Many of aXcelerate’c clients have often discussed with us the difficulty they have with understanding SEO (search engine optimisation) and how to use it effectively within their business’s marketing and management systems. Consequently aXcelerate has gotten it’s resident SEO expert to uncover the mysteries behind Google SEO, in order to provide further understanding to all of our clients. This topic will be featured on our blog for the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

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To understand Google, it helps to understand the original model the entire search engine industry was based on – directories. Yellow Pages was, for a time, a huge success because of its simplicity. An electrician was required, a directory was consulted, an electrician was found and a call-out was made. If a service was required you searched Yellow Pages until you found what you were after and proceeded with that information. Businesses wanted to be inside the directory and people wanted a copy of the directory; it was mutually beneficial.

While search engines may have initially seen themselves as digital directories, the size and scope of the internet blew up rapidly and Google in particular was quick to pivot. Web pages weren’t limited to businesses, nor were businesses even the most common thing people searched for. The uses for the internet were growing quicker than anyone could have imagined and web sites popped up, covering anything and everything. But people still needed to find a way to them. If Yellow Pages was a platform, Google was, and is, best seen as a superplatform. The more searches made, the more advertisements run on the results pages. To encourage more searches, Google wanted people to trust in its ability to deliver what they were searching for. The goal was to deliver the most relevant results to searches. Relevance is determined by a number of factors, an obvious one of which is whether the words being searched appear on a certain page. If you search for “croissant recipes”, it stands to reason that you expect to see results that feature some combination of those words on the respective pages displayed.

After the noughties, Google released two very important updates to the algorithm they used to determine search results. The first, Panda, was a filter created to cut off low-quality pages (and the websites they belonged to) from appearing in the top results of searches. Primarily targeted were websites referred to as scrapers (basically, sites that were collating articles, original work and content from other sources and deceptively presenting it as their own) and thin sites, which were websites with very small amounts of content on each page and very high amounts of advertisement. Panda was followed by the Penguin, which similarly punished websites who tried to artificially boost their search rankings by swapping and buying links to their pages. The overriding goal of these two updates was simply to make the search results more relevant and on the whole the updates were celebrated as a giant success. We were now in an era of location, time and the type of device you were using, playing a significant role in what results you were shown. I feel it necessary to talk about a result I was delivered a few weeks ago.

Late on a Friday night I decided rather suddenly that I’d like to go and get some Mexican food. Unsure whether the specific restaurant I was planning on visiting was open, I simply google-searched the name of the chain and nothing else. The first thing on my results page was a map pointing me to the closest franchise to where I was at the time, with a contact number and opening hours directly underneath. In case I’d missed it, there was even some bold red text reading “closed now”. While this is the type of result I’ve become accustomed to seeing, as has anyone with a smartphone, I couldn’t help but be a little impressed with how exactly Google had delivered for me. It was certainly not luck or chance that matched my simple query to such a precise response – it was the result of Google’s well-documented obsession with achieving relevance through tweaking, testing and experimenting to find the perfect algorithm. The point I’m trying to make here is that as a company Google seems to see no limits to the pursuit of displaying the correct result to searches – in the long-term, pages that should be shown for a query will be shown. Spending time and money on planning what queries your business would like to rank well for, or could rank well for is ineffective. The focus should always be on what queries your business should rank for.