EP 8: The Evolution of SEO

---

Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill

Midway through my time with SEO, I fell out of love with it. In fact, I actually stopped doing it. I took the service off of our website. I avoided projects that needed SEO. And I really didn’t want to work on it for ourselves because it became a challenge and it wasn’t a challenge to succeed with it. It was an emotional challenge for me.

The clients that I would interact with or the prospects that would come to me wanted instant success overnight. They wanted to throw money at it but not putting any work into process. They wanted to buy links and do black hat tactics and all of it was – none of that works. And I just literally just stepped away and I took a time out or I put myself on a timeout.

But back in 2016, I fell in love with SEO again. I realized that SEO is evolving and it’s not anything like it was before. While a lot of it still stays the same, so much has changed. And when I looked at the evolution of SEO in 2016, I fell back in love. That’s when I created the course that we have. That’s when I started to engage with clients again. And that’s when I really started to put my heart and soul in educating people how to do SEO right and how to use SEO to empower themselves and empower their websites.

So you might be asking what shift it, why the change of heart? Well, the search engines shifted. They became much more sophisticated. They became more knowledgeable and they changed a lot of the rules by which we lived.

So for example, here is some of the activity that happened in 2016 and this is some of the reasons why I changed my view of SEO and I started to view it as an evolving practice that I can embrace and it became a challenge again for me.

So here’s a summary of the activities that happened around SEO in 2016 that made me really fall in love with it again.

First, Google cracked down on those obnoxious pop-ups in mobile devices. I can’t stand those boxes and I rarely use them. Every time I go to an e-commerce site, before I can even see their products, I’ve got a box in my face asking for my email address.

Well, you know what? If you want to date me, you need to first let me check you out and you need to give me a second to digest who you are. And that’s what I felt like every time I go to those websites and the box comes up. And a lot of times, in mobile devices, you couldn’t even see the content. All you saw was that obnoxious box.

Well, Google cracked down on that. That made me happy. Google moved to a mobile first indexing or stated they were going to. They have not yet rolled it out and they’re still working on that. But that shows me that the search engines are focusing more and more on mobile and they’re seeing the importance of it because we as a population are evolving ourselves and we’re moving more and more to those devices. I love that because it shows that mankind is just shifting and evolving itself.

Schema became a greater option for search and for SEO consultants and it’s used more in the search engine results pages and it makes and creates a better use experience for those people that are using Google or Bing and searching for content. I love that. I think it’s really awesome and it just presents more challenges.

There’s an increased presence of rich answers and with the knowledge graph and you can try to get to that position zero which is that top position on the search engine results page that pulls information out of your website, presents it to show users both in desktop as well as voice search.

Google came out and started using Rich Cards more. Google pushed towards SSL and HTTPS-based websites and a push to be more secure. And they have a better user experience for those people that are using its search engines.

AMP arrived. While we’re still trying to figure AMP out and if it’s a good fit for every website, it created just a new element of SEO. Search overall got really smart, longer search phrases became possible. I’ve joked about my son asking if mac and cheese is healthy and Google gave me a great response via voice search. That just shows that we as a population are getting more sophisticated with the way that we use search engines. And the search engines technology is so much more advanced and it can really bring back those complex answers to those searches and create a really positive user experience.

Google started cracking down on malware and infected websites and good lord we know hacking is just growing across the world and it’s becoming more of a challenge. Why that made me fall in love with SEO, I don’t know. But it just shows that the world is shifting, that technology is shifting. And I always get really excited about that.

There was just a great integration between Google Search Console and Analytics so we have more data available. Google had taken away data from an analytics which was very frustrating but they gave a little bit of it back with that merge of Search Console and Analytics. And all you have to do is connect it with a button.

Sadly, Google removed the option for non-advertisers to use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner but I did find a number of good solutions for that. So while it crushed me for a moment, I got over it really quick.

And all of these changes in 2016 really started to feel like my love for SEO. It made me excited about it. It made me want to dig in more and help people more.

And then as 2017 rolled in and it started to go through and now we’re halfway through the year, I look at it and I’m like, “Wow! It has continued to evolve.” We look at voice search for example. It is now 20% of searches. I have a Google Home in my kitchen and I love listening to my 11 and my 17-year-old ask questions whether it is a question about mac and cheese or it’s a question about math that my daughter stuck on and I clearly can’t help her because I’m not good in math, it just – it’s evolving the way that we interact with technology and I find it fascinating.

Part of me really love psychology and that use of voice search and how humans are shifting and technology is shifting and we’re kind of blending together, I find it truly fascinating and it really energizes me for what lies ahead with SEO.

Another thing that I absolutely love that has become very apparent in 2017 it’s that the use experience is at the heart of SEO. As I’ve talked in presentations throughout the year, I have continued to come back to the user experience. It’s funny because I’ve always said to people when they’ve asked me, “Well, should I do this for SEO?” And I would come back with a question saying, “Is it good for your user?” And if they couldn’t tell me that it was, I would say to them, “Don’t do it. It’s not going to provide you good results.”

Well, the search engines have come out and loud and clear and have stated that the user experience is paramount. And if you can’t create a positive user experience, you will not survive with search engine optimization. You will not be presented in the search engine results page. That user experience is both on desktop and on mobile devices.

It’s with the way that you present your content, the type of performance that your website has, the visual aspects of your template or your theme. It’s with the quality of the written word or your videos or your podcast. All of that is blending together now to create this holistic view of the user experience and how that will or will not help your SEO and your rank.

I love this because it shows that the search engines are truly caring about the people that come and use their service and that they want to present not just results but they want to present quality results that make people happy. And I think that that’s – it has been part of my life. I want to help people. I want to make people happy. And I love that the search engines are moving this way, right?

Another way that I think that we’ve shifted in the last 12 months roughly is that we’re really moving towards problem and a solution environment with search. For as long people have problems that they need help with, search will still exist. SEO will still exist. The heart of SEO is helping the human visitor and it’s helping the human visitor identify solutions to their problems. And as that search gets more complex and we have longer search phrases and question and really in-depth responses, the search engines are adapting to this and they are providing better user experience for people to find those solution for their problems.

We know that secure websites are really important and performance and that’s because the search engines project really Google has stated that they have not yet even seen their true customer base come online yet because it’s third world countries. It’s people with limited data plans and only have phones and really need high-performing websites that load quick and provide really good data fast. And that’s wonderful and I love that because that again shows how mankind and our world is shifting and that technology is quickly and rapidly trying to make sure that it can stay up with that evolution of humans.

And again, I love that because I truly believe that. And the reason I wanted to do this in the first place is because SEO is about helping people. It’s about whether you’re creating content that helps solve the user problems or me as an SEO consultant and an educator, I am teaching people to be able to do it better so that they can help other people. It’s a spiral effective goodness.

And in the last two years, I have seen that come in very strong and that’s why I’ve fallen in love with it again, that evolution. You have people who are tracking the exact position of a keyword. It’s becoming kind of a futile effort because things are changing so quickly and there’s personalized search and so many different ways to present data on the search engines.

Does rank still matter? Yes. It absolutely does.

Do keywords still matter? Yes. But we do rank and do we chase? Are we in position 1 or 2 for giving keyword phrase? I would tell you no. You need to focus on actually solving people’s problems.

You as a website or a blog owner, you need to evolve along with SEO and along with humans. As the humans around the world and people around the world change and they evolve, and we are, whether you see it or not, we truly are, you have to make sure that your marketing tactics and the way that you present data to all of those people worldwide, evolves with them.

The search engines are trying to get you there and I’m trying to get you there and I want to make sure that you have the tools available to get you there as well.

So if you can take a step back, what can you do to make sure that you’re prepared for this evolving world of humankind and SEO?

Well, for one thing, as web developers, if you are a web developer listening to this, you need to understand that the technical aspects of building a website, your architecture, your code base, the way that you present information, that all goes towards SEO. The ability for the search engines to crawl an index or sites goes towards SEO.

You have to make sure that you have secure SSL websites that perform well, that have solid code and that make it easy for the search engines to crawl through your website, digest your content and place it into search.

If you’re creating websites for users or for clients, you need to make sure that you do everything you can to adhere to those requirements.

As website owners, you have similar but different types of task in front of you, you need to make sure that you pick a quality developer or that your internal team is well-versed on technology and what’s important to today’s world of SEO.

You need to create really good content and make sure that the content is of value. But most importantly, you need to make sure that the content or whatever the information you’re presenting whether it’s blogs or podcast or the written word or downloads, that that solves a user’s problem. That you are always focused on your user and creating a positive experience for them both with the presentation of your website or your blog as well as the content that you produce, even down to how you utilize social media to bring people in.

Those old days of bait and switch and scammy titles that are not representative to the articles they link to, those days are over. Facebook is locking down that type of approach and disallowing it to show up in the feeds. It wants high quality data just like the search engines do. You have to evolve with that. You have to make sure that your content is of quality.

SEO is a shifting world. It is going to continue to shift. It is going to continue to evolve. Your job as a developer or a website owner or a marketer or a business owner is to make sure that you are staying up with the trends, not the fads but the trends. You are seeing the things and the techniques that are shifting within the industry and that you’re making sure that you are shifting along with them.

And really, all in the final goal of just creating a positive user experience and helping people because that is truly what SEO is about. And that’s where I have found my love with SEO again.

If you’ve not reached that love of SEO, I encourage you to stick with me because over the next few podcast episodes, I will continue to share that information with you and try to make sure that I continue to guide you on the path of SEO to make sure that it is helping you, it’s helping perform on your website and it’s helping you reach the people that you need to connect to to help them, sell your products or services, bring in leads, whatever the case. That’s our goal. That’s my goal as a marketer, as an educator, and I want you to have that same goal.

If you don’t quite love SEO the way I do yet, hang with me, you will. I promise you, you’ll start to see it the way that I do and you’ll start to have it just become ingrained in what you do and become part of who you are. Maybe not at the level as me and that’s OK because I’m a little weird. But you’ll still really find that it can be very beneficial to you, your website and your business.

So that’s it for today. I look forward to having another conversation with you next week as we continue our SEO journey together.