SEO Basics: What The Algorithm Means To Brands

Welcome to the first in a series of SEO articles aimed at helping you understand and navigate the use of search engines for growth. Although there are other algorithms available, this article will focus on the role of the mysterious Google algorithm.

We will begin by exploring the history of Google’s algorithm development and why the algorithm exists. We will then discuss why it is important to us as brands and then finish off by looking at where we think the algorithm is heading and discuss key considerations to stay ahead of the game.

At the beginning, this was far from perfect and website owners quickly realised they could manipulate search results by providing certain cues and signals to Google’s crawlers. There were many ways to do this; the most common being keyword stuffing (overusing keywords again and again).

Each time Google uncovered tricks being used to manipulate the algorithm, it created counter measures which were included and released into the wild as a series of algorithm updates. It allowed two things:

1. A chance for Google to improve the sophistication of its algorithm and refine its ability to return relevant search results

2. An attempt to stay ahead of constantly evolving tricks to manipulate the algorithm.

A shift in the stakes

As the use of Google soared so did the rewards for manipulating the search results giving rise to the idea of ‘black hat’ SEO (the intentional practice of trying to manipulate the rankings on Google search result pages).

In 2011, rather than playing some eternal game of cat and mouse, Google introduced the idea of penalties. Along with its usual process of trying to fathom the reason for a page, algorithm updates began to analyse websites for manipulative practices. Any caught engaging in underhand tactics could be penalised by being dropped down or removed from the rankings.

At this point, brands were making huge amounts of money from customers arriving from Google. The potential impact of a penalty on revenue therefore led to the growth of 'white hat' SEO – the practice of trying to manipulate search results via optimisation that ticks Google’s boxes.

Algorithm updates today

Since 2011, Google’s process for implementing algorithm updates has evolved. Initially, it would roll out huge all-in-one updates which would have strong, measurable impacts on search results. Over time the frequency of updates increased and the amount of change became less heavy until we get to today, where Google is making ongoing, constant changes to the algorithm, some noticeable and some extremely subtle.

Updates were given names, allowing them to be easily identified. You might recognise names such as; Caffeine, Panda, Penguin or Hummingbird. Today, most algorithm updates are identified by date and it’s left to the SEO community to name them, with many SEOs desperate to make a name for themselves rushing out to be the first to notice and name one…

What does this mean to us?

We will look at algorithm specifics in subsequent articles, but for now let’s focus on what they mean to us as brands.

• They are important because they can potentially smash or trash our online success levels. They stand like an obstacle between us and our goals in a way rarely found in any other marketing channel.
• They sit between us and our customer like some secret judge and jury. Behind closed doors they decide when we can and cannot talk to customers. Worse still, they decide what we are allowed to talk to them about.
• Google is unable to reveal to us exactly how these algorithms work and what, specifically, they look for in choosing their top ranking pages. So if we want to have our content and pages appear for our ideal audiences, whether that’s by relevance, size, or both, we have to prove ourselves to the algorithm. We have to demonstrate our websites jump through all the mysterious hoops the algorithm holds and that we do it better than the competition.
• All this secret hoop jumping isn’t entirely unfair of Google. After all, people conducting searches are in fact Google’s own customers and returning high quality, relevant search results are its ‘product’. Therefore, it’s pretty justifiable for Google to want to return only the best results, otherwise its customers might well leave for another search engine. Also, if they were to publish the inner machinations of the algorithm then we’d be back playing cat and mouse as we began to manipulate the algorithm for gain.

It’s fair to say that if we want to appear as top results for our target audiences and their queries, then it’s essential we appease the algorithm - enter ‘SEO’ (Search Engine Optimisation). SEO specialists spend years testing, tweaking, researching and unravelling the implications of Google’s algorithm in order to be able to advise brands on how to optimise their sites to work within the algorithms framework.

Friend or Foe?

The Google algorithm can be a brand’s best friend or its worst enemy. It depends on a multitude of factors, many of which spring from one important question, how important is online revenue/visibility to your business?

If online audiences are important and you decide not to invest seriously in SEO then don’t expect page one visibility from Google. You’ll have to invest in pay-per-click if you want those top spots! Investment doesn’t just mean money for SEOs either. It means a commitment to creating great content and developing your website to welcome and aid the algorithm as it tries to crawl and understand your pages.

The rewards for befriending Google’s algorithm can be huge. The top five results on page one get 73.6% off all traffic for a given query whilst the top five positions on mobile get 64%. (AWR Oct 2019).

So, imagine you were targeting a search query worth 10,000 searches each month. A whopping 7,360 of them choose to engage with one of the top five results. If you’re not in this top five you’ve already given 73.6% of that online audience to the competition. Now, there are other tactics available and a good SEO will identify when a top five position is a viable battleground and for which phrases this is the case.

The penalties for ignoring Google’s algorithm can be drastic. We are not fans of SEO doom and gloom prophecies, but penalties are real. Unfortunately, most brands are hit as a result of innocently stumbling into problem areas, ignorant to the fact they were violating Google’s algorithm policies in the first place.

Not having been penalised for poor SEO practices yet is no guarantee that you won’t be penalised at some point in the future. The really scary bit is the impact a penalty can have on long-term online revenue. Recovery can often be a long and difficult process lasting anywhere from weeks to years.

Voice search

Voice is very much the hot topic on everyone’s agenda, driven through the growth of voice search on smartphones, smart speakers (Google Home, Amazon Echo) and voice-driven interfaces such as Alexa and OK Google. My own belief is that voice, in the short term, could potentially set search behaviour back slightly. In the same way we used to search heuristically with broken phrases like ‘restaurants Coventry’ or ‘used cars Manchester’, I believe it will take some time to settle in to speaking with technology.

Our spoken search queries will be fragmented and short tail as we try to enunciate clearly and avoid having to repeat ourselves to devices. Especially as they often struggle to capture exactly what we have said. This could lead to the creation of a gap between the sophistication of Google’s algorithm in understanding context to an incredibly deep level, and our broken, short tail queries which will seem vague and undefined... at least for a while.

BERT

If we really want to think about how we can plan our content to work with future iterations of algorithm updates, we should look at developments such as the latest update named BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers – Oct 2019). This update further advances Google’s ability to extract context and contextual meaning around key phrases in a more natural language and nuance-driven way. It uses more of the content before and after a specific phrase to help understand intent better, especially for longer tail queries and where certain word operators change context such as ‘for’, ‘as’ and ‘to’. We will look at BERT in more detail in another article.

In conclusion, Google has moved another step towards understanding the natural and accurate intent in both a search query and within content. It can better match responses (pages) to questions (queries). If we really want to succeed in future iterations of algorithms, we should make every effort to truly understand the intent and real-world needs of our target audiences and their search behaviour i.e. is it explorative or a specific question, is it to compare or affirm existing thoughts, to transact or engage? Understanding what leads audiences in our direction means we can create content that delivers genuine, valuable answers. This is what Google wants to provide to its customers. If we can create our sites to offer this, then each algorithm update is more likely to work in our favour as opposed to becoming something we need to first pick apart and then adapt to.