What is SEO?
Hello, friends! Before a user comes to your website and has a great user experience, you need to learn about driving traffic on your website in the first place. As the website is your storefront and when you have real traffic to it, you will make money for sure.
With this, we begin our journey of understanding the various organic and paid marketing channels in detail.
Specifically, in this article, we take up one of the most important organic marketing channels a marketer has in his toolbox and that is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Here we will go through the basics of SEO and the important considerations one has to make while optimizing for a specific keyword. Not only this, but we will also learn how to measure the impact of our SEO efforts.
So, what are you waiting for? Let’s dive into it.
Each one of us, in time of need, has searched for various products and services on search engines like Google. And more often than not, Google has helped us with a variety of options for each of our queries.
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Let us understand the advent of Google in our lives through some examples.
Suppose, you want to find a job.
Earlier, people used to look for jobs in newspaper ads or go to an employment agency’s office. But thanks to search engines on the internet, you can search for jobs in your specific city and specific industry on Google and you will get search results from portals like naukri.com, merejob.in, monsterindia.com available on your computer screen.
Similarly, you can find gyms around your home or information on the latest phones in the market, all thanks to search engines. Whenever you search for something on Google, you will see a list of links to relevant websites.
This list of results is called Google Search Result Pages. The exact terms/phrases that you search for are called keywords.
A question that should come to your mind but never does, is – Why does Flipkart or Facebook not appear in the search results when a person is searching for jobs on Google?
That is because even if you know nothing about SEO or digital marketing, you know that Google’s search results are shown on the basis of its relevance to your keyword query.
You know this because you have common sense. But how does Google – a search engine platform know this?
That’s right! The super-smart people sitting at Google have developed an algorithm that helps Google decide what is relevant and what is useless.
But what tells Google that one website is MORE relevant than the other? How does Naukri.com become more relevant than Monsterindia.com?
Understanding this will help you understand how Google works.
Once you understand the parameters that help secure a top position in search results, you can implement that knowledge to get your website to the top of Google Search Results. That is what SEO is all about.
By definition, SEO, Search Engine Optimisation comprises of all the things you do on your website or off it, to ensure your website gets a good rank in the search engine results.
You basically optimize your website for Search Engines.
Interesting, right?
Till now, we go through the basic insights on the major parameters that affect a webpage’s search engine rank and the best practices that one should follow to get a good rank.
Google also releases various top-secret algorithm updates from time to time to make sure the spammers and fakers do not get ranked and users get only the most relevant content.
Further, we will also take a sneak-peek into these Google algorithms.
Why SEO?
Okay! Now we know about the humongous effort put into by the search engines to display relevant content to its users for their respective keywords.
But doesn’t it make you wonder whether it really matters if a site is displayed on the second page or the first page of search results? How important is ranking in Google search results?
After all, if a website comes up in the search results, it’s a relevant website and so, should catch the attention of the user, shouldn’t it?
But when you take a closer look at the facts, you will understand just how important ranking on top of Google search results is.
The popular myth that no one looks at the second page of search results is dauntingly true. About 95% of the users click on the links that appear on the first page of the search results.
Have you ever searched for shoes or the local gym and gone to the 2nd or 3rd or 4th page of the search results?
Probably never, right? The first page has enough results to solve almost everyone’s query.
Here are some more facts to help you get a clearer perspective on search engines:
- Around 80% of web population searches for local businesses before finally buying a product
- Google leads search results in India with 90% of web population preferring Google over other search engines
- The fact that 95% of web population clicks on the links appearing on the first page, means you may lose 95% of your potential customers if you don’t appear on the first page of Google search results
Now, do you get an understanding of the significance of getting ranked in Search Engines?
Great!
Now that you understand the significance of our challenge, let us understand how exactly SEO can help a business.
1. SEO helps improve your search engine ranking:
We have understood the advantages of a business as if it appears on the first page of search results.
Subsequently, the position on the first page also matters.
The brands which appear at the top of search results are considered to be the most trusted and leading brands in that category.
With the help of SEO, you can reach that position and establish yourself as the leader in your category or for particular keywords.
A good rank in search results gives your website credibility and a trust factor.
2. SEO helps you increase traffic to your website:
For most major businesses, SEO is the source that gets them the maximum traffic.
If you want to build a successful business, you cannot ignore SEO. The search engine is where every user gathers. You cannot ignore the traffic which it generates.
SEO traffic costs the least and has the highest credibility.
A major part of SEO involves improving search engine ranks for different types of keywords relating to your business.
We discussed earlier how SEO can help you improve your website’s search engine rank.
As the rank of the website increases, your visibility increases, and thus traffic to your website increases.
This traffic might come from generic search terms or from search terms that are more specific to your brand and your unique selling points.
Think of an e-commerce company for example like Amazon.
Different users might land on the Amazon site by searching for different keywords. Someone might search for keywords like “buy a phone online”. On the other hand, some users might be searching for something specific like: “buy Oneplus phone online”.
Both these users will see a link to Amazon in their search results and when they click on it, they will add to user traffic generated by SEO.azon
Hence, your website needs to be search engine optimized for as many keywords that are significant to your business as possible.
3. SEO helps you optimize conversions:
Imagine the situation where you have been able to successfully direct search traffic to your site by targeting the right keywords.
Now, how do you make sure they perform the action you want them to perform?
Let’s take the example of an e-commerce store, for a particular category of say headphones.
Now, you want users who are searching for headphones to land on your website.
However, as you are focusing on this Headphone theme, you realize from your Google Analytics account, that a particular “intent” word like the word “review”, when associated with the searches, gives a poor conversion rate of 0.2%. So this is for keywords that capture search queries like “headphones review India”.
You also noticed that there is another intent keyword called “best” which gives a much better conversion rate overall of 1.2%. Meaning that approximately, for every 100 clicks on the organic result for a search around the headphone keyword theme, the ones with “best” had better conversions.
From this, you would want to highlight the words and synonyms of best in descriptions of your product pages that more would be present naturally in the sentence.
Introduction to Google rank and working of Google Search Engine
Finally, now you have a clear understanding of how SEO can make a difference to a website and its business. Its use in driving traffic and optimizing conversions is truly indispensable.
With this, let’s dive further and introduce ourselves to the concept of Google Rank, and how exactly Google search engine goes about collecting and using the vast information available on the Internet to rank search results.
After having discussed the advantages of SEO for any business, let us now take a step back and understand the working of Google search engine to produce the most relevant results.
The Google search engine goes over 60 trillion pages and displays the relevant links to everyone around the world?
Amazing, isn’t it?
But what is the exact procedure that Google employs?
Let’s find out.
Here are the major steps that Google follows at its back-end to help you find the most relevant query:
1. Crawling
Every Search Engine has crawlers that look at webpages and follow links on those pages; much like a person would if they were browsing content on the web.
These crawlers go from link to link and bring data about those webpages back to the Search Engine’s servers. Search engines use software known as ‘web crawlers’ to discover publicly available pages. Google uses a web crawler called ‘Googlebot’.
Crawlers visit websites, look for links for other pages to visit. They pay special attention to new sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links.
2. indexing
In layman terms, Indexing is the process of adding web pages into Google search.
It is the processing of the information gathered by the Googlebot from its crawling activities.
Once documents are processed, they are added to Google’s searchable index. Much like the index in the back of a book, the Google index includes information about words and their locations.
When a user searches, at the most basic level, Google’s algorithms look up the search terms in the index to find the appropriate pages.
3. Processing
Google then processes a search request which means that it compares the keywords in the search query with the index pages in the database.
4. Relevance
It is also possible that several pages contain the same words as that in the search query.
So in that case, Google calculates the relevancy of each link in the index to the search query.
5. Results
The next task for Google is to retrieve the best matches results and displaying them in the right order of relevance.
Let us take an example.
Suppose you have created the definitive website on skydiving. Your site is a new one and is not listed on any search results yet.
So as your first step you submit your site to search engines like Google and Yahoo and invite the crawlers.
The Web pages on your skydiving site include useful information, exciting photographs, and helpful links guiding visitors to other resources.
Even with the best information about skydiving on the Web, your site may not crack the top page of results on major search engines.
But once the search engine crawls, and indexes your website, you can start applying SEO strategies to improve its rank.
The advantage of playing in a commoditized mature market is that people search, they think that they know what they want and they search on Google and other search engines and it’s easier for us to be found online.
So that was how we got an initial set of customers and even today that’s our primary acquisition channel when you go online and search for say, ticketing software or the cloud-based help desk or free customer support software, so we, Freshdesk shows up on the list and people come to the website. We make it really, really easy for anybody to, kind of, a sign up for a trial account, 30-day trial and we make it easy for them to set it up. So, I think our initial attraction and most of the attraction today is coming from the online acquisition.
What is a Google Algorithm?
Having gained a detailed insight into the functioning of Google search engine, let us now go through some of the algorithms which Google has implemented over the years to rank the relevant websites. This will give you an idea of the factors Google has emphasized to increasingly provide relevant content to its users and what this means for marketers.
Google is committed to making your life, as a user, easier and your life as a marketer tougher. As a user, Google wants to give you the most relevant result, avoid the spammy links which try to hack their way into the search results and solve your query as quickly as possible.
To make search results more relevant and useful, Google keeps changing its algorithm around 500-600 times every year. Although most of these changes are minor, from time to time Google will roll out a major change in its algorithm and make a Marketer’s life tougher. There have been four major changes in Google’s algorithms since its launch in 1998 – Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird and Rankbrain – and each of these have made substantial changes in the way search engine operates and the way it ranks results.
At the earliest stages, Google used to crawl, index web pages and use factors like keyword density to rank its results. It was innocent back then and assumed that if a web page mentioned ‘Formal shoes’ several times, it would be about ‘Formal Shoes’. But Marketers soon learned this and started to stuff keywords in their webpage. To make its searches more relevant, Google started taking various factors into account and Google Algorithm was born.
You, however, don’t have to worry about Google Algorithm if you are keeping your website clear of spammy content and implementing your SEO strategies honestly, for the benefit of your consumers.
Let’s have a brief look at the major Google Algorithms changes.
1. Panda
The Panda update has been one of the most significant updates by Google yet. Once Google realized that a lot of websites collect content from various sites and plagiarise content in order to rank for a variety of keywords, Google decided to focus on website quality. The primary purpose of Panda was to promote high-quality websites and penalize lower-quality sites. A high-quality website is one which provides high quality, in-depth content that focuses on the need of the audience rather than ranking on Google. Panda updates are still rolled out from time to time and Google periodically keeps checking the site quality with each refresh in the Panda algorithm.
2. Penguin
This update majorly focused on spam-linking and in some parts dealt with keyword-stuffing. A lot of Marketers paid spammy websites to mention a link to their websites or stuffed their own websites with irrelevant keywords to rank on Google. Penguin update penalized such websites.
3. Hummingbird
The Hummingbird update had nothing to do with page ranking. It focused on Google’s understanding of each query. What do people exactly mean when they search for a particular thing? That is what Google wanted to understand and improve upon. This update was created keeping conversational searching in mind. With this update, you could literally ask Google a query in simple English.
4. Rankbrain
The latest algorithm Rankbrain is not actually an algorithm but more like a tool that makes Google’s algorithm more accurate. It’s one of the components of Hummingbird. With Rankbrain, Google declared that it had started using a machine-learning artificial intelligence system to find better search results. The problem Google was facing was that almost 15% of its everyday queries were something the system had never received before. With artificial intelligence helping it understand and interpret these new queries, Rankbrain has become one of the most important factors in search engine rankings.
Now that we know about the basics of SEO, we can move ahead and learn the basic principles of SEO that help you improve the rank and increase traffic. We’ll learn all about these SEO principles in the next session.
Summary
Quite an informative introduction to SEO, isn’t it? With this, we have an understanding of the what’s and the whys of SEO & also the internal workings of Google search engine.
To recap the major learnings of this session, we first saw how search engines like Google address user queries by displaying relevant search results. Using an example, we learnt how users searching for a job are connected to the right portals, thereby facilitating a meaningful interaction between the user and the search engine.
This ultimately presents marketers with the opportunity to catch the attention of the users, which is where SEO comes in. Next, through some interesting facts, we saw how SEO plays a crucial role in helping firms transform their business. Not only is it useful for websites to appear at the top of search results and thereby drive traffic, but it’s also useful to optimise conversions. We saw the example of Amazon, where optimising for the keyword ‘best’ instead of ‘review’ resulted in an improved conversion rate.
Third, we dived deeper into the functioning of Google search engine and learnt how the entire process takes place from collecting and storing information, through processing relevant information, finally to ranking search
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