“SEO is the process involved in increasing the opportunities for content to be found by people using search engines’ organic (non-paid) listings”

As mentioned in my previous blogs, SEO is a constantly evolving practice. What works one year might be outdated an ineffective next. With search engine algorithms changing daily in some cases (Affiliate Marketer Training, n.d.), it is important for digital marketers to understand what currently is good SEO practice, and keep up to date with what changes. The primary goal of SEO is the increase your webpages ranking, which in turn brings in more visitors, and also helps increase the number of conversions whether that be comments on a blog or purchases made on the site. This post will hopefully provide tips and tricks on approaching SEO in its current form.

Martin (2013) believes that in todays SEO there are 3 pillars, content, inbound links, and social media. The most common phrase used around SEO is “content is king” (Techknowsys, n.d.). Even in the early days of SEO, content has been the primary factor in a pages ranking. This means regularly creating new content, and making sure what you have is of high quality. Experts believe even among the rapidly changing iterations of search algorithms this will always be the case, and therefore should be the primary focus of any SEO strategy. Simple metrics like time visitors spend on page, page views, crawl rates should all be monitored and analysed. If people are not staying on your site long, or coming back again, it is probably because your core content is not good enough.

Link building has long been an important aspect of SEO, however as algorithms have changed, they have become smarter. Previously it was easy to pay to gain the level of links needs, with search engines doing very little to evaluate and verify the quality of the link to the site (Alperin, 2016). However, google started to penalise sites with bad backlinks, therefor making it very difficult to artificially manufacture a link network to you page. The punishment now for poor backlinks is believed to be very severe, making any attempt to “trick” the algorithm seem unworthy the risk.

The source of the link and uniqueness is now very important, with links from the likes of The Financial Times rewarding sites with huge ranking boosts. There is also the idea of expressed and implied links. Expressed are the aforementioned physical and clickable links back to your website. Implied involves mentions of your website from other sites, which google considers a sign of popularity and trustworthiness (Smart Insights, 2015). If people are regularly talking about you, it will dramatically improve your page rank.

The difficulty of link building does not end there. Companies must also protect themselves against negative SEO. Malicious SEO attempts are not uncommon, creating bad unnatural links from poor sources which google identifies as trying to cheat the system, and penalises accordingly. While stopping this is impossible, you can contain the attacks by constantly monitoring links and statistics, and using webmaster tools to report suspicious activity, can help reduce penalties you occur (Sullivan, 2017). Indicators like sudden spikes in the number of backlinks, or monitoring keyword density from those links can help identify malicious activity.

Social media is the final pillar, and seems to be to many what google is currently prioritising. A good social media following with active engagement with followers with links to and from the website is highly valued. The key is to constantly promote content through your social media outlets, and encourage visitors to share content through their profiles (DeMers, 2015). Websites are also rewarded if they actively engage and reply to comments left by users.

A risk in engaging in these SEO practices is that you forget the core performance and quality of your site. While content is king, a poorly designed website, with slow loading speeds, poor mobile integration will result in your site being heavily penalised as well as providing a negative experience for the visitor. While loading your site with plugins, links and images may seem like upgrading your site, if it slows the performance down it will be negative both for your page rank and user satisfaction. Another part to this is technical issues. Website downtime, or plugins not working result in your site being penalised long term, which can be hard to reverse. Site reliability and the ability to fix issues quickly helps mitigate some of this risk.

Another risk with SEO is that it can become an expensive practice which requires constant investment of resources and time. Too often companies indulge in an expensive SEO fix, only to leave it for months or a year and lose all their progress. Constant investment and redesign of strategy is key, as algorithms can change daily, and what is valued once can be obsolete a year later.

Finally, the biggest risk is that you do it wrong. There are many self acclaimed “SEO experts” but the reality is the search algorithms are not public knowledge, and therefor marketers can only guess what effects rankings the most. What is clear is that Google and other search engines are trying to penalise any attempt of trickery harshly (McClean,2015), in order to ensure searchers get the most relevant content. These penalties can be expensive and time consuming to get rid of. Therefor it is equally important for marketers to know “google rules”, what they see as black hat SEO.

 

 

Gudivada, Rao, and Paris’ (2015) piece on understanding SEO outlined many of the more technical aspects to SEO, both white hat and black hat. They identified that while many SEO companies do help customers improve using white hat SEO strategies, many agencies try to take shortcuts using black hat techniques like spamdexing. Therefor any marketer or company looking for external help needs to still research what SEO is and how the agency intends to help the companies SEO.

While these risks might scare some of performing SEO, the reality is it is a necessity when developing a website. In an era where searches can bring back millions of results in milliseconds, ensuring your page remains one of the first couple of results to visitors you want to attract is vital in digital marketing.

References

Affiliate Marketer Training. (n.d.). How Often Does Google Change?. [online] Available at: https://www.affiliatemarketertraining.com/often-google-change-algorithm/ [Accessed 4 Apr. 2018].

Alperin, M. (2016). Risks of Doing SEO Link Building for Your Own Website. [online] Lead to Conversion. Available at: https://leadtoconversion.com/blog/risks-of-seo-link-building/ [Accessed 4 Apr. 2018].

DeMers, J. (2015). 6 Social Media Practices That Boost SEO. [online] Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2015/01/27/6-social-media-practices-that-boost-seo/#4fee18693d17 [Accessed 4 Apr. 2018].

Gudivada, V., Rao, D. and Paris, J. (2015). Understanding Search-Engine Optimization. Computer, 48(10), pp.43-52.

Martin, J. (2013). 8 Things You Need to Know About SEO Now. [online] CIO. Available at: https://www.cio.com/article/2383232/web-analytics/8-things-you-need-to-know-about-seo-now.html [Accessed 4 Apr. 2018].

McClean, R. (2015). 7 Things You Need to Know About SEO. [online] Custom fit online. Available at: https://www.customfitonline.com/news/2015/3/26/7-things-you-need-to-know-about-seo/ [Accessed 4 Apr. 2018].

Smart Insights. (2015). What you need to know about SEO into 2016. [online] Available at: https://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/seo-strategy/what-you-need-to-know-about-seo-in-2015/ [Accessed 4 Apr. 2018].

Sullivan, R. (2017). Negative SEO: Destroying Businesses One Backlink at a Time. [online] WP Site Care. Available at: https://www.wpsitecare.com/negative-seo/ [Accessed 4 Apr. 2018].

Techknowsys. (n.d.). Why Content is King in SEO. [online] Available at: http://www.techknowsys.com/search-engine-strategies/content-is-king [Accessed 4 Apr. 2018].