SEO News

Put simply, Google (and other search engines) are always looking for genuine quality content, and are increasingly smart at finding (and dismissing) pages that try to game the system.

For example, Google’s Hummingbird algorithm restructure from last year enables it to better understand the meaning behind search queries as well as the semantics behind content.

So what should you focus on if you want to produce content that search engines will recognise as high quality? Here are five key factors that we have identified:

1. Holistic content

Content should not just be focused on optimising for single keywords – but should cover the topic comprehensively and be based on content clusters, individual subjects or topic areas that are based around keywords and a variety of related terms.

This change is because the Hummingbird algorithm change and the move to semantic search means Google is now much better at recognising the intent of searchers when they enter a search term.

Companies therefore need to include content clusters in order to be more holistic – and, at the same time, make content more relevant for users with different search intentions. 

A good way of doing this is to look at content in terms of proof terms and relevant terms, as both have a strong positive correlation with high Google rankings.

For example, for a search term such as “iPhone 6 plus” proof terms such as “Apple” or “mobile” are words that are strongly related to the primary keyword and highly likely to appear at the same time.

Relevant terms such as “bending” or “screen size” are a bit more removed and part of a sub-ordinate topic cluster, but still important.  

2. Length of text on the page

Back in 2012 when Searchmetrics analysed the factors that correlate with pages that rank highly in Google, we found a higher number of words on a page had a negative correlation.

That already changed last year, and the trend continues; our Ranking Factors study in 2014 found that the average length of a top ranking result is now around 975 words/8,313 characters.

Obviously this is not just a question of writing more words – search engines are looking for quality content that is relevant and contains content clusters, rather than unconnected, single keywords.

3. Readability of copy on the page

As part of the aim of delivering usable results, Google is also considering the readability of the text – i.e. how easy (or difficult) it is to read particular pages.

We used the Flesch readability scale, which analyses word and sentence length, to assess the legibility of content.

The scale ranges from 0 (difficult) to 100 (easy) and we found that the average Flesch score for high ranking pages is 73/74. For reference, the scale states that content between 60-70 is easily understood by 13-15 year old students.

Generally therefore web content that aims to appeal to a non-specialist audience should be straightforward to read and understand if it is to rank highly.

For more specific search queries covering more academic subjects, results may be slightly different. Consequently, it is important to create content that fits the search intention and the needs of your specific targeted user group.

4. Less advertising on the page

Sites that rank in the top 30 positions generally include less advertising than average according to our analysis. Our findings indicate that Adlinks and Google Adsense integrations both correlate negatively with good rankings.

This continuing change reflects the desire from people to find and read holistic content, rather than be distracted by advertising. 

5. The presence of images

While perhaps not worth a thousand words, photos and videos seem to be viewed favourably by Google as well as making a page more attractive to readers.

The top ten ranked sites in Google’s search results tend to have between 6-8 images on a page for example. While it is likely that this will be capped by Google in future, ensuring your content has relevant, high quality images will help when it comes to ranking.  

Google is getting better at identifying quality content and its succession of algorithm updates will continue to downgrade the appearance of poor and spammy pages in its results.

If you want to achieve strong, long lasting search visibility then you should make sure that producing a regular stream of high quality content for your target audiences is a key part of your strategy.

Audit your international SEO potential

This is the first step you should take. Discover whether you have a global audience (or a potential one) by looking at some data.

Within whichever analytics package you use, you’ll be able to identify which countries your search listings are visible to and are in turn sending you organic traffic.

You’ll also be able to see what the volume of traffic is from each country. What language they speak. Whether they provide conversions or not. You’ll also be able to view metrics such as visit duration and bounce rate.

You’ll then be able to ascertain whether your site is ready to play on a bigger stage or if it’s providing adequate accessibility for international visitors.

It’s not just Google

According to our own SEO Best Practice Guide, Google may well be the most popular search engine in most of the western world (with a market share in the US of 70%) but other search engines have a high usage and market share in other countries. 

For example:

• Baidu in China is the most popular search engine with a market share of 75-80%. Google is of course blocked here.
• Yandex in Russia has a 60% market share. 
• Naver in South Korea has a 70% market share.  

The first step to take when expanding your SEO efforts to reach international audiences is to find out which is the most popular search engine for the targeted country.

Each search engine will have a similar keyword planner tool just like Google, so don’t worry if that’s something you’ve become used to using in your regular SEO strategy.

Language

Because you’re not going to get very far if you’re only speaking one language. 

Forbes has some good advice just in case you’re secretly tempted to go the easy route… “Do not put your website’s text into Google Translate and then slap that up on your foreign language website. The results will be bad for your visitors, not to mention your SEO efforts.”

In fact most tools are frequently inaccurate and will inevitably lead to confusion for the user. If you’re a publisher and have a comments system under your articles, you’ll understand the bafflement and pain of badly translated spam comments.

Instead use experienced human translators. They understand the local culture and custom, so therefore have a good feel for what people like or dislike and how they search for information.

Experienced translators also understand the nuances of the language. The slang, the abbreviations, how people really speak to each other. This is vitally important in coming across as a relatable, human and approachable business.

Of course using an actual professional will be more expensive than an automated tool, but the improved targeting and relevance to the searcher will surely provide a much larger amount of revenue.

URL structure

Each version of your country and language targeted sites must have its own unique URL. This ensures that search engines can crawl and index your site without any problems.

You should avoid using cookies or scripts to take users to the same URL, however you can use cookies to personalise the different language or country versions according to user preferences, as long as each version is crawlable and indexable under its own URL.

Country targeting

If you wish to target by country, you can use Country Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs), which provide a specific country extension for a website.

Ecommerce sites tend to use these, for instance Amazon has a range of different ccTLDs for every country it operates in: Amazon.fr (France), Amazon.co.uk (UK), Amazon.at (Austria).

Although it might be easier to manage one website rather than many different ones for every country, operating separate domain names is much better for SEO. 

However ccTLDs require more technical resources and more effort to build popularity because they’re effectively separate sites and must work harder to gain authority.

If you’re using a generic domain (.com, .net, etc.) then you can also enable country versions by using subdirectories (yourname.com/uk/). 

Subdirectories require much less technical resources and will inherit the popularity of the main domain. However this will also add more complexity to your web structure, and geolocation signals are not as strong as the ones given to ccTLDs. 

If you want to avoid adding complexity to your structure, try using subdomains (uk.yourname.com) again however this may require more effort to develop the subdomain’s popularity as they’re seen as independent entities.

Here’s are the differing ways to craft country targeted URL structures:

Language targeting

You can also target for a specific language. For this you can choose to use subdomains (es.yourname.com or de.yourname.com) or subdirectories (yourname.com/es/ or yourname.com/de/).

If you’re language targeting, you should use a specific web structure for each language, either with subdirectories or subdomains. 

Again, sub-directories require less technical resources and less effort to grow popularity over sub-domains, but they also have a more complex URL structure and could limit crawling and indexing.

Hosting

Also think about hosting your site with a local web hosting company. If you’re providing a website to a country where the host is half way across the world, this will create a severe delay for the user and scupper your SEO potential.

Credit 

I hope you found this helpful, again this is very much a beginner’s overview. Please consult our SEO Best Practice Guide for more in-depth guidance and help.

As well as our guide, I also couldn’t have written the article without the following resources from Moz, Kissmetrics and Forbes.

Further reading for beginners

During my first year at Econsultancy I’ve been making a point of writing beginner’s guides to any new terms or phrases I find particularly baffling, or that I might suspect other people may find baffling too. 

The following related articles should help clear up a few things…

• Black hat & white hat SEO
• Dictionary of SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Paid search (PPC) 
• SEO for beginners

Posted by Isla_McKetta

You’ve heard the wisdom: 

“Your business should have a blog.” 

“Blogging helps your SEO.” 

“Why aren’t you blogging yet?” 

According to the experts, a blog will solve all your Internet woes. Blogging will increase your traffic, expand your audience, improve your engagement, position you as an authority, and allow you to shape the message in your space. 

In fact, blogging is so hyped as a panacea, you’d think that simply adding a blog to your site would also help you find the perfect spouse, cure the common cold, and even turn lead into gold. 

While I won’t deny the power of a good blog on the right site (seriously, as a writer, I’m pro-blog in general) to do all of those good things and more, you should always question anything that’s touted as the right answer for everyone (and everything). So should you blog?

When a blog is NOT necessarily the right form of content marketing

Now that you’re asking whether all that time and energy you’re putting (or planning to put) into your blog is really the right investment, let’s look at a few examples of when blogging is a bad idea (or is simply unnecessary).

1. You own your market

Johnson & Johnson. Amazon. Target. Google. These companies have already captured the hearts and minds of so many consumers that their names are nearly synonymous with their products. Here’s why blogging would only offer each of them a marginal benefit.

Traffic

Does Johnson & Johnson really care about traffic to its site when you already have Band-Aids (and all their other name brand products) in your medicine cabinet? Sure, they produce infographics, but there’s no real blog, and you were going to buy their products anyway, right?

Audience reach

Ordering anything from books to pet-waste bags online? You didn’t need a blog to discover Amazon, it’s so ingrained in your Internet history that you probably went straight there and those products will be on your doorstep in two days or less.

Engagement

Target mastered engagement when Oprah and Tyra started referring to the store as Tarzhay and shoppers only got more loyal as they added designer labels at discount prices. It didn’t matter that most of their products weren’t even available on their website, let alone that they didn’t have a blog. Their site has gotten a lot better in the past decade, but they still don’t need a blog to get customers in the door.

Authority

And Google… Sure they have a blog, but Google is such an authority for search queries that most of the consumers of their search results have no interest in, or need for, the blog.
So if you have little or no competition or your business is (and you expect it to remain) the top-of-mind brand in your market, you can skip blogging.

2. You have a better way of getting customers into the top of your funnel

A blog is only one way to attract new customers. For example, I live less than a mile from the nearest grocery store, and I can get there and back with a spare stick of butter before my oven even warms up. If the next nearest store had the most amazing blog ever, I’m still not going to go there when I’m missing an ingredient. But if they send me a coupon in the mail, I might just try them out when it’s less of an emergency.

The point is that different types of businesses require different types of tactics to get customers to notice them. 

My mom, a small-town accountant who knows all of her clients by name, doesn’t blog. She’s much more likely to get recommended by a neighbor than to be found on the Internet. If paid search brings you $50k in conversions every month and your blog contributes to $10k, it’s easy (and fair) to prioritize paid search. If you find that readers of white papers are the hottest leads for your SaaS company, offering a 50:1 ROI over blog readers, write those white papers. And if your customers are sharing your deals across email and/or social at a rate that your blog has never seen, give them more of what they want.

None of that means you’ll never have to create a blog. Instead, a blog might be something to reassess when your rate of growth slows in any of those channels, but if you’ve crunched your numbers and a blog just doesn’t pan out for now, use the tactics your customers are already responding to.

3. The most interesting things about your business are strictly confidential (or highly complicated)

Sure the CIA has a blog, but with posts like “CIA Unveils Portrait of Former Director Leon E. Panetta” and “CIA Reaches Deep to Feed Local Families” it reads more like a failed humanizing effort than anything you’d actually want to subscribe to (or worse, read). If you’re in a business where you can’t talk about what you do, a blog might not be for you. 

For example, while a CPA who handles individual tax returns might have success blogging about tips to avoid a big tax bill at year end, a big four accounting firm that specializes in corporate audits might want to think twice about that blog. Do you really have someone on hand who has something new and interesting to say about Sarbanes Oxley and has the time to write? 

The difference is engagement. So if you’re in a hush-hush or highly technical field, think about what you can reasonably write about and whether anyone is going to want (or legally be able) to publicly comment on or share what you’re writing. 

Instead, you might want to take the example of Deloitte which thinks beyond the concept of your typical blog to create all kinds of interesting evergreen content. The result is a host of interesting case studies and podcasts that could have been last updated three years ago for all it matters. This puts content on your site, but it also allows you to carefully craft and vet that content before it goes live, without building any expectation associated with an editorial calendar.

4. You think “thought leadership” means rehashing the news

There is a big difference between curating information and regurgitating it. True life confession: As much as I hate the term “thought leader,” I used it many a time in my agency days as a way to encourage clients to find the best in themselves. But the truth is, most people don’t have the time, energy, or vision to really commit to becoming a thought leader. 

A blog can be a huge opportunity to showcase your company’s mastery and understanding of your industry. But if you can’t find someone to write blog posts that expand on (or rethink) the existing knowledge base, save your ink. 

Some people curate and compile information in order to create “top 10” type posts. That kind of content can be helpful for readers who don’t have time to source content on their own, but I wouldn’t suggest it as the core content strategy for a company’s blog. If that’s all you have time for, focus on social media instead.

5. Your site is all timely content

A blog can help you shape the message around your industry and your brand, but what if your brand is built entirely around messaging? The BBC doesn’t need a blog because any reader would expect what they’re reading to be timely content and to adhere to the BBC’s standard voice. If readers want to engage with the content by commenting on the articles, they can. 

If you can explain the value that blogs.foxnews.com adds to the Fox News site, you’ve got a keener eye for content strategy than I do. My guess, from the empty blog bubbles here, is that this is a failed (or abandoned) experiment and will soon disappear.

6. Your business is truly offline

There’s one final reason that blogging might not fit your business model, and that’s if you have chosen not to enter the digital realm. I had lunch with a high-end jeweler in India recently where he was debating whether to go online (he was worried that his designs might get stolen) or continue to do business in person the way his family had done for at least three generations. 

If you are successful at selling your products offline, especially if your product has as much variation as a gemstone, an argument can be made for staying offline entirely.

When you should be blogging

Now that we’ve looked at some times it’s okay not to have a blog, let’s take a quick, expanded look at five reasons you might want to blog as part of your content marketing strategy (just in case you thought you’d gotten off scot-free by almost fitting into one of the boxes above).

1. You want traffic to your website

Conventional wisdom goes that the more pages you build, the more chances you have to rank. Heck, the more (good) content you create on your blog, the more collateral you have to showcase on your social channels, in email, and anywhere else you want to.

2. You want to expand your audience

If the content you’re creating is truly awesome, people will share it and find it and love it. Some of those people will be potential customers who haven’t even heard of you before. Keep up the excellence and you might just keep them interested.

3. You want to connect with customers

That blog is a fantastic place to answer FAQs, play with new ideas, and show off the humanity of all those fantastic individuals you have working for you. All of those things help customers get to know you, plus they can engage with you directly via the comments. You might just find ideas for new campaigns and even new products just by creating that venue for conversation.

4. You have something to add to the discussion

Do you really have a fresh perspective on what’s going on in your industry? Help others out by sharing your interesting stories and thoughtful commentary. You’re building your authority and the authority of your company at the same time.

5. You’re ready to invest in your future

Content is a long game, so the payoffs from blogging may be farther down the road than you might hope. But if a blog is right for your company, you’re giving yourself the chance to start shaping the message about your industry and your company the day you publish your first post. Keep at it and you might find that you start attracting customers from amongst your followers.

The gist

Don’t blog just because someone told you to. A blog is a huge investment and sustaining that blog can take a lot of work. But there are a lot of good reasons to dig in and blog like you mean it. 

What’s your decision? Do you have a good reason that you’ve decided to abstain from blogging? Or have you decided that a blog is the right thing for your business? Help others carefully consider their investment in blogging by sharing your story in the comments.

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