Content  Content is the information that people see on the page. This is where on‐page SEO tactics, such as keyword optimization, HTML mark‐up, and content structure, take place. The content that you publish on your website will also drive the incoming links from other websites, as people link to content that they like, trust, and recommend.

Links  Links are the primary navigational device. External links from other websites make your site more visible and provide credibility. Incoming links from other websites are one of the most important factors for increasing your rankings. Internal links are helpful for website visitors because they direct people to the information they need. Your navigation is the backbone of your website's information, enabling people and search engines to navigate the pages of content.

Structure  The structure, or architecture, of the website focuses on how the website is built, such as the organization of the content, the hierarchy of the content structure, the programming code, and server settings that make the website fast, accessible, and “spiderable” by search engines. Spiderable or spiderability is the how accessible and crawlable your website is for the search engine spiders.

These three areas, working in concert with each other, create the ideal conditions for search engines to find, assess, and rank your website. Optimizing a website involves each of these three areas. However, many times the tactics that you need to work on aren't clear. Experience is a wise teacher in SEO, as you develop a combination of an artist's eye, a scientists’ framework, and a weatherperson's ability to predict the weather (and still get it wrong).

Words  The first level of research is simply finding the words and phrases that your audience or customers use when searching for a solution or idea. In the early days of SEO, this was the biggest problem, as companies would create beautiful websites and add their corporate content. However, they would leave out the content that described their products and how those products solved problems. Instead, you would find generic corporatized phrases such as “enterprise application solutions” without any explanation of what the actual product or service was. If the words your customers used were not on the website, you would not be found.

My rule is to simply call things what they are.

Intent  Learning the needs of industry provides a depth of intent. For example, if I am selling car insurance, I can compare the number of searches for teen driver insurance to classic car insurance. I can determine a likely market size and learn the specific nuances of each group. These are two different groups—teen drivers and classic car owners—each with different needs, expectations, and budgets. Learning how they describe their needs enables you to create better content that matches the intent of each type of search.

Problems/Solutions  The next thing you learn from keywords is how their audience uses those works within context. People search when they need to find information, usually to make decisions. When people start using precise words and highly descriptive situations, you can learn the context of those searches and learn more about your audience. The more you relate your content to their needs, the more you enhance your rankings and conversions.

These additional words provide amazing insight into the thinking process, external factors, timing, location, and hundreds of other factors that make up the search phrase typed into a search engine. Learning the contextual words and how they affect or influence the search provides you with a unique insight into the mind of the searcher.

Buying Cycles  When learning the words people use, you quickly find that there may be a buying cycle (or a decision cycle) based on the types of words that are used and the depth of explanations. Typically, early in the buying cycle there are many short‐tail keywords. Short‐tail keywords are one‐ to two‐word keywords or phrases that are very general. An example of this is a search for “cars.” As a single word, it defines a very broad category, yet it contains no clues as to the need, intent, or nature of the search. The searcher could be shopping for cars or looking for pictures of cars. You do not know, but these searches are typically at the beginning of a decision cycle and will be refined as the searcher realizes that the results do not provide the information they need. While short‐tail keywords tend to be the more popular, they are also more general and do not produce many conversions, if any.

However, when the searcher starts using long‐tail keywords, which are phrases of four, five, or more words, you can begin to see defined intent and contextual signals. Toward the end of the decision cycle, searchers are looking for more detail and have specific questions. These keyword phrases are full of descriptive factors and attributes, providing rich feedback on the needs of the searcher. Long‐tail searches are typically at the end of the decision cycle, so when searchers find exactly what they want, they tend to convert at a very high rate.

Trends  Depending on the industry, people search for things that may have dramatic shifts throughout the year. In addition, the words used in the searches may change in different seasons. In a research project in the hiking industry, I found that “hiking survival” was a popular term all year. “Hiking destinations” were researched in the winter months. Hikers usually researched and purchased equipment in the early spring before their outdoor adventures. But it wasn't always the hikers themselves. In October, November, and December, “hiking gifts” increased. What I found is that these searchers were usually friends or family members who want to get a gift for a hiker.

As you can see, you learn much more than a simple keyword.

Customer Research  First, interview your customers and talk to your salespeople. What problems did you solve? How do customers explain or describe your product, service, or solution? Look through emails, correspondence, call logs, and your interactions with the public to find the words they use.

Seed List  Starting with these words enables you to develop a seed list. These are the dozen or so words that you start with that describe your business. Now if you have a large ecommerce website, you have most of this ready to go with product names and descriptions. You'll take this list and use it to start your keywords research in multiple tools.

Keyword Research Tools  There are multiple places online to get a sense of how people search and the words they use. AnswerthePublic.com (see Figure 4.3) is a great place to start. By adding a keyword, you'll find how people search and the questions they ask.

Answer the public is a great resource because it focuses on keywords within the context of questions. This is important because of the growth in voice search. People are using Siri, Alexa, and other voice‐activated assistance to search for information audibly. When people use these technologies, they are asking questions rather than using a few choice keywords, as they would if typing into the search bar. As a result, the questions are more specific, contain ideal keywords, and provide greater context and insight into the motivation of the searcher.

There are also dedicated keyword research tools such as Wordtracker.com (see Figure 4.4). When searching for keywords in Wordtracker, you'll see related keywords listed in order of volume, or popularity. This is the estimated amount that the word has been searched on in the past 12 months. You can also see a trend chart that shows the change in demand throughout the year.

These tools also provide calculations on the difficulty rating to rank for these words and the competition level. They allow you to research entire industries, create keyword projects, and explore your niche. Keywords are not just limited to Google. You can explore the keywords used at YouTube, Amazon, and eBay.

SEO Software  Another source of keyword data is from a full‐suite SEO Software tool. SERanking, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz, Majestic, and Serpstat are the main tools used by the SEO industry.

In the example from SERanking in Figure 4.5, I am researching the keyword “car insurance” and can gain a significant amount of information. I can immediately see the difficulty score, estimated search volume, cost‐per‐click (CPC), related keywords, websites that are ranking for that term, and the volatility of the top 10 rankings.

SEO software provides in‐depth keyword research tools and position tracking in the search engines. They will track your performance and that of your competitors. Some will also provide in‐depth competitive analysis that will report the keywords used by your competitors in SEO and paid search.

Google Trends  This research tool (see Figure 4.6) provided by Google is an insight into Google search data, without revealing actual keyword counts. All comparisons are relative and provided on an index of 0–100, which bears no relation to the actual keyword demand—just the relationship among the keywords you are exploring.

While estimated search counts can be greatly out of proportion in SEO tools, I use Google Trends to compare keywords and get a comparison from the search giant itself.

For example, in comparing my “teen driver insurance” to “classic car insurance,” I can see the difference in demand specifically in Google.

“Classic car insurance” is searched for three times as much as “teen driver insurance.” However, you can also see that I added “vintage car insurance,” which came up in the research as well, to compare “classic” to “vintage.” This helps me understand and verify the word choices and explore other descriptive adjectives to use in my marketing content. Just because the word “vintage” isn't as popular doesn't mean I should exclude it from my use in optimization. It should be integrated to provide additional contextual content that is relevant to a potential customer.

Interestingly, Google Trends also provides a map to show where the highest percentages of searches are done, compared to the population of a state, country, or region. In this example, the darker states are those that have higher concentrations of searches as a representation of the population. This can be used when targeting geographically based audiences in paid campaigns.

Step 1: Optimize SERP Factors  The search engine results page is the first thing that potential visitors will see about your website. This is where you present your best information and persuade them to click! The most important element is the Page Title. It is presented in the SERP in big, blue letters, and is most likely the only thing that people will read! Focus your attention on creating a highly descriptive sentence or phrase that answers a searcher's questions.

There are many options here, but it is best to keep the title around 50–60 characters (including spaces). You can create longer page titles, but the entire title may not be seen by searchers on mobile devices. It is a matter of preference, and there is no specific standard. The most important thing is what the searcher will see and how it will persuade them to click your result.

Next, use a keyword in the page title. I recommend that it be used in the context of the information. I have seen websites simply repeat the keyword and related phrases in the page title. This is a clear attempt to boost rankings. Similarly, others may recommend adding keywords separated by hyphens or bars. From my experience, I like a short, clear title in a sentence format that simply explains the content of the page. This method is the most contextually relevant and the easiest for a human to read.

Next, the URL should provide a description of the content, but also reflect the organization of the website, as in this example URL:

https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/what-do-sea-turtles-eat-unfortunately-plastic-bags

You can see that the article is located in the “Stories.” The article heading is being used in the URL. Many times, this is the default setting for many websites and blogs. Each word of the title is used and separated by a hyphen. At one time, many SEO professionals would have cautioned against the use of so many hyphens in the URL, but now it is so commonplace because of the default publishing settings on content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress and Wix.

Finally, the description. In this case, the content is being pulled from the page. You can use a meta‐description to provide a more in‐depth description of the content of the page, and the search engines may use this, but not always. The key is that you can use this to provide more information to the searcher, as the content in the meta‐description code does not affect rankings.

Step 2: Page Structure  Now, examine the structure of a page. The content on the page will be read by humans and search engine bots. How will you communicate which content on the page is most important? This is done through markup. This is also where my journalism background prepared me for SEO.

The most important element on the page is the headline. In HTML markup, this is denoted by an H1 tag.

<H1> Place headline here</H1>

Like a newspaper, the headline is the largest text on the page. It is larger, bolder, and more contrasting to the background, enabling people to read it quickly and gain a summary of the content. Then, the content on the page should be organized into subtopics and displayed in a readable format. People avoid large paragraphs of text, so you can make reading easier by breaking up the content into smaller sections and headings that make it easier to scan. You do this through additional markup.

Subheadings are used to provide content organization and structure, and they are denoted by H2, H3, H4, etc. Links to additional resources are typically blue and sometimes underlined (links should look like links). Using bullet points increases the readability of the document, and bolding important words will grab the reader's attention. Writing impactful, descriptive sentences as subheadings, paragraph headings, captions, bullet points, and page links engage the readers and allow them to quickly scan the content and locate important information.

For the search engine, they need the markup to inform the context. Without markup, all text appears the same in the code. Using markup shows the search engine which content is the most important, such as headlines, headings, bold text, and more. When you place keywords in the headings using markup, you are showing the search engines the importance of these key concepts.

Here's the dual purpose of SEO: by making the content easier to read for humans, you are optimizing the content for search engines! See Figure 4.9.

Step 3: Other On‐Page Optimization  There are many other areas of on‐page content that can be optimized. The key here is that you are not simply stuffing keywords into the content anywhere you can. Rather, you are creating a highly contextual development of content.

Microformats or Schema  Schema is an accepted data format that is understood and handled universally across search engines, browsers, devices, and operating systems. For example, an address schema (see Figure 4.10) is understood as an address in the search engine, the browser, apps, and operating systems. This enables users to see an address on a website while using their mobiles and be able to click the address, have it open in maps, and get directions.

The coordination among different systems universally recognizes the format, function, and content of the markup. Google suggests the use of schema as much as possible to make it easy for crawlers and systems to easily identify, classify, and republish this information. Author pages and articles can benefit greatly from very simple HTML markup and schema techniques. These properties can be used for contacts, reviews, events, authors, locations, articles, and many other common features of websites. References for types of data and their formats can be found at Schema.org.

Popularity  A link from a popular website is one of the desirable factors. A recognizable website that is visited often can provide a great boost when a link is made. Gaining a link on a popular site may also provide a branding benefit, as people will see the link mentioned in the content and could also result in visitors coming from that link! News and information sites are excellent examples of popular links from credible, established, and popular sites.

Relevance  The second factor in measuring links is the relevance of the linking website. For example, is the site that is linking to your site related in some way? A news site can provide a great link, but an industry‐related website can provide a highly relevant link. Contextually, they provide content and information within a specific subject matter and can be seen as more authoritative because of the depth of content. Gaining a link from this source enhances your credibility by being associated in the same industry.

Influence  It is not simply the link from one site to your site. Linking algorithms measure the influence of websites beyond the first level of links. They evaluate the links of the site that is linking to the site that is linking to you—and beyond! Evaluating the extended link networks, they find the sites that may not be the most popular, or the most relevant, but the most influential. These indirect clusters of influence impact the amount of credibility and authority attributed to your site.

Verify Your Name, Address, Phone, and URL  One of the first link‐building methods is to search for websites that mention or list your business or organization on their page. First, verify that your business or organization's name, address, phone number, and website URL are accurate. Second, ensure that they are consistent! These primary fields need to be consistently formatted across every listing, entry, mention, and directory. This includes your website URL. Inconsistency in the business name, the address, or the URL may cause search engines to create duplicate entries or confusion about which version is the actual one. Machines may not process the different formats as a human would understand them.

Once you've verified that the information is accurate and consistent, then see if there is a link. If your business is listed, but it does not contain a link, ask for one. You may have to complete a form or contact the website manager. These are typically the easiest links to gain and provide a good foundation.

Directories and Associations  The next level of links focuses on Internet directories, industry directories, business listings, and local associations. These are benefits of joining organizations or finding industry resources. In the early days of SEO, directory links were the primary place to start, and I still find them to be an overlooked method of establishing a good link base. Search for relevant directories and ask any membership organizations if they publish a directory of members. Many times, the link and listing are a benefit of this membership.

Prospecting Competitor Links  This is where SEO software tools became valuable. You can use these tools to track your competitors and see the websites that are linking to them. I like to look for the links from articles or resources that are publishing lists of vendors or businesses. These are easy to get into, and many times there is a link to the author of the article where you can approach and ask for inclusion in the page or in the next article. Sometimes, this tactic simply uncovers many links that you can't replicate, such as a media link where the story is specifically about that business.

Prospecting Podcasters  One place that is growing in popularity is to be a guest on a podcast, or even start your own! Podcasters create pages on their website for each show and link to the guest's website. The podcast also promotes the guest interview through email and social media. In response, guests will also reach out to their audience and promote their interview on the podcast. Multiple links are developed and created based on one event, which benefits all involved.

Create Amazing Content  I'll admit, it sounds like I am jumping ahead here. But this is what drives most high‐quality links! Original content such as research, studies, analysis, articles, stories, and videos naturally attract attention and people link to them, curate them, and republish them. I work with a company that specializes in developing original research. They partner with companies in a specific industry and use the content to attract leads by registering to access the research. They also find many media and industry influencers who will use the research to create articles and additional content, which provide links back to the original source.

Digital Public Relations  Finally, I have found the most effective method of develop high‐quality, popular, and relevant links is to develop a public relations (PR) campaign. Using press releases, compelling stories that are developing with video and images, and a clear pitch is an effective method of gaining links in news search, search results, media sites, industry news, and beyond.

This method takes work, as you develop an appropriate pitch to take your story to reporters, editors, podcasters, bloggers, and others. The pitch is what attracts attention and makes the case to publish your article, information, research, or story to the wide world. However, the work is worth it, as a great PR campaign can create valuable links, gain immediate visibility in search and news results, increase visits, and make a significant economic impact.

The Pitch  The pitch is how you approach others to persuade them to act, in this case, to include a link to your site through any of these means. Remember that no one is under any obligation to give you a link! It is on you and your ability to present a compelling reason to publish your article or to give you a link. How you approach and ask for this largely determines if it is read and considered or deleted without a thought.

Your pitch should first show familiarity with the person or source that you are approaching. Have you read their material? Find a unique perspective that they have given, or a recent article, and quote it. Showing that you have done the most basic research first will provide a good first impression. Second, how will your information or link help their audience? You need to focus on their benefits, not yours. Third, realize that most editors, writers, and website owners receive dozens of pitches like this a day. Usually, they send it to spam without a thought. How will you stand out and make an impression?

Google Panda, 2011  One of the earliest and most impactful updates was the Panda update. For starters, this update targeted “thin” content that was very shallow or was duplicated across dozens or hundreds of pages. An example of “thin content” is a website attempting to rank for plumbing contractors and building a page for every city or town, then interlinking all the pages with the city name and the word plumbing as the anchor text. The text on the page would be the same, with only the name of the city changing.

This update also targeted websites that simply aggregated feeds from other websites and published them as their own. Other tactics were those that published duplicated or stolen content from other websites or had the same content repeated across the website (such as 200 how‐to articles on the same subject). Google targeted sites that were built specifically for rankings and had little to no quality based on user experience or the content itself. This was one of the first algorithms that focused on identifying the authorship of content, as many sites were simply stealing or appropriating content and publishing it as their own.

Google Penguin, 2012  This update was targeted at sites developing false relevance from linking schemes. This targeted sites that were buying links or participating in link networks designed to inflate a backlink profile. Additionally, Google targeted websites that employed “doorway pages,” which was a method of showing the search engine a false page designed for rankings but sending the searcher to another page.

Google Hummingbird, 2013  Hummingbird was a unique update in that it focused on the on‐page content of websites rather than backlinks or spam. This algorithm was focused on a context‐driven evaluation of the content. This marked a major shift in Google's search technology as the search phrase itself, rather than the individual words, was being evaluated for relevance. Previously, in a search for “mechanical gaming keyboard” the algorithm would attempt to find the best matches for the three words separately. This update was the first application to evaluate the intent of the phrase rather than the individual words.

This update showed a dramatic shift in evaluating the content of pages, as simple keyword repetitiveness was not going to be effective. Rather, the natural use of synonyms, contextual cues, natural conversational content, and long‐tail keywords would be used to evaluate the page for relevance.

For example, think of the many synonyms for cars: autos, automobiles, vehicle, motor, wheels, motorcar, hybrid, SUV, and so on. Webster's lists 57 synonyms. In natural conversation, people use synonyms all the time, because using one word becomes repetitive and contrived. According to Google, “Synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across more than 100 languages.”

Google Pidgeon, 2014  Pidgeon was designed to enhance the local search results using distance and location. The emphasis started the development of enhancing the visibility of local businesses in the results.

Google RankBrain, 2015  After these major algorithm shifts, there was a change, as many of the newer algorithms were additions to the primary algorithm. In this case, RankBrain was added as an update to the Hummingbird algorithm. RankBrain was a machine‐learning AI designed to learn words and concepts of rare or uncommon words. It was designed to understand the variations of different search phrases. In 2013, Google announced that 30 percent of search terms were phrases that had never been used before! Also, as new words, trends, and events happen around the world, Google needs to keep up with the increasing vocabulary. RankBrain was designed to learn these new words or phrases and connect them to meaningful results.

Google Fred, 2017  Fred was another update that targeted false relevance, specifically keyword stuffing, link schemes, and misleading backlinks.

Google BERT, 2019  While not an algorithm update, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations) is a Google technology for natural language processing. The goal is to understand language nuance and idioms. As an example, think of the many ways that the word “like” is used in English:

• I like coffee
• This coffee tastes like dirt
• I feel like dancing
• My friend and I are alike
• It's like, you know

It's a single word with multiple meanings based on the context of the words around it. BERT was designed to pick up and interpret these meanings.

Google MUM, 2021  Another technology change, Google's MUM (Multitask Unified Model) is built on BERT architecture but is 1,000 times more powerful. This expands the language capabilities of the search results to reach across language barriers and find answers through accessing and translating information in other languages.

Localized Results  Primarily, search results are first delivered based on the searcher's location. The vast majority of searches are conducted on a mobile phone, so the search engines primarily provide results based on location and favor local businesses.

Search History  Another factor that influences the results is your past search history. This information enables Google to develop personalization factors and information or industry preferences based on your usual activity. While this will not heavily influence results, your history informs how certain phrases or concepts should be weighted in the results.

SEO Software Reports  Any SEO tool or software program has to query Google to gain rankings data. However, to comply with Google's terms of service, they need to have a token or an API access to Google. This enables them to query a certain number of times or a number of queries in a day and only from a designated server so that the ranking reports do not take up valuable resources from human searchers, and so that ads are not shown to reporting queries.

Because of this, the rankings are coming from a centralized server and not from servers that humans are using. The data may be out of date, may not be using the latest algorithm, or have not updated based on the last crawl. The rankings reports produced from these tools or software are good as a comparison and trending view of a website's progress or ability to hold consistent rankings. If you choose to track rankings daily or even weekly, you'll see many changes back and forth and predictable swings of one to four positions, gained or lost. For this stage of reporting, a level of consistency is the desired outcome.

Acquisition  An acquisition report should compare your search engine visits as compared to other channels such as paid search, social, direct, email, and other campaigns. This provides a direct comparison of the effectiveness of search as a primary channel for generating qualified visits to the website.

Also, when tracking value, such as goal value or transaction value, this is reflected in the revenue and can show that search is one of the most effective revenue generators for your business website.

Landing Pages  When evaluating the results of optimization, evaluating the increase of visits to the landing pages is one of the most direct measurements of the results. Not only this, but the influence of that page on the revenue of the website shows the impact of developing a visitor experience that results in a measurable economic impact of your optimization!

Comparing time frames prior to optimization to the same time frame after optimization will provide the data you need to justify your SEO efforts. Depending on the impact of the SEO, if you see rankings increase, then you should see visits and goal completions increase as well. While you may not see the increases over days or weeks, you may see it more clearly when comparing years or quarters.

Revenue and Value  With Google's shifting of analytics toward a first‐channel attribution model, you will see more and more the influence of search as a major contributor toward visits, revenue, conversions, and overall business impact. Search is a top‐of‐mind activity and the primary method of finding information.

Measuring rankings only reflects a first‐step influence of your efforts. To truly show the full impact of search to an organization, reporting must start with the first‐visit channel, showing how it influences ongoing visits through additional searches and direct visits, and how it confirms actions and economic impact at the end or through the decision cycle.