The typical explanation for SEO, in its simplest form, would go something like this 

“Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of tailoring your website and content to get more organic traffic from search engines, like Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go. “

Today we gonna give you an in-depth look into how best to maximize your SEO efforts for the best results possible.

If we think about what Google needs, what Google’s trying to do, it might make our lives easier, because what we’re trying to do is, help Google to help us. 

Understanding, Credibility & Deliverability

So Google faces 3 fundamental problems, which are, understanding what it is we’re offering, evaluating the credibility of the solutions it has found and evaluating the deliverability of those solutions, but let’s start with understanding. 

Google needs to understand who you are and what your offer is to be able to present it to its users. Now, remember when it’s presenting your content to its users it’s recommending your content as well. The one right at the top, whether it’s you or your competitor, doesn’t matter, it’s the one that Google thinks is the best solution. 

It’s recommending and people trust Google. How many of us go through all the search results, trying to figure out which is the best one. And how many of us, simply click on the most attractive element on the page, be it a blue-link, a video, Twitter boxes, knowledge panel, or people-also-ask(PAA). 

Whatever it might take to feature on the first page of Google for your particular niche, you need to make sure that Google understands, who you are and what you offer. And what you’re doing in SEO is trying to explain to Google, who you are and what you offer, and that comes down to clear writing, clear copywriting, semantic-triples, subject, verb, object, really simple. Also, schema markup, which explains explicitly to Google in a language it can understand, what is on the page. 

Now, what about credibility? Once it’s understood, that your offer and your competitor’s offer are equally good. How does Google decide which one goes above the other? And that’s where credibility comes in, expertise, authority, and trust. 

What does Google use to evaluate credibility? 

It’s going to use things like reviews, peer group approval. You can use schema markup to point it to all the things online that confirm that you are a more credible solution than the competition. Now, it’s understood that you both offer the same thing more or less, and it’s understood that you’re more credible, but what happens if it doesn’t believe you can deliver the solution to its user. You’ve lost the game.

Enter deliverability, now deliverability can be on your site, that would be PageSpeed, mobile-friendliness, but also think about the format, video, written content, podcasts, and images. All of those are potentially more deliverable than the content you have, you need to find the content that corresponds to the needs of the user in the circumstances they find themselves in. That could be their preferences, it could be their device, it could be their geolocation, it could be their internet speed, all of those things come into play. 

And also remember that some of these results, some of these solutions are delivered on Google SERPs, that’s on SERP SEO that’s a big bag of fish that we don’t want to open up here, but, sometimes Google will deliver your answer, your solution on it’s SERP. At which point, it needs to be able to reach into your content, pull out the piece that needs, and put it in the SERP. So well-structured html5 will help with that, using IDs in your divs, using schema markup, once again, which serves all three of these pillars extremely well, schema markup, incredibly important! 

If Google can pick your content up and put it into the SERP, it probably will. At the expense of your competition, which is the name of the game at the end of the day. 

Ok, if we turn it around now, instead of being empathetic to 

Google, let’s think about ourselves, be empathetic to us, we need to communicate to Google, who we are and what it is we’re offering, on every piece of content. We need to communicate what the offer is clearly and very explicitly. Use schema markup, write clear copywriting, do transcripts for videos, brilliant. Next, we need to convince Google that we have the best solution, the most credible solution, and that can be inbound links, reviews, on-page user-generated content, comments on a video, it can be the no. of likes on a video. All these things are going to convince Google that this is a credible solution for its users. 

Finally, we need to ask ourselves the question, are we making the content in the right format? Are we putting it into our pages in a manner that allows Google to easily find our content and put it on the SERP? Or make Google confident, that it can send the user through to our site, and that the user will be well served, or are we putting it on a platform where Google is going to look for this content, for example, videos on YouTube.

 So, if you look at your SEO activities, your SEO work at the moment, everything you’re doing must serve one or more of these three pillars. Understanding, credibility, deliverability. If it doesn’t, it probably isn’t worth doing. So that’s how we’d advise our clients to look at their SEO work. 

Remember, Understanding, Credibility Deliverability! 

Thanks for reading, have a great day!