By Maria Singer
SEO. If you’ve used the internet at any point in the last ten years, there’s a good chance you’ve at least heard of it. SEO is one of those terms that is sometimes used as a catch-all when referring to anything related to online marketing but is actually much more specific than how the term is sometimes casually used. Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the different ways content creators, copywriters, and web developers can optimize web pages to make them easier for search engines to understand and recommend to users through search results.
“Why is that important?” you may ask – and with good reason. If you’ve built a content-rich site with loads of valuable information for your users about your products, services, or goals, shouldn’t your site be high up in search results when someone is seeking exactly what you offer?
The answer is not exactly.
For the purpose of this article, we’ll be focusing mainly on Google organic search results.
HOW DOES GOOGLE RETURN SEARCH RESULTS?
To understand how SEO works, it is important first to understand how search engines like Google work. Whether you’re troubleshooting the tapping noise coming from your 2009 Toyota RAV4, trying to find the highest-rated dog food for your senior schnauzer, or searching for a helpful beginner’s guide to SEO just like this one, Google displays search results for pages that have gone through the following 3 step process:
- Discovery: There are two main methods of discovery: bots and manual submission. If your site is brand new or has recently undergone a significant overhaul, you can submit it for indexing (below) through Google Search Console. In another method, bots (commonly called spiders) ‘crawl’ web pages and download information. There are also other methods for Google to discover your pages, but these are among the most common.
- Indexing: Once Google is aware of your page’s existence, it extracts what it thinks are the essential parts and adds them to its index.
- Ranking: Google’s algorithms define and rank your content’s quality in 200+ areas. Some of the key areas include:
- Relevance
- Location
- Page speed
- Freshness
- Authority on a topic
How Google personalizes your search results
The most commonly known and understood factors that come into play when personalizing your search results are your location, browser language, and past search history. Within a split second, Google identifies a list of top websites that fit your queried keywords. In that same timeframe, it compares those search results against what it knows about you to re-prioritize and even eliminates some of those results.
Understanding the basics of how Google delivers results to its end users is half the battle when it comes to deploying a better SEO strategy. The good news is that most other search engines, like Bing or Yahoo, work in much the same way that Google does. According to BrightEdge Research, 53.3% of all trackable web traffic comes from organic search results; this means that focusing on improving the overall quality and readability of your web pages could be the single most important thing you can do to increase your website’s long-term, completely free web traffic.
We Could Go On
Understanding the basics of search engine optimization is the crucial first step to improving your site’s ranking overall. Above all, it’s important to simply write good content – be the authority on your topic, and generate rich information that users actually want to read without too much (or too little!) fluff. When it comes to search engine results, each spot your website is closer to the top, the more likely it is to receive valuable traffic. If you have questions or want to learn more about how we help our clients at Zer0 to 5ive build or revamp their websites, let’s chat.
Why are you reading this blog post? That, I’m not really sure about.
Who are you? Why are you reading this blog post? I can take a good guess. You probably have marketing, communications or PR in your profile somewhere. Chances are, you’ve read a post on a similar subject or even read something on the Zer0 to 5ive blog before. If our readership mirrors a site such as MarketingProfs, you are likely a professional at a small or medium-sized business in North America.
How do I know this? Because we’re inside an optimization loop. It’s similar to the social media bubble of our own design that keeps the unpleasant posts of our crazy uncle out of our feed and keeps feeding us posts that we’ll like, comment and share on. The optimization loop is more automated and more invisible. Every Google search (at least 5.5 billion a day), Amazon purchase (600 items a second on Prime Day 2016), or Facebook like (500,000 a minute) is being captured and analyzed to keep us clicking, buying and engaging.
Past performance is generally regarded as a good predictor of future behavior online, so the optimization loop keeps on working to drive more clicks. For those trying to get someone to take a new action online, the loop can be hard to break into. Here are a few ideas on how you can get your message out (or your client’s message, since you’re probably from an agency!):
1) Publish Outside Your Box
When creating content for potential customers to read, it’s important to get it published in the right places and engaged with by the right people so that it leaves your brand’s loop and enters the content loops of your prospects. This can best be accomplished through contributed content to publications or blogs that serve a target audience. When it comes to Google, they will have stronger authority on the content topic, and will be more likely to make your content rise to the top of search results.
There are also ways to leverage social media to try and break into new areas (e.g. hashtags in Twitter, audience targeting in Facebook), but if your account is outside of the loop, it’s less likely to be effective. With systems like Facebook’s algorithms in place that rely on thousands of factors tied to affinity and actions around a company’s page and individual posts, having your content pushed out by a well-regarded third party is a great way to increase impressions on your message. Plus, it allows you to use your brand and personal accounts to spread that message rather than relying on self-published content, which is likely to receive fewer eyeballs.
2) Become an Expert to Your Audience
There used to be ways to fake it online without real content, but the methods employed by Google and Facebook to determine valuable content are largely driven by user behavior. Bounce rate, time on page and post engagement all matter when it comes to rankings and visibility, so time spent creating good content will pay dividends over time. By combining strong content and wider distribution, it’s possible to become an expert source for target audiences.
This emphasis on quality carries over to email marketing as well. Gmail and other services increasingly monitor user engagement to determine if an email will be delivered. They examine behaviors at a macro (sending account) and micro (individual email) level to build reputation scores, so if your emails are ignored for being of little value (let alone marked as spam or unsubscribed), it’s going to keep your content from being seen.
3) Understand the System
It takes a lot of work to keep up with the changes being made by the big online platforms. Keeping up with what’s working on Google and updating your content and communications strategy on an ongoing basis to match can pay big dividends. Factors go beyond content too. For example, if web pages are slow loading, not mobile friendly, or not protected with SSL encryption, there can be penalties from Google because your site is not providing a good, secure user experience.
There’s also a degree of “follow the money” that smart users can capitalize on. If Facebook wants to push Facebook Live video to users to increase its popularity, it would be wise for you to use it and break through the walls that the algorithms put up. Being aware of best practices and using them to influence your communications strategy can create a lasting competitive advantage, as the optimization loop only gets stronger in your favor.
By: Bob Minkus, Director