Feb. 16, 2021
10 min reading time
10 min reading time
Jim Yu, founder and CEO of BrightEdge, discusses the changing face of search and the milestones SEOs need to track to remain relevant.
As the calendar turns over, we are always reminded to look back, realign ourselves, and prepare for the year ahead. Take a moment to think back to the beginning of 2010 – could you have ever imagined how much the search would change in the last decade?
At the macro level, the last decade has seen a shift from searching as a superficial task of information gathering to a complex journey with multiple touchpoints across devices, networks, and channels. Simple browsing has given way to a desire for instant answers. As social media has been plagued by "fake news" and rampant misinformation, search has proven far more effective at verifying data, whether it be location information, answers to informational questions, claims about products, and more.
In fact, ten years ago, marketers struggled to get their messages to the people who actually wanted to hear them. Today, more than 60% of people expect brands to give them the information they need, when they need it, and less than half believe that brands actually provide it (Google). The face of search is changing, and SEOs, more than anyone else, need to keep track of these changes to remain relevant.
Voice search is undoubtedly one of the most influential consumer trends for SEOs, and you can expect this to continue into the next decade. Google first introduced voice search in 2002, but it's only in recent years that consumers have truly become comfortable conversing with and interacting with their devices the way we do now. People no longer just type words and hope Google understands their intent; they ask questions and even have ongoing conversations with the technology. The long tail is the new normal.
They don't just ask Google or Alexa. Although Google dominates the market share of traditional search engines, searches also take place on platforms like Amazon, Facebook, and... YouTube Instead, getting the answer to a single question can span multiple networks, as increasingly sophisticated searchers compare answers from different sources.
SEOs must adapt to a zero-click environment where Google curates so much information that searchers' needs are met without ever leaving the SERP. As a result, SEOs need to make better use of featured snippets and other available space across the search ecosystem. Schema.org has been around since 2011, but it wasn't until the latter half of this decade that structured data truly became a core principle of SEO.
Mobile experience had been a focus area for many years, but in 2018, with Google's introduction of the "Mobile First" index and mobile speed updates, it became business-critical. Snippets became smaller, page speed became a ranking factor for mobile search, and video became a far more common content format in SERPs. SEOs had to move beyond thinking about "mobile-friendly" solely in terms of web development and also consider how mobile users search for and consume content.
Today we have moved beyond the concept of "mobile-friendliness" and towards "Mobile First", where Websites They need to do much more than just work on smartphones. The mobile-first design concept offers a seamless, intuitive experience where content, navigation and page structure, CTAs in the context of the customer journey, and much more are carefully considered.
Many have long assumed that the Quality Rater guidelines are the key to understanding algorithmic ranking factors, but this was only confirmed by Google's VP of Search, Assistant and News, Ben Gomes told CNBC in 2018.
"You can consult the rater guidelines to see where the search algorithm should go."
EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trust) are categorized as "very important" in the guidelines. This isn't new or groundbreaking, but it's clear that content quality and the author's/company's authority aren't going anywhere. Creating authoritative content, citing reputable sources, developing your digital footprint and online profile, and engaging within your niche will be crucial in the coming years.
“People come here looking for all kinds of information that will help them better understand the world and the issues that matter most to them. […] Now we’re using the latest machine learning technology to bring this approach to Google Search’s top stories, making it easier for people to dive into the most useful and up-to-date articles.”
– Duncan Osborne, Product Manager at Google
SEOs are challenged by machine learning on two fronts – firstly, how Google uses it to evaluate and rank content. But secondly, SEOs have a great opportunity to scale and maximize their own performance with intelligent automation and tools that integrate machine learning.
First, there's the NLP-based BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) update from October 2019, which uses machine learning to help Google better understand the relationships between queries and content, and was rolled out to 10% of all queries. Google called BERT "the biggest leap forward in the last five years and one of the biggest leaps in search history." So you can bet this is an area SEOs will want to focus on in the coming years.
Regarding the question of how SEOs can leverage machine learning and intelligent automation, I have written about this in recent columns; see How AI is driving real-time SEO research: Insights and optimization and Five ways SEOs can use data with insights, automation and personalization for more.
Technical SEOs are as important as ever, but SEOs are forced to think more holistically about the searcher experience and the entire path from discovery to conversion to loyalty.
IDC predicts that 175 zettabytes (175 trillion gigabytes) of new data will be generated worldwide in 2025. As the role of SEO As marketing data has evolved within organizations, we increasingly see ourselves as the central resource for its interpretation and activation.
In the coming years, we will have even richer and more diverse data sources to draw upon. For example, marketers now have access to open-source data from a multitude of sources via Google's Search dataset, which has just emerged from its beta phase.
"The majority of the world's governments publish their data and describe it using schema.org. The United States leads in the number of available open government datasets, with more than two million. And the most popular data formats? Tables – you can find more than six million of them on Dataset Search."
– Natasha Noy, Research Scientist at Google Research
Here too, I cannot overstate the importance of intelligent automation for SEOs, given the speed of the data deluge that companies face. It's impossible to operate in a real-time world without automation. AI enables marketing to strategically manage demand, meet consumer expectations for real-time personalization, create intelligent content optimizations that directly address consumer needs at every stage of the journey across channels and devices, and much more.
Video and visual SEO will become increasingly important elements of a comprehensive SEO strategy in the future. The next generation of search is driving our understanding of what's possible and is evolving primarily around how consumers find and consume multimedia content.
SEOs are now able to optimize for the awareness and viewing stages of voice content. Currently, Google Assistant is installed on over a billion devices, and Google Home accounts for 24% of the installed base in the US (Amazon's Alexa-enabled Echo accounts for 70%). Amazon uses Alexa as a lure to encourage consumers to spend their money elsewhere on Amazon, while Google views voice search as an extension of the search experience; a more conversational way to find answers to all of life's needs and problems.
Mike Levin, co-founder and partner at Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, said that Amazon and Google's strategy of offering more affordable devices so people can own more than one appears to be working. "Currently, about a third of Amazon Echo and Google Home users own multiple devices." According to the report, 35 percent of owners had more than one device in December 2018, compared to 18 percent the previous year (CNBC).
Knowing that two of the world's most productive tech giants are doing everything they can to ensure that every home, car, and pocket has a voice search device, SEOs would be negligent not to make voice search a key focus area.
Don't forget your visual content, including video. More than two billion logged-in users visit YouTube every month, and every day people watch over a billion hours of video, generating billions of views. Furthermore, according to YouTube, more than 70% of YouTube viewing time comes from mobile devices. The platform is a massive search engine in itself. Original content is a huge opportunity. But SEOs can also increase their company's or clients' online footprint by creatively repurposing content to capture and drive traffic back to YouTube.
As the various facets of digital marketing continue to collide and converge, SEOs are uniquely positioned to take the lead. Last year (according to BrightEdge research), the share of organic channels rose to 53,3% of website traffic. At some point in recent years, your SEO responsibilities may have encompassed not only technical SEO and data analysis, but also social media, email marketing, blogging, PR, web design, and much more.
The evolution of search creates a need for a kind of sherpa within organizations; for hybrid marketers who think equally analytically and creatively. Whether this person is an internal employee or a contracted extension of the team, the demand is growing for this conductor who understands the challenges and opportunities of each channel.
In this next phase of SEO, search engine optimization and customer experience optimization truly merge. Business leaders will rely more heavily on the insights SEO provides when making decisions across all departments and will seek guidance from SEOs on how to leverage organizational data. As SEOs continue to bridge the gap between departments and disciplines, we are entering a new era where delivering dynamic content and SEO work together to create new experiences throughout the entire digital journey.
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