For the past few years, organic search marketing has been
fuelled by keyword-targeted content. But as iPullRank points out
in a MOZ blog post (which I highly recommend), there’s a technical revolution
going on in SEO. And it looks like one of the more predictable and long-lasting
changes in the field since its inception.
Back in the mid-1990s SEO was just beginning. It was a
mostly technical skillset that required creating the best site possible on an
architectural and performance level, to better the chances of getting it
included on web directories. Creating websites with clear link structures and
fast-as-possible-performance was critical back in the dial-up days, when users
would spend longer sessions on sites and rack up more page views.
Then the search engines came, and with them came black hat
SEOs. Content creators at the time realized they could increase organic traffic
with formulaic keyword-based writing and meta data stuffing. Users started
having bad experiences with misleading, poor-quality websites ranking well in
search.
Google and the other search engines have been fighting this
battle ever since. Their latest weapon is advanced natural language
processing: and it’s working.
There’s a Shift in Ranking Data
A
SearchMetrics study actually shows a positive correlation between relevant
phrases, proof words, and organic traffic; and a negative correlation with
specific keyword targeting. And when you look at data
Neil Patel collected, longer blog posts are consistently outranking shorter
word count posts.
And although a well-written meta description can improve
your organic CTRs, there’s been another change on SERPs that’s even deprecated
that: Even when you code in a well-crafted meta description, Google will often
override it and display text they scraped from your page. Because specific
keyword targeting doesn’t work anymore, Google frequently finds better, more
relevant phrases from your webpage to match whatever the specific query was.
And they even put relevant and proof keywords in bold to boost visibility.
Google’s message here is clear: They are enforcing a premium
on in-depth, naturally well-written content over keyword targeting.
The Tools: Data and Coffee
There are a number of SEO tools out there that give you
individual pages’ SERP ranks, how your pages are ranking for specific keywords,
overall domain authority, and several other metrics to help determine your
website’s health in search. But all of those stats are completely worthless
when you think about it. That data is collected as if searching as a brand new
user with no history – how often is that going to happen in real life?
To get a true idea of how your SEO efforts are working,
analytics tools are your best bet. Drilling down into the fluctuations in
organic traffic for page groups and individual pages is the best way to
identify problems and opportunities. You should also familiarize yourself with
the more technical issues to look for, like cross-device performance and page
load speed issues.
This is where coffee comes in. And by coffee I really mean
JavaScript, but if I put JavaScript in the title I knew about 20% of you would
have immediately stopped reading. But if you’ve looked even a little into
Google Analytic’s new page speed tool, you’ve probably seen issues with the
advice to “Minify CSS/Render-Blocking JavaScript”.
Google is making two things clear here: Page load speeds really matter now, and you need to
correct these issues. And in a couple of years, if at this point you have to go
find someone else to do this task, then you can’t fully perform your function
as an SEO specialist.
Render-blocking JavaScript actually means something pretty
simple. As Google is rendering the webpage in your browser, it has to stop and
wait for JavaScript code to load before finishing the rest of the page. For the
past few years Google has been working on ways to better-read content rendered
via JavaScript, so loading scripts and indexing the content they produce is the
best means of analyzing true relevance. But it’s not ideal for speed.
There are newer variations on the JavaScript language that
can mitigate this issue. Angular JS is a server side scripting language, which
means it renders JavaScript before pushing to the user’s browser. This helps
with the time it takes for a user’s webpage to load.
Minifying CSS means to literally compress the code and
remove all of the extra spaces and unnecessary code. Again, a simple process in
theory, but without knowledge of how webpages are created and the tools
necessary to work with them, you can end up doing real damage to a site.
And yes, this does mean that familiarity with HTML, CSS, and
JavaScript is going to become pretty much mandatory. But it’s really not as
impenetrable as it sounds. With free tools like Code Academy you can develop a strong
foundation in these languages and more with just a few hours a week practice.
Using Developer Tools to Gather More Data
Once you have experience with JavaScript, you can leverage a
powerful data investigation tool: Browser-based developer tools. Chrome DevTools is one of the
more powerful examples. What this tool does is open a window on the side of
your browser that shows all of the code and certain stats and elements of the
webpage. One of the tool’s options is called Console, and this is where
JavaScript comes in. Using JavaScript, you can interact with the website in
interesting ways. For example, in the phenomenal blog post by iPullRank featured in
MOZ (yes, I’m plugging this post again – it’s that bloody useful), they
talk about how they were able to set a trigger to start recording whenever a
user’s meta data included ‘Googlebot’. Then they could actually playback the
recording of the Google bot navigating around their site.
This data is infinitely useful when combined with analytics
data and overarching digital marketing goals. But it’s only one small example
of what’s possible when SEOs and digital marketers take it upon themselves to
become specialized in how websites are built, maintained, and evolve over time.
But it’s Not Just More Hard Work. It’s Also More Payout.
Yeah, learning three coding languages on top of the myriad
other skills and tools that digital marketers need to be experts in is a real
pain. But keep in mind the reason it sounds like such a pain: programming is a
hard, technical skill that only select, trained people can do. That’s why
programmers make sky-high salaries. And that’s why adding it to your repertoire
will increase your worth exponentially over your career.
That’s just the more obvious, concrete reason to
professionally adapt to this shift in digital marketing. Another reason is that
knowing basic coding will make the rest of your work more precise, easier, and
if you’re passionate about your work, more fulfilling. Not only is SEO not dead
or dying, it’s about to become an even more specialized and in-demand skill
than ever before.
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