HotHouse makes brands work for people online

By Simon van Wyk

Number one on Google – that’s the Holy Grail that search engine optimisation (SEO) was meant to deliver to savvy site owners.

SEO involves tweaking your website to appear in the first page of Google search results for the keywords your customers are most likely to enter and yes, it’s Google we care most about, because Google still reigns on the Internet.

According to search engine data collection agency comScore, Google accounts for around 67% of all search queries worldwide. Next in line with just 8% is Yahoo, then Chinese search engine Baidu, which holds 7% of global search. The remaining 18 percent is distributed among a range of other search programs including Russian engine Yandex, Bing, AOL, Ask.com, eBay and Facebook.

In Australia the figures are even more stark. Recent Hitwise data shows that Google Australia accounts for nearly 75% of Australian searches, with Google.com taking more than 12%, equating to an overall market share of more than 87%.

In comparison, Yahoo and Yahoo Australia combined for only 7% of Australian searches, while Bing accounted for only 4% of the market.

But as search engine optimisation has moved from a contest of geek-stardom to a critical business feature – and more and more companies are vying for that page one spot – ranking highly in search is becoming far more challenging for most organisations.

Jeremy Tang, newly appointed director of search at HotHouse, who I interviewed for this month’s HotHouse podcast, says that the biggest issue for most companies is a lack of understanding about how SEO works.

SEO is not just about rankings, he says; it’s about optimising all of the organisation’s communication (online and offline) to the customer, not to the search engine. “You need to understand exactly what your customer is looking for - and make sure you deliver that,” he says.

“Get that right and you’ll not only do well in Google ranking, but more importantly, your  customers will be more engaged because you’ve been able to address their information needs better than your competitors.”

Jeremy firmly believes that SEO has to be an ongoing process to be effective, because your customers’ needs are always changing and the competitive environment is dynamic.

If you want page-rank nirvana, though, you have to make sure you get a combination of things right. “The most technically optimised website possible won’t rank for terms that are important to your customers without the right content strategy,” Jeremy says.

“Or you might have a great content strategy - but if much of your content isn’t visible to the search engines you’ll get sub-optimal results.”

Google SEO spokesman, software engineer Matt Cutts, recently gave a presentation to search engine experts showing the results of a site audit that Google did on its own website.

Cutts is one of Google’s most accessible personalities and search engine experts wait breathlessly on every tip he shares about getting good search engine results.

(Cutts is so geek-cool, he’s even been immortalised as a cut-out and dress-up cartoon doll.)

He gets peppered with questions about the secrets of Google’s algorithms and how much difference tiny tweaks and links and strategies might make to the ranking of a website.

But a lot of the time, the advice Cutts gives is not about mathematical algorithms or convoluted ways to raise your site’s rankings – it’s about thinking like a customer.

“Think about what users are going to type to find your page,” Cutts told USA Today. “Then just make sure those words are on the page.”

Jeremy Tang agrees. He says having good insight into what information your customers are looking for is a critical first step. Next, you need to deliver that information through your website in your customers’ natural language, in a format that search engines can read. And finally, you need to build the authority of the website as a trusted source of this information through backlinks.

“The success of the program will hinge on that first step: understanding your customer sets the entire direction into which everything else falls into place,” Jeremy says.

And these days, there are many ways of finding out exactly what your customer is looking for – even when they are not too sure about that themselves.

“Search is behaviour,” says Jeremy. “So when you are trying to understand your customers, always pay more attention to what they do, than to what they say.”

Plenty of companies base critical decisions about their web strategy on the opinions of management - or at best, using customers’ self-reports from focus groups and surveys.

But it’s possible now to tap into the actual search behaviour of millions of Australians to find out exactly what they are looking for.

“Not only is this statistically more significant as a data source – it is all based on actual behaviour,” says Jeremy. “This leads to much better marketing decisions.”

Some businesses make the mistake of believing that they can change the terminology in the marketplace – but the web is beyond their control.

On the web, people will search the way that makes sense to them. If your website doesn’t include the critical keywords for your market, your customers won’t find you.

Jeremy says that he has had several clients recently ignore recommendations for keywords, despite being presented with search data on the terminology people used for the product they were selling.

Both times, the client believed their multi-million dollar advertising campaign would dictate - or at least heavily influence - the terminology in the market. Both times, the client was wrong.

“These days, running TV, radio and print ads will trigger people to search to find out more. If they can’t find the information in the language they are using to search for it, then their interest is lost - or worse, intercepted by a competitor who understands search better,” says Jeremy.

If you are going to optimise your website so that it appears high in the search results for your keywords – you’ve got to be really sure of your keywords and research them well.

Keyword research is about understanding the conversations your customers are having; and the best way to capture this conversation is to ask the people in your business who interact with your customers every day - your call centres, your sales staff, customer service, resellers, and of course your actual customers.

“Having enough conversations with these stakeholders helps to quickly uncover patterns in what they are looking for,” says Jeremy. “Team that up with online research by a qualified SEO person, and you’ll get some powerful insights into customer interactions offline and online.”

Once your customers find you – there’s got to be good reason for them to stay on your site. For that reason, if people are searching for information that your brand is in the best position to provide and you aren’t ranking for that search, someone else can control that messaging.

Building deep, continually refreshed content will build your brands reputation as a trusted source of information as it continually appears in the searches your customers are making.

If you want to develop a deep relationship with your customer, you have to provide them with information that they are interested in and keep it constantly updated because their needs are dynamic.

“It makes sense from a human perspective which is why it works from a SEO perspective because Google is all about delivering relevant and valuable customer experience,” says Jeremy.

Listen to the podcast

Tags: customer, customers, Google, Jeremy Tang, Matt Cutts, search, search engine optimisation, search engines, SEO