People locate and discover desired content by browsing, searching, and asking. In Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb, SEO falls under the Findable facet. SEO is the process of maximizing a site’s organic search visibility to connect with its potential users and customers during their search journey.
Building a solid site architecture, and creating content that users want. SEO has become a catch-all phrase that represents all organic marketing. In fact, my preferred phrase is “Web Presence Optimization” because that’s really what we do, optimize all aspects of a business’ web presence. SEO is all about providing end users with a positive content experience at the right moment in their user journey across different platforms and devices.
Technical SEO is becoming more and more complex with mobile, semantic data, and page speed layered on top of more traditional on-site issues. Mobile devices, voice search, and location linked searching are much more dominant than a couple of years ago. This information, paired with other forms of business intelligence, can be used to shape overall marketing strategies. SEO encompasses all aspects of how a business exists as it relates to presenting information and being found online.
As long as content can be searched, its performance can be optimized to help make a company “the best answer” for customers, wherever they look. SEO is a methodology that technically and topically aligns brand content and engagement with searcher intent. As Google acquires more off-site information about businesses, SEOs need to be thinking more about optimizing a business for both online and offline success. More of our clients finally understand that the most desirable links are the ones that have the potential to convert for you and not just help you rank. Once you have competitive data in hand, the next step is to aggressively leverage proven SEO strategies such as content creation and link building, to replicate and extend the success of market leaders. By always thinking user-first, businesses can better cater to what their target audience is looking for.
This helps them better predict trends, meet expectations, and grow their online presence. Know how to architect the structure of their site and its content for search bots and humans. From Schema to AMP to canonical tags, it’s really easy to screw up a website so that it won’t rank well in search. Add HTTPs to that, along with redirects and site migrations, SEO has become more important than ever. I see it as more of a need now for SEOs to make websites search engine friendly.
We’ve been told by search engineers, such as Paul Haahr, more about how Google works, which now involves recognizing whether an entity is in a searcher’s query. SEO today is the same as it was before, but with some advances in code, devices to optimize for, and a few small alternate tags. You need to provide solutions, a great user experience, and attract links. Regardless of the year, SEO goes where people go as they search and find answers that apply to the world around them.
Success no longer means just working toward high rankings on Google, as the proliferation of data and devices serves to de-centralize the source of many searches. We therefore need to adapt our perspective on SEO as an acquisition channel and our ways of measuring campaign impact. Today, technology allows us to deliver on the purest essence of SEO. Whether via a mobile screen or a digital home assistant, our job is to ensure that our content can be discovered and served as seamlessly as possible.