Abbaz Uddin

So, I've done my bachelor's in computer application. And after that, I've done my PG diploma in digital marketing and communication. My first job was not a digital marketing role. So I made a switch in the 11th month of my first job. My first job in the digital marketing role was as a content marketing specialist, where I put my hands on experience of managing content, everything, and then I made sure that we were bringing in growth through content. And after that, I joined an agency where I got the opportunity to work with a lot of clients based out of the Americas and Europe. It was a great experience because I got to work with a lot of clients originating from different industries, facing different challenges. So during my tenure, I worked with B2B SaaS, IT Services, B2C Commerce, and a few others. And that was my full agency experience. And after that, I joined the Net Tech startup, but I'm currently handling SEO for the premium category of our courses that we sell. So I take care of the strategy and a small team of three people who are working and reporting to me for our SEO growth. Other than that, I'd also like to talk about the media business that I ran from 2020 to 2022. And in that, I was able to grow the media business from scratch to 100,000 visitors a month in a span of 1.5 years. And right now, one of the achievements that I'd like to highlight for my current company is our blog. When I joined the current company, it was somewhere around 3,000 visitors a month. And after I took over the blog and the content team and the overall content cycle, right now, the latest month, which is April, we have received 150,000 visitors on the blog itself, which has also expedited the process of getting organic leads and improving the overall organic business for the company.

So it is actually E-A-T instead of just E. It has been recently updated by Google's guidelines. So, basically, it emphasizes the quality of information on a broad perspective. If I could just summarize this, it would be that for someone writing a medical article or something related to healthcare, the person should know what they are talking about. Oh, sorry about that. So, it is basically there to ensure that the person writing the content has expertise. Along with that, it also emphasizes the authority of the website. If a person is writing a healthcare article and is not a doctor or a practitioner, the author is not displayed. So, it is a set of guidelines that Google provides to ensure that the content we put out there has expertise, authoritativeness, and other factors required to have authority and provide the right kind of information.

Well, Bing Webmaster is, to be honest, just a copy of the search console that we have from Google. Overall, it's a great way for us to measure our performance on Bing because Bing has been growing, but we should also focus on being along with Google. It gives you a lot of information from uploading the sitemap, making sure that your website are getting indexed on Bing, making sure that you are able to rank on Bing for whatever reason, making sure that your site doesn't have a lot of errors. Even though Google search console will give you all of that, but if you just double check with Bing Webmaster, it might give you something which is not present in the server. In most cases, Google search console will give you almost every issue that your website currently has. But in some cases, if there are something where Bing Webmaster is telling you that this is an issue and you are not able to find it on Google search, that's one way to making sure that the website doesn't have any issues in terms of the technicalities and overall improving the indexation process of your website. So Bing Webmaster is overall a great tool for us to measure our performance on Bing and just to improve our overall performance and the growth on the search engine as well.

Google Business Profile. During my tenure with Uplift, which is the marketing agency that I work with, I also work with a lot of businesses that focus regionally. And I think Google Business Profile is a great way for us to optimize our business for regional searches. What happens on Google? Bing has its own Google Business Profile alternative, which we also optimize for. So you can leverage it in many ways, to be honest. First off, you can make sure that your business profile is optimized for all the right information. So making sure the fundamentals are in place, you ensure that you do not have any incorrect information. For example, working hours, product pages that you can add, making sure you are adding the right UPMs to track where the user has come from. You can add your phone numbers to give immediate access to your potential customers. Along with that, you can also post article excerpts on Google Business Profile, which will be shown whenever someone searches for something and you match that intent. So there are a lot of ways, but first, I would say that having a fundamentally strong business profile is the most important. When I say fundamentally strong, I basically mean the correctness of the information. The correct address of your website with UTM tags, the phone numbers, and making sure you are updating your files in whatever way is possible every now and then. Along with that, I would also recommend that you read your reviews. And whenever there is some amount of negative reviews, you take action on that, reply to the customer, and make sure you are providing the best after-sales services as well because that will matter a lot once we talk about organic search as a whole channel.

Google Search Console is one of my favorite tools when I talk about organic growth because the kind of information and data that you get from the tool is unbelievable. First, you get to see how people are searching and landing on your website. So what I mean by that is basically the exact keyword that people are searching. Second, you can also see where you are ranking for the corresponding keyword, and you can take action on that by optimizing for those keywords, of course, excluding keyword stuffing as a technique, but there are multiple ways that you can optimize for keywords that you can find from Search Console. Additionally, Google Search Console has a separate section. It's mostly visible on the notification tab, where you get notifications every now and then. So you get a lot of issues that Google tries to highlight for the webmaster, where the person can take action. So whenever Googlebot is not able to crawl a particular URL, you'll be notified about it, and you can take action to make sure that you fix it. As the website grows, more issues will be visible on the Google Search Console because the more pages there are on a particular website, the more issues will be highlighted on Google Search Console. If you are proactive and make sure that you are able to fix all the issues that come up on Google Search Console, it's a great way for you to have a technically sound website.

I personally prioritize SEO tasks based on low effort, high outcome. And what it does is, basically, you will be able to focus on the areas which will give you immediate results. Most of it, Google, SEO as a whole, has been criticized because it takes a lot of time. So if you focus on stuff which will show you output in, let's say, 3 months, it will not be the right approach. Rather, we should focus on stuff that is easy to fix, but the outcome will be sooner and it will be greater. And this also helps you in having a fundamentally great website. So, basically, the most fundamental issues when you are able to fix, you see greater outcomes in a much shorter span of time. And all the issues that come after you optimize the fundamentals can be fixed as you grow the website. Right? Now, just to summarize, if you are able to prioritize your tasks in a way that aligns with the overall growth KPIs we have. But my approach personally is always low effort, high outcome, fast outcome. This way, I'm able to show the results I want and break the method that SEO takes time. But, yeah, that would be my approach.

The simplest thing that I can talk about is whenever your CTR is something that you see it's way too low depending on the industry. But on an average, I would say 3 to 4% is a good CTR. However, it might vary with the current industry. Whenever you talk about CTR, if it's not doing great, the simplest thing that you can do is focus on the meta data, and analyze the top ten results from first to 10th to see what different approaches and techniques they've taken for the meta title and try to come up with something that provokes a user to click on it. Of course, you should never deceive the user. If you promise something on the meta title, it should exactly match the intent after they land on the page. So, you can start from the meta title, and input some power words, some numbers, whatever it is. But if you optimize the meta title and the meta description, your CTR will improve with that.

And sub features, there are a lot. So the first and foremost right now is SGE, which is the newest thing on the block with Rasa AI and JetDuty. So that's 1. 2nd is the featured snippet, which is also called position 0 by a lot of SEO tools and digital marketing software. And the third one is the regular search results that you see. And there are a few others. For example, the people you may know, ask section. But for example, for SGE, right, if you want to optimize for your content to appear on SGE, you will have to make sure that you align with the large language models. Along with that, you also optimize for NLP, which is the natural language processing, the AI that works on top of that. So if you optimize for them, you will be able to be visible on SGE. But one server that has recently shown, I'm not sure, I told the marketing agency that has done that. But with SGE, for example, with the featured snippet, you have to be on the 1st page of Google to be able to be visible or to achieve the featured snippet. But with SGE, you can be on the 3rd or 4th or 5th position. You can still be visible on the SGE answer, which is the AI answer by Google. and all the other regular search ranking pages, which is from the first edition, is the regular optimization that we do from the content to the on-page elements to the meta title, the description, the focus keyword, whatever we are targeting. And for the people also ask section, you can optimize your content. And towards the end of it, if you add some FAQs with the schema's intact, you will be visible on the people you may know, ask section.

Well, I think we all saw this coming. Right? Mobile access to the Internet is becoming greater as we speak. So right now, in my current company, close to 60% of our users come from smartphones. And the rest of it predominantly comes from the desktop. And that's one of the harsh truths that Google might be planning for a very long time. So in terms of impact, not a lot. Because in terms of indexing of pages, right, whatever the ways we used to do previously, is the same thing. But the importance of mobile has been becoming a huge factor in the last 5 years. Because when a person talks about user experience, right, the smartphone is the major thing that we focus on whenever we are optimizing for the overall user experience. And when you optimize your website for the user experience on a smartphone, by default, your pages are optimized to get indexed faster. So overall, I would say if you just focus on smartphone from a user experience perspective, because the reason we focus so much on smartphone and not so much on desktop is because on desktop, there's a massive screen on top. So the user has a lot of ways to navigate. On a smartphone, there's limited space where you have to make sure that the user is able to click wherever you want to take them, plus the button, the links, the hamburger menu, the logos, and everything has to be in a place where it is accessible and the user finds it a great experience to use the website. Now if I talk about indexing as a whole process, then I would say, if you just have a good user experience and your website has a great server and the technicalities of the website, for example, the robots.txt file, the noindex pages to pages that you don't want to be indexed. So if all of these things are taken care of, then your indexing will not be facing any issues, no matter whether it is mobile-first or the legacy indexing process that we have.

Well, right now, I wouldn't talk about AMP, to be honest. AMP as a whole technology has gone down drastically. Other than a few legacy news media and online news media websites, no one is talking about AMP anymore. Because Google supported this project like it's the next big thing. But to be honest, it did more harm than good. For example, with AMP, your URL changes, which puts the brandability of your business at stake. I remember when I was running techvalue.com, a tech website, and I implemented AMP. Initially, it got a few clicks, but later I decided not to focus on AMP. I then removed AMP, thinking it would kill the website's organic visitors. However, to my surprise, the organic growth didn't stop; it increased instead. The fundamental problem with AMP is the user experience. AMP feels like reading a newspaper, lacking user interactivity. This leads to problems with conversion rate optimization. If you're not in the news business, publishing news content, I don't think any other business needs to worry about AMP right now. The idea behind AMP was to have a faster website, accessible in less than a few milliseconds. If you optimize your website for speed and user experience, either way, you're following AMP's idea. Simply optimize your website for speed and user experience; otherwise, you don't have to worry about AMP.

Well, voice again, it's with the rise of AI. This is yet another thing that SEOs have to worry about. But voice has been here for a very long time, unlike SEO and other VIN chats that we have right now. So if you optimize for NLP and large language models, right, if you optimize your website with that in mind, then you by default optimize for voice searches as well. But the only difference here is with AI or someone typing on Google or on Bing and searching and accessing your website and someone speaking it out and then finding your information on voice as a result is the only fundamental difference. Now the only thing we have to think about is how do you optimize for people who speak and then you're able to come as a result. So if we know how people speak and ask questions to Alexa or to Google Home, then I don't think you have to be going crazy about it. Because a lot of things, for example, right now, with Alexa, which is the biggest in the market, most of it, Amazon focuses on shopping, but we who give information and remain active on the internet. If we are not an information-based website, then I don't think you have to worry about it a lot. But, of course, if you are an ecommerce store which also wants to optimize for voice search, if you just do it for if you just optimize your website for NLP and large language models, then I think your 80% of the job is done. Other than that, if you want to focus on voice, you just have to make sure that you align with people speaking out and then you're able to come as a result.