Search Experience Optimization, Search Content Strategy, Content Marketing Strategy…these are a few different names, but they all relay the same messaging when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s simple – create content for the users, NOT for the search engines.
Long gone are the days of simply creating links and bam, your website will be found by users. It is much more than that now as Google has become a personalized and intuitive tool. According to Google themselves, their goal is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Our goal as marketing strategists is to make sure that the user gets the right information at the right time, regardless of which device they are using and what location they are in.
Carefully crafted marketing strategies that focus on findability, technical, and authority aspects of SEO are essential to building a solid online foundation. Here we will take you through why the user experience is key to gaining visibility to your site through organic search.
- Can Google find you?
- Is your site optimally structured?
- Does Google consider you an authority in your area?
Findability
As an online business, you probably want to be found on Google, right? Of course you do! It is important to optimize your page content with relevant keywords and relevant content creation to increase your chances of being found by users. With this concept in mind, it goes back to marketing basics: connect the users to the information that they seek. When creating new content, ask yourself things like: Is my content fresh and relevant? Does it answer my customer’s questions?
Technical and Indexing
You also need to ensure that there are not any site architecture problems that could be inhibiting search engine spiders to crawl your site. This includes things like 404 errors, poor linking structure, and robots blocking bots that can create an overall negative user experience. Also, it is important that pages are properly tagged and organized in a manner that users can easily navigate your website.
Authority
Google is constantly upgrading its algorithms and evaluating websites based its authority, experience, expertise, and trustworthiness. This means that your brand’s website is the place where people go for information about your brand, products, or services. Authority means that Google considers your company’s overall online reputation, looks for earned links that provide value to a user, and checks if you utilize social channels, which shows that people want to hear from you.
There are many signals that can increase your brand’s authority on Google; some of them include having up to date schema, optimizing for local search, solidifying social channels (Google My Business, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.), and if possible, adding a Wikipedia page, so that there is one cohesive brand message.
Having this framework and understanding that the user experience is what ultimately determines Search Engine Results Page (SERP) position and rank. Knowing that your online visibility requires much more than just building links and optimizing for relevant keywords is what will help set you apart from your competition.