Let's Talk About SEO

What Exactly Is SEO?

Can you imagine a world without search engine giants like Google? Unfortunately I can’t, since I was born in the 1990’s when Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was starting to become a thing. It’s incredible to think about how SEO has changed the way we live and interact with information. So what is technically SEO? According to MOZ, SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. With this in mind, SEO embraces both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines. The goal for SEO is to make a website essentially a better experience for people, by building search-friendly websites. The three big players that drive web traffic are Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Search engines are like roadways that drive traffic to your site and it’s a huge advantage for businesses to be using SEO.

It’s extremely important for businesses to build strong site architecture, based on Search Engine Watch, in order to provide a clear navigation to help search engines index site quickly and easily. In such a digital world that we live in, SEO is the umbrella for all the methods businesses can use to promote visibility for your website. This is easily done for larger businesses than smaller businesses, since SEO is expensive. However, MOZ Enterprise explains that the way to measure success for a business’s brand is whether it increases in-store traffic, sales, phone calls, bookings, or some other metric, by the growth in Key Performance Indicator’s (KPI’s). As a marketer, it’s important to measure the online interaction that happens, in order for SEO to be successful. 

To start, Portent article encourages a business to answer these valid questions:

·     Where is your business suited to compete?

·     Who you’re up against?

·     What niche you can realistically attack as a result

So How Does SEO Actually Work?

With the help of MOZ, it explains that search engines have two major functions: crawling and building an index, and providing search users with a ranked list of the websites they have determined as the most relevant.

1. Crawling & Indexing

• Links allow the search engines’ automated robots, called “crawlers” or “spiders” to reach the many billions of interconnected documents on the web
• Each stop is a unique document – usually a web page or a file

2. Providing Answers

• Search engines are fundamentally answer machines
• Both relevance and popularity is what the process of SEO is trying to influence
• Based on MOZ a popularity and relevance aren’t determined manually; instead, the engines employ mathematical equations (algorithms) to sort out the relevance based on ranks that is influenced by the quality (popularity)

“According to a new study, when both brand and location- specific pages exist, 85% of all consumer engagement takes place on the local pages (e.g., Facebook Local pages, local landing pages). A minority of impressions and engagement happen on national or brand pages.” – Local Search Association

Link Building

Within SEO, there is the concept of link building, which is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. In addition to that, links are a way for users to navigate between pages on the Internet, according to MOZ- Link Building. The two ways that search engines use links are: (1) to discover new webs pages and, (2) to help determine how well a page should rank in their results. Linking building can also involved outreach to other relevant websites in your industry. I think this is essential to companies since it builds long-term relationships if relationships are build with influencers who can make your business highly trusted. With good link building, it can help build a strong brand for your company and create an authority in your niche.

Types of Links:

·     Links to homepage

·     Links to “deep” pages (such as product or category pages)

·     Links containing your brand/company name

·     Links containing the keywords you’re targeting

Important Upcoming Issues for SEO

It’s not surprising that SEO is always changing! Some of the changing issue look forward to 2018 concerning SEO is the rise of voice search. According to The Mission article, 1 out of 5 searches already come from voice queries. For this reason, it’s vital that companies are optimizing their SEO strategy for more of voice search. What this looks like technically is more focus on long-tail keywords and syntax used in everyday language, so that it creates a well-structured content broken down in sections. The next trend that is occurring for SEO is featured snippets, which is a bit of information identified on the search page before the actual web page. Google today has 30% of instant answers in the form of featured snippets on the search queries, according to The Mission. With this in mind, featured snippets are already stealing about 10% of traffic from top resulting website pages. SEOs already collect information on the formatting and structure of the content of the website, so it’s easy for Google to pull relevant information for the featured snippets. Lastly, another current change with SEO for 2018 is the massive shift to mobile use. What this means in terms of SEO is that many algorithmic changes are occurring to turn page rankings upside down. Therefore, SEOs are adopting accelerated mobile pages to optimize the user experience for mobile, by restructuring the load time to navigate, information architecture, and the design. All of these important issues that are shifting SEO, and if businesses want to keep up with the latest trends and continue being successful, they need to get onboard to the changes.