What is Search Engine Optimization or SEO?
In 2009, Bill Gates gave a speech at a private dinner where he famously said"the future of search would be verbs."
Gates wasn't discussing the words people type into search boxes, he was instead talking about why people search.
Today's searchers search to solve problems, to achieve tasks, and also to"do" something. They may be searching to reserve a flight, purchase something, learn the latest Taylor Swift lyrics, or surf cat photos -- but these are actions. Or, as Gates referred to these, verbs.
When a user begins a search, they're really starting a trip. Marketers like to discuss something called"the customer journey." It's just a fancy method of referencing a user's route from the inception of their job to the conclusion -- and the majority of these journeys start with a search.
The customer journey was gradually playing a bigger role in search over the previous decade. Initially depicted as a funnel wherein consumers move from awareness into consideration to purchase, this older consumer journey is now obsolete (although we still use this version for descriptive purposes and also to make persona research simpler ).
The Evolution of Search & the Consumer Journey
In order to match this new version, search has had to evolve from simply words on the page to knowing the consumer intent at each stage of the journey. Search is no longer only about keywords, but has evolved into providing the right content to the right consumer at the right time in their travel to help them achieve their job.
For those users, it is all about the verbs. For search marketers, it's all about helping the user in their travel (and, ideally, influencing them somewhat along the way.)
Sticking with all the crazy straw model, today's consumer journey no longer happens on a single device. Users can start a search on their own mobile device, keep researching on their tablet computer or work notebook, and finally purchase from their desktop computer at home.
Search is not just confined to computers or telephones. Users can now search from a variety of devices, including watches, smart glasses, bluetooth speaker supporters, and even kitchen appliances. In today's world, even my refrigerator has its own Twitter accounts -- and search marketers will need to be conscious of how many devices relate to each other and play a part in a user's search experience.
There is some healthy debate regarding if this has always been the case, but in the current constantly on hyper-connected world, SEO has morphed into what we'll call"real marketing."
Gone are the times of hacks, tricks, and attempting to reverse-engineer algorithms.
Technical problem-solving.
The 3 Main Tenants of Any Marketing Strategy or Campaign
But search centers heavily on the very first phase: Attract.
"If you build it, they will come" may apply to baseball fields, but it doesn't work with sites.
It is not sufficient to have an awesome product. You must actively attract customers through multiple channels and sockets.
This is why, despite some claims to the contrary from customers or design bureaus, every page is, in actuality, an SEO page.
If a webpage is involved in bringing visitors, engaging traffic, or converting them there ought to be an important SEO component to this page.
However, why is SEO important? Isn't SEO only a programmer thing? I heard that there was a plugin for this. Can not Google and Bing just figure out my site?
We started this narrative with a Gates quotation, but it was Google instead of Microsoft that required the philosophy to heart.
Things like Hummingbird, Panda, Penguin, RankBrain, Mobilegeddon, Possum, Pigeon, entities, and AMP essentially have been attempts by Google to adapt its own search algorithm to move from words to actions -- and help users accomplish whatever tasks they could be focused on -- they aren't that easy to comprehend.
SEO has come a long way in the times of meta information. Sure, there's a good deal of best practices involved that"should" be covered by the development group or a plugin (or assembled into a framework *cough cough* angular, respond, I'm looking at you guys) -- but frequently they are not.
Today's sites are more program than they're a website, and software come with lots of fancy features which don't always play nicely with search engines (hello, angular and respond.)
Implements through multiple versions of the same page.
With proper server configurations.
Find methods to speed up your website.
A good SEO professional not only knows the searcher, but the competitive landscape too. It is not sufficient to just understand the consumer's job, search marketers need to know what other choices are from the market, and how they can fill the gap to offer a better solution for the consumer's task.
We've come a very long way from keywords on pages to full-service marketing. SEO experts get to use numerous hats since they help connect development, information architecture, user experience, content strategy, marketing, social, and paid press teams.
There are loads of cautionary tales about matters as simple sounding as a website redesign or new CMS system inducing a site's traffic to fall or vanish leaving businesses scrambling. The easy truth of the matter is, most website changes nowadays influence SEO -- and only by adding SEO up front and during the project can a business expect to see positive outcomes.
So Why Is Search Important?
As technology continues to evolve, SEOs will constantly take care of new ways of searching new devices to search on, and new types of searches (such as voice search, or searches done by my oven) but the one thing that will remain constant is why people search. The verbs are not going away.
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