Getting found online: optimising your site for search€¦ · your business. We wouldn’t recommend a real estate company start writing about Taylor Swift, but we might recommend

WHITE PAPER | JANUARY 2020

Getting found online:optimising your site for search

GETTING FOUND ONLINE: OPTIMISING YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH 2

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. In 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.

Testimonial

"The best place to hide a dead body is

page two of Google."

ANONYMOUS

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.

Source: Twitter


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.

76% of search traffic comes via Google, 86% of mobile search traffic comes via Google.


A brief history of GoogleWhen 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

Source: Google


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.

EXPLORE GOOGLE TRENDS HERE

Source: Google Trends


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.

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.

Testimonial

"Google only loves you when everyone

else loves you first."

WENDY PIERSALL

Source: Wikipedia


VIEW THE REPORT HERE2018 TRUST BAROMETER REPORT

Reputation Management

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.

91% of 18 - 34 year old consumers trust online reviews

92% of customers read an online

review before doing business with a company

Source: Tripadvisor


Making life easy for search enginesSearch 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.

Source: Google


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.

FOR MORE ON GOOGLE’S APPROACH TO LOCALISATION CLICK HERE


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.

Source: Google


ConclusionIn 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.


Talk to us aboutyour next marketingcampaign

WRITTEN BY GRAHAM DELLDigital Strategy Director

Graham brings 20 years of digital marketing experience to Crowd. With expertise in a wide range of disciplines, he can help to realise projects of all sizes and requirements with a level of detail and breadth that has delivered successful results time and again.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?mail [email protected]


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Getting found online: optimising your site for search€¦ · your business. We wouldn’t recommend a real estate company start writing about Taylor Swift, but we might recommend