Turning Search Engines Into Our Storefront
Ask the average person how Bing, Google and Yahoo work and they’ll tell you quite simply: You put in what you’re looking for and they find it for you.
Simple. That’s why almost all search traffic originates from search engines, at least initially. Like phone numbers, people no longer bother remembering all those www.blahblahblah addresses—it’s all too cumbersome.
But we so rarely understand how these search engines actually decide what we see, and like any good chip manufacturer will tell you: the product you see first is usually the product you go with. That’s why FritoLay pays so much to have their products displayed at eye-level on store shelves. It also happens to be why we, as businesses, need to understand SEO.
How Search Engines Work
When we pull up our favorite search engine and type in, “Mediterranean food near me,” we often imagine our search engine taking a split second to search the web and display our best options.
But it’s far more like a librarian searching her card catalogue. The truth is, Google, Bing, Yahoo and all our other search friends send out bot crawlers to search webpages continually, gathering important data in the code and text of websites so they can quickly index and display the most relevant results based on those indexes.
If we desperately need a bee costume for Halloween, the search engine doesn’t need to search the web at the split-second we hit enter. It has already catalogued (with the help of those bots) our websites countless times since launch, displaying a host of websites by relevance, location, and other filters. Making sure our websites are built with this in mind is essential to success.
Use Content to Your Advantage
Many of Google’s criteria for ranking one site over another is shrouded in constantly-shifting mystery. Code hidden in headers and footers—that the average web user never lays eyes on—dictates what we see and when we see it, often pushing better products and services further down the list simply because SEO was neglected when the site was developed.
Some of the most valuable pieces of information we can optimize towards are typically the least considered: Keyword Density, Title & Meta Descriptions and Link Structure.
Keyword Density
Probably the most difficult job of any marketer is knowing not just what people are looking for, but HOW they look for it. What words do we use when looking for a restaurant? We only search for a name directly when we’re aware it exists, after all. But if we don’t know, we’re likely to use other words to describe the sort of food we’re interested in.
A successful marketer must embed the perfect keywords into a website’s content with an optimized density. It is a fine line, too much can be too much and too little might be too little. Titles, subtitles, all the way down to menu items can be optimized based on what people most commonly search for on the web. They also need to be consistent throughout the page that will show up in the results. But this requires knowledge of keyword popularity and optimization—a constantly changing world it’s a marketer’s job to stay on top of.
Title & Meta Descriptions
When you see a search result, it has several elements you’ll never see on the actual website. That’s because the title, body copy and link (known as the title and meta descriptions) displayed on Google are all pulled from embedded code on your webpage.
Think of this as the lighthouse that guides people across a whole sea of other choices to your product or service. Without something concise, clever, or perfectly tailored to your prospective audience, even if your page is high-up on the results, clients are likely to go with someone else. But the perfect title and meta description can pull focus to your brand, netting new clients that might have gone elsewhere.
Link & Information Structure
Designing a website is a lot like city planning. From the outset you want a logical flow through your webpage, so people looking for your most-useful and most-frequently visited pages can find them quickly and through multiple avenues.
That’s why search engines look at your embedded links and information structure to display what it thinks are your most valuable web pages. But if our linking structure is a mess, just like with a poorly planned city, our clients risk getting confused in the messaging and Google will prioritize unhelpful pages that have high bounce rates. Having accurate data about pages clients spend the most time on and building our website around those can have a huge impact on long-term search engine success.
The Importance of Being Relevant
We often consider our websites as a tiny corner of the world we’ve carved out for our business, but do not be mistaken.
Search engines are our real store-fronts. We depend on them to drive in-market customers to our products and services, so having display priority is the first step to successful marketing. We want customers to not only find our web pages, but once they’re here we want to show them the most relevant products as quickly as possible.
That’s the role of Search Engine Optimization and page optimizations: giving search engines the clearest picture of who our business is and what we provide, so we can turn Google, Bing, Yahoo and the countless other search engines into the most powerful billboards money can buy.
Written by Taylor Bair