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
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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
GETTING FOUND ONLINE: OPTIMISING YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH 3
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.
GETTING FOUND ONLINE: OPTIMISING YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH 4
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
GETTING FOUND ONLINE: OPTIMISING YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH 5
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
GETTING FOUND ONLINE: OPTIMISING YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH 6
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
GETTING FOUND ONLINE: OPTIMISING YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH 7
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
GETTING FOUND ONLINE: OPTIMISING YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH 8
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
GETTING FOUND ONLINE: OPTIMISING YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH 9
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
GETTING FOUND ONLINE: OPTIMISING YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH 10
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
GETTING FOUND ONLINE: OPTIMISING YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH 11
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.
GETTING FOUND ONLINE: OPTIMISING YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH 12
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 graham@thisiscrowd.com
GETTING FOUND ONLINE: OPTIMISING YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH 13
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