In 2020, SEO is all about the human
Do you know what a ‘ranking factor’ is? If you’re new to SEO (search engine optimization), this may be a totally new term for you, but that’s ok because it’s a pretty simple one to grasp. Ranking factors are all the elements search engines take into account when deciding how to rank websites in their search results (that page of results you get after you search for something on Google or Bing).
What gets complex is what those exact factors are and how much weight search engines give to each one. This is where algorithms come in and, fortunately, you don’t need to be able to read, understand or write algorithms to be able to do good SEO. You just need some basic knowledge of the top ranking factors.
So, what are those ranking factors? The top 3 are directly related to how people interact with your website. They are:
- Direct website visits - People who come directly to your website, meaning they don’t click a link on another website or other source, but instead enter your website address directly into the address bar of their browser.
- Time on site - The amount of time people spend on your site in a single visit.
- Pages per session - The number of pages people view during a single visit to your website.
These 3 factors all indicate how engaged people are with your website. Search engines exist to help people find what they’re looking for and people only use search engines because they’re good at doing that. Think about it. We go to Google because we know it’s going to give us the answers or resources we’re looking for. If it wasn’t able to do that, we simply wouldn’t use Google. That’s why search engines put a lot of effort into these complex algorithms to continually try to deliver the best search results possible for actual humans. Because of that, it makes sense that search engines would rely on factors like the 3 listed above to determine whether or not a website or webpage is truly valuable. The more valuable your site or page is determined to be, the higher it will rank in search engine results pages.
There’s a great article here about the different ranking factors. If you’re very new to SEO, be warned that the linked article is a little advanced, but if you scroll to the graph of ranking factors, you can see the top 17, which is quite interesting.
What does this mean for SEO?
When optimizing your site for better search engine rankings, do it with the human in mind, not the search engines. Search engines do this and that’s why we should too.
Optimizing for Humans
In the early days of SEO, there were all kinds of tricks you could use to get that top spot. If you know the ins and outs of the algorithms, you could essentially “trick” the bots - the search engines spiders that crawl the web, indexing sites and pages. What happened? A whole lot of irrelevant, low quality results started coming up on search engine results pages. The tricks were successful for the SEO’ers, but not so much for the people trying to find things on the web. And so, search engines had to adapt. They did so by measuring and analyzing how people interacted with different websites and using that data to understand how to deliver high quality results and continually tweak their algorithms to find the best resources to match search terms. The further we go along in the evolution of search, data and internet use, the more these algorithms are geared towards human behaviour.
As search engine experts, marketers, business owners, bloggers or anyone else trying to build up a website, we can’t rely on tricks and “quick wins” to get a website established and ranking well. Instead, we need to rely on creating value - creating for humans.
What do humans want? What are they searching for? Does location matter for them? Do seasons matter? What trends might they be reacting to? What have they searched for in the past? What type of content do they interact with most? What sends them away?
These questions - and more - are what search engines are looking to answer for humans. If you focus your SEO efforts on answering these questions as well, you create value and are more likely to go up search rankings.
How to Optimize for the Big 3
So, we need to focus on direct website visits, time spent on site and pages per session. How do we actually do that? Since the big 3 are all about creating value for people, you want to focus on activities such as:
- Creating relevant content that adds value
- Getting active on social media to build brand awareness and community
- Contributing content to other outlets that align well with your brand
- Regularly adding new content to keep your website fresh and relevant
- Staying up on trends in the market and in web traffic
- Measuring and analyzing visitor behaviour to optimize strategy and tactics continually
If you’re interested in learning more about SEO and how to optimize for humans, this interactive workshop is designed to get beginners up to speed on the basics of SEO and how to implement best practices and strategies for long term growth and success.
Want to learn more about the trainer, Tarek Riman? You can find his bio here.