Editor's note: Today we're featuring back-to-back episodes of Whiteboard Friday from our friends at Stone Temple Consulting. Make sure to also check out the first episode, "Becoming Better SEO Scientists" from Mark Traphagen.
User experience and the quality of your content have an incredibly broad impact on your SEO efforts. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Stone Temple's Eric Enge shows you how paying attention to your users can benefit your position in the SERPs.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard.
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Video transcription
Hi, Mozzers. I'm Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting. Today I want to talk to you about one of the most underappreciated aspects of SEO, and that is the interaction between user experience, content quality, and your SEO rankings and traffic.
The link algorithm from the very beginning was about search quality. Links allowed Google to have an algorithm that gave better results than the other search engines of their day, which were dependent on keywords. These things however, that I've just talked about, are still just the tip of the iceberg. Google goes a lot deeper than that, and I want to walk you through the different things that it does.
So consider for a moment, you have someone search on the phrase "men's shoes" and they come to your website.
What is that they want when they come to your website? Do they want sneakers, sandals, dress shoes? Well, those are sort of the obvious things that they might want. But you need to think a little bit more about what the user really wants to be able to know before they buy from you.
First of all, there has to be a way to buy. By the way, affiliate sites don't have ways to buy. So the line of thinking I'm talking about might not work out so well for affiliate sites and works better for people who can actually sell the product directly. But in addition to a way to buy, they might want a privacy policy. They might want to see an About Us page. They might want to be able to see your phone number. These are all different kinds of things that users look for when they arrive on the pages of your site.
So as we think about this, what is it that we can do to do a better job with our websites? Well, first of all, lose the focus on keywords. Don't get me wrong, keywords haven't gone entirely away. But the pages where we overemphasize one particular keyword over another or related phrases are long gone, and you need to have a broader focus on how you approach things.
User experience is now a big deal. You really need to think about how users are interacting with your page and how that shows your overall page quality. Think about the percent satisfaction. If I send a hundred users to your page from my search engine, how many of those users are going to be happy with the content or the products or everything that they see with your page? You need to think through the big picture. So at the end of the day, this impacts the content on your page to be sure, but a lot more than that it impacts the design, related items that you have on the page.
So let me just give you an example of that. I looked at one page recently that was for a flower site. It was a page about annuals on that site, and that page had no link to their perennials page. Well, okay, a fairly good percentage of people who arrive on a page about annuals are also going to want to have perennials as something they might consider buying. So that page was probably coming across as a poor user experience. So these related items concepts are incredibly important.
Then the links to your page is actually a way to get to some of those related items, and so those are really important as well. What are the related products that you link to?
Finally, really it impacts everything you do with your page design. You need to move past the old-fashioned way of thinking about SEO and into the era of: How am I doing with satisfying all the people who come to the pages of your site?
Thank you, Mozzers. Have a great day.
It’s always baffling to me that this even has to be explained. I remember entering the SEO world 6+ years ago - leaving a global publisher (where we created content that was relevant/useful to our audience!) for an SEO-specific agency. One of the 1st things I remember questioning was why we would ever want to optimize so many “SEO landing pages" for the same general topic, or better, why in the world would we “optimize” a page for a keyword that’s so far removed from the page’s context. The answer from this agency (and likely from a lot of SEO agencies) can be summed up as: quick rankings = more money for the agency; and my favorite: ‘we got them the traffic, it’s the clients job to convert the visitors.’ Are you kitten me right meow??!!! ;) You can imagine my frustration - and the frustration that came with several years of working there trying to change the company practices (with little success).
In the end, I had to just do what was right for the clients I had direct interactions with. The positive: I left with a super keen eye for spotting spam tactics or things that just don't make sense, which as a business owner now, has been invaluable (esp. for educating client-side teams). Also - in many ways I actually prefer the era of 'not provided' since it forces SEOs to focus more on landing page performance (driven by relevancy / quality / visitor satisfaction!) and less on rankings.
Well said Sheena!
Very well said! Love the passion!
Thank you for this short and sweet WBF to help folks focus on UX, quality content and SEO for ecommerce.
While I find what you are saying to be true, it does little to help folks understand what is meant by great content and UX. For example, what is the threshold between quality content that serves user intent and old school SEO tactic? What I mean by this is that if we truly want to develop a product detail page that serves all that arrive by leaving no content stone un-turned, then the page quickly goes from a clean, precise, product page, to an "answer all of the questions and fringe related content" page. What a mess!
Using your "Men's shoes" example, so many intent variations of this phrase exist that it is nearly impossible to serve all audiences and all parts of the funnel on one page with phenomenal UX. some might be looking for men's shoes pictures, other looking for sandals, others looking for a band called "men's shoes", others looking for what men's shoes are made from, some looking for shoe sizes, some looking for price, some looking for how to make men's shoes at home, some looking for how to clean men's shoes, and on and on and on. If all of these are related terms and deserve some content and/or a link on that page, it because a spammy looking page full of associated terms trying to serve any and all visitors.
Any real suggestions on how to approach better understanding majority user intent and forgetting about the fringe? This is what I mean by threshold between good content and SEO.
Hi Brad,
The connecting piece between SEO and content is relevance. For a given intent, what related information is relevant to that the intent of that question alone? What information should belong in another "answer" (i.e. content item, landing page)?
I've brought up topical relevance a few times on this blog recently -- pardon, I am not suggesting that relevance is an end-all-be-all -- but it certainly seems like a missing link here. The core of it goes back to semantic theory. Compare these three sentences:
Of these, #2 seems the best because it contains relevant information (i.e. has a higher information value) but doesn't stuff other, only moderately-related contexts in (as #3 does).
Hope to see great discussions on relevance and on topics vs. keywords elsewhere on this blog.
Aki
PS - Full Disclaimer: I co-founded a company that helps marketers measure relevance in content
that was exactly my point. where is the fine line between relevance and stuffing?
for example, "the big dog went to the sunny park" can be written several different ways, using all of the synonyms for big, dog, went, sunny and park. As an SEO trying to get as large an audience to my page talking about big dogs going to a sunny park, if I say "the large canine was at the bright playground", do I lose out on traffic because I did not say Big or Dog or Park? the SEO in me says that I should try and work in all of the keyword variations to satisfy all searchers and the same general thematic intent, but everyone keeps saying to ignore keywords, or greatly reduce focusing on them. I have to believe that a site with equal authority that includes the exact phrase someone searched for will outrank my site that uses relevant, but not exact terms.
now, multiply this example to 10,000 product pages on an ecomm site and it is enough to make someone want to curl up in a ball in a dark room and go insane!
Hi Brad - agreed that the execution part of this is not simple. The first guideline is that anything you put on your page needs to have end user value as a first priority. If it's going on there because you are trying to get a keyword in there, then don't do it. This relates to both straight text content, and to the links on the page as well.
So when it gets to keyword variations, and that old fashioned SEO stuff, the best way to do that is while creating great content for users, and not just to try and invoke a bit more potential keyword volume.
In terms of some ideas how to do that, I did write recently on Moz about Term Frequency and Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) as you can see here:
https://moz.com/blog/using-term-frequency-analysis...
https://moz.com/blog/inverse-document-frequency-an...\
These are two neat ways to dig into some technical detail on determining what users want the most, by comparing your site to the others that Google values the most.
You might say that this approach feels like it's about manipulating SEO, but it's really more about saying - hey, here's what Google values highly, and they apply a TON of tech to figuring out what users want the most, so let's leverage that so we can offer a better user experience.
Hi Brad,
To echo Eric's points, in general you don't need to worry about synonyms and keyword optimization. For example, blinds.com ranks #4 for venetian blinds even though they rarely mention that word in their content. (They mostly talk about wooden blinds, which is essentially a synonym.)
But the point I made was not about keywords, but about topics. Topics are the building block of content. You want to make sure that you talk about topics comprehensively. The actual keywords you use to do this -- not as important. (This is because Google is doing topic modeling behind-the-scenes to score your content quality.)
The distinction between topics and keywords is easily confused, but post-Hummingbird it became very important today. Check out a comprehensive post I wrote on this: https://blog.marketmuse.com/2015/02/26/topical-auth...
Hi Eric,
To add to your point: LSI and TF-IDF have existed, but with the addition of Knowledge Graph, it's become a lot more sophisticated. Our technology essentially replicates a Knowledge Graph for your query. I'd love to discuss with you (and since we're both in Boston, we could even meet in person). I'll follow-up via LinkedIn.
Thanks,
Aki
That's my boss! ;-)
Forgive me the little selfish celebration, but I love being associated with this guy, the integrity and value he brings to our company and clients, and I love every chance for others to get to sample his proven wisdom in SEO. Thanks Moz!
Thanks for the video!
I had a quick question this reminded me of. On one of the sites I am working on, I optimized a landing page for a fairly important "main" keyword and it was not the home page. Originally, I was ranking for that landing page and doing pretty well. Recently, I've been ranking for the home page instead, where I have not optimized for that particular "main" keyword. Most of my traffic lands on that homepage, so it makes sense. Do you think I should switch and optimize the homepage for that "main" keyword instead, or let this trend continue?
Ha, hopefully that question made sense and that it's relevant to this topic.
Thanks!
Well apologies for barging in like this, If you think the landing page had better conversion then go for it do not optimize homepage the crawler will get even more confused with this. My personal suggestion is that you should try passing an endorsement(link) with your main keyword from homepage to the landing page, it will fix the issue.
Nice pitch Eric, more clients will see the immense content you've composed in the interest of your customer on the off chance that they find themselves able to keep running crosswise over it on Google or on one of their informal communities. So be informed that there's a basket-full of writing techniques out there that can build the span of your customer's content.
Hi Jordan - tricky question. These things can change based on how Google chooses to weight Page Authority vs Semantic Relevance. Whether you want to change it or not I think largely depends on whether one of the two pages converts much better than the other.
If the landing page is a far better converter, than you might want to go through the effort of trying to persuade Google to switch back. Since its relevance is already much higher you might want to figure out how to get it some highly authoritative, relevant links.
i am still slighly schocked about the SEO level of stonetemple.com (the author of the video). Even the most simple and standard SEO items are not enforced. :-(
Marketers are required to change their overall approach towards Search Engine Optimization. Better consider google an affiliate to your site. You will receive nice referrals only till you serve all these customers very well and satisfy their needs. The day buyers are being unhappy, referrer would stop sending you customers because it damages their reputation as well. Same is the case with Google and SEO now. Consider Google as your referrer who sends traffic to you. Unless you satisfy the visitors with best of the class UX and content, Google would not keep sending you the visits because it hurts their reputation as well.
I would like to quote one liner questions asked by Danny to Google's Gary.
"What is quality content?" Danny asked.
Gary replied, "the content people like and share on Facebook, twitter and with other people."
Danny asked, "Does Google still relies on proxy to decide the content's quality?"
Gary has no answer. What you conclude from this disucssion?
Picture your website from the other end of the spectrum, not just your end, or from the creator's eye only. This practice is very important if you wish for your website to be successful in its information delivery to those looking for your specific product or service for which you provide. Focusing on how your visitors are interacting with your page is the ultimate key to a satisfying and successful website experience, or UX, for those learning the technical lingo of website creators. As keywords within your content and meta data description are a very important tool to take advantage of in order to get potential visitors to your page in the first place, the overall design of your site and the links you provide towards direction to your website are what is most vital to the user experience. If you do not remember anything else, remember this: UX, or user experience, is key to making your website enjoyable to everyone.
So you are saying that UX and content should be focused on more than trying to rank for keywords?
Well it is true that everyone wants to go a site where there is a good user experience. BUT, it is equally important to have an SEO optimized site to rank well in my opinion.
Gary talk about quality content "... content people like and share on Facebook, twitter..." really?, any joke on gif is quality, UX related with quality?... why?
There were some great insights about user experience and how to break the conventional shackles of SEO.
Thank you Eric engie!!
UX should definitely come first, and quality of content to match user intent should win over keyword density. A good website will be able to marry the UX with the keyword targeting. I like to develop a site for UX first, then come back through to layer keywords through the web pages. There can be a lot of good opportunity for keyword targeting on pages that are super relevant to the site - like product category pages - as long as it sounds natural and doesn't interfere with the user experience.
100% quality.
Great! totally agree.
Hi Eric,
Great job on this Whiteboard Friday! I couldn't agree more. Thanks for validating information that we have been practicing and preaching out our agency for years. I would say UX is the most overlooked category in online marketing. Great presentation Eric! I enjoyed the content you shared with us. Thank you!
Great clarity of thought. And real commonsense if we put ourselves in our visitors shoes. Customer satisfaction isn't new but should be our 100% focus, it completely makes sense. These things are going to be reflected but the time users spend on our sites and how engaged they are are, I guess these are now the things that could goes about measuring and thus decides if it wants to send any more of it's customer to us.
Can you write a post about tips for new SEO providers? I have spent more then a year setting up my Minneapolis SEO business and spent a year trying to rank it, and after all that I did not get any sales yet. Please write a post about how to convert visitrs into sales for new local SEO firms. How do you convince people to buy from you? I have cancer for nearly 10 years since the age of 14 and I tried to find a way to earn money online since I was and am too sick to work in the public so its very important that this business makes sales. I am targed for Minneapolis SEO so the traffic is as you would expect very little. So please offer a post how to convert visitors to sales for new my SEO Minneapolis firm. What am I doing wrong? The site looks good and the price is great, I even offered 30-day free trial. Here is my link of my Minneapolis SEO firm.
Hi there!
To me, the best place to start is the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You can find that and a ton of other resources in our Learn section. Happy learning! :)
Also, I'm afraid I had to remove your link, as we don't allow promotion in blog comments. Just FYI.
Thank you for this information, it is very useful for my plan with a company.
ı got a nice point from the post and Im gonna change my blog strategy little bit. What i am doing to do is that under the each article i am going approach my audiance to one of the as follows. This way i can earn audiance loyalty and Return rate.
Hi Eric,
Good points for ecommerce websites. I've one question though. What if I have a blog and have written about the shoe trends, for example, and someone searches for let's say 2015 shoes and comes to my website, as I provide an in-detail report of 2015 shoe trends. However, since I don't sell shoes and the person is looking for buying a pair, he/she leaves the website immediatelly as the info doesn't interest him/her.
I thought adding some affiliate links for buying those shoes in this shoe trend report would make the article more powerful and would satisfy different visitors. However, on the other hand you again risk having a high bounce rate, as the readers would click on the affiliate links and leave your website quickly.
I'd like to know about your opinion on this, please.
Hi Ed - in your scenario, the affiliate links to answer a user need, so that's better than not addressing the need at all. Better still would be if there was a way to order the shoes on site, or perhaps make the shoe selections on site, and not have the affiliate links come into play until the user wants to pay.
Hi Eric,
Thanks a lot for your response and advice.
Great theory but can you give me direct pointers to improve UX?
That's a big question, and one that's very dependent on what business you are in, and what your customers want. Ultimately, that's where it starts, is with really understanding what your potential customers want. There are many ways to do that:
1. Survey them
2. Run A/B tests on different versions of your pages to see which versions get the best response.
3. Interview them.
4. Bring them in to your offices and ask for their direct feedback.
The reason why I am answering the question this way is that a lot goes into UX design and what makes sense for my web site might not be the right thing for yours.
Option 1 and 2 has that advantage that are easier to execute and (in most cases) cheaper that 3 and 4. A/B test are, in my opinion, most efficient way to get a roper feedback, as some folks may cheat in surveys.
Hi Eric. Are there specific metrics with regards to UX and design to take into account (i.e. clear call to actions on every page, standard NAP in the footers, etc.) What if redesigns are well received but not that SEO friendly, such as the the single page websites a lot of companies are adopting. In this scenario, would more visitors and longer page sessions be worth it to oversimplify page structure just to appease your audience?
HI Eric,
Last two Options you suggested does;t work more potentially as the persons who come in your office never give negative feedback for business or personal purpose.
And in the interview the candidate gave the answer positively what you want to hear.
Hey Eric, thanks for the brief points. These are really the important factors like doing survey and analyzing the real factor that affects the UX.
Eric you said something I often think about .. what if I would sent me traffic from MY Searchengine .. when I thing, yes thats a great deal, the users will be satisfied the site often has much organic traffic.
Content is most important factor in GOOGLE ranking as well as Quality Industry related content or website Links also important for google search engine ranking.
Hi guys i have website with over 400 articles around 80 procent original.www.beautyzoomin.com i need some help on finding 100 procent copy articles on my site.is any free tool out there or paid tools??can anybody take a quick look .thank you very much.
Great little WBF Eric!
I whole heartedly agree that UX should now be at the forefront of any sites activities, but I feel it still needs to be blended with some of the more proven SEO strategies (while they exist), granted Keywords are not the all might powerhouse they once were, but they are still relevant to the site and users content expectations providing you don't go overboard etc.
A mix of testing both content, site architecture, visual aids to bring UX and SEO closer together is the direction I am aiming for.
Hello Eric,
As usual, great information with an interesting bad user experience example. There are many factors included to have a good user experience like site speed should be good, add relevant products on the page and do interlinking as much as possible to make customer stay on the page.
The best way to sell a product is - Don't Sell It .
Keep it up :)
same ol', same ol'.
Thanks for great material, I still need to learn a lot of UX.. hope I'm going somewhere?!
Thanks. :)
nice article, i will apply in my site :)