Part1: SEO is more than Techniques

In these series of video clips and posts, we will do our best to explain the SEO Strategy planning in a way for you to understand the concept to apply for your website.

First of all, we will talk about the fact that: why creating an experience is more important than creating contents?

You can either watch the video from Websima DMCC or read this article for the first part of this season.

Strategy planning is the first and the most important step of the SEO. The importance of this section is more than the others however most of the people don’t understand this concern. They start to create contents and they do link building without having a strategy, but they don’t succeed. In Websima, most of the times, we even do the SEO Strategy planning before the web design so we can set the website’s features based on that.

Let’s get back to that question:

why creating an experience is more important than creating contents?

In this article we are goanna try to answer that question. In the other word we would like to see what are google’s objectives TODAY? and what are the “zero-click searches”?

Google is not a Search engine!!!!! That’s true! Maybe you think I am wrong, but stay with me, I will convince you.

Google is not a search engine! It is more like an “Answer Engine”. Today, for most of the searches, google shows the results in the same search page! And most of the users don’t even click on any links or websites to find their answers.

Let’s see some examples:

You can see in the figure above that if you search for the last week match between Manchester united and Leeds united, you can see the result, goal scorers and important moments of the game in the same page of your search. So, if someone is looking for a general information about this match, he is goanna get his answer and leave without clicking on any links.

Here is another example:

You can see in the figure above that if you search for USD to EUR rate, again, in the same page you will see the answer you were looking for. But it is not only that, it also gives you a calculator so you can put your amount and see the result in the other currency!

We call this, “Zero Click Search”. It refers to the searches in which users get their answers from google without clicking on any links.

This is an alert for us, because we are creating contents, and google is using the same contents to answer the users without forcing them to visit our website.But, it gives us also the first lesson:

Lesson 1: Do not invest on contents that their answers are SO obvious.

Like a result of a match! Because your’e not goanna get any clicks from that!

SEO is not the only way for you to get visitors.

Don’t hear that from Websima but it is not the best way!

We saw that google was an answer engine instead of the search engine. On the other hand, google is doing advertisement for the keywords users are searching. So, the fastest method to get your visitors would be Google Ads.

The question is, which method is better for you? SEO or Google ads? it  Is not easy to answer that question and there is no general answer for that. Depends on the nature of your business it can be SEO, Google ads or even a combination of both.

Let’s go through some examples:

Check the figure above. If you search for web design in Dubai, the first 3 websites that you see are advertisements! So even if you have a good ranking on this particular keyword, you will not get a worthy share of that.

It is the same if you search for “Buy Samsung handsfree”  as you can see in the picture below.

So, SEO is not the only and is not the BEST option for your marketing. Then why are we doing that?!

Lesson 2: Because it is the most efficient method to advertise your website especially for a long-term plan.

The Second page of Google is just a bullshit!!

If your goal is to reach second page of the Google, forget your project! Let’s go through Google’s statistics:

As you can see here; almost 50% of searches are zero-click! (we talked about the zero clicks before). About 5% of users click on Ads only and finally 45% are the users that we are looking for. All the efforts on SEO is for these users. It is also interesting that 35% of users are clicking on first website.

Check the chart below:

You can see in this figure how number of clicks will go down as your website rank becomes worse. 60% of our targeted users will click on first 3 rankings and 18% of the total users click on rankings above 4. What does it mean? It means that not only second page of google is worthless, even the 4^th ranking is not that useful!

keep in mind that these data are on average, so imagine if you can invest on keywords that don’t have zero-clicks possibility. By applying this method, you can use all the 50% of that share as well and that’s a huge number!

Lesson 3: Start the project ONLY if you are willing to get #1 ranking

&

Lesson 4: Invest on keywords which are less likely to be “Zero-Click search”. Because in this way your chance to get visitors will be double.

Keywords are dead

Till now we’ve used “keywords” many times. But let us tell you a truth. Keywords are dead now! Google algorithms are now focusing on implication of your contents instead of the keywords in your contents. Check this one:

A User searches for something, Google tries to understand his intent of the search. On the other side, you have a SEO content on your page. Google tries to understand the implication of your contents instead of looking for keywords. If the intent of user meets the implication of your content, you are done, Google will suggest your page to him. The point is by focusing on implication of your content, you can cover many keywords however by focusing only on keywords, in the best case scenario you can get that keyword.

Lesson 5: Do your best to create an implication in your contents. Forget about keywords.

Google understands the contents of the images you upload

Did you know that Google can understand the contents of the images you upload? It’s awesome.

Look at this picture:

You can see what google figured out from this image on the right side. You cant see it here but google even found out its plate number! What is the result of that?

Lesson 6: Your images will improve your SEO significantly. Do not forget to use them and use right photos on right places.

Effect of User Experience on SEO

May be 10 years ago, google was working with robots and artificial intelligence that were trying to understand what the best response to users is. Years after years, google found out that the best method to understand what users want is to use themselves. Nowadays, Google tries to understand the user experience and based on that it decides to come up with its suggestions.

Let’s see what are the factors that google consider for the User Experience? For that purpose, we categorise the factors into 2 sections:

1.  Analysing the page indexing
2. User behaviour after entering the website

In analysing the page indexing, google considers:

• Page Experience
• Mobile Friendly
• Page Speed
• Content Quality

These factors are measured even before a user is searching for you.

And on the other side we have “User behaviour after entering the website”. Google will consider these factors:

• Click Through Rate – This means how many clicks your website will get per impression.
• Dwell Time – This is the time that user will be in your website before he returns back to the search engine.
• Engagement- It refers to user’s activity in your website such as commenting or watching a video or something similar to that.
• Bounce rate –  Bounce rate is equal to the number of users leaving your website divided by number of users entering your website. So a lower bounce rate is better.

All of these factors will be considered by google to suggest you a website. This is for users to have a better search experience.

The truth is that Google will continue these kinds of analysis till make sure that all users in the world can reach what they are looking for in the first three suggestions and that’s exactly why “User Experience” is extremely important for your website and the SEO.

Lesson 7: Improve your website’s user experience. It is impossible to have a good ranking without that!

Thank you for reading this article and we hope you enjoyed this part and we are sure you will watch our next part.

Part 2 will be about “How to Find Keywords”. In that part we have discussed how to find the best keywords for your SEO project based on the points we have mentioned in this article.