If you haven’t noticed, we dig SEO in a big way here at Search Engine Journal. And while we love spiders and all things that crawl (no, we’re not talking about prepping for our Halloween party), we get especially jazzed when sharing our insights with SEO beginners.
SEO is great. We love SEO. You might say we’re a little obsessed with improving the way people, brands, and strategists (who- ever!) do SEO. And while there are many awesome ways to learn SEO as a beginner — keyword research, competitive analysis, and site audit — right now, we’re going to cover the changing landscape of SEO to catch you up to speed.
If you’re going to begin your path in SEO, knowing what you do and how you do it is important, but knowing what changes have been made and staying in-the- know will be ever more meaningful in your ongoing efforts.
For example, whenever you begin an SEO audit, there are prerequisites that need to be completed such as crawling the site’s HTML, checking robots.txt for blocked pages, and measuring PageRank of your competitors. But, if you don’t have a basic understanding of SEO history or changes being made over time, how would you know that Google turned off its Toolbar PageRank from its browser in March 2016? And, how does that affect your SEO audit process? AND, how will you know the authority of your website going forward?
For a long time, I viewed my SEO audit process as a task that needed to be done rather than a craft that gives my forthcoming strategies a fighting chance to win new clients or improve organic traffic for my current clients.
Because of the changing SEO landscape and with a little help from the SEJ news Slack channel, the idea of “This is a boring audit that needs to get done” turned into an opportunity to be one of the first to try new SEO tactics or pre- pare for Panda algorithm update.
After years of working in SEO, I’ve accepted that it’s hard to keep up with every new algorithm change and the hottest trends conference goers chat about.
Misconceptions Around SEO
There are a lot of misconceptions related to SEO. This is likely because context, personal preference, experiences, and lack of knowledge often muddy the ef- fects SEO have on our websites So, to clients, the idea that SEO strategies such as building high-quality backlinks or updating your local listings with accurate information are able to evoke some sort of large increase of traffic to your web- site seems about as realistic as having a psychic predict your future.
There’s still a lot to learn and consider if we look for practical ways to begin our SEO strategy.
SEO, What Does That Mean?
It’s human nature to change. From I Am Jackie Robinson to A Christmas Carol, the charac- ters in these narratives (whether truth or fable) help represent the lifeblood of how it’s human condition to change. With that, technology changes. From Pong to MacBooks, technology adapts just as humans do.
The same goes for search engines: at the end of the day, SEO evolves with humans and technology, but what you do with those changes rely on your ability to adapt.
The same goes for search engines: at the end of the day, SEO evolves with humans and technology, but how you react to those changes is based upon your ability to adapt and change.
Google, a search engine, is the middle man for searchers (like me!) and the content on the internet. As search engines become more sophisticated, these 80 million results become tailored to my search history and preferences to serve up more high-quality content that I’ll most likely be interested in clicking.
SEO, SEM, PPC, (and other triple-lettered iterations) serve as the driving force behind getting your content to perform well in the search engines. If you’re curious about looking deeper into the secret inner workings of Google’s algo- rithm, the new Search Quality Ratings Guidelines Google announced at the end of March 2016 is about as close as you’re going to get. This document was orig- inally released in November 2015. The guidelines emphasize local and mobile and reduce the supplementary content.
The Transformation of Organic SEO
I still regret not saying anything when I heard this SEO guru, the person signing my paycheck, promise page 1 in the search engines for a high- ly competitive keyword by month three of signing the contract.
As an SEO consultant in training (years before my role at SEJ), I should have stopped my colleague before the client signed, but being too inexperienced, I didn’t say anything. The result: We landed a new client, my colleague got a chunky payday, and I was stuck explaining to the client on month three why they weren’t ranking on page 1 for the keywords we promised.
Keywords are one of the most talked about misconceptions in SEO. Keywords are vital to beginning every SEO campaign, as you’ll learn further in this guide. Back in the ole’ days, you could “stuff” your meta titles and meta descriptions with keywords to manipulate ranking positions. Now, choosing the type of key- words based on conversational search (also known as Hummingbird), transactional use, or informational structure is more aligned with search these days than a goal fixated on ranking page 1.
For example. Google’s Rich Answer Box has become a prominent aspect of Google’s result pages. Have you seen their introduction of symptom-related an- swers? As Pete Meyers from Moz said, SEO in 2016 is about “being the answer.” We’re going to continue to see brands shift their keyword strategy to achieve Answer Box status.
With changes like Google’s Answer Box, SEOs cannot depend on keywords to target and optimize their content. There’s not doubt about it: structuring your content around keywords or topics can influence the SERPs. But, with Google performing over a trillion searches per year, how does Google organize this all? Well, inside Google, the old model of using engineers to process search results has progressed to having a machine-learning artificial intelligence system called RankBrain. Google uses RankBrain to sort and manage relevant search queries. Google Search Quality Senior Strategist, Andrey Lipattsev, announced in March 2016 at Google Q&A that RankBrain was the third ranking signal. The other two? Links and content. Andrey went on to say these rank in no particular order.
Another potential ranking signal in 2016? Structured data. John Mueller, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, mentioned on a Google+ Hangout that search results with rich snippets might start to rank higher. Rich snippets make sense because they add a degree of relevance to your content and helps RankBrain categorize your content in its correct entity.
RankBrain is a part of Google’s overall search algorithm Hummingbird. Those who aren’t living in SEO day-to-day may see this as confusing. Hummingbird proves to us that Google’s algorithm (whatever it’s called these days) is under- standing the meaning of words and phrases. These search engine algorithms are learning to adapt to the way the human brain works and functions. They are becoming more complex and accurate when identifying relevant, quality con- tent. (Have your heard of Panda yet? More than once? Okay. Moving on.) These changes to the algorithm allow us and search engines to connect the dots be- tween keywords and search queries for a better overall organic search experience.
The Hidden Revisions of PPC
The remarkable benefit of learning organic search is that you have an easy en- tryway into discovering paid search. While many paid search analysts would like me to hypothesize how exactly PPC works, I’d rather explain to you the recent changes that will affect your overall SEO strategy. Meaning how changes to paid search are affecting organic search.
For example, what would happen if the right-hand PPC ads were removed from the search results? Well, at the end of February 2016 Google rolled out a new search result page and surprise, surprise…no ads on the right panel.
At the same time, Google also introduced a fourth ad position above the fold on top of the organic listings. While industry experts below this had a low impact on click-through rates, it’s still a pretty big update.
Next, let’s talk about Google switching their ad label from yellow to green in mid-April. Google stated they researched if the color change impacted the way users determine paid versus organic listings, and they found none. This was Google’s goal. PPC analysts over at Wordstream confirmed Google’s theory when they detected click-through rate with the new green URL went up 15% in 12 their controlled group study. The green ad label doesn’t stand out as much com- pared to the organic results.
Google also unveiled the “next generation” of local search ads which appear in Google Maps (desktop and mobile). The ads include brand logos and offers that surface directly on the map vs. the side of the map. Taking a cue from another search engine rival, Pinterest, Google is launching promotional pins on Maps as well. With more than a billion users and 1.5 billion destinations being visited based on their searches, Google Maps is something you’re going to want to be- come very familiar with as a newbie.
Improving Mobile Optimization for SEO
Successfully optimizing your website for mobile search is a must for any busi- ness looking to provide users with what they need on the SERPs. Plus, with Google’s constant updates to mobile algorithm (also known as Mobilegeddon) it’s vital to understand the basics.
Mobile page speed, app indexing, and AMP pages are factors that help inform the search engines of your mobile-friendly and influences your mobile search roadmap. It’s also essential for measuring mobile traffic and the user journey across multiple devices.
Getting a handle on how customers view your website on desktop and mobile is invaluable. This is why we see most big publishers (and recipes!) taking advan- tage of Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) pages. AMP pages were created as a slimmed version of a content page to make it load fast on mobile. And, we’re also seeing Google roll out updates to their mobile algorithm.
Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, mentioned at the Search Mar- keting Summit in June 2016 that the page speed ranking signal will begin to look at the speed of your mobile website pages. This new update could potentially hurt your mobile rankings if your site isn’t up to speed.
Mobile is also shifting with rising technologies like voice search. During Sundar Pichai’s, Google CEO, Google I/O keynote he announced that 20% of queries on its mobile app are voice searches. This announcement comes at the same time Google is prepping for its in-home speaker and Amazon Echo competitor, Goo- gle Home.
Another win on mobile is if your brand or client has invested in an app, take the extra time to get your app indexed. Indexing your app can help driving more traffic, interaction, and therefore conversions. And, could potentially appear higher up in the SERPs.Once you begin to the behaviors and differences of mobile and desktop, you will develop habits that become routine when working with a client for the first time.
The Search Engines are Your Friend
You launched. You celebrated. You waited. It’s now six months later, and you realized you may not have spent enough time on optimizing your website. Sound familiar? Creating an SEO friendly website may seem like a daunting task, but it will change the way you do business digitally.
Once you’ve converted your biggest SEO fears into strengths or confirmed or stomped all those myths based on your actual real-life experiences, you’ll arrive at the hard part: implementing your SEO strategy and explaining it to your cli ents or stakeholders at your company.
Start by asking yourself, “How does SEO add value for you, your customers, and the organization’s bottom line?” Use data and your knowledge of the changing landscape to show the impact SEO can have on your website and online presence. Go into your analytics archives. Dig into the algorithm’s history. Find the answer and use it to increase traffic to your website. Yes, you might have to go back to the drawing board; you might not know the answer right away. This is OK.
The idea is to create value for the consumer before asking anything from the search engines in return. When all parts of your SEO strategy work together smoothly, you’ll have an awesome synergy where it really counts helping your consumers convert.
This SEO guide will give you the foundation and resources you need to discover trends to fix technical SEO issues and improve user experience. With an under- standing of SEO best practices, there are plenty of opportunities for you to rank your site. And, we are on it.
The Three Pillars of SEO: Authority, Relevance, and Trust
For just a moment, remember a time be- fore the Internet and search engines. What did we do if we needed information? In most cases, we began our own quest for a source to supply the needed information.
Let’s say you wanted to know the difference between Einstein’s General and Special Theories of Relativity. You could ask your next door neighbor, but you probably wouldn’t, unless you happened to know that your neighbor was a physicist, a science teacher, or was at least well-read on the topic. If you had access to a nearby university, you might seek out a physics professor to get your question answered. Alternatively, you could go to a library and ask the librarian to recommend the best book on relativity.
In each of those cases, you’re making a decision about authority. You know the closer the connection of your information source to deep knowledge about physics, the more likely you are to get a good answer. In other words, you want the most authoritative answer, which will come from the most authoritative source.
Of course, we need more than information. Sometimes we need stuff! Say you’re looking for a new dishwasher. Before the web, you might have picked up a copy of Consumer Reports. Or you might have asked friends or neighbors if they were happy with a particular brand. Unlike the physics example, in this case people you know might actually be good authoritative sources.
As soon as it was apparent that the World Wide Web was going to become the major repository for human knowledge not to mention the primary source for products, services, entertainment, and much else the need for search engines was obvious. Search engines help connect us with authoritative sources for our questions and needs, whether that’s a physics professor’s blog or dishwasher reviews by real users.
There were a few early attempts to do human indexing and categorization of web pages, but it didn’t take long to realize that effort would never keep up with the growth of the web.
Modern search engines use complex algorithms to find, read, and ascertain the topicality of web pages. They can then match those pages with search queries looking for the information they contain. It’s at this point that the importance of authority emerges.
For any given query, there are typically a great many pages that potentially satisfy that query. Users expect the search engine to take the role of the knowledge- able librarian and direct them to the best pages for the query. That’s a judgment, then, of the relative authority for the topic of the query of all the possible pages, and search engines must be able to assess that authority at a huge scale.
How Search Engines Evaluate Authority
In reality, modern search engines such as Google use hundreds of factors in evaluating the authority and relevance of web pages, but we can boil them down to two main categories: Content (relevance) and Links (external citation authority).
First, a search engine must read and analyze the actual content and other features on a page. From this, the engine associates relevant topics with the page. In the early days, on-page assessment pretty much ended there, but now search engines are much more sophisticated and are able to analyze a page’s language, structure, and other features to determine things like how completely the page addresses a topic and how useful it might be to a visitor.
Once the search engine understands the page and adds it to its index, it turns next to external signals that help validate and gauge the level of authority of the page for any given topic. Ever since the invention of PageRank by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, links have been the primary signal used for such assessment. Search engines use links much like we might treat scholarly citations. The more scholarly papers relevant to a source document that cite it, the better. The relative authority and trustworthiness of each of the citing source comes into play as well.
In the next two sections, we will go into more depth about how search engines use content and links to assess authority, as well as what you need to do to gain such authority for your own site.
Why Links Still Rule the Roost
The big innovation that made Google the dominant search engine in a short period was that it used an analysis of links on the web as a ranking factor. This started with a paper written by Larry Page and Sergey Brin called “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”
The essential insight behind this paper was that the web is built on the notion of documents inter-connected with each other via links. Since putting a link on your site to a third party site might cause a user to leave your site, there was little incentive for a publisher to link to another site, unless it was really good, and of great value to their site’s users.
In other words, linking to a third party site acts a bit like a “vote” for it, and each vote could be considered an endorsement, saying the page the link points to is one of the best resources on the web for a given topic. Then, in principle, the more votes you get, the better, and the more authoritative a search engine would consider you to be, and you should therefore rank higher.
Passing PageRank
A significant piece of the initial Google algorithm was based on the concept of PageRank, a system for evaluating which pages are the most important based on scoring the links they receive. So a page that has large quantities of valuable links pointing to it will have a higher PageR- ank, and in principle will be likely to rank higher in the search results than other pages without as high a PageRank score.
How this works is that when a page links to another page, it passes a portion of its PageRank to the page it links to. Thus pages accumulate more PageRank based on the number and quality of links they receive.
futures post I will write some SEO basic.