7 Things You Can Learn from Search Engine Results Pages

You can learn a lot from search engine results. In this in-depth guide, we’ll explore all of the lessons that you can implement right away.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a proven way to generate traffic and leads to your website. But it’s incredibly competitive.

The process involved in getting Google and other search engines to find your web pages useful and relevant to a specific audience is indeed challenging.

However, like many online tactics, there are various tasks and tricks that you can use to boost your results. And one of the best ways to start is by checking out what's already working for others.

Building a solid website architecture and providing the users with clear navigation will help the search engine crawlers to index your web pages quickly and easily. More importantly, it will give your visitors a fantastic experience of using your website and encourage repeat visits.

It’s worth noting that Google is gradually paying attention to user experience. In other words, how users interact when they land on your web pages is as important as the process that brought them to your page.

Now, when we talk about how much traffic the search engines drive to your website, the percentage is quite enormous, and perhaps the perfect indicator of the importance of SEO.

A study conducted by Search Engine Watch shows that “64% of all internet traffic comes from organic search, compared to 2% from social, 6% from paid search, 12 % direct, and 15% from other referral sources.

Similarly, of all organic traffic in 2015, eMarketer found that Google accounts for over 90% of global organic search traffic. Therefore, you obviously need a solid presence on Google search engine result pages (SERPs).

But how solid?

Well, this study indicates that “on the first page of search engines, the top 5 results account for about 67.60% of all clicks, and the results from 6 to 10 account for only about 3.73%.

Now, since most people who visit the internet begin their experience with a search engine like Google, getting found in the search will definitely help your business gain more visibility, leads, and increased revenue.

So how do you achieve this?

As a business owner or marketer, there are some lessons, tactics, and strategies that you can learn from search engine results pages, especially in your niche or industry.

Search engines have transformed to the extent that nearly every organic results differ based on user-intent and topic.

Let’s quickly review 7 things you can learn from search engine results pages that will help you to broaden your understanding of SEO in general.

1. Page Design And Layout Is Important

Don't isolate web design from SEO. Because each of them depends on the other to provide the best results. Here’s an excerpt from the Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide:

“Although Google and other search engines crawl billions of web pages, it's inevitable that some sites and pages will be ignored or missed. One of the core reasons why that could ever happen is when the page design is difficult for Google to crawl its content effectively.”

The truth is that if a search engine is able to understand and interpret the layout of a web page and identify the most important sections and parts of a web page, it will be a lot easier for it to pay more attention to that section, especially when crawling and indexing content from that particular page.

The links found on these page layout or sections will be given more weight than links in other sections of the page (even though they're on the same parent domain).

Your page layout may not have a direct impact on search rankings, but it's a tool for engaging users. Users care about designs.

When they're happy with how you laid out your pages, overall website responsiveness on multiple devices, and color choices, they will stick around for a longer time. This will increase a user-based metric known as “dwell time” which Google is desperately monitoring.

When creating content for your website, if you diligently obey Google's "rules," it's usually going to boost your chances of getting found in the SERPs.

So what are these rules?

Well, these are things I'm sure you've been hearing everything but might not be practicing.

Well, a proper page design goes beyond aesthetics or feel of the page. It’s about functionality as well. Is the page able to meet user’s intent?

If a searcher inputs the keyword “Yacht party guide,” does the page address this keyword? It should!

In getting started, you have to conduct keyword research before creating your content. This will enable you to determine what people are searching for in your industry, and this can be very effective.

According to Backlinko, “keyword research is market research for the 21st century.”

The screenshot below explains Brian Dean’s method for conducting keyword research:

Here’s the point: Creating blog posts on topics that people are already searching for is a good SEO practice. Never forget that!

Having known the importance of choosing keywords to target in your content, is that all you should focus on?

Of course not! You equally need to follow Google's various on-page layout recommendations – this is very important. For example:

●     Write a clear, relevant, and keyword-rich title tag.

●     Write a relevant and persuasive meta description (and include your keyword and ensure it flows naturally).

●     Interlink your inner pages with a mix of branded, exact match, and naked anchor texts.

Bottom line: When creating content for your blog, ensure that your page layout is well-optimized for users as well as Google. Make it easier for search engine bots to determine what your content is about. 

There are very specific instructions here and if you follow these steps, you’ll drastically increase the chances of your content being seen.

More importantly, use appropriate tools to dig each keyword that your competitors (i.e., advertisers) are targeting; you might uncover long-tail keywords that you can easily rank in Google.

Business owners and even SEO experts are often obsessed with the volume of specific keywords. However, we understand that this data is rounded and estimated by Google and should be used as such. It’s not 100% accurate.

But from my personal experience, the “cost-per-click” data is much more directional in aiding marketers to understand what keywords are essential to their business.

We often find that lower-funnel keyword (closer to purchase-intent) cost a lot more, but in certain cases, a significant variance will still exist between bids in high-volume keywords.

However, the exposure (advertising risk) for high bid + high volume keywords should be measured to ascertain which queries will likely provide the biggest investment and are really “worth the risk” targeting in organic or paid.

Now, I know you might be wondering how you can get this type of data. Well, Google AdWords or Bing Ads will give you all the data you need, but only if you are signed into an account.

Alternatively, third-party SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush will also give you limited data for free. Simply visit any of the tools and sort by cost-per-click (CPC) to get the “true story” of the golden keywords you come across.

For example, when I searched for the term “small business accounting software” on SEMrush, below is the result I got:

Now, you want to pay more attention to the CPC of the keywords here. Imagine if a keyword has a CPC of $30 and you’re able to create a compelling content that ranks in Google #1, #2 or #3 organic results, what sorts of results can you expect?

This could result in thousands of targeted leads to your website (depending on the keyword volume and competition).

3. Social Media And Other Advertising Channels Matter

The relationship between social media and SEO has, and will perhaps remain one of the most discussed topics in the SEO industry. Specifically, people are often eager to know if social media really help SEO efforts.

So does it?

The short answer is yes!

At least, numerous studies, including one from Search Metrics Rank Correlation shows that search engines look to social signals when trying to rank a web page.

The screenshot below from the study speaks volume:

Realistically, it’s very unlikely we’ll ever understand exactly what’s in Google’s algorithm except for someone who works at Google suddenly decides to share that information with us (good luck with that).

As a result of this, we have no other choice than to judge based on what Google employees have told us and what we have gathered in case studies and experiments.

Although Google has repeatedly said that social signals aren’t a ranking factor, we’re not giving up yet. Because we know that social signal points to user engagement metrics that Google is about.

First, let’s start with an article published by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land “What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count? In this blog post, Google stated that links shared on Twitter and Facebook are used as a ranking signal.

After Danny published this post, the former head of Google’s Webspam team “Matt Cutts,” confirmed again in a video that Google used links from Twitter and Facebook as ranking signal.

Surprisingly, Cutts posted another video in 2014 tackling this topic. This time, he claimed that Google treats Twitter and Facebook pages like they treat any other web page for search, but never as a ranking signal.

Similarly, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst “Gary Illyes” was asked in 2016 whether Google takes social media into account for SEO. He then retweeted Matt Cutts’ YouTube video and said: “the short answer is, no, we don’t.”

Therefore, since Google’s algorithm secret is well-guarded, we have no choice other than to take these comments as their official word — that social media signal is not a direct ranking factor.

However, the fact that Google stated that social media isn’t a ranking factor does not mean that it doesn’t, in any way, impact rankings. The 2016 SEO report of SearchMetrics still showed that “the correlation between social signals and Google rankings is very high.”

Now, I believe the answer to this whose debate lies in the word — correlation. Matt Cutts highlighted the same thing when he made the statement that, “It’s correlation, not causation.”

The study discovered that the total number of social signals on a given web page has remained constant. This means that the highest ranked web pages in Google’s SERPs have lots of social signals. 

It’s obvious that backlinks are one of Google’s top ranking factors. Google has already made it clear that social shares do not count as individual links. But at least, there’s a correlation here.

This means that if you produce great content, it will most likely go viral on social media, and people will probably link it to — which does increase your rankings.

So is it a surprise that websites with lots of social media signals also have high numbers of backlinks? Well, it shouldn’t.

Are you aware that Google is "dating" Twitter? And Bing is in a “relationship” with Facebook. Well, now you know!

Therefore, being active in social media (especially on these two networks) can be a great way to drive your SEO strategy — as it helps the search engines to know what content is popular by engagement level.

In a similar manner, there have been some reports indicating that paid advertising can positively impact click-through rates (CTR) in organic search results. How? Imagine when you rank 2nd or 3rd for a search phrase in Google.

Reports show that if you have a paid advert showing above or next to your organic search listing, it’ll increase the chances of your organic link being clicked. In this case, having ads that you’re not paying for (because it’s not getting clicked) it’s helping the effectiveness of your search engine ranking. Great!

4. Big Brands Thrive on Authority of Their Websites

Have you ever wondered why big name brands tend to dominate the top of search engine results pages?

Bear in mind that some of these big brands don’t have a budget for link building. I mean, they don’t build any links (manually), yet, they’re ranking very high for high-volume and competitive keywords.

It all boils down to the authority of these websites.

Assuming you were asked, “What’s more important, keywords or branding?” which would you choose?

Logically, keywords bring people to the website but building a good brand recognition, which equals authority will help you to achieve a top organic ranking in a short time, and get more sales. Although it’s not really a pure sales vs. traffic scenario, it’s quite close.

In simple terms:

“No traffic = no sales.”

But traffic without enough authority also equals no sales. So what are you going to do?

Over the last few years, the way search engines work has totally evolved. They’re not only looking for highly-optimized and useful web pages — they’re now focusing more on trusted and helpful content pages from authoritative domains.

If you get the point, it means that a poorly-optimized web page on an authority website has a great chance of outranking a well-optimized web page on a website with little or no authority in Google’s eyes.

The major difference here is that optimizing a page helps that single page alone while building solid authority around a website helps all your pages!

Therefore, a good amount of focus on internet marketing right now is not only on optimization — but good authority building. But what role does branding play here? Is it equally important?

No doubt, brand authority equally plays a significant role in boosting raw website authority. However, unlike website authority, the brand authority has a big impact both online and off the web. But apart from the buzz in website authority, the main value in brand authority comes from the organic clicks.

In the search environment, authority rules.

For example, when you search for the keyword “running shoes for women” on Google, you’ll notice that the majority of the pages ranking are big brands such as Nike, Amazon, Zappos, among many others.

These are all brands that don’t have time for link building. They and many other big brands in the industry can ride the waves of mentions, backlinks, shares, and other social signals, and their content will always rise to the top.

However, this does not mean that they should start resting on this glory. This is simply because the higher the brand, the higher the social media reach, and the higher the fall if something terrible happens.

Bottom line: As you can see, people are obviously talking and Google is listening. So, does this mean that if you’re a small player in the industry, you don’t really stand a chance against the big boys in the market with your tiny budget or a new website?

Not exactly…

You still have a chance to target and optimize your pages with long-tail keywords that big brands have neglected because of their low search volumes. When you take this approach, it means you can rank quickly in the SERPs with little or no backlinks at all.

5. Inbound links and Headings are critical to Google ranking

You’ve probably heard that heading 1s with your keywords and keyword-rich backlinks can help you rank higher in the search engine. But this belief changed in 2012 to the extent that H1’s that contains keyword can hurt your ranking, instead of helping it.

Similarly, long page titles can negatively affect your website, as shown in the chart below:

(Source)

As you can also see from the chart, Google advertising program was given a little push in the ranking direction, from its initial position on the negative side of the scale.

Furthermore, one other crucial discovery is that the total word count of content now factors more in a ranking, as longer posts tend to be linked to and shared more than simple short articles:

This chart shows that word count around the 400-525 mark appears to perform best. Therefore, while writing your content, always focus more on creating useful, comprehensive, and compelling content.

If you want to tackle a topic, make up your mind to create content that’s by far better and meaty than everything else that has been written on that topic previously.

The more useful words your content has, the more attention it’ll attract. However, while focusing on content length, don’t forget to make it epic and interesting.

6. Useful and comprehensive content is the foundation of organic ranking

On the web, the word “content” can mean so many things. It can be blog posts, articles, videos, audio, PDF reports, graphics, live video, or any information that the search engines can index. Though visuals are gaining more popularity in recent times.

In other words, the entire web is driven by and around content. Now, when you hear the “cliché” that content is king, it simply implies that content rules both the SEO game and the internet world.

And it’s true!

Google loves great content. If people see Google as their desired source for relevant, educative, and interesting content, Google wins. When you make use of Google to perform any search, they serve you adverts and they, in turn, make billions of dollars from advertisers. 

It's pretty much the same thing with Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other web channels.

So, does this make content the king?

A lot of people will agree, while others still have reservations. But I don't really care if content is king or queen. The most important thing here is that content on the internet is incredibly important!

Great content often drives a lot of traffic. And sometimes, it doesn't. But in general, the quality of the content you produce will significantly affect its visibility on the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Therefore, as I earlier stated, never compromise your content quality with quantity. It’s better and more sensible to create one incredibly amazing, and enchanting content per month, than dishing out 10 - 30 half-baked, mediocre content per month.

Remember, online engagement is geared around content. So, if you truly want to get results (in terms of traffic and leads) with organic search, start creating and publishing only high-quality, relevant, and evergreen content consistently.

Think about blogs, social media posts, event calendars, video channels, graphical content, and so on.

7. Google Makes Decision Based on user-based metrics

When it comes to SEO, targeting the right user metric is a very critical step towards making the right data-driven marketing decisions. This is because these metrics will directly or indirectly impact your online visibility in the search engines.

For example, if you want to build a spaceship to the sun, all of the data and metrics you'll gather must help you reach that exact goal: such as your speed, the distance to the sun, and so on.

If you mistakenly select even one incorrect user metric like your distance from the moon, you’ll end up floating aimlessly in the space and your mission will be futile.

In the marketing industry, a good metric usually has the following characteristics:

●     It is directional: This means that the positive or negative change of the metric will tell you if you're moving towards or away from your main goal.

●     It is relevant: It helps you to accomplish an important business objective, whether that means acquiring more customers or simply making a sale.

●     It is time-bound: It evolves and you’re able to get real-time insights of your actions

When it comes to search engine optimization, here are some of the user-based metrics that define user behavior — you should pay attention here:

1. Bounce rate: This is simply the total percentage of visitors to a specific web page who navigate away from the website after viewing just one page. Having a high bounce rate, in most cases, is an indicator that people are not engaging with your content.

So you have to create better content and make it easier for users to navigate your web page and find content easily.

2. Page load time: The loading speed of your web page will either keep or chase visitors away from your website. You want to ensure your website is properly optimized for fast loading. Why? Because there’s a connection between load time and conversion.

For example, in a recent study by ConversionXL, the relationship between website load times and conversion rates yielded a 25% reduction in conversion rates with just 1 extra second of load time:

3. Navigation: The navigation menu of your website is not there to confuse or frustrate your users, it’s meant to help them find useful information instead. Pay attention to this as well.

4. Checkout abandonment rate: This refers to the total number of users you lose in their very last step before completing an order. One thing that's inevitable in this business is that "some of your prospects will abandon your website before completing checkout." You want to ensure you minimize this.

Other critical user-metrics you should be mindful of are:

●     Product page conversion

●     Session length

And so many others.

Paying attention to all these metrics will definitely help your page to rank higher in the SERPs (which is actually the ultimate goal).

Given that “about 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine,” positioning your web pages for this huge audience in the search engines will help your business.

The same study equally shows that 70 to 80% of active search engine users ignore the paid ads and instead, focus on organic search results.”

More so, “75% of search engine users never scroll to page 2 of the search results.” Hence, the reason why you should appear on the first page.

While search engine optimization attracts visitors from the search engines, usability is all about conversion, which means helping active users meet certain goals.

Unfortunately, most people think that usability does not matter in SEO as long as your content is properly optimized for long-tail keywords. But I’m afraid, the reverse is often the case. You, therefore, need to keep an eye on those usability metrics.

Conclusion

You’re already aware that search engines are rapidly evolving. And so is the practice (i.e., SEO). The old tactics that worked before Google started rolling out their algorithm updates (Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird) no longer works.

The major challenge that most people are facing today is how they can easily rank their web pages higher in the search engines without being penalized.

But here’s the truth, paying attention to your active users will give you an edge over your competitors that don’t cater for their website users.

As a blogger and content marketer, you don’t want to be like those people who wake up in the morning, come up with a new topic and start dishing out a generic content.

Long-form and informative content is the way to go and I strongly believe in it. This type of content has immensely helped a lot of businesses and marketers to generate dramatic organic traffic, increase search ranking, and grow their revenue.

The fundamentals of SEO hasn’t changed.

It all boils down to properly researching your industry or market, picking the right keywords, identifying questions that your audience are asking, and creating high-quality content that will attract trusted backlinks, generate social signals, and improve user-based metrics that will drive your search engine visibility to the roof.