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Search engine optimisation becomes more difficult to define every year. As SEO crosses borders with content marketing, web development and various other parts of your marketing strategy, it’s hard to draw the lines between them at times.
So we thought it might be a good idea to clarify the state of search optimisation in 2017. There are five key ingredients to a successful SEO campaign and no single ingredient can work independently of the others. Understanding these five pillars will help you identify how you can achieve organic search success.
SEO is a vague term these days and there’s a lot of confusion about what it does/doesn’t involve. The five pillars of SEO help clear this up by breaking down the key elements of search optimisation after years of relentless change in the industry.
These days, SEO essentially means a combination of five things: relevance, authority, website health, competition and usability.
Google has transformed dramatically over the past five years and most of the changes relate to relevance. In 2013, the Hummingbird update replaced Google’s entire search algorithm with a more advanced system, which is now largely powered by the tech giant’s machine learning toolkit, including RankBrain.
Instead of matching volume of keywords and links, as it used to do, Google now aims to match user intent and the context of a search with the most relevant content available. Its search algorithm is getting better at understanding the meaning behind user queries every day and marketers need to prioritise user intent and context in the same way.
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Relevance alone isn’t enough to get you among the top spots in Google. Search engines want to trust the information they provide and this is where authority comes into the five pillars of SEO. The more online authority you have, the more faith Google and other search engines will put in you when it comes to ranking results.
But how do search engines determine authority?
The above signals tell Google that people trust you and inbound links remain one of the most powerful ranking factors today. This might change in the future but Google is yet to come up with a better trust factor than inbound links from high authority sites.
Note: Last year, Andrey Lipattsev stated that links, content and RankBrain are the top three ranking factors in Google’s search algorithm.
This is where the more technical side of SEO starts to come into play. By site health we mean the code-level fundamentals that make your website easy for search engines to discover and index.
These are the key areas you need to focus on:
The first two items on that list have always been important in SEO. Meanwhile, code integrity refers to the quality of the code behind your site – how clean, efficient and true to the latest standards it is – and this has become increasingly important over the years.
Then we have structured data, which is now an integral part of technical SEO. Structured data gives search engines vital information about your content so they’re better informed on how to index it. This is the technology that allows Google to distinguish product pages from articles, for example.
Logic says the more competitors you have, the harder it is to hit your marketing targets. The amount (and level) of competition you face, the higher you’ll have to bid on keywords, harder you’ll have to fight for top ranking positions and more strategic you’ll need to be with your pricing and special offers.
The important thing is to know how many competitors you have and who they are – but this isn’t always as obvious as you might think. For starters, your main rivals in business and your main rivals in search may not be the same companies. It’s important you’re able to make this distinction, spot any irrelevant businesses you’re competing against in search and keep track of any new rivals that emerge.
This is one of the main reasons we built Apollo Insights – a platform that (among other things) pinpoints your direct, indirect and emerging competitors. With a competitor analysis tool on board you’ll never get snuck up upon by new competitors and you’ll always have insights on what you need to catch up on those ahead of you.
Aside from relevance, the other big change behind how Google ranks results has been an emergence of usability factors over the past few years. This has been largely driven by the rise of mobile, which is fundamental to Google’s plans for the future. So it’s no surprise to see the search giant pay more attention to user experience.
Here’s a quick summary of usability factors that can affect your search ranking:
These usability signals will have a direct impact on your search ranking. Poor usability has a knock-on effect on other signals Google uses to determine your place in the search results. Good usability should also mean the following:
If your users cannot find what they need on the site, manipulate interactive content or fill in forms, this will have a negative impact on engagement and conversion, not to mention repeat visits.
I’ll give you one example – I hate it when I click on a news article to go to a newspaper website that takes ages to load and is hard to read because of too many ads and pop-ups. I will avoid that site in future – when it pops up in search results again, I am not going to click on it.
So that’s the state of SEO in 2017 broken down into its five key elements. This should make it easier to understand and explain what it takes to run a successful search optimisation campaign in 2017.
This also gives you a good idea of where SEO overlaps with content, design and the other marketing essentials. Power your SEO efforts with these five pillars and you’ll have a competitive advantage over competitors who only take care of one or two elements.
To find out more about how we approach SEO using our unique Fix-Boost-Fill methodology, click here.
Steve (RIP) was Services Director for Vertical Leap. He started professional life as a magazine journalist, working on music magazines and women's titles before becoming a web editor in 1997, then joining MSN to work purely in online publishing. Since 1999 he has worked for and consulted to a broad range of businesses about their digital marketing.
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Categories: Content Marketing, PPC, SEO, Social Media
Categories: Content Marketing, SEO