The search engine is always adjusting its algorithms and does it more frequently than a decade ago. For marketing professionals, one of the areas in which they have to work in terms of strategy and positioning is SEO. SEO is crucial in the digital marketing strategy and continues to be one of the key elements to reach consumers. In fact, the boom in mobile devices and the fact that consumers are using them at all times has done nothing but make SEO even more crucial, because a lot of things are sought and also at exact times when it will consume. Who hasn’t, for example, asked Google for restaurant recommendations when they didn’t know where to end up eating?
All this makes the SEO Strategy remain crucial and decisive and that the marketers continue betting on it. It also implies that those responsible for marketing have to be alert all the time to understand how things change and what the key elements to achieve a better position are. And that means, right now, much more work than we assumed years ago.
This is not a casual affirmation, although the fact that the marketers have to assume more and more responsibilities and more work areas could do since it was assumed from the outset that any work they have to perform will be more complicated.
The truth is, however, that working the SEO strategy requires more dedication and more work right now because, simply, Google is making things more difficult. The changes he makes in the rules of the game and the adjustments he makes in his search algorithm are now more, in volume, than they were years ago.
3,200 adjustments in one year
There is nothing more to look at the latest data on searches and decisions that Google has made. Google has just pointed out that in 2018 it made 3,200 changes to its search system. “Our search algorithms are complex mathematical equations that are based on hundreds of variables and only last year we made more than 3,200 changes to our system,” says Google.
As explained in the post on his blog (in which this data is only a curiosity that points in a paragraph, in a more general text about searches), these changes are sometimes visible (such as “new features”) and others are simply adjustments Invisibles that want the results to remain relevant. “And some are improvements based on problems we have identified,” they add, recognizing that those changes do not imply that the problems are corrected quickly and that they need time to do so.
The figure is, however, more than a curiosity, because it shows that marketers now have to face a more complex market than long ago.
More adjustments than ever
As you remember, taking advantage of the data of changes they have for another year, Google has accelerated in making changes. In 2009, Google made about 350 to 400 changes a year in its search system. Not only has the number of changes made almost multiplied by 10, but it is in a sort of constant adjustment.
The data matters because all these changes impact in one way or another on the SEO strategy. As you remember in the American media, these figures show that SEO strategy cannot be a job of staying cross-handed. It requires work as constant as the pace of changes that Google makes.
That is, marketers have to be on top of their SEO strategy all the time and can never afford to drop their barriers. You have to work constantly and recurrently and always be aware of how things are being readjusted. What happens today will not necessarily be what happens tomorrow.
Scrubbing the algorithm doesn’t mean doing SEO
There are many misunderstandings regarding the activities of an SEO. The main one – also because of a certain type of market offerings and the knowledge gap between customers and suppliers. Fortunately, this gap is narrowing – it is to consider SEO as a kind of thing that knows where to get your hands to make a lot of clicks on your site. To screw the algorithm. Indeed, a whole series of poor positioning strategies have worked overtime and still work, in mere volumetric terms. But if you have an investigation project that talks about the Middle East, would you like clicks (traffic) of people looking for the latest news about Ronaldo at Juventus? If you have e-commerce that sells beauty products, would you like clicks (traffic) of people interested in football betting?
In general, would you like clicks from people who are not interested in you and never will be? Would you like vegan customers in a steak house?
The answer is quite obvious.
Yet a lot of time is wasted trying to screw the algorithm.
Simplifying, it’s like having a restaurant and investing time and budget to have false reviews written on websites to magnify the culinary skills of the chef of your restaurant and to denigrate everything that happens to your competitors’ restaurants instead of bumping into trying to improve the service, the cooking, the environment, the relationship with customers.
“So everyone will come to me,” you say to yourself, “if I’m in the first place in my area.” Yes. They will all come to you and then find out that the reviews were false and write true. Wasn’t it better to work on the product rather than on ways to screw the algorithm?
SEO and people
A non-reductionist way of approaching SEO is, for starters, the healthy habit of starting to think of the search engine as a platform that is used by humans. There are no SERPs – that is, search results pages – if a human being has not done a search. Maybe it seems trivial to you. But after years of work we realized that when we see a peak of traffic on a digital analytical instrument when we see the numbers on an excel file, we forget that those numbers, those peaks, those graphs are human beings.
And that, by expressing their conscious needs on Google, asking questions to Google (using natural language or keyword searches like “telegram” or using voice search functions) they expect to find content that answers their questions.
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