We hear it regularly –
the death knell tolling for SEO.
In the past several years, we’ve been bombarded by a barrage of change
in organic search, from Penguin to Panda to Hummingbird, from inbound
link penalties to [not provided]. Let’s face it: the only constant in
search is change.
But I propose that SEO isn’t dead by far. In fact, the role of SEOs
is expanding rapidly, and the reality is that we now have to look beyond
just the company website. Let’s review some of the ways search has
changed in 2013 and take a look at how those changes have impacted the
role of search marketers.
Mobile Search
Just how important did mobile become this year to organic search? The most recent
research from Walker Sands
indicates that mobile traffic now accounts for 28% of website traffic,
up a whopping 67% year-over-year. At his Pubcon keynote in October,
Matt Cutts shared the statistic
that YouTube’s mobile traffic had grown from 6% of total site traffic
in 2011 to 40% in 2013. Clearly, mobile’s importance is growing
dramatically.
But what does this mean for SEOs? Mobile presents unique new challenges for us. Google has made
several key points about
how mobile search will differ from desktop search, indicating that some
sites will be essentially “penalized” on mobile SERPs if they are not
well configured for mobile:
To improve the search experience for smartphone users
and address their pain points, we plan to roll out several ranking
changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for
smartphone users.
What the growth of mobile means for SEOs is that we can no longer
just focus on website optimization from a single angle — now, we must
also consider additional criteria (or sometimes an entirely different
set of criteria) to ensure that same site ranks in mobile search as
well.
Mobile Apps
Just a few weeks ago, Google also announced that they now have the capability to
index information housed within mobile apps just as they do for websites.
To index mobile apps, similar to websites, you must create and submit an XML Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
Google then indexes the pages in the Sitemap and reads and ranks that
information appropriately, allowing searchers to deep link directly to
that information within the app. Great!
But what that now means is that SEOs need to be involved with the app
developers as well, ensuring that the content created is optimized
appropriately and that the XML Sitemap is being updated as app data is
updated.
App Discovery
In a story last year, Inside
Mobile Apps estimated that the iTunes App Store and Google Play each
contain nearly 700,000 apps. Apps certainly can be expensive to develop,
so once you create one, you’ll want to ensure that mobile device users
can find the app and download it.
Mobile app discovery could essentially be considered another area of
search engine optimization, both with the addition of app indexing in
Google mobile organic search and within the search platforms of the
iTunes App Store and Google Play themselves. As apps continue to be
developed and added to these platforms, searches get more crowded — how
can an app be found in the clutter?
The greatest challenge that mobile app discovery within the app
platforms presents to SEOs is that the algorithms work completely
differently than the Google and/or Bing search engine algos. It’s
something SEOs may need to embrace as app development continues to grow
and even expand beyond typical mobile devices such as smartphones and
tablets to wearable technology such as Google Glass and smartwatches.
Hummingbird & Conversational Search
When the
Hummingbird algorithm was announced back
in September, SEOs everywhere were wondering what the algorithm change
meant for the future of SEO. Hummingbird’s foundation lies in
conversational search, in which searchers ask search engines questions
rather than enter short keyword phrases, and Google interprets the query
and processes it accordingly (
also known as Ask Jeeves circa 1998).
Conversational search has long been a goal of search engines, but the
rise of mobile in the past year has made conversational search even more
important.
In a study from last year from Google,
researchers determined that because it is more difficult to type on
mobile devices and the keyboards on mobile devices aren’t as easy to
use, users won’t spend indefinite time searching for something specific;
rather, they would simply try some other means of getting the
information they want.
With the addition of voice search to mobile devices, however,
searching became faster and easier than typing on the mobile device.
Microsoft has also taken up voice search and even applied it to other
devices, like the Xbox One, which features
voice search for Bing.
While the searches are focused on entertainment results such as movies
and games, it does open the Xbox up to become a search device, like
Google TV.
Hummingbird simply makes better use of conversational search and the
relationship between words, which means that SEOs must now think more
holistically about how information (and the relationship between pieces
of information) is presented for indexing. No longer are we optimizing
for a keyword phrase — now we optimize for words and relationships.
The Knowledge Graph
I would be remiss in mentioning the Hummingbird algorithm update
without mentioning the Knowledge Graph in the next breath. If there’s
anything that might impede SEO, it’s not Hummingbird — it’s the
Knowledge Graph. Why?
Google’s mission states:
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Notice that nowhere in that mission statement does Google state that
its mission is to provide websites with clicks. Google’s mission is
“information-based” — not website-based.
For the past three years, every study I could find reported that visitors spend
nearly double the time on Facebook as they do on Google.
But to be fair, that makes sense. Facebook is designed to be a place of
sharing whereas Google has traditionally been a site where you find the
information you need and leave. And for years, Google tried to make
your searches even faster, through improvements such as
Google Suggest/Autocomplete, and
Google QuickScroll.
Both improvements were designed to help searchers find an answer
faster, in turn ensuring time on site would likely be shortened as
searchers found their answers and clicked away from the search engine.
Why does Google care about the time-on-site statistic? The faster
that you find an answer in organic results, the less likely you will be
to click on an ad in paid search results. Google AdWords is the
financial engine that keeps Google alive. In
Google’s 3Q2013 SEC filing, Google AdWords accounted for 93% of the company’s total revenue.
But what if Google could provide the information you search for —
your answer — directly on Google.com? Would it mean you would stay on
Google.com longer? Would you use Google as your “information resource”
versus clicking to another site?
Knowledge Graph accomplishes this goal.
But what does the Knowledge Graph mean for SEO? On the one hand,
there’s a great opportunity to be a resource in the Knowledge Graph — to
be the site that the Knowledge Graph links point to.
On the other hand, as in the example above, searchers who queried
“Marie Curie” who might have normally visited the Wikipedia entry listed
first may find their answer instead in the Knowledge Graph box. This
saves the searcher a click but also robs Wikipedia (and the other sites
on this results page) from having a potential visitor.
As the Knowledge Graph continues to evolve, SEOs will have to be very
strategic about how to incorporate this reality into optimization
efforts.
What It All Means If You’re An SEO
All the changes mentioned throughout this column suggest that SEO is becoming a much more holistic practice than ever before.
Now, SEOs will need to have a hand in all things marketing (if they
didn’t before) to ensure that all of the hard work and investments a
company makes — from websites to apps to content — can be found.
Otherwise, what’s the point in creating it?
There’s a brave new SEO world out there. Go grab it.
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