If you are engaged in SEO, optimising how you think is vital! SEO involves obtaining and analysing a complex array of changing information. Knowing how to apply knowledge requires the magnificence of human brain power! SEO practitioners need to be able to formulate plans and evaluate potential outcomes.
Effective SEO thinking is increasingly valuable to online marketers. Fortunately, you don’t have to be an Einstein in order to engage in worthwhile SEO thinking. You just have to use your mental powers to imagine scenarios from various vantage points. The more you get to do this the better your decisions will be.
Three basic viewpoints are sufficient for productive SEO thinking. You simply need to take on the perspectives of:
- the search engine
- the user, and
- the scientist
To think from a particular perspective, you need to imagine you have motivations and concerns consistent with the adopted perspective. Taking on each different perspective brings up different sets of possibilities and potential outcomes. Seeing things from different perspectives leads to wiser choices and ultimately more productive digital marketing.
The Search Engine’s Perspective
Business Model
The search engine business model involves providing a free information retrieval service that attracts users. By attracting many search engine users, there is scope for gaining revenue through advertising. If that wasn’t good enough, search engines are ideal for advertising. Since people tend to search for what they’re interested in, search engines have information to facilitate well-targeted advertising. Because of this, popular search engines are able to supply potent advertising and earn a vast amount of revenue.
A search engine’s advertising appears in the form of paid search results. This advertising is typically delivered alongside the standard ‘organic’ search results! While a search engine’s revenue comes from its advertising, its popularity depends on it providing useful non-paid search results. After all, people mostly use a search engine for its non-paid search results. This is because the non-paid search results tend to link to higher quality informational web pages. Whereas, paid search results tend to link to sales oriented content.
Theoretically, if its non-paid search results are more useful, a search engine will attract more users. This point underlies the thrust of present-day SEO. Web pages with high-quality content tend to feature more prominently in the non-paid search results than those with low-quality content.
Lower-quality pages appearing in search results
The notion that search engines strive to deliver the best organic search results is not always true. It is apparent that lower-quality pages are tending to show up for sales-related searches. If you search for a product or service you might expect a list of relevant local businesses. However, you are likely to find your search results are largely populated by business directory or classified pages. Furthermore, when your search is sales-related, there are generally many ads as well. Surely this is not in the best interests of their users!
It can be speculated the search engines want to push users towards the paid search results. In addition, they would like business owners to invest in paid search ads rather than SEO. In the end, a search engine can play this game only so far since its reputation is at stake. If a search engine stops providing high-quality non-paid results for sales related searches its users may look elsewhere. For this reason, search engines will continue including some very good sales-related web pages in their organic results.
Algorithms
To fulfil the task of providing highly useful search results, the search engine must be able to efficiently evaluate the content found on web pages. Search engines endeavour to provide non-paid results that will be consistent with the evaluations of the human beings they serve, by ranking pages in terms of relevance to various search phrases. This sorting is done efficiently using computer algorithms. The algorithms analyse the content and structure of a website, the presence of links, social media activity and also signals provided by users as they interact with the search engine and the webpages its search results refer to.
Deception and Web Spam
One issue that search engines are concerned with is manipulation of their results through some kind of deception or web spam. Because obtaining search engine success is not easy, some people attempt to game the system in some way. There have been a number of instances where poor to mediocre webpages have gained high rankings even though they have not been worthy of them. This has led search engines to be on the lookout for signs of possible spamming and deception.
Link building
Since the number of links from other pages is a way for a search engine to evaluate the worthiness of a particular webpage, a strategy used to achieve high rankings was the creation of many spam pages for the sake of increasing the number of inbound links to a particular page. While this method used to work, the top search engines adjusted their algorithms to detect signs of unnaturally created links and sites making use of them receive unnaturally low rankings or may even be dropped from a search engine’s index, completely.
Camouflaged keyword rich text
Another example relates to on-page SEO. A search engine will look deeply at a website’s coding to make sure the text on pages is readable. An old strategy for fooling search engines was to camouflage keyword-rich text. By including text coloured the same as the background, humans would be unable to read it. However, the search engine algorithm would read it no matter the colour. A website owner can easily place a competitor’s brand name invisibly within the coding of a web page in order to rank for the competitor’s brand name. At one time such a strategy worked, however, the search engines are now able to detect this kind of deception and may penalise websites that try to do it.
As you can see, included within the search engine’s perspective is the need to detect anything that may resemble strategies designed to artificially inflate the worthiness of a web page or website for the sake of higher rankings.
SEO thinking from a search engine perspective
The search engine perspective leads an SEO thinker to consider known and suspected ranking factors and to avoid strategies that may give a search engine algorithm the impression that any form of deception is being employed as a means to higher rankings.
Questions that you might ask when you adopt a search engine perspective are:
- What are the popular search phrases that relate to the products or services I want to market?
- Does the title, meta description, URL, image alternative text, and my copy contain the keywords I am targeting?
- What other words should I include on a page to reinforce the search engines the impression that my content relates to my target search phrases?
- How should I structure my website in order to enhance how search engines view it?
When you take on the search engine perspective, you also realise that you don’t want to give any signs that you are doing anything that may be considered deceptive. You will, therefore, ask yourself questions like:
- What are all the things I should avoid doing so that the search engines don’t apply a penalty to my site?
When the search engine perspective is not enough
If it was possible to completely understand the workings of a particular search engine, then a search engine perspective could actually be enough to guarantee high rankings. However, it is doubtful that even the individuals who design the algorithms have enough of a grasp to predict with great accuracy what is likely to rank well and what isn’t.
It is quite possible to create low-quality web copy that contains the right keywords necessary for ranking. Those using a pure search engine perspective may not feel inclined to check whether their web copy adequately conveys the information the keywords imply it does. Such a web page could pass the spell and grammar checker and produce a reasonably low reading age but may well fail in the long run readers do not be gain the information they are looking for.
By thinking from a search engine perspective, you will realise that the content needs to satisfy readers, however, a search engine finds this out in hindsight, which takes time. Waiting to find out whether a search engine evaluates a webpage as providing a good user experience could be a very slow process. It is clear then that when you are engaged in SEO, you need to be able to think from the perspective of human users.
The User’s Perspective
Since SEO practitioners are human internet users, they are in a good position to understand a typical user’s perspective. The behaviour of users is governed by a range of thoughts and emotions. There are many different people with different needs and concerns, so it is important to understand the kinds of people a page is targeting. An idea to provide web pages that will be well received by as many different users as possible lies at the heart of this perspective.
The user perspective is all about enhancing the visitor’s experience. When you think in terms of the user perspective, you need to reverse roles with visitors to your website prompting you to ask questions like:
- Who might be interested in viewing this page?
- What value can this page provide for the user?
- Could graphical content assist the user?
- Could the text on this page be more engaging?
- Is the information provided accurate?
- What other information might be helpful?
- Could the navigation on this website be more intuitive?
- How well does the web design perform on mobile, desktop and tablet devices?
When the user perspective is not enough
While adopting the user perspective is highly valuable for designing websites and their content, if you take this approach exclusively, your success in terms of search engines may be compromised especially when you are chasing high numbers of visitors. Unfortunately, there are some things you can do to improve the user experience that turns out to be counter-productive for attracting visitors via the search engines. Search engine robots can easily misconstrue your efforts due to their limited capacity to understand why you might employ a particular strategy when presenting content so it is important to keep these limitations in mind.
Hiding supplementary text
One way that can apparently lead to a better user experience involves hiding supplementary text when a page first loads and allowing visitors to request additional information through special links on demand. This approach is thought to be beneficial for readers, especially those who may not require the additional information your full article includes. However, leaving it out altogether would not be helpful to those that would want to read it.
A large amount of text could conceivably overwhelm readers. By hiding supplementary portions so that a reader initially sees a condensed version of the article may well be a strategy for communicating your overall message more efficiently. For those who wish to gain more in-depth information, special links (typically plus signs [+]) that when clicked, reveal additional sections. This way of presenting textual content has been tested and apparently does provide a superior user experience but it turns out not to be the best of ideas for SEO.
The problem
Unfortunately, Google doesn’t like this style of page and will tend to rank pages like it lower than equivalent full-text pages. It is therefore important to evaluate decisions aimed at providing a good user experience with what you might understand when you adopt a search engine perspective. From a search engine perspective, hidden text on a page is a sign there could be some form of deception at play.
The least problematic outcome in relation to hidden text is that Google will evaluate only the text that is visible to a visitor when the page is first viewed. The better option, in this case, is probably to include all the text on the page, as the gains from ranking highly will generally outweigh the gains associated with a good user experience. Dan Petrovic explains this finding in this article exploring the merits of user behaviour data on ranking.
Sensible compromises
Improving a website with the aim of pleasing users and search engines is likely to result in the need to make sensible compromises. Rand Fishkin of Moz examines these issue in his blog post dealing with the tensions and trade-offs between optimising for the experience of users and search engines.
Unexpected outcomes
There are often situations that arise where adopting both search engine and user perspectives lead to unexpected outcomes. This is because it is impossible to understand everything all of the time. SEOs are largely in the dark in relation to how the search engines decide to evaluate web pages. The search engines are continually updating their algorithms so understanding what will work and what won’t, is never certain. This leads us to a third perspective in SEO which relates to taking a scientific and logical approach.
The Scientist’s Perspective
When you think from a scientist’s perspective, you have to try to be dispassionate about any particular outcome. Sometimes the evidence appears to defy common sense and logic. Nothing is stable or certain so it is important to take the evidence at hand seriously. It is, therefore, useful to approach your work in a similar way to scientific experimentation. It is important to keep track of what you do and when you do it and to note the outcomes.
If things don’t happen the way you expect, it is important to isolate the cause. Sometimes this involves undoing recent changes to see if your search results return to what they were before. Through the application of logic, you can uncover evidence to support certain theories and debunk others. In this way the strategies you employ evolve over time.
Like the other perspectives, the scientific approach has its limits. Keeping changes to your website simple enough to keep track of is very difficult and sometimes impossible, however, if you don’t take a scientific outlook, you will be operating in relative darkness. If you make no effort to validate your activities, you won’t be able to tell if anything you have done has any value.
Successful SEO
Ultimately, successful SEO is about knowing how to get the right visitors to your site. To achieve this you will need to optimise how you think when you approach SEO. Thinking from different perspectives helps you to see a broader spectrum of possibilities including negative ones. From a business perspective expanding your thinking will significantly improve your bottom line.
Common Questions About SEO
SEO involves a number of terms and processes that aren’t always obvious when you first encounter them. The following questions explain some of the concepts we think are useful for understanding how search engines discover, process and present websites.
What is crawling?
Crawling is the process by which automated programs discover and access pages and other resources on websites.
Search engines use crawlers to discover content, follow links and retrieve information from websites. Google refers to its web crawler as Googlebot.
Crawling and indexing are related, but they are not the same thing. A search engine may crawl a URL without ultimately indexing it.
What is a search engine crawler?
A crawler is an automated program that visits websites and retrieves information from them.
Different search engines have their own crawlers, and other organisations operate crawlers for different purposes. Crawlers may discover URLs through links, sitemaps and other sources.
Making important pages accessible to crawlers is an important part of technical SEO.
What is indexing?
Indexing is the process by which a search engine processes information about a page and stores it in its index.
Being indexed means that a page is available for consideration in search results. It does not mean that the page will necessarily rank highly, appear for a particular search, or appear every time someone searches for a related term.
This distinction is important: crawling, indexing and ranking are three different stages of the search process.
What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is a file that provides information about URLs on a website.
An XML sitemap is primarily intended to help search engines discover URLs that are important to a site. It can be particularly useful for larger or more complex websites, although search engines can discover pages through other means as well.
A sitemap is not a substitute for good internal linking or a well-structured website, and submitting a sitemap does not guarantee that every URL will be indexed.
A website can also have a human-readable HTML sitemap, although this serves a different purpose and is primarily intended to help visitors navigate the site.
Why can a page’s search ranking change even when I haven’t changed it?
A page can change position in search results even when you have not changed the page itself.
Search results are dynamic. Other websites may publish or improve competing content, search behaviour can change, technical problems can affect a website, and search engines continually update their systems.
Changes to a site’s hosting, redirects, internal links, indexing, structured data or other technical elements can also affect how search engines access and understand its content.
When a significant change occurs, it is better to investigate the evidence than to assume that a particular cause is responsible. Search Console can be a useful starting point for examining changes in search performance and indexing.
Why do search results change?
Search engines continually process new and updated information across the web.
The results for a search can therefore change as websites publish new information, existing pages are updated, search behaviour changes, and search engines refine their systems for understanding and ranking content.
This means that SEO is not simply a matter of making a website once and expecting its search visibility to remain unchanged forever.
What is a search algorithm?
A search algorithm is the collection of automated systems and processes used by a search engine to determine which information to present for a search and how results should be ordered.
Google uses many ranking systems rather than one single, static algorithm. These systems are continually developed and updated.
For website owners, this is one reason to concentrate on fundamentals that provide genuine value: useful content, accessible pages, sound technical implementation and a good experience for visitors.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to work that helps search engines access, understand and process a website effectively.
It can include areas such as crawling and indexing, website structure, redirects, canonical URLs, internal links, structured data, page performance, mobile presentation and other technical aspects of a website.
Technical SEO is only one part of SEO. A technically sound website still needs useful, relevant content that satisfies the needs of people searching for it.
What is search intent?
Search intent is the underlying purpose behind a search.
For example, someone searching for “how to register a domain name” is likely looking for information, while someone searching for “domain registration Wollongong” may be looking for a service provider.
Understanding intent helps determine what type of page is appropriate for a particular search. A page is more useful when its content matches what the searcher is actually trying to accomplish.
Why is useful content important for SEO?
Search engines aim to present useful and relevant information to people searching for answers.
For that reason, SEO should not be treated simply as a process of inserting keywords into pages. Good SEO content should explain a subject clearly, provide useful information and satisfy the purpose of the page.
Google’s current guidance describes this as a people-first approach: content should primarily be created to help people rather than primarily to attract visits from search engines.
Our approach to website content is discussed in more detail in our guide to high-quality content.
Does good page experience help SEO?
Page experience is one part of the broader picture of how a website performs in Search.
Google considers a variety of page-experience signals, including Core Web Vitals, HTTPS and mobile presentation. However, there is no single “page experience signal”, and good Core Web Vitals scores do not guarantee high search rankings.
The practical reason to improve page experience is therefore not simply to obtain a particular SEO score. A fast, accessible and usable website is generally better for the people who visit it as well as being easier for search engines to process.
Our Core Web Vitals guide explains website performance in more detail.
Does SEO mean trying to manipulate Google’s algorithm?
No. SEO can include legitimate work that helps search engines discover, understand and present useful content.
The distinction is between improving a website so that it can be understood and found, and creating content or using techniques primarily intended to manipulate search rankings.
Google’s current guidance explicitly recommends creating helpful, reliable, people-first content rather than content created primarily to manipulate search rankings.
Our approach is to concentrate on sound website structure, relevant content, technical quality, usability and other improvements that have value beyond search rankings alone.