I just got back from Seattle where I attended the tenth edition of MozCon, one of the largest conferences for SEO and content marketing. After three days of inspiring presentations and meetings, here are the most important SEO trends that, in my opinion, should be factored into your content marketing strategy.
Google’s mission is simple: respond to search queries with the most relevant results possible. But how do Google’s bots determine which results are high-quality without speaking to users? Traditionally, what we know about the algorithm is that website ranking is based on many different factors, the most popular of which is the quality and quantity of inbound links from external sites.
For a bot, evaluating user experience is extremely complex, but after many years of testing and learning, Google’s algorithm is getting better and better at discerning whether or not a user is satisfied with the results they get.
According to several SEO masters including Wil Reynolds and Rand Fishkin, it’s not crazy to think that user satisfaction will eventually become the most significant factor in search rankings.
In SEO, a satisfying search experience means that the user easily found a site and that the content they were served responded to their questions and objectives.
Imagine the following behaviour: a number of users are searching for keywords related to your industry. They find your website and click on the corresponding result. However, they leave almost immediately and click back to the search results page where they choose a more appropriate site. Why would Google continue to serve up your site as a response to that particular user search?
Here’s a relevant example presented at MozCon that demonstrates exactly that: if you search for the cost of the Namely platform on Google (“How much does Namely cost?”), the brand itself won’t show up among the top results.
Why? It’s simple. The Namely website doesn’t provide pricing. Similar to many other platforms and software, the company prefers to collect contact information before presenting their pricing grid. As a result, Google has decided that the official site isn’t able to adequately respond to that request, and so shows other sites to the user instead.
Consequently, users (who were initially interested specifically in Namely!) end up visiting external sites, where they may well end up being dissuaded by user comments and/or the presence of competitors’ services.
In SEO, we put a lot of emphasis on understanding the user to create and optimize content. We use a lot tools to help us understand the user better, most of which provide us with quantitative metrics. The methods currently in use are solid, but after the talks I heard at the conference, I see opportunities to go farther. The ultimate goal is to be more closely aligned with UX and to include qualitative metrics to our research and analyses.
We need to do more than try to put ourselves in the skin of our users. Instead, we should be listening to what they have to say, observing how they interact with our content and, above all, talking to them.
During the session I'd Rather Be Thanked Than Ranked, Wil Reynolds, founder of SEER Interactive, talked to us about having worked for three years to get the top search results for high-value commercial keywords like “SEO agency”, “SEO experts”, and other similar terms. The result? They wasted a lot of time and money because, in fact, the users who were searching these keywords were generally not qualified.
What you can do to better understand your user:
First, we want to understand how users search. Then, we want to know if they’re satisfied with the results they’re getting and, above all, what drives them to either continue navigating through a particular site or, conversely, to immediately click away. Instead of relying on arbitrary metrics like the bounce rate, time on page or social cues to determine whether your content is relevant and appreciated, why not ask your users directly?
As Google has made updates, we’ve seen several new search results formats appear. These changes reflect the evolution and transformation of the process of searching online. More and more, users want to access information quickly, at all times and from any device.
Featured snippets and voice search are perfect illustrations of these new user expectations.
A featured snippet (or position 0 in SEO jargon) represents an extract from a page that is sometimes positioned above search results. It responds to a specific question and allows the user to find what they’re looking for directly on the search results page. Its positioning might change depending on the query, but it's always far more prominent than standard results. Here’s an example for one of our clients, Arctic Gardens:
A few interesting facts about featured snippets:
Voice search is very similar to featured snippets because it presents the user with an abridged version of a web page. Essentially, it quickly communicates information without requiring the user to visit a website.
Another similarity is the strong correlation between featured snippets and voice results. Google uses the position zero results to define voice results, which means that if you want to dominate voice search, you first need to work on securing featured snippets for your content.
A few statistics and observations about voice search:
Because of the complexity and uncertainties involved in achieving position 0 and voice results, for many people it’s better to focus their efforts on the technical optimization of their website, so they’ll be properly indexed by Google and easily found by users.
When I started my career in SEO, the technical aspect seemed complicated and inaccessible. Fortunately for new recruits and me, there are people out there who do an excellent job of making this information more accessible, such as Cindy Krum, Britney Muller and Dr. Pete Meyers. Here’s an overview of a few SEO requirements and principles to ensure that you’ve got a solid technical foundation, that you’re up to date and that you’re ready for 2018.
To conclude, only one thing seems to worry Rand Fishkin, co-founder of Moz: in the world of search, Google dominates. In May of this year, Google represented 87.8% of searches conducted in the United States. Visibility on this search engine has never been more crucial. To survive the many changes, and ultimately stay visible and effective, Rand Fishkin has a few tactics to share:
To see the rest of his suggestions, download his presentation (PDF).