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Here we look at why search engine optimisation is a vital part of the customer experience. By providing a website that is optimised for Search Engines, businesses can provide a better customer experience, boosting revenues and increasing margins through their ability to acquire and retain customers without resorting to price competition.

Why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Matters

Guy Wayland – Director – WMS Australia Pty Ltd

Search Engine Optimisation is like frankincense and myrrh, most people have heard of it, it’s precious, but they do not know really what it is or does. For too long, SEO has been seen as some kind of mysterious art – it’s not. This article is an attempt to clear up some of the mystery, and explain why SEO is a vital part of the customer experience.

The Experience begins at the Search

When searching for your product or service, the first contact a potential customer makes with your site is with the search result. For starters you have to be found, and then you need to provide a result that is attractive to the customer… so the experience has begun… A search for “rose bouquet”, for example, returned several hundred results in Google. Amongst them were:

If you click on each result, your experience is totally different. The Roses Only result leads you directly to a page about ‘rose bouquets’ and all the information you require is in front of you.

The initial customer experience is excellent and now the site design takes over, the SEO has done its job.

From the above example, there comes a basic learning:

Search Engines Rank Pages, Not Sites

An important fact is that Search engines rank individual pages, not sites. So while a site may be relevant to a particular search, a specific page on a site may not. With the increasing size of search engine databases, this is becoming increasingly true, with deeper and deeper content being uncovered and Search Engines delivering traffic directly to these lower level pages. So any page on your site is potentially the first page of your customer’s experience.

Is Customer Experience compatible with Search Engine Optimisation?

A lot of searching is done in worktime, not necessarily on work related matters. The customer’s initial experience is based on getting a result, undertaking an action and getting out.

Kevin Mullet put it perfectly in the last issue of Brief when he said
“Customers flow toward the online experience that lets them accomplish their goals as efficiently, reliably, and predictably as possible… Satisfied customers… produce a chain reaction of repeat business, both personally and through recommendations to others, who in turn generate additional business to the extent they, too, are satisfied with the experience.”

A website that is well optimised for Search Engines is the first step in making a customer’s experience favourable, and always remember…

Search Engine Facts and Stats

• 70% of online purchases begin with a search - Nielsen/Netratings, July 2002;
• More than eight in ten Internet users have gone to search engines to find information on the Web
• Around one in four Internet users present queries on search engines on a typical day
• Search listings are 8 times more likely to be remembered, and 20 times more likely to be clicked on than banners or buttons (NPD Group)
• Search Engines will promote your site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
• SEO provides motivated, pre-qualified visitors that are more likely to buy than those generated via other methods.

Search Engine Basics

The term “Search Engine” is used to describe a variety of fundamentally different beasts. There are broadly two categories of Search Engines: Search Portals where users go to search for things (www.Google.com.au), and Search Engine providers that provide results to a variety of different sites (Overture, Google etc). This can cause confusion on occasion, but generally when referring to SEO, a search engine is the database that holds all the results, and whenever talking about actual results, it refers to the place a user searched.

In terms of Search Portals, some provide all their own results (Google), some show results supplied entirely by third party entities (NineMSN and the broader MSN network) and others fall somewhere in between (Ask Jeeves).

For the purpose of this article I will be concentrating on Robotic Search Engines. Robotic search engines are those Search engines that send “robots”, also known as crawlers, spiders and bots, out into the Internet to download and store as many pages as possible, by following links on pages to discover and index new content.

Search Engine Optimisation most commonly deals with robotic search engines, and most coding and copy writing Best Practices are based upon what a robotic Search Engine needs from a page.

The first search engines, e.g. AltaVista, originally indexed and ranked pages based upon a few very basic elements. Essentially, all that these early Search Engines indexed was the contents of the Title, Meta keywords and Meta description tags. Eventually, these tags were spammed to the point whereby relevant results were no longer returned using these limited algorithms, and ever since Search Engines have added more and more elements to their ranking algorithms in an unending search for improved relevance and less Spam. Examples of search Engine robots include GoogleBot and Slurp, the old Inktomi and current Yahoo bot.

How Search Engines Rank Pages

The early days

In the early days of Search Engines, databases were small, and the number of elements present on a page that were used to rank results was very small. Over time, as Search Engines became more sophisticated, and as site owners became better at “gaming” the engines, more and more factors were incorporated into the Search Engine’s algorithms.

Whereas AltaVista originally only utilised Meta keywords and Titles, modern search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, utilise full textual search in combination with complex Link Analysis, analysing who links to you and what they say about you.

Having established that, there are still a few basic assumptions that can be made.

Relevance X Importance = Ranking

Modern Search Engines use formulae by which they first find all the relevant pages for a search term, and then order those pages by “importance”. Relevance is very simple to understand. If the word being searched for does not appear on the page, in the URL or in links pointing to a page, that page is not relevant to the search.

Importance is a measure of the raw number and weight of links pointing to a page, with links from other important sites weighted more heavily. Google call this PageRank, and Yahoo has a similar figure that it uses, although this is not publicly visible like Google PageRank is. Summing up, in order to rank well, a page needs to be relevant to a search term. It must have a page with the search term on the page or in links pointing to the page, and also be an important page.

Content Ranks

In order to be relevant to a search, all the words used in the search need to be on that page, or in links pointing to that page. Taking that a step further, in order to rank for the maximum combination of terms, a site needs a lot of content. As an example, if a site has 10,000 pages, it has 10,000 opportunities to deliver traffic. If a site has only 10 pages, the combination of words is limited, as are the opportunities to capture traffic.

Understanding What Search Engines Look For

Google claims to use 100 different factors in their ranking algorithm. Yahoo and other search engines also use significant numbers of variables. A basic understanding of these factors is important in the chase for increased Search traffic.

Types of Factors Considered

There are three main types of factors a search engine can use to rank pages:

• On-page factors – This is the information contained within the source code of a page itself.
• Off-page factors – This is all the information about a page contained on other pages, usually in the form of links. Off-page factors include Link Reputation, PageRank and Link popularity.
• Human Review – Human review is the oft forgotten element in SEO. Human review can take one of two forms, either a positive tick or editorial review, or the more common negative Spam review, in which a human editor decides that a site is in breach of SE guidelines, and applies a penalty or filter to a site.

All factors that a search engine uses fall into one of these three broad categories.

Why make your site Search Engine friendly?

The vast majority of traffic to a website will originate from Search Engines. Searching is the second most popular use for the Internet after email, and Search Engines are like the highways of the Internet, connecting users with different types of content as they require it.

Not only do Search Engines provide the largest volume of visitors to a site, but correctly implemented, Search Engine Marketing can also provide a site with some of the most qualified consumers on the Internet.

Internet searchers in effect pre-qualify themselves by the keywords used to find a site. Someone who types into a search engine, ‘buy apple iPod online’ is highly likely looking to buy an iPod. With the increased uptake of eCommerce, this transaction is also likely to take place online.

Ensuring that a site is found by anyone looking for a service should be an essential part of any businesses’ online marketing strategy. Looking to connect consumers in greater numbers and in different ways is vital.

Webqem offers search engine optimisation services.
Please contact Larry Adler for more information.