4 Things Most Leaders Don’t Understand About SEO

In an online business environment that’s heavily dependent on organic search, the lack of an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is detrimental to your growth and profitability.

In this column, we will look at three SEO facts that business leaders should know to achieve excellent results.

Fact #1: SEO Is Not An Add-On, But A Build-In

Search engines have become an indispensable part of the consumer’s decision-making and buying process, which means that organic search is important for every business. Being visible in Google and other search engines matters because that’s where most searchers go to look for things — and where most traffic to your website will come from. Organic search connects you with buyers.

Factors that affect your ranking on search engines are not limited to your own site, either. Some of the most important ranking factors are external, such as getting links from other authoritative websites in your niche. Google counts them as “votes” in your favor.

For best results, search engine optimization should be integrated with all of your other marketing initiatives from the start. Breaking down silos and working with other departments is mutually beneficial for all parties! Here’s how:

Content Marketing

If content marketing is an important element of your traffic generating strategy, then you must first research your ideal prospect’s search behaviour to gather insights for planning your content.

Doing this before creating your content will help tailor whatever you create to the existing needs and current behavior of your clients.

Paid Search

Some business leaders consider paid traffic to be completely distinct from search engine optimization, not realizing that an SEO specialist can help you amplify the reach and impact of your paid search campaigns.

It is true that SEO and paid search are different beasts, requiring specialized knowledge. But both address search users, and having SEO and PPC teams work together can be powerful.

SEO specialists tap into multiple data sources and use research and analysis techniques that can make PPC experts more effective at generating sales and boosting profits. And conversely, PPC is a great way to try out new ideas and experiment with conversion-boosting techniques before investing a larger budget into long-term strategies like SEO and content marketing.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Just getting more visitors isn’t enough. You must convert them into paying customers, or get them to do what you want. And SEO can bring you better results once you understand your typical website visitor on a deeper level.

• Why did they come to your website?
• What do they want from you?
• How do they intend to act on your information?
• Armed with this data and insight from an SEO expert, you’ll better understand the psychology of website visitors and can use it in your online communication to improve conversions.

Business Development

Insights gathered from Google can help future-proof your business. By digging into archived, historical data and comparing it against future trends, you can

• analyze markets
• study competitors
• make sales forecasts
• allocate resources
• All of this will help you find out what you need to become a market leader, how long it will take to beat your competition, and which activities will get you there in a cost-effective manner.

A good SEO analyst can help you uncover information that will warn you against venturing into markets which are too competitive, or safeguard you from wasteful investments in areas with low profit potential.

Branding & Communication

Once you understand what goes on in your ideal customers’ minds, your brand message and marketing communication will be more consistent and more effective. It costs nothing to access Google’s search data and study it for insights.

Are you speaking in your customer’s language? Have you identified the most frequent questions your customers ask? Do you solve the major problems that they are facing?

Your story becomes more interesting when you talk about what they are already interested in.

Knowing what your prospects care about, you can:

• reach out with a helping hand
• offer valuable resources
• plan effective brand campaigns
• conduct interesting and entertaining interviews
• use data intelligently
• combine it with your other data and information to amplify the impact
• Integrating SEO into all that you do, both offline and on, can enhance your results and speed up your growth.

On the other hand, trying to “slap on some SEO” like putting icing on a cake doesn’t work. This mindset is why many businesses don’t experience success with search engine optimization.

Fact #2: SEO Is No Replacement For A Good Product

Great SEO can’t fix what’s wrong with your product. As a U.S. politician said recently, that would be like “putting lipstick on a pig.” So start with your product — and fix that first.

In the future, the way your customers feel about your products (and the opinions they voice about your business) will affect your visibility on Google. The search engine giant wants its users to keep coming back, so it will ultimately strive to suggest only high quality products and services which their users will love. Thus, “customer delight” might soon become a crucial ranking factor for your website to show up high on Google search results!

Stop thinking about SEO as a “quick fix” or “duct tape” solution for your business. That attitude will prevent you from reaching your potential and can become a threat to your future success.

Fact #3: Plug-Ins Can’t Replace An SEO Expert

You can’t just “install SEO” quickly and easily. A WordPress plug-in cannot cover all aspects of search engine optimization. If you believe that SEO only means checking off boxes in a plug-in’s settings on your website control panel, it’s time to change.

Many businesses lose out on opportunities because leaders and in-house marketers lack knowledge and skills to dominate at organic search.

An expert can use SEO to make your marketing stronger and prevent expensive mistakes. Common errors — like website code changes that negatively affect SEO, or installing plug-ins that slow down your website, or not running SEO audits from time to time — become easy to avoid.

Technical SEO, which you must work on before installing an SEO plug-in, includes planning out several aspects of your website, such as information architecture, website structure, navigation, internal link architecture, etc.

Fact #4: Good SEO Is Data-Driven

This May at SMX London, I had a fascinating discussion about this with some SEO consultants. We all agreed that poor planning creates poor results. And when search marketing fails, you can’t blame Google or SEO itself — only yourself and your poor planning!

It’s time that business leaders accept this. If only a tiny fraction of what you do is effective in bringing you desirable results, why repeat everything that doesn’t work again next year? Stop doing it!

There are prospective customers you haven’t yet reached because your planning and execution is sub-optimal. That’s because you aren’t getting important things done, and it is increasing your rate of failure. By engaging these prospects and establishing a relationship, you can boost sales.That’s why you should take decisions based on facts, not gut instinct. Digital analytics are critical for this purpose.

Not only must you cull the right data to review, you must actually know what you’re looking at — and how it is relevant. Unless you are able to weed out things that don’t matter, you’ll only keep guessing and taking unnecessary risks… eventually driving your business into the ground.

Google: We Are Working On Making The Penguin Update Happen Continuously

At SMX Advanced, Google’s Gary Illyes announced that Google is working toward a continuously running Penguin update. He admitted that Penguin currently runs slowly, but said Google is working to make it update in real time. If that happens, the algorithm will get data that is refreshed all the time. Currently, the data has to be manually refreshed to see any ranking changes for sites impacted by Penguin.

Illyes explained it is hard for Google to do this right now because it requires a lot of reworking of the algorithm. But that is their goal, to make the Penguin algorithm run by itself, without manually refreshing any data. Illyes said this kind of change is months away and didn’t estimate a date for when webmasters can expect this change.

He also said that Google doesn’t see the update Panda ever running continuously, but rather requiring a manual data refresh.

Is It Time For Google To Rank News Content Behind Paywalls Better?

For years, Google has suppressed the ability for paid news content to rank well in its search results. It’s time for that to change, given how Google doesn’t suppress other types of paid content. The change may help people value news content more. It might also produce real revenues for news publishers, if they can come together on an “all access” subscription plan run through Google.

The Paid News Problem

Many news publications have “paywalls,” where people can’t read content unless they have a paid subscription. Some of these are very strict, such as with The Times of London. If you don’t pay, you don’t get to read. Some are “leaky,” such as with the New York Times. It allows people coming from Google or from social networks to read some or all content for free.

Strict paywalls pose a big problem for Google. The company has long said that searchers generally don’t like being sent to sites that have paywalls. Searchers are used to the idea that they can read anything they click on from a Google search for free. If they hit a paywall, they get annoyed. Some of that annoyance blows back on Google. “Why did you send me to this place!”

The First Click Free Solution

To solve this, Google created First Click Free. Publishers in this program agree to let anyone clicking from a Google result to read the listed article. That’s the “first click” which is free. If those visitors then make a “second click” from that article to read more at the publication, the paywall or subscription barrier can go up. To stem abuse, publishers can also limit any individual to five First Click Free clicks per day.

This is exactly why the New York Times and so many other papers have leaky paywalls. They want the Google traffic from the first visit, which they hope to monetize with ad views and paid subscription conversions.

First Click Free has been a good system but has some issues. Publishers don’t always follow the rules. Publishers like the New York Times might follow them so strictly that search visitors get discriminated against in a way that social visitors don’t. Some publishers simply don’t know how to implement First Click Free correctly. Others don’t even know it exists.

Discrimination Against Non-First Click Free Content

Not every publication wants to do First Click Free. Some believe that giving anything away makes it harder for paid subscriptions to have value. They’ll keep their paywall strict for everyone, including Google’s “crawlers” that gather up content from across the web. If Google can’t crawl a site, then the content within that site — perhaps important and useful information — is effectively invisible to Google and those searching through it.

Google hates the idea of content that it can’t see. That’s why Google tries to appease those with strict paywalls. It will include them in its search results, if they let Google behind their paywalls, without requiring them to give away the first click free to Google visitors. Instead, they’ll have a “Subscription” designation next to their listings.

Here’s how that looks in Google News:

I suspect most people reading this haven’t seen articles with this designation showing up much in Google News. That’s because, to my understanding, Google generally won’t rank this content as well as free or First Click Free content. I did ask Google several months ago to confirm this — twice — but I never got a response. But that’s the explanation I’ve known from years ago, when all this started.

I know people doing regular Google searches haven’t seen this next to news articles. That’s because Google only uses this designation in Google News itself. I suspect it doesn’t bother with it for news in its main results because such subscription content is even further suppressed there.

Some publications, to get around this suppression, may post summaries of their articles. The Information is a great example of this, where you might see the first few paragraphs of a story. It allows for some inclusion in Google without the subscription discrimination. But since the entire story isn’t being crawled, it might not show up for all the searches it could be relevant to.

No Discrimination For Music & Video

Now let’s flip things around from the logic Google uses for news content and apply it to music and videos.

If someone searches for Game Of Thrones, those episodes aren’t free anywhere (at least legitimately). Nevertheless, Google doesn’t hesitate to point searchers to a variety of places where Game Of Thrones is behind a paywall.

Want to download “Uptown Funk” for your music player? Search for “uptown funk download” or “uptown funk mp3,” and Google’s happy to send you to Amazon and iTunes, where the music is behind a paywall. Google will also send you to a lot of places where you can get pirated copies, but that’s a whole other issue.

In either of these examples, most searchers probably aren’t going to be upset with Google for sending them to where the content can be purchased because they expect to pay. Yes, some want it free. Yes, some of those will keep hunting. But many will actually be grateful if Google directs them to legitimate places where the content they expect to purchase can indeed be bought.

End The News Discrimination

Why should news be different? As Google’s brought in more and more support for the paywalls of Hollywood, maybe its time to do the same for those of newspapers.

There’s an argument that Google’s helped train people to expect that news content should be free, even though it has a cost. If Google removes the discrimination it has in place against paid news content, over time, people might accept that clicking into it will require payment in the same way they accept that with entertainment content.

More Visibility Doesn’t Mean More Paid Subscribers

While increasing the visibility of paid news content might help people regain a sense that news has a cost, there remains the huge challenge that most people aren’t going to buy expensive subscriptions for each and every publication they encounter.

Let me use myself as an example. I pay for a subscription to my local newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, at a cost of about $250 per year. I have a Wall Street Journal subscription at a great rate of $100 for six months right now. When that expires, the WSJ will want around $350 per year, at least. I’m overdue to buy a New York Times subscription just so I feel I’m supporting it more. That’ll be $200, but it won’t include my tablet. Or I can pay for that but not get my phone. Or I can try to figure out the crazy pricing they have with a spreadsheet. Because yes, New York Times subscription costs are that insane.

That’s nearly $1,000 per year spent on news. Yet, none of these expensive subscriptions are going to help me if I encounter paid content in Google, assuming it does make it more visible. I’m unlikely to pay $100 to $300 for an annual subscription to a new publication to read a single article I’ve happened upon in my search results. Even a trial offer means dealing with a form that will likely take longer to read than the news article I wanted.

Better visibility alone isn’t the solution. There needs to be an easy way for publications to be paid by visitors for their content that’s reasonable, that’s workable and appropriate for those single reads that happen.

Introducing “Google News All Access”

No, it’s not micropayments. At least, it’s not micropayments by the consumer. It’s micropayments by Google itself, as a broker for those consumers.

Let’s call it Google News All Access. I’m taking that name from Google Play Music All Access. That’s Google’s program where it charges consumers $9.99 per month to listen to whatever songs they want. Behind the scenes, that revenue gets shared to rights holders according to some mystery formula but one that’s clearly good enough that many participate in.

I want Google to do the same for news. Maybe it launches Google News All Access that allows people for $10 per month to read any content in Google News they want. Maybe Google keeps a small amount of this to manage the program. The rest is divided up among the publishers.

There will need to be some hard thinking on the formula. Sites that don’t have paywalls already might not get any payout. Those that have expensive paywalls might get a bit more per click than those with less expensive ones. But it’s far from impossible to do. If it happens, then you get the best of both worlds for news publications with paid content. The content is made more visible and also converts into subscription fees.

Other things would have to be worked out. Some publications might value the idea that everyone can read some of their articles without a subscription. Perhaps First Click Free continues but it gets modified, so that people get only one free click to a publication per day, not up to five. Publications might also choose to keep some articles open to everyone while others are more fully locked down than First Click Free currently allows.

I don’t pretend to know all the solutions, the exact solution or even if what I propose would be it. All I know is that the justification of suppressing paid news content no longer makes as much sense as it once did. It’s arguably harmful to the news industry by devaluing its content. But if paid news content is going to be made more visible, news publishers will finally have to get innovative about how they want a mass audience to pay for it.

Reff:- http://selnd.com/1A63XbH