2022: The Year of Organic Search. Two Tricks to Improve Your Game!
2022 is the year of organic search.
Bob James aficionado and SEO expert Andrew Shotland has been on a tear with great videos about the importance of organic search. Don’t believe me, check out Andrew’s SEO agency before reading this article.
Too many websites treat organic search as an after thought ignoring key topics like site structure, website load speed and user experience in favor of shiny toys like a nifty new JavaScript framework or TikTok ads.
For companies planning a website relaunch, it is especially important to bring in the marketing and SEO teams BEFORE key decisions have already been made and baked into the code. Some key choices to involve them on are your Content Management Systems, Front-end frameworks and site structure.
Smart folks like Andrew can improve your traffic after the fact, but you will be fighting with one hand tied behind your back.
Search user experience in 3 stages:
The initial search
Google search results about your site before your customers even arrive
Customers searching on your website itself
Why is it important to think about this? Expectations!
All of us experience mismatched expectations and is rarely a positive surprise. ;-)
Unfortunately for businesses, consumers have unrealistically high expectations for search experience. Google, Amazon and Netflix set the bar high with multi-million dollar budgets for a world-class search experience.
There is a great research on how to improve your SEO performance. Rob Jay, CMO at Southbank Investment Research summarizes well.
“Tactical - make sure your search is well structured and set up to be found.
Strategic - understand your user and the search terms most likely to engage them then create content to make sure you are found!” - Rob Jay
The first trick to improve your user’s experience is Google’s sitelinks feature.
By providing a clear site structure for Google to index they can show up to 7 links for your site so searchers can jump straight to the juicy bit.
Sitelinks are links from the same domain that are clustered together under a web result. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for.
In plain English:
With direct sitelinks in Google search results, Searchers can find answers to their questions on your website and take action faster.
A valuable bonus is less screen space for competitors on your top search terms!
Here is what it looks like on Google’s own website
The second trick to great Search is compliment a strong Google presence with great “internal search”.
Internal search means your website’s search bar.
Elastic Search is a free open source tool to customize your on-site search results. It provides control over the experience and increases the likelihood users will find what they search for.
Enterprise and ecommerce companies with large sites and/or lots of products will probably need more support to achieve a smooth onsite search experience.
Check out Algolia, a startup that empowers you to customize your search results and enables Autocomplete which displays results from a searchers’ first key strokes.
Autocomplete is a feature users will be familiar with from searches on Google, Amazon, Netflix and Slack - a great example of how these companies raise the expectations for all companies!
I also recommend the article from Steven Carr at UserTesting.com on Top 10 ways to test internal search. It includes actionable tips for both marketers and product teams.
A valuable bonus to improving your internal search is you boost your overall SEO!
To provide users with a great search experience marketers and product teams need to engage many stakeholders.
The crucial question is how much money are you leaving on the table by not doing it properly?