This is my first trip to India and it's been a very revealing, wonderful experience for me. Thank you very much for welcoming me and my life suits here in this country. I've been struck by how open, generous people here are. Everybody I've met has been very willing to talk to me and look at me and it's a wonderful thing. Everybody is friendly and they're smart, everyone. There's a lot of depth here and there's one other quality that I see throughout the people that I meet. Regardless, yesterday we went on a long tour of Bangalore. We went to some very upscale houses and some very downscale houses. What we saw was family. We saw this understanding that family is who we are and that it ties us together and a great value of that. The company that my wife and I started, now 26 years ago, Cooper, was also a family company and we brought family values to business. I understand that value in the same way. You may not know this, but in October, just a few months ago, Cooper was acquired by Designit, which is acquired by Wipro. We're now part of Wipro, which is a local company and one that I think could also be described as a family. So I feel very much at home as part of that organization. This picture is a picture of where Sue and I lived. Seven years ago, we left our Silicon Valley house in the heart of the vast Silicon Valley and we bought a ranch. This is what it looks like. We call it Monkey Ranch. Have you ever heard the expression monkey business? Yeah. Well, there's a little of that.  And the cool guy at a monkey ranch is a tool. And we also have a cat named Monkey Ranch. Anyway, what you'll see is the background for a lot of my slides. These lush green ones are pictures of Monkey Ranch. And they're a fitting background. A lot of the thinking that's gone into my presentation came from my moving up and seeing life. So now, let's get going here. Can everyone hear me okay? Go in the back. Can you see me okay? I see a couple of hands going up. That's a good, okay. So today, I want to talk about the way I like to vote. It's not unique, but it's somewhat rare. And I call it working backwards. It's widely useful, but it's most powerful as a tool for innovation and creativity. A less obvious application is its usefulness in managing the creative process. Working backwards also gives you insight into the larger world and what your responsibilities are as a citizen. Simply put, working backwards means questioning every assumption before you accept it. You first step backwards with genuine inquiry, and only then do you proceed forwards with knowledge and confidence. Now, it may seem like a waste of time to question every assumption, but rushing in the wrong direction gets you nowhere. The world is simply not out there breathlessly awaiting the release of your poorly conceived. Now, working backwards gives you three main advantages. It helps you know your user and their goals. It helps you to see possible solutions, and it helps you to see the bigger picture. And I'll talk about each of these. Now, you've probably heard that old saying, success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. There's a lot of truth to that saying and a little bit of vision to be the foundation for a huge amount of hard work. Working backwards is how you find your vision. It's that 1% inspiration that all the sweat comes from working forwards. You can't escape that huge quantity of perspiring work. It has to be done. The problem is that creating massive failures takes just as much hard work and perspiration. The difference is the 1% inspiration. What differentiates successful products from failures is something new and different, something better and friendlier, something that hasn't been done before, or something that has never been this easy to use or to learn. And we call such differentiation innovation, and it comes with a built-in conundrum, a dilemma. Innovation, by definition, is doing something counter-intuitive, something that has never been done before. And if you've never done it before, it's a certainty that you don't know how to do it yet. So regardless of your previous experience with similar projects, the more innovative it is, the more it diverges from the known. Working backwards demands that you do things differently. Or to use the proper management term, you're doing it the wrong way. You won't just be doing this in a vacuum. You have to fight for your right to work backwards. Working backwards really pisses me. I've always worked backwards. I just naturally question assumptions. I don't just want to see results. I want to see how things work. I don't just want to see the play. I want to see what goes on backstage. I'm a born rule-breaker and a shit-disturber and a road-less traveled guy. As a young man, I wore my hair long, I dropped out, and I always did what people said I shouldn't do. For 40 years, I've been designing and writing and critiquing software and technology. And working backwards is my superpower. When someone tells me I have to choose between A, B, I always choose C. It really pisses me off. Over the years, I've invented many design tools for working backwards, like para-design and user personas. One of our oldest tools is an exercise called pretend-its-magic. More than any other, it exemplifies the power of working backwards to break new ground and to frustrate conventional things. Pretending-its-magic is easy. You just ask yourself, how would we solve this problem if anything were possible? Typically, conventional design and engineering begins with a ritual recitation of constraints and requirements. These tell you what you can't do and what you must do. But this approach condemns you to doing what you already know in ways that you're already familiar with. It's a roadblock to innovation. It's assuming before knowing. It's working forwards before you've worked backwards. It emphasizes history, convention, old technology, old mental models, and just the way we do things around here. Instead, it's better to work backwards. Start by throwing out everything, all your assumptions, all those known limitations. For the moment, just assume that all technical problems can be solved, that all organizational hurdles can be overcome, that all resources only imagine the possibilities. What does the user want and what would make them? For example, if you have to build a bridge across a river, you would normally start by building concrete abutments and then laying steel girders between them. But when you build a bridge backwards, you start by asking, what is the fundamental purpose of the bridge? Who needs to get across the stream? Why? Are there existing forms or variants that could do the job? And what else could it be? Now, you can see the objective with more clarity. You can better understand why this bridge needs to exist, and the essential feature set becomes clear. You can see what isn't needed, what doesn't belong, and those tasks that don't need to be done anymore. But importantly, you can see the opportunities to do more than people ask for, to go beyond the minimum requirements, to give people a car instead of just a faster horse, or a whale instead of a cucumber, or to put a dead end in the units. You probably still have to build a bridge, but now you can clearly see how to build the bridge more efficiently and make it more effective for its users. Maybe be something more. Maybe, like this small Northern California town, the citizens realized that the simple footbridge that they needed to build should do more than just get pedestrians across the Sacramento River. That its soaring power should tell time. That it should unite their town and be a source of civic pride. That it could become a symbol of their city and revitalize it by becoming a popular tourist attraction. The Sundial Bridge, a simple but elegant crossing, is a huge success and has done as much for the small country town of Reddit as the Golden Gate Bridge has done in San Francisco. It's counter-intuitive to make a bridge tell time and be a tourist attraction. And when it was first proposed, it probably pleased people up. When you work forwards, you take what you have and you improve it incrementally. But when you work backwards, you examine its underlying purpose and what it's trying to accomplish. Its goals. Companies have their goals and you have to satisfy them. But users usually have different goals and theirs are more important. Companies often imagine that their purpose is equivalent to their users. And that's one reason why those companies. So when your boss tells you to deliver some feature or some service to your user, you have to first find out what the user is. You have to seek out your users and listen to them. You need to learn their motivations and get into their heads to absorb their mental knowledge. You question the nature of your product and you reshape the experience. You change the fundamental value of the product which in turn affects the strategy of the entire business. Working backwards is doing what you don't know how to do in the hopes of finding a better way to do it. Working forwards is doing what you do know how to do because you've done it before and you know it works. Above all, working backwards is a challenge for you. A challenge to step back and ask why. A challenge to look outside the known boundaries, to ask yourself and others to me. Eventually, you find yourself asking even bigger questions beyond business. Questions about our society, our government, and about social justice. The more you work backwards, the more connections you see in the world around you, the more inequality you detect and the more opportunity to make a better world. Each way of working has different characteristics. Some of the differences between working forwards and backwards are, forwards confirms what you think while backwards discovers something new. Forwards optimizes the existing while backwards develops the opportunity. Forwards is brittle. Backwards could adapt to changes. Forwards concentrates on constraints and requirements while backwards looks at new possibilities. And forwards asks, where are we right? Backwards asks, where are we? Now let's talk about the first strength of working backwards, knowing who your user is and what their time can accomplish. So Cooper, the innovation and consulting company that my wife Sue and I founded 26 years ago, now part of the Zynut. Over the years, we've served clients large and small around the country and around the world. Cooper uses what we call the gold-rected method because it's based on understanding the user's goals. While we tailor our efforts for the particular situation, everything we do is based on the simple idea that knowing the user's goals helps you design a new one. First, you identify your user. Who are they? What differentiates? You'd be surprised how many companies will open their users. Second, you determine what their desired end statement is. What's their goal? Where do they want to end up? Then third, you find out what motivates them to get there. Sometimes it's just because they want to go home to their family. You need to ask the question, why do they want to do it? Knowing these three things informs everything a company must do to innovate. You lose sight of them. It just doesn't matter how cool your products are. They're not going to see you. When Cooper first started 26 years ago, designing digital systems was in its infancy. I had been building them for 15 years, so I knew the territory. But there were no academic programs, no books, no process, no tools, no terminology, no job roles, and certainly no industry credibility. We had to invent both a practice and a profession. And all we had was our commitment to making software easier for people to use. At each step of the way, we worked from first principles. Who is the user? What are their goals? Why? We started out as an interaction design company, showing our clients how to get more done with screens. But the more we worked backwards, the more powerful we became. We discovered that our tools and techniques for interaction design were precisely the tools needed to innovate. Using them, we assist our clients to create, to invent, and to transform their businesses from being product-centered to user-centered. This is why today we call ourselves innovation. As my friend Molly Knicks of Uber says, design is the process used to build products. That is, design is not a phase in the process. It is the process. When you work backwards, design is not just a part of business, but rather, business becomes a part of design. Design is what informs every aspect of the business, and it has more to do with success in manufacturing, marketing, sales, or finance. We don't have any illusions about being experts in our clients' business. They haven't been doing their business for years, and it's almost a certainty that they know their users and what they should provide to them. The problem is typically that the correct answers are hidden amongst the incorrect answers, the way the trees hide the forests. A client once described us as experts at becoming experts. We know how to learn a lot from very modest input. Our job is to guide the client onto the right road, not to carve that road for them. Often our job is to show them a new way of seeing what they see every day. The value that we bring is our perspective as deeply interested outsiders. We enter as a tabula rasa, a blank slate without any preconceptions. We're looking for unexpected patterns in amorphous data. We call our stance omnivorous and non-judgmental. We want to hear everything about anything. Or, as I like to say, we draw on our deep well of ignorance. Now, for the sake of practicality, this has to be done quickly, but speed is our ally. Imagine that you are trying to assess the quality of the smoothness of a surface. To get an overall read of the quality, you have to work backwards. You really want to sweep your hand quickly across the width of it to feel for any roughness. You touch it in one place to confirm a rough spot to repair, but you sweep across it to get the big picture of what needs work. Recently, one of Cooper's favorite clients provided a great example of how this works. And by the time we were done, both Cooper and the client were surprised by what we had learned. The Village Plus is a United Airlines loyal member managing free supply of hospitals. They hired Cooper to help them generate more trading and quality. They wanted more members to redeem both more miles for more mergers. But they already had a lot of valuable data, but the data wasn't telling you. They knew about their users' capital patterns, their incomes, their demographics, and market segmentation. But what exactly does that mean? Now user personas is one of the inventions that's been widely adopted in the design world. They are hypothetical archetypes based on empirical research that represent real users. Now some people will tell you that personas are obsolete or they don't work. They just don't know how to make them or to use them. We find personas to be one of the most effective tools in our kit. And we use them on virtually every project we do. In this case, senior Cooper designers, Nate Clinton and Steve Colley, went into the field and observed Village Plus users in their natural habitat. They weren't trying to find out what offers they had in place, but instead sought to discover their goals. Nate and Steve found three groups with different goals. They then created three representatives, personas. Neil, the million-miler, the road warrior, all he wants is comfort. He wants to stay upgraded, and he wants more legroom. Margaret, who flies for business, is not very much. She loves collecting her miles, and she dreams of that big vacation trip. And then there's Bradley, digitally adept millennial youth. He doesn't fly that much. He sure likes to get his stuff. Now, these personas are not based on demographics, but on what they want and why they want them. The client mostly liked Neil and Margaret, because Neil and Margaret are already the biggest users, and they always seemed to provide the best opportunities. But we worked with the two senior executives there. The first executive was a marketing guy. He knew what he wanted from the very beginning. Their current solution was emailing attractive merchandise offers, but members mostly ignored it. So, executive one wanted us to create a mobile app that would deliver even more attractive merchandise offers. Classic working forward, doing more of the same, only doing it harder on a new platform.  But it was at this point that the mileage plus executive number two stepped in. He was willing to work backwards. The narrative that he heard from our personas was new and original and compelling. He saw a previously obscured opportunity with the persona of the young tattooed traveling. Executive number two then showed us an orphanage technology that the company had previously worked on, but it then discarded. They could generate retail gift cards on the fly in a store on a smartphone. They had thrown it away because they didn't see a way to make money. Working closely with executive number two, we developed a plan, a design, and then we pulled from the product. It was released as United Mileage Plus X, a smartphone app aimed squarely at the smallest but most promising market. Users could get at least double miles by using the app by merchandise, besides retail stores. This was a key motivator for Bradley. The X app has been hugely successful for our client. With it used to generate over $100 billion in just over a year. We know members love it. It's 35 cents a day. And every month it grows by 20 cents. It's been a very desirable millennium. For the sake of it, all of the realities of innovation are present in this story. It took exploration, teamwork, and a willingness to question closely held beliefs.  The executive knew his gift card technology was cool, but it wasn't used until we could look at it through the lens of the user. Field studies are an exercise in searching for what we don't know we don't know, rather than as a confirmation of our assumptions. And as is often the case, the client already had the answer. But they needed some outside perspective to help them to see it in its true light. The mileage plus X app nicely demonstrates another important notion. And it is that working forward is an integral part of the process.  Now executive number one was a smart guy. And for me as a lifelong entrepreneur I know that his self confidence and his relentless drive is what makes productivity and it is indispensable to success. But I've also been a lifelong inventor and I know that my constant willingness to question my assumptions is equally indispensable. It's the quality that innovates and delights users. So I arrived at this accident. Your ego gets it built but it's your humility that gets it loved. And to succeed in a world of innovation you need both these things. Okay, now let's talk about the second part of working back helping you to see absolute solutions. In 2005 I think a year of the machinist training at night at City College a two-year technical college in San Francisco that's my classroom. I learned how to shape steel and the lathe and the milling machine. These are my two biggest last projects of this and a pair of in balloon gears. The instructor would give us a blueprint of what we had to make. Then he'd demonstrate the method then he'd let us do it for ourselves. This ancient craft isn't about radical innovation it's about mastery of tools and processes. The thing about cutting steel is that it isn't very forgiving. If you aren't doing it right things go pear shaped very quickly. So I worked backwards. I would measure, plan, set up my work then I'd ask around then I'd measure again change my setup, plan, measure all before I put the tool to the metal. And I began to notice an interesting pattern. I always was the last student to start cutting steel. But even more interesting I was always the first student to finish and I had good results too. The lesson here is a simple one starting sooner doesn't mean finishing sooner. You need to be willing to give yourself time to be correct. The surprise is that this lesson comes straight out of the industrial age. In the digital world it's even more true not because the technology is so hard to change but because people have already made up their minds and minds are harder to change than software. In general for most people it doesn't come naturally to work backwards. Your gut intuition and your common sense aren't good enough to endure. Do they ever work? Human awareness and behavior is deeply biased. Over the last few decades the science of human cognition has made remarkable advances. Contrary to popular belief humans don't hear what we think we hear and we don't see what we think we see and we don't make decisions that are wrong. Accepting is hard for any one of us but it's particularly hard for business people who have depended on our common sense for centuries. John Minouzian began this delightful codex of known human cognitive illusions any one of which would lead us astray but taken together you see by so many of these how defenseless understandings and misconceptions adding insult to injury is that a subset of these illusions has a sole effect of making us disbelieve the truth and instead doubling out on our group in thinking. These include such illusions as confirmation bias where we only listen to things that agree with what we already know or zero risk bias whether be certain or correct cognitive biases pervade institutions as well and they manifest as silent cultural abuse for example most companies are biased for its success this means that no matter how much they say over and over again fail fast failure is not a good thing for your career most companies are also biased towards action which means that they reward hard work more than they reward patient reflection about whether or not that works it takes it takes strenuous mental effort to think objectively common sense is just our cognitive biases speak and it makes me wonder subject to this daunting plethora of bad ways of thinking how could humans have ever emerged from that moving for you in his book thinking fast and slow the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman humans have two entirely separate mechanisms of thought that he calls fast and slow if I ask you your name the fast part of your mind answers automatically but if I ask you to multiply 16 by 7 you stop walking that's the slow part we all have and it works just fine but it consumes a lot of energy so it's very very lazy any time a fast thinking mind offers an alternative answer we snap it up before we bother to get our slow thinking out of bed so we think yesterday we made money so tomorrow we do the same that's fast thinking that's easy but if we do something new and different we'll let that make money see now to add to that means that we have to wake up our slow thinking mind and that's harder now most of you have noticed the clever parallel between slow thinking and work backwards when you work backwards it's the slow thinking part of your mind it's another clue to why working backwards is counterintuitive in the industrial age westerners learned to make machines of gears, belts and levers no matter how complex such machines get they remain simple deterministic systems they're not complex systems like personal relationships natural ecosystems corporate cultures and software platforms unfortunately it's so much easier to think of complex systems as simple systems with single simple causes and single simple effects we tell stories and we cite anecdotes so we can believe this all in an effort to rely on the lazy fast thinking part of our minds and spare the hard work that we do the problem is that we can tweak complex systems as though they were simple machines and we can often get predictable results but that's not all you get in John Gall's memorable phrase anytime you act upon a complex system the system always gets back in other words you might get the results one but you will always get some other unintended consequences and you probably will find it you can start fracking in Oklahoma for example and quintuple your yields of oil but you also destroy the state's bedrock in all of recorded history Oklahoma had no measurable seismic activity but when they began fracking in 2009 Oklahoma became the most seismically active state in the continental U.S. with more than 1,000 earthquakes of 3.0 every year for California there are always unintended consequences when you mess with complex systems and frequently the downside of the consequence is much greater than the predicted upside social media is another example of unintended consequences at first it was an amazing tool for keeping us together and for uniting old friends but the algorithms facebook and twitter use create a personal echo chamber for each of us increasingly the only thoughts and opinions we see are those that match our own gradually we lose sight of what is really happening in the world the creators of social media only wanted to help but no one could forget those second of the week right? now it's time to talk about the third strike of working backwards this is helping you to see the bigger picture you and I are the practitioners we are the backwards workers the slow thinkers we're building the future out of design and behavior and it's our job to ask the hard questions in my 40 years in the trenches to show which questions are the toughest the first tough question isn't what should we do here but it's rather what is our goal the second tough question isn't whose fault is this but rather whose responsibility is this our job doesn't stop at making a change Robert Oppenheimer the atomic bomb made a great product upon seeing the bomb explode for the first time he began to question the role of the atomic bomb in the world he started working backwards and he discovered that his real goal his ultimate responsibility was to be a good scientist we have now as an industry we've arrived at our own Robert Oppenheimer moment when we work backwards our vision expands and we see beyond our comfort we can sweep our hand across the fabric of the entire social world and we feel that we know that we have worked to do we look up from our screens we see a world of right with inequality and the projects we work on every day are often the root cause of that inequality the capitalism of software web apps, social media and shopping carts has eaten the world and now we're trying to catch it our legislative protections have failed from a citizen's point of view Uber is a tax attack and Airbnb is a hotel chain but because their business models are innovative they claim to be something different and they escape the regulation that protect us when we work backwards is the only way we're going to invent a legal mechanism that can keep pace with disruptive innovation these are all unpredictable unintended consequences of innovation it's nobody's fault but it's become our job to fix things when we work backwards far enough our goal is revealed not as making product a profit but creating a peaceful environment for everyone one that we would be proud to pass on this is our job we're just technologists tweaking this but increasingly the levers of the economy are in our hands when we wonder who's responsible to do this we must ask ourselves congressman John Lewis' famous question if it's not us then who and if not now if it's something we ask and it may not be something we want but the responsibility for and the power to create a just and peaceful society is more in our hands than in anybody else's so how can we use our privilege as educated and affluent people to achieve this desire and stay we're like the keystone in the arch we won't stay up without us here's where our ego and our humility come together to make our world better we have a big job in front of us so now you see the power of working backwards it connects you to your users so you can really get to know them and understand their motivations and goals and it gives you a fresh point of view so you can find innovative approaches and it gives you the bigger picture so you can see how your work fits into the larger world working backwards has implications not just for your product but for your teams, your company and our society when you become an innovator you become more powerful and that means you must also become more responsive you need to assess not just the immediate value of your creativity but the long term effects of it there are those in our society who idolize people who make a lot of money and buy big houses and yachts I want to elevate people who fight inequality Gustavo Petro the mayor of Bogota said a developed country is not a place where the poor have cars it's where the rich use public transportation this is the kind of thinking that I respect who makes their projects part of the larger social world and makes the world better one app at a time no project is too small for working backwards the way to create a better world is to make certain every tiny piece of the world you create makes you a better answer I think give him a standing ovation


Really, there are wonderful speakers to choose from, so I'm honored to be in your presence and to dive into this conversation about SEO and building community. I really wanted to start this off by kind of shifting our mindset away from maybe some more traditional understandings of SEO and maybe more, it's really technical, it's difficult, I don't know where to begin, what is SEO? Search Engine Optimization, for those that don't know what SEO is. This is a good talk to come into for beginners because the focus is really about building community and the SEO strategies are just how we line up with that vision, with the value of building community. And I think this conversation is essential to have right now because we're seeing so much content on the web and we really need to ask ourselves what value we're offering the world when we're putting our content out individually. So that's why I think that this talk is so important right now. A little hiccup?  I have been able to do so many things that I could have never imagined, you know, 10 years ago coming out of college. I was able to start a yoga studio and be the person that does the website and the marketing and creates all the online necessities for the space that we created with our yoga studio and without WordPress that wouldn't have been possible. I was able to make new connections, new friends, rekindled relationships, Michelle, and I've been able to actually pursue a career in WordPress which is just amazing. So I love this idea of democratizing connection. It's this idea of really broadening our understanding of what connection is and how it ties into building a community and what that looks like online. And I think that SEO is our blueprint for creativity in that regard. So our SEO strategy is our practice. It's something that we keep tending to and something that is going to help us grow and reach our goals. So this brings us into tending our garden. So I love visualizing SEO and the internet as a garden. So it's not something that you can just set it and walk away. It's something that needs to be tended to. It needs love and care and needs attention on a daily basis. It really does require all the nourishment of putting in that time and understanding what that little piece of garden that you have, that landscape on the web that you take up, what it needs, and what the internet needs from you. So I love this analogy of growing our garden together and all of our little gardens kind of interweaving with each other on the web and it's just a beautiful space for connection the internet is. I forgot that doesn't work. So how do we build a bigger online community? That's the question we're here to answer, right? So we kind of have this understanding of why. We want more traffic, we want more engagement, we want more conversions, we want people talking to us, we want that conversation to unfold on our blog or on our website. Whatever we're creating we want people to share that experience with us. So we know why we want to do these things and we want to build a community. But how do we do it is not so clear. So personally I've come up with my own understanding of this and it's to be intentional, to be aware, and to build trust. So we're going to go through that today and how it ties in with three specific SEO strategies and really be able to put this into action. So the first is keyword research, being intentional, really starts here. Our SEO process is an understanding of really what is being searched on the web and how do I fit in, how do I have an understanding of what my people are searching for, my audience, like what are their pains and worries and what do they love and what do they hate and how can I best communicate. So we really need to take our time with keyword research as our starting point to really take that intention of I want to build community, I want to have a conversation and really nailing it down to but what, about what, what are we talking about, what do we need to be sharing. So the core concept of keyword research is essentially understanding I might have this idea of what I want to come up for and search and what actually is searched could be very different. So I always love to start with my clients just kind of brain dumping all these keywords, getting a big old list of keywords and really just getting all of our ideas out on paper or wherever, you know, out loud, whatever works for you to really creatively get everything out of your mind and out somewhere that you can ideally visually see. So you see all these different categories, you see all these different scenarios, you have all these keywords, these phrases really to gain a better understanding of what you think you should be ranking for and then the keyword research aspect is actually understanding what people are actually searching for. So that's the process we're going to be going through. I love this quote, empathy is the starting point for creating a community and taking action is the impetus for creating change. So empathy is so important when we're doing our keyword research. It really allows us to put ourselves in the shoes of our customer, our client, our people, our audience, whoever we're trying to connect with and really understanding them as best as we can. So seed keywords are where it all begins. These kind of little simple keywords, they might not be so simple. They're general, they're short, they're maybe one to three words. Really a long tail keyword is beyond two to three words. That's when you get into the longer phrases, more specific. Seed keywords are your products, your brand name, your services, the niche and category that you kind of take up space in, your industry. It's this really broad idea of what you're offering and you need to start there so that you can nail down the specifics with each of those seed keywords. So keyword research, seed keywords, building your lists is the next step. So once we kind of have this brain dump of all this information out on paper or on the computer, whatever it is, we kind of have to really focus ourselves in on something. So first you need to kind of get these ideas out. And so here's an example of a gardening center. Garden supply, gardening tips, backyard landscaping, gardening gifts. These are some broad ideas and maybe for this particular business it's some priorities. These are really topics that we want to be making sales on. We want to draw people in regarding these topics. We know that we want to do something with these associated lanes that we take up in on the internet. And if it's a brick and mortar, it's really difficult. I work with a lot of creatives that don't necessarily know how to bridge the gap between their physical space and that they take up in the world and how that actually translates to their online space and what they should be representing themselves as online. So our seed keyword, I always love to just pop it into Google and get Google Suggest to help me along. When I run out of ideas, I can't think of anything else. I'm just at a loss, do a little Google Suggest research and see what else is going to come up. Like what did you miss? Maybe what things are irrelevant to you in your business. Make a negative keyword list of I don't want to be focusing on these keywords, I don't want to necessarily come up for something that isn't relevant to my business or my offering. So seed keywords are really this little seed that we start with to be able to hopefully grow our garden. So working with these seed keywords, there's a lot of tools out there to use. These are some of my favorites. I love to use all of them for any project that I really take on to get some different perspectives and fill in the gaps and these are all clickable so when I can get my slides and you can explore these tools for yourself. Each of them are going to be a little different and the goal here working with your seed keywords is to build out your list, your keyword list. So I use a Google spreadsheet and I'll show you that in a moment of what that kind of looks like. Each little tab of the spreadsheet is going to be the seed keyword, this big idea that you're trying to go after and then you're going to use these tools to populate the list within them. So long tail phrases are really the goal here, really specific, nailed down ideas and these tools are awesome to go through that. So Ubersuggest will pull in all the Google Suggest queries so rather than typing in your keyword into Google and I used to do this before I realized there were tools out there and just writing them down or copy and pasting them. Also at the bottom of Google, at the very bottom of your search results, those Suggested search queries, that's what Ubersuggest and keyword.io will pull in all that for you into a nice report. Google Correlate is awesome because it kind of gives you some associated ideas with what you're talking about and it might give you some creative inspiration for where you can take your topics. And Google Trends is also really awesome to evaluate where your keyword's going, where it's been and is it really even relevant to focus on at this point? Is it already gone and already had its time or is it kind of up on an upswing? And so the public is one of my favorites as well especially when for your content writers out there, really this is all gearing towards writing content so whether you're guiding your client to write content or you're writing it yourself, these are going to be awesome but answer the public specifically with blogs, question and answer. What better way to do market research and understand what your audience actually has questions about than actually looking on answer the public or Quora? So this is a kind of visual of what my spreadsheet starts to look like. So we have our seed keywords all the way at the bottom, all each tab is that seed keyword and then we start to fill out our lists and I really go crazy here when I first do a report, I'll just pop in as much as I can and then I start to nail it down and start to really focus in on what my client actually wants to focus on and I'll mark things in red that are irrelevant, things that we don't want to be focusing on just to make sure that we're really clear about where our lists are coming from. So continuing on in creating this spreadsheet, we've got all these tabs with all these keywords and we need some data around this. We need to understand what these keywords mean and really where there is the most opportunity for connecting and building this community. So Google Keyword Planner is free and it's an awesome tool to use. There are a lot of paid subscription tools out there as well. Moz is a good one or Ahrefs is also great and those tools, the paid subscriptions are going to give you more specific and a little bit more insights but Google Keyword Planner actually just had a facelift and instead of giving you an average of your clicks of this could happen between 500 and 1,000 or 50 and 100 and now it's actually giving you some actual, this is how many clicks we actually expect. This is in terms of how many clicks for a specific date range. So the cost, right, right. So this is all coming from Google AdWords and it's really like even if you're not running any ads, this is just valuable data to understand the viability of any topic or keyword that you're trying to work with. I actually don't really use actual implementation of ads very often because I like to really focus on that organic traffic and this is just really helpful to understand the competitive nature of your keyword and seed keywords are obviously going to be very competitive but the long tail keyword phrases that you're working with are going to start to become a little more specific and they're going to be a little easier to chew on. So we're basically going to use this tool. I just take my one tab at a time, take my list of keywords, pop it into Google Keyword Planner, get the data and paste it back into my spreadsheet so I start to have a filled out document. So kind of give you an idea of what that looks like. You can customize this however you like, you know, color code, organize by length of the keyword or, you know, really the competitive nature is really what we're going for here. So if somebody is paying, you know, an insanely amount of money for clicks on a particular keyword, we might want to nail that phrase down a little bit more so it's a little easier to go after. You have a spreadsheet. So now what? Like you get the spreadsheet that has a billion tabs in it with all these keywords and when I first started doing SEO, I gave this to a couple clients and I was like, isn't this so cool? Like, look at all this data. They're like, yeah, but like, now what? Like, what do I do now? Like, I don't, this is great. Look how hard this looks. Like, I have so much to focus on now. So, and I love Oprah. Competitor analysis, being aware, that's our next step. So keyword research is being intentional, really starting off on the right foot, understanding where you're coming from and all the information out there that we need to really hone in on. And competitor analysis is going to be where we start to become aware of our market, aware of our industry and how we fit into the mix. I see a lot of articles out there talking about competitor research and it's talking about spying on your competitor. I don't really like that idea. I think it's more just really getting to know your industry and knowing what's out there and how your competitors are serving your same similar audiences and how you fit into the mix. Where do you communicate better? Where do you offer better services? What did they get wrong? What are they missing? You can really get a lot of good insights and really focus yourself into a niche that's needed. So step one, we're going to download Moz bar. It's also free, yay. So we're going to use this tool to better understand our competitor links that we're looking at when we start to pop in these keywords into Google, better understand what the viability is for each one. And it is a process. This is a practice. This is something that takes time and it takes a subjective look at each keyword and how it shows up in search. You really have to take your own creative mindset into this process and take your time through it. So Moz is going to help us understand page authority and domain authority. Authority is essentially Moz's understanding of what Google ranks a website as. So it's kind of like a little score of ranking in search, and I'll show you that in a moment. So once we have this Moz bar, we're going to get to what that looks like. We're going to enter our Google keyword into Google. We're going to look for one or more of the below of these little options and review the quality of the content. So if you can find some articles that are with a page authority of less than 20, it's out of a scale of 100, 100 being like Google, and it's very hard to get that high. The lower page authority is going to give you a clue that it's going to be a little easier for my site to rank above this one, because maybe I'm going to write a better piece of content. I am going to write a better piece of content to make sure that I rank above that competitor. Sites that are kind of spammy or directory listings, blogs that kind of include and talk about everything, that's going to be a good clue that, yeah, there's not really any great content out there, and I have an opportunity here to hone in on. So this is an example of what the Moz bar in action looks like. So once you toggle the Moz bar in your browser on, it's just an add-on extension. I just put in gardening tips, a seed keyword, this big idea, into Google search, and these are the first three search results, so you can see the HGTV 73 page authority, and I really want to bring your attention to page authority specifically. We're trying to outrank pages, not whole sites. It is a good idea to look at the domain authority and understand how competitive a website is as a whole, but really we're trying to dominate in pages, especially when it comes to writing comprehensive content. We want to be the best page out there for that. So really focusing in on that and not getting too discouraged when you see a high domain authority, but a low page authority. So this is a good example of a very competitive keyword. This is going to be really difficult to beat. HGTV, that's a brand. It's a good clue that this is a very competitive keyword and that they're already doing some great work. And links are a whole other topic, but just to bring your attention to how many links there are, it's a good clue as to how valuable this piece of content is and how much it gets shared and all the links coming to this page to and from. So it's an understanding of how, again, how competitive. So this keyword is from my seed keyword of gardening tips, vegetable gardening for beginners. So we're getting really specific here. We're looking at a specific beginner mindset. Vegetable gardening is a really honed in term. So the page authority, the very first search result is only one, but the domain authority is 75. So again, nice to look at, but that page isn't doing so well in terms of the scoreboard that we're looking at in terms of authority. So this gives me a clue that this might be a good keyword to go after, if this is something that is, you know, I can get excited about and write a good piece of content around, then we might be able to have a chance to outrank these other competitors. So we kind of move into building trust. This idea of now we have our keywords, we have an understanding of what our competitor environment looks like, and now it's time to actually start writing content and providing value.  So some simple tips for writing content in terms of SEO. You wanna use your keyword term, the specific phrase you're trying to rank for in the beginning of your article, and you don't wanna use it too much, you wanna be contextual here. So that means that Google's understanding content better and better by the day. So it's able to really read your content and understand what it's talking about. So keywords, back in the day, they used to white out keywords in a page and put it on a white background so you couldn't see the keywords and then you would have all these keywords on your page and you'd rank in Google and it worked and now that's black hat and you will get penalized for that. And it just doesn't look good, like it's just not a good tactic. So using your keyword phrase that you're really trying to nail in on, use it in your title right in the beginning if you can. That's becoming a little less important, but if you can, it's helpful. Use numbers in the like three tips for success or three ways to do this or that. That's a really attention grabbing way to also tie in your keyword and make it tangible, make it actionable and really give your reader an idea of what this piece of content is gonna look like. Keep your sentences concise, so be very clear into the point, especially in the beginning of your content, you wanna keep your reader going so you wanna make sure that their attention is grabbed right up from the beginning, not overwhelming them with too much content and just really grabbing their attention right off the bat. Include images, charts, videos, any kind of visual aid, something that's gonna offer a different kind of learning experience for your audience or whoever is coming to this page, you wanna try to make it as accessible as possible and really hone in on all different kind of learning styles. So if somebody's more a visual learner to offer those kind of visuals and maybe even a podcast or a link to some kind of audio, any kind of additional value you can add through other media is always wonderful. Yeah. How concerned do you get in keywords in your metadata for making? Yes, you do wanna include that in your alt tags for your images, you wanna make sure that you're including it in your meta description, anywhere that you can to really help, you're really just trying to help Google understand what your page is about. So yes, anywhere that you can optimize is always great. We're not getting too technical in this talk, but all those SEO practices, I'll have some resources for you too at the end are good to maintain. Yes. Do you have a search? No, they'll be able to see them as well. I mean, Google's gonna read the pages in an entirety and get an understanding of what your page is about. So anywhere that you're adding content, that's gonna become relevant. Yeah. I had something that I think it's lost. So comprehensive content, that's what it was. We wanna create comprehensive content. We wanna really be this authority in our industry for whatever we're writing. We're not just writing to get rankings, we're writing to provide value. We're building community. We're writing because we wanna connect with people in a new way. And comprehensive content is becoming more and more important. It's much better to spend your time writing a really in-depth piece of content once a month rather than writing a bunch of little articles that don't really offer much substance several times a week. So really find a rhythm and a pattern that works for you. Monthly seems to work well for me because it's a lot. It's a big project. It's a lot of work. And depending on how much time that you really wanna allocate to it. So for my personal stuff, I give myself that month. But the comprehensive nature is gonna help Google further understand what you're trying to do, what you're trying to communicate. And Google's actually gonna start being able to read videos soon. I don't know if they already are, but it's happening. And so that kinda gives you, or at least for me, it gives me a clue of Google's really understanding more like we do. So it's understanding conceptually and contextually what's going on in this page so that it can best provide that result for searchers. And regarding that idea of this comprehensive content, it's this idea of offering that value once again, coming back to being that authority in your industry, that go-to person, that's gonna be a way to build trust with your audience, that they're gonna know who to go to. Any kind of content you're creating. I mean, blog posts are kind of more, this is where I'm kind of like leaning towards of the focus, but it could be anything. Just being as in-depth as possible and really trying to give every scenario an answer regarding that specific term or topic that you're discussing, yeah, right here. Yeah, yeah, that's usually how I would accomplish that. Yes, and the numbers are a little more eye-catching and in terms of click-through rate, which we're gonna get to next, it seems to work better. People tend to respond better to the number right in the beginning. Gives them an idea of what content's like. That's the title of your presentation. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Get attention. Yeah. I said, do you have any perspective on it's better to take one page and put a lot of content and weight it to a particular topic on that page versus bringing that content up and creating several different pages with some sets of particular topics? Yes, that's a great question. And the first, it's creating that content that's as lengthy as you can. Really, articles that are ranking really well are more than a thousand words at least.   So it would be better, my personal approach, and there is a lot of opinion about this, but I do like to keep it all in one page and focus on ranking that page. And then where I start to get into other topics, like where this topic deserves its own page, I'll dive into that rabbit hole for creating that content. Thank you. So your five or six main headings, you're talking about creating one very lengthy blog post and then if you had a similar topic, so maybe you're writing a first article on planning tomatoes. And then next month you're gonna talk about planning papers. That's a separate, when you talk about a separate page, it's a separate post. Yeah, yeah, essentially. But go on to the blog. Yes, that's correct, exactly. And the search engines will find that eventually. Yes, yes, if it's well optimized then we create comprehensive content and that brings me to a point I had lost earlier and it came back. The idea of this contextual understanding, Google's understanding of your page, your keyword research doc is gonna be a great tool for that to help Google further along in understanding your content. So the keywords that are within that tab of the seed keyword that you're focusing on or if you pull the long tail keyword out of that tab and you're working on writing that piece of content, look at the other keywords in that same tab and see what's related. This is a good way to include the same kind of topic in different ways and these keywords are gonna be sprinkled throughout your content to help Google A understand your content better and to not overuse your target keyword. You only wanna use that target keyword that you're really focusing on no more than three times in your content. And depending on the length you can get away with it a little bit more but it really does depend on how long your content is. So this is a great little kind of cheat sheet for click-through rate and just gives you some inspiration for writing titles and just helping people to find your article a little bit more. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, yes I have a link at the end and I'll provide that for you. Yeah, no worries. So using Quora and Udemy is an awesome strategy for understanding the structure of your content. You of course don't wanna necessarily steal somebody else's structure of their class course that they've posted on Udemy but you might want to understand, all right this is what content's already out there, this is how many people have taken this course and it gives you an understanding of like how many people are out there at least in this lane of the internet that care about this topic. It kind of validates you and helps you understand that yeah this is a need and there are questions that need answered. So I like to look at Quora and Udemy to understand how I'm gonna structure my content, break it up and answer different questions and really be as valuable as possible. Adding modifiers to your titles are great. These are some easy ones and you can throw those numbers right before it, seven easy ways to plant your vegetable garden using a different fast or best review this current year and that means using 2018 like the ultimate guide to gardening 2018. You wanna make sure that you're really making that as relevant to right now as possible. It's gonna lead people and if they see 2017 might not be drawn to that content. Say if you're revamping an old piece of content they're 2018 on there, add some more tips and tricks and start promoting it again. Bucket brigades are awesome. I think that they are a great way to break up content and it's just a really easy way to kind of add some more white space in your page and lead people through. So if somebody's scanning your piece of content and they see some of these phrases they might be like oh this is crazy, what's crazy? Like I gotta keep reading and maybe they'll be more enticed to actually read your content. So we're being intentional with keyword research. We're being aware by understanding our industry and our market through competitor analysis and we're building trust by writing really awesome content. And I think that this is really speaking to being of service in your industry and using our SEO practice as that a practice to build trust. A practice that we keep coming back to to provide value to better understand our businesses, to understand ourselves and how we communicate with our audiences the connection that we have with them, how close are we to their problems? How do we actually get in their mind without doing it in a way that I just want more traffic? I just want more clicks. It's not that it's community. You wanna feel connected with your people and I believe that SEO is the blueprint for that. So I have some resources for you. You can check these out. Specifically the sleep is important. This podcast is amazing and I'm obsessed with it and sleep and it just is relevant because without a strong foundation, your SEO practices aren't gonna be that strong, right? So a couple SEO resources and some other things I've been loving lately. And thank you so much. I'm Amanda Gorman with GiveWP, Making Lives Better. And I'll be at the happiness bar with any questions and I'm happy to take them right now. Oh yeah. Yes, that is an excellent tool. I could do a whole talk about search console, webmaster tools. It is so essential. It's almost better than analytics to me, at least in terms of keyword research and understanding where you're gonna find your niche. So yes, and I was gonna include this and I'm really glad you asked this question. If you go into your, I can't remember what the little menu is called. It's where you find all your keywords that you're currently ranking for. It's on the left hand side. It's one of those menus. Just search in there and find, it'll have at the top, it says clicks, impressions, click the rate, position. And I click all of those to understand where I'm positioned for keywords already and I'll take that list and that'll be a whole another spreadsheet that I use and kind of go to and be like, oh, we're number three for this keyword. I wonder if I write a little bit of content about that or improve the content I have, maybe it'll start to get boosted up. Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's the best, one of the best places. I mean, it can happen in hours. It really can happen instantaneously. It's pretty quick. It depends on how much you're getting clicks and how Google translates that.  Contact info, sure. Absolutely. You probably want to go in depth with that one. And search articles might be seasonal or just kind of time used, so for that one, you maybe don't want to put as much into it, but how do you kind of, what's your process for weighing how much to put into an article or content that you're looking at? It's a great question. And I think it's really about your priorities of where you want to focus on and what's going to be the most of value to your audience and if it's seasonal and you just want to get some, you know, some essential content out there, just go ahead and publish it, you know. It's just gonna be difficult to rank if the content that is already out there is more lengthy, more valuable, has video, has other kind of tangible things that are boosting the ranking for that page. So it's really just, do you want to beat every competitor? I don't think so. I think you're just trying to be as much of value as possible and then maybe selecting one article that you want to spend your time on really getting that ranking up so that you get those clicks in and they start to spend time on your website and explore the other important information that's there. So I don't think that, you know, you can certainly spend your time on every page and, of course, you want to optimize as much as you can but in terms of the comprehensive content, I think it's better, it serves you better to be specific and have some goalposts. So maybe mapping out like I want to have four comprehensive content pieces this year. You know, really just like starting small and creating those pieces and seeing where it takes you. Yeah, it's really subjective. I mean, it's really, you have to really get in touch with where you want to provide value and where that meets your clients and where they're at right now. So I like to find gaps in the market, understanding like this competitor is misrepresenting this information or they're not sharing anything about this topic and I like to fill in those gaps to make sure that it is well rounded and that you kind of serve your audience as well by filling in spaces that were not served before. Does that make sense? Yeah, cool, thank you. Yeah. So I know as being one, two, three, and four over, that you post like over a week, so it's better to have the single article. I mean, if each one is lengthy and valuable, I wouldn't see any, I mean, that's a series, you know, I think that's a valuable way to keep bringing people back. Give did that with Gutenberg and I thought it was awesome but each piece was in depth and talking a lot about this particular topic, you know, one by one, yeah. I love Yoast and All in One SEO pack is also great. Those are the really two options that I use. All in One SEO. I've just been exploring All in One SEO a little more but Yoast has been my go-to on sites usually. I don't use both, not in the same thing. No, no, no. They're essentially, they're very similar. I'm more exploring All in One SEO just to kind of, I met a bunch of those guys last week in a rally so I was like, oh, maybe I should check this out. The functionality seems similar but it would be kind of fun to test the difference. Really, it's just a guidance. It's helping you understand like this is the topic I wanna focus on and this is the green mark, the ways I'm doing it well, the ways I'm not doing it well. I think Yoast has really awesome suggestions below. Like, hey, you're really not doing this right. Fix it. Yeah, anything else? Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.


I get to give you a whistle-sob tour of our lab, what it's done, what it plans to do, why we are, who we are, what we're doing and what we plan to do next. Now, I'm pretty sure I've broken the template, which gives me all the time in the world. We live in the outer atmosphere of our star. That star is a turbulent, convicting, nasty mess driven by its magnetic field. That magnetic field drives the entire solar system, but not only driving that solar system, and this is where it's probably broken. It drives, see, I broke it. It drives our atmosphere too. Of course, we know that when the sun gets up in the morning, it's warmer, when it goes to sleep at night, it gets cooler. And in general fact, the sun doesn't really do much to the earth, other than buffed it continuously with radiation, particles, light, etc. But anyone who knows this, relentless buffeting is called space weather. Space weather comes from our star, and our star is dominated. I have definitely broken it. This magnet is really a miniature model of all things. The earth, sun, trees, cells, everything is shaped by magnetic fields. Who knows Maxwell's equations? Hands up. The earth's magnetic field is coupled to the sun's magnetic field, and our atmosphere is therefore coupled to that. What HEO does is it encores solar terrestrial physics lab, it studies the complex magnetothermal interface between the sun and the earth. Now, back in the 1940s, some smart forts in Washington discovered that when the sun had an eruption, it destroyed the ability for people to communicate to people in the field. A smart guy, shown bottom right, or Roberts, was positioned in a mountaintop in Colorado. He reported back to Washington on what he saw in the sun, who then relayed it out into the field. What was truly a pioneer? That pioneering work set aside 75 years of work, multiple observatories, both ground-based, space-based, etc. Instrumentation, technology development, theoretical developments, and galore. These are just some of the things that we have worked on or are working on. They span the full magnetothermal environment, that 93 million mile stretch from the sun to the earth. I'm ahead of schedule. Of course, HEO is more than just science. HEO is about its people. We had a gathering here at the start of last month to think about the thousand-something people who've worked actively there over the 75 years. But back to Walt's vision and the impacts and the origins of HEO, that in our technologically dominated world, satellites are vulnerable to space weather. They're also vulnerable to what we call space climate. Our power grid system is vulnerable to space weather. I'm going to pause. Take a breath. Where do you live? All right, we ran up an ATM bill today. That thing critically depends on GPS timing. GPS satellites are critically dependent on space weather. If the sun thwarts, those satellites get disturbed. You could end up in charge one nano cent more for your transaction. What are the grand challenges for HEO in this technological society? We need to understand the processes that drive that space weather. We still don't know. We know it's the magnetic field, but not how it connects. But then to go a step further and understand how it connects to climate. How does the troposphere and interplanetary space connect? To do that, we need new observations. Two things here. One's COSMO, big one, which is our project. And on the top right is DECAST, D-K-I-S-T, the biggest solar telescope ever built. And in order to understand those data chunks, that massive data volume, you need new modeling strategies. And so upstairs, we're developing new model strategies to understand how to interpret the photons that get captured by those huge telescopes. That's a really crucial interpretive aid to doing what we do. If you can't understand the observations, in my view, there's no point in building the observatory. Did I say that in Jim Stanton? But the other crucial part is the feedback between the modeling activities and the observations themselves. So if you want to improve forecast skill, as Bill told us, you need to have a critical feedback between observation and model to improve your ability to figure out what's going to happen next in a similar set of circumstances. And so we're actually working to piece our little pieces of modeling infrastructure together to give us a better insight. You know, one of the things I'm particularly proud of, and this is a pretty recent activity, is to show how the tropospheric evolution, or weather down here, couples to the weather 100 kilometres above our head. This is something that I'm going to have to shoot you, because you're not meant to see it. As our newest evolution of how the ionosphere, the piece that Bill and his RO is trying to sample, how you see tropospheric variations. Things from down here affecting the upper atmosphere above, which is also being coupled from the sun. So the ionosphere is this real nexus between the sun and the earth. Pretty fascinating place. It's also the place where all your satellites fly. So if you've got a tropical storm, that thing can have devastating global impact to little subtle variations in the earth's upper atmosphere that scatter communications, etc. I think I did break it. I'm proud of that. But another crucial piece of our mission is to educate and to engage. And so in 2017 and 2024, there are literally two once in a lifetime events, seven years apart, that are going to straddle our whole country. These are total solar eclipses. We all have a field campaign for one and other activities around the other, where there are likely to be upwards of 100 million citizen scientists out there intrigued about what the sun is and how it impacts our planet on a day-to-day basis. And I'm done. Thank you.