Introduction

Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) is still somewhat of a mystery. The major search engines will alter their algorithms without any notice and leave the optimisation community scratching their heads to discover why they have suddenly seen a boost or decline in their organic traffic. Recently (August 2018) Google rolled out an update which primarily affected Medical and Health websites. Nicknamed the ‘medic’ update, Google’s only advice was that they had updated their algorithm and the only advice for pages which had been demoted was to ‘provide great content’. The community shared their findings and as a collective discovered that the algorithm affected mainly health and medical websites. This example illustrates that a lot of our knowledge about what search engines are looking for is largely community led, with the most basic advice coming from the search engines themselves.

What Do Search Engines Want?

The easiest way to approach search engine optimisation is by treating search engines like a store and your website is a product. They want to make their store attractive by offering good products. If your product (website) is better than your competitors, then they will put it closer to the front of their store or to stretch the analogy further in the window or the front page. At the end of the day, search engines are businesses. By providing results that their users will find useful, their users have a good experience and will come back again in the future. When they come back, they will see more adverts and search engines will profit from repeat visits. 75% of search traffic comes via Google, 90% of mobile search traffic comes via Google.

A Brief History of Google

When Google first emerged as a search engine it offered one key advantage over its main rivals: it was fast and it was accurate. At the time the alternatives were directories like Lycos, MSN and Yahoo and question sites like Ask Jeeves (which was way ahead of its time as it turns out). Google provided a no-nonsense approach and allowed it’s users to find what they were looking for quickly. It became trustworthy and eventually a verb: “Let me Google it.”. Despite offering more and more options (image, video searches etc.), Google remains simple and fast even today.

So the key to any optimisation activity is actually relatively simple: All we need to do is provide content that searchers want to read. In principle, if we do this and nothing else then we will eventually arrive on the front page of search results. Now before we do ourselves out of a job, the main activities of search engine optimisation generally fall into the following categories:

Developing this valuable content

Making it look valuable

Making it easy for the search engines to find and categorise it

What Is Valuable Content?

Valuable content is basically any content that people want to find. We should just pause and reiterate: it must be relevant to your business. By using content as a lure on search engines (and social networks), it must talk about what your company offers in terms of goods or services. Otherwise, your visitors will just bounce off having found out what they wanted to know. Good content should attract visitors and excite them enough to engage further. This is the subject of a white-paper in itself. We can establish the potential popularity of a piece of content by looking at search volume data which is mainly made available for the use of paid advertising to justify higher rates for popular searches (and larger ad impressions). You can use Google Trends to find popular search trends at the moment as well as general data on the popularity of search terms. Tools like this are used to establish keywords that may be valuable in developing content that is popular, but at the same time it shouldn’t be used to write content that isn’t relevant to your business. We wouldn’t recommend a real estate company start writing about Taylor Swift, but we might recommend the content focus be skewed slightly to take advantage of relatively higher volumes. For example, a real estate company with properties near Dubai, can take advantage of higher Dubai based property searches by writing about the benefits of being near Dubai without actually being in it: lower costs, more space, great commuting etc. The real estate company educates its readers and latches on to higher traffic sources without misleading searchers or search engines.

It’s a Popularity Contest

One of the ironies of search engine marketing is that the more popular a piece of content is, the higher it will rank. But how do we make our content popular from page 2 of the search results? There are two main avenues to generate links to our content: social media and PR. If your article, product or website is generating a lot of buzz on social media, the search engine will assume that the content is useful or interesting to many people and will boost your rank accordingly. Wendy Piersall “Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.” Likewise, if content is talked about on other respected sites such as news outlets or Wikipedia, then it assumes the content is notable enough to warrant a boost in position. These tactics help boost domain authority or in other words boost your credibility as a trusted and noteworthy source of information. If Wikipedia (which uses real people to review content) is happy to feature you, then you must be OK.

In addition to checking incoming links, search engines will also look at review data to find out whether you are a company that other searchers have had a good experience with. This forms part of the business profile section and sites like Google will look at third party review sites (who make this data available by publishing it on their own sites) and also their own Google Reviews data. So it is really worth investing time in encouraging positive reviews from happy customers by making it easy for them to leave reviews whether on Google, Tripadvisor, Trustpilot or similar companies.

Making Life Easy For Search Engines

Search engines are busily scouring the web for new and useful content on topics that people want to know about, but they also care a great deal that what they present to their searchers is relevant, tidy and useful. In recent years Google has brought even more information from company websites onto the search pages themselves. This includes useful data like locations, business hours, reviews, event information and even content itself if it can answer a specific question. This data needs to be properly formatted on your site for it to appear correctly on search engines so a large part of search engine optimisation relates to ensuring that search engines understand your content and that it looks good in search listings. As we said earlier, search engines will find your content and display a link to it if we do nothing to it. However, we can help provide attractive listings by preparing meta information that is stored in the code of the page and that search engines output in their results. This code is an opportunity to add in some keywords and describe the content in a meaningful way so as to entice visitors to click. Again, meta information must truly reflect the content of the page - there is no opportunity to try and trick search engines as the page content is taken as a whole. So we include the page title, a company name in the title to give the business some exposure and a brief description of what the page is about using keywords that searchers are looking for with the aim being the searcher thinks “this looks relevant to me” and clicks through.

What are Rich Snippets?

In addition to meta information, we can add tags to our website code which will help search engines categorise our content and extract relevant information for use in it’s additional features. There are several schema’s which developers can use to ensure that the information presented on site can be read and output to met the searchers needs. A good example of this is for a product, where a properly labelled item will appear in Google’s Shopping results if it can understand key information such as the SKU, Product Name, Image etc. Rich snippets aren’t suitable for every occurrence, but a check on possible use should be made during the site build to see if there are any that are applicable. But preparing our sites for search engines doesn’t stop here. There are many other things that a search engine will consider when promoting your content over competitors: all focussed around providing a good user experience for their searchers.

Is the website available on a mobile device? 

Search engines do not want to send users on a smartphone to a site where they have to pinch and zoom to use the site. Especially if there are alternatives which offer a good mobile experience.

Is the site fast and easy to use? 

When searchers click on a link to your site do they have to wait a long time for content to load? Does it eat through their mobile data because you have large images? A well performing website with fast server response and rendering time is a key consideration in helping the search engines provide that good experience. Google has introduced a program called Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP (https:// www.ampproject.org/). Building your site to be AMP compatible is becoming a key consideration - adhering to Google’s own specification is bound to improve rankings in the same way that using Google Plus did until it was planned to decommission that platform.

Is the site secure? 

Search engines do not want to send their users to sites which may infect their devices with malware or viruses. This is possibly the worst experience a user could have: “why did you send me here?!” So search engines will check a security certificate is present and rank you accordingly.

Is the site in a language suitable for the audience?

We’re conducting business in a global marketplace. Does your business ship overseas? Do you present your content in alternative languages for customers? If you are trying to sell your product in France then it makes sense to present content in French in order to compete with other French businesses! It is somewhat misunderstood that presenting the same content in different languages will result in penalisation for duplicate content, but Google for one appreciate what you’re doing and will more likely feature your localised content on it’s .fr version of it’s search engine for example. As well as providing the language options, the code needs to be correctly formatted to tell search engines what language the page is in. Again proper formatting in the code makes life easier for search engines.

In Conclusion

In this document we have looked at some of the tools that the search engine marketer has to use, but we started by saying that SEO is somewhat of a mystery and that is still true. The principal search engine Google will continually make adjustments to algorithms without warning so from one day to the next you may see spikes or troughs in organic traffic for seemingly no reason at all. But as we have also explored, by understanding what the search engines are trying to provide for their users, we can ensure that we make things easy for them to find, classify and display links to our websites. The fundamental truth is this though: if you’re not saying anything of interest or aren’t providing an exceptional product or service, then you won’t make much of a mark and this has been ever the way in business.