There’s a Fundamental Relationship
Between Creative and SEO
Connection Central
If either fails, they both do!
When engagement and SEO are brought into alignment, they build upon each other in one harmonious function.
It’s the basic secret of digital marketing.
At the core of it, your content represents the heart and soul of your business. Focus on it. Cultivate it. Create irresistible stories, how-to’s and informational guides that real people really want to read. The more people that want to read your content, the more likely they are to share it – and improve your ranking.
Rule #1: Create your content as if YOU were looking for what you’re writing about…
...Content "Dictates" SEO...
No doubt, you’ve heard the expression, “Garbage in – Garbage out”. Well, it’s never been more true than it is with respect to search.
Why SEO REALLY Matters More Today Than Ever
As far back as 2006, SEO appeared to be “brain surgery. Of course, it wasn’t unless you were looking to radically boost your organic traffic or were trying to impress someone. But spouting off higher math equations for how you were going to rank bigtime might have impressed a few, but it needed it’s other half, creative copy and design. But that for another time…
The Relationship Between SEO and Creative (continued 🙂
Inextricable linked! So a boatload of reasons why all kinds of business, regardless of the size or industry, need to rethink “being found” and when you’re found, finding a way to not let go!
Organic Search and Digital Traffic Organic search is unquestionably the key and fundamental role in how your website performs. It’s a critical factor, reflecting the buyer’s interest and getting maximum engagement. Reliability and Trust. For example, we’re based in Rochester, NY. We want to work with local people. It’s most important to make sure Rochester, NY is prominently or explicitly displayed.
SEO is another term for developing a site that offers an sound, clean user experience that can be easily accessed in search, as a result of the credibility and trust the brand engenders.
Building credibility and trust don’t just happen. A strong, credible presence needs to be built strategically.
Category projection (who gets featured first, second, etc.) is a result of key elements like keenly optimized content and features, positive user behavior and pertinent backlinks.
Building a dominant brand requires perseverance and patience along with providing a valuable service or product that leads to consumers believing in and trusting the brand.
The User Experience
This, of course, is crucial. If the user is unhappy – for any reason – this isn’t a productive search. As the saying goes, “The customer is always right.”
Search engines have learned how to determine favorable and unfavorable user experiences. The success of a website relies heavily on a favorable user experience.
Consumers know what they want and if they are unable to find it, this will certain have a negative effect search ranking.
First-rate SEO purports a positive user experiences that enhances and elevates the brand.
SEO is another term for developing a site that offers an sound, clean user experience that can be easily accessed in search, as a result of the credibility and trust the brand engenders.
Building credibility and trust don’t just happen. A strong, credible presence needs to be built strategically.
Category projection (who gets featured first, second, etc.) is a result of key elements like keenly optimized content and features, positive user behavior and pertinent backlinks.
Building a dominant brand requires perseverance and patience along with providing a valuable service or product that leads to consumers believing in and trusting the brand.
The User Experience
This, of course, is crucial. If the user is unhappy – for any reason – this isn’t a productive search. As the saying goes, “The customer is always right.”
Search engines have learned how to determine favorable and unfavorable user experiences. The success of a website relies heavily on a favorable user experience.
Consumers know what they want and if they are unable to find it, this will certain have a negative effect search ranking.
First-rate SEO purports a positive user experiences that enhances and elevates the brand.
A lot has changed in recent years that has affected the way websites are ranked. In the distant past is was a matter of keywording in meta tags, using <H1> titling on the home page, at the top, etc. etc. Tricks basically to get ranked. And that worked…Then
Let’s look at what’s been happening with the algorithms Google uses and discuss how it affects us all.
A recent history
1. HTTPS
In August of 2014 Google announced that the use of SSL would be considered a positive ranking factor.
At the time they said that the change would impact “fewer than 1 percent of global queries,” but they were very clear that “over time, we may decide to strengthen it” in an effort to encourage all websites to use HTTPS.
In August of 2017, Google Chrome started marking any page with a form as “insecure” in the browser if it did not use HTTPS.
This indicates that Google is still focusing on HTTPS and may continue to increase its influence as a ranking factor in the future.
2. Mobile-Friendliness
In April of 2015, Google began rolling out a mobile-friendly update, designed to identify pages that were difficult to use from mobile devices and remove them from search results on mobile devices.
3. Mobile Interstitials
In January 2017, Google began rolling out a penalty for sites that use intrusive pop-ups and interstitial pages that interfere with the mobile user experience.
4. Mobile-First Indexing
Google has introduced mobile-first indexing, meaning that for a large portion of sites, Google indexes the mobile-version of a page rather than the desktop version, and uses that for all search results (on both mobile and desktop devices).
Google notified sites that were mobile-first via the Google Search Console.
5. Safe Search
Because Google blocks certain types of adult content by default, some pages won’t show up in search results unless safe search is turned off.
Safe search exists primarily to block pornographic results, but bear in mind that explicit language could result in your pages being blocked from certain search results.
6. Content Depth
Word count is not a ranking factor, but the length of your content is correlated with rankings in the search results. Giving search engines more information to work with can prove to be essential in SEO.
Many Page 1 results have word counts that are more than 2,000 words – and the number one position averages roughly 2,450 words.
While it is clear that word count itself can’t be a ranking factor, the over-arching concern for useable, effective, content seems to be a factor that Google takes into account, either directly or indirectly.
7. Heading Tags
Since heading tags were specifically developed to provide a hierarchy of information for the underlying document, there is reason to believe that Google interprets them as such, rather than simply as bigger words.
The most important of these is, of course, the H1 tag, which identifies what the page is about.
SEO experiments suggest that using the H1 tag does indeed give a slight rankings boost, but it’s important to keep in mind that its practical importance is far less.
Including heading tags from the beginning is useful, although redesigning an entire site to include them not.
8. The Reality of Authoritative Backlinks
Google has clearly rethought he way that links are given value. However, the essential principle is the key metric to remember. Its goal with backlinks was always to determine how likely it would be for somebody to come across your site naturally.
While their models have gotten far more sophisticated, the thinking behind PageRank is likely still the how all major search engines analyze links.
9. Link Anchor Text
Google factors the anchor text of a backlink into the rankings and uses that information to determine whether a search result is relevant for a query.
However, in response to abuse, Google has made it clear that anchor text manipulation (e.g., article marketing or press releases with keyword-rich backlinks) can result in putting you in “the sandbox”. It’s a timeout of sorts. A penalty for trying to ‘beat the system’.
10. Link Context
The semantic content surrounding a link is something that Google has been considering using for five or six years.
The methods in which this information is put to use has undoubtedly grown far more sophisticated since the patent released at the time.
11. Link Relevance
Google acquired the “Hilltop algorithm” in 2003, a method of identifying how relevant a page was for a given keyword based on whether it had backlinks coming from an “expert” page.
The expert pages were curated lists containing links to pages on specific topics, and the pages that received the most links from such expert pages where considered authorities. This was instituted to keep Joe’s Computers from getting into the same airspace with Microsoft. It posed a content rich, but also a page view, reviewed model to subdue acquired SEO tricks.
12. Outbound Links
It was once cryptically stated that:
“In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.”
While it’s clear that linking out can’t PageRank boost legitimately, it can be an integrity piece if the sites you link to are trustworthy.
13. Query Deserves Freshness
This classifier is used by the search engine to identify if the query the user is searching for indicates that they would be more interested in fresh content.
This means that for some industries and topics, the more recent you have updated your content, the better your rankings will be.
Keep a sharp lookout for the search rankings on keywords you are focused on to determine if they are frequently maintained/updated.
14. Keyword in Title
Correlation studies and a Google patent both suggest that including the keyword in the title tag has an influence on rankings.
John Mueller of Google has confirmed that the title is a ranking factor, although he downplays the idea that it is a key part of a page.
15. Keyword in URL
A Google patent suggests that Google may be using keyword data within the URL for a page as a method of determining, in part, what the page is about.
It is also been made clear that an excessive number of keyword variations included within the URL could count against you. Beware “The Sandbox”.