic with a walkthrough of how to use it in the near future.
Hey, I hate to be labeled as "that guy" but I found the Macy's commercial to be very annoying and it caused me not to watch the video. I realize you guys are probably trying new ways of monetizing the site....but the same goes for me when I go to Reddit or other social media site and am presented with a link to a video....only to have to sit there for 10 or 15 seconds and watch the commercial prior to being able to view the video. If I can quote the sage and wise Moleman for a minute:
"you took 15 seconds of my life and I want them back. Oh, I'd only waste them anway."
Ahoy Mr. Snrub! Long time no see - missed you.
I think the commercial you're seeing is part of Ustream's monetization, not ours. We're just embedding the video. While we'd love to use Vimeo or another player, to live stream required a service like theirs. In the future, we'll try to have better recordings. Sorry about that!
Hi Rand!
Sorry I missed the PRO seminar in Seattle back in August. I was in Melbourne, Au. doing kangaroo type stuff. And of course scouting locations for my new nuclear plant. /exellent.
Had no idea that video was for a live feed!
Went ahead and rewatched it and it was excellent! (no pun intentded)
Fantastic presentation. The Excel spreadsheet is superb as well. I am going to try and add to it and see if I can find any correlations. I personally think that some metrics affect other metrics, i.e. if brand links are missing, anchor text is too perfect, 99% of links got to homepage, etc., then the value of a sites incoming links will be greatly reduced. But then again, maybe not? Thoughts?
Great presentation Rand. Comparing this with some of your very early videos you've definitely developed into quite the professional speaker.
Flitting back and forth to different slides didn't help but I like the diagrams and slides you've given us access to, since they were difficult to read on the video.
I've seen a few people say that the audio was poor, but I don't think they could have expected anything better. To ease their disappointment could you provide a transcript of the presentation? This has worked so well in WBFs.
In regards the term "KW Usage"... Does it refer to the # of times the exact phrase appears in the content (including Title, META Description, keywords and page itself?)
Thanks!
For the KW Usage column, I employed the methodology from our PRO web app's keyword grading system to give an A-F grade to the pages and then put those on the numerical scale you see.
Good as you are always! Thanks for your help! Thanks to you my site is far more atractive to users that want to buy carpets (tepisi): https://www.aloser.rs
Very cool post, I too would like to know more about the San Diego event, please let us know!! Thanks.
I enjoyed the discussion but I have to agree with the statement above, I couldn't read the slides at all and the audio was difficult to understand what you guys were saying.
Despite that, however, I did enjoy the discussion and my 2 takeaways were:
be creative, come up with something completely new, even if it is more creating a new name for something else or an entirely new thing
create exceptional stuff that can couple well with getting the views and encouriging links to your content.
Thanks Rand and Will!
I guess this works or Rand wouldn't be presenting it, but I thought Google deliberately injected randomness into SERP in order to undermine such reverse engineering. So how reliable is this? has any analysis been done on repeatability? How about control testing?
If these are unknowns people might be wasting a lot of effort with this approach!
Mark
It will never be a perfect process because we'll never have ALL the inputs. However, when you're doing SEO at a competitive level with a big (or small) budget, you need the best intelligence and direction. That's what this process does - it tells you which direction to go and how far, like a sign that says "Seattle, 12 miles west" - it's not telling you every road to take and which streets to turn down, but it's a good shot better than flying blind.
Great Presentation!
James Platteborze
Arlene Platteborze
Great presentation Rand and you showed great positive energy !
but i had crosseyes from the way your were movinggg (left to right,...right to left.. right to right lol )
but thumbs up!
This video needed deinterlacing (stops those dodgy horizontal lines).
Fantastic chart, Rand!
Ustream = worst video hosting evar.
The first time I clicked to play, it opened a window to ustream, played an ad, showed a 2nd ad, and then died.
The second time I clicked to play, I got yet another ad, then while the video was playing I clicked to pause -- at which point the window refreshed to ustream's site again and played another ad.
The sound quality was poor and with a professional audio/visual team the slides would be readable too. Spoilt a very good session...
We did have pro A/V there - there is a full recording working its way into post-processing now ready for the DVDs. This was from a camcorder at the back running essentially an experiment with ustream (we streamed the session live yesterday). It's definitely far from perfect, but we figured it was better than nothing (before the DVD comes out) for people who couldn't be there in person.