Introduction
Hi. My name is Ria and I am the most recent member of the Silkstream team. I am currently in my third month of my apprenticeship here at Silkstream. Through these weekly blog posts (titled My Week of Search), I hope to share my experiences with you as a newbie in this industry of SEO and internet marketing. I shall be reviewing what’s new in the world of online search, what I have learnt and anything else interesting that might go down in the Silkstream office as we settle into 2014.
To introduce the My Week of Search blog series and to kick off the new year, I wanted to review the past year and what changes and developments to Search and Social we’ve seen in 2013.
2013: The Year of the User
The year 2013 brought a rollercoaster of changes to the way we search and are searched for. The biggest change of the year was Google’s brand new Hummingbird algorithm in September which focused webmasters’ perspective to the overall quality of the content on their website and not just how the content is perceived by the almighty GoogleBot. According to Google, Hummingbird improved Google’s understanding of conversational and semantic search, matching the user’s queries to webpages that focus on, not only each exact keyword separately, but the general theme or context of the query. By having the ability to look this closely at the semantic relations between concepts, Google is becoming more human and, like humans, it can take years to master a language. Google has developed an increased understanding of human communication to produce search results with higher relevancy to the user. This shifted focus on how the search algorithm treats conversational search queries, leading SEOs everywhere to re-evaluate how they use long tail keywords.
This huge change to the algorithm, which acted to shift focus away from keywords, seemed to coincide rather interestingly with the keyword (not provided) phenomenon which prevented search data junkies everywhere from seeing their organic search keywords in Google Analytics. In September 2013, Google added SSL encryption to all searches, withholding those all-important keywords that some base their entire lives around. This was of course in the interest of their users’ privacy. And of course Adwords advertisers still have access to keyword data…
It’s clear that Google are encouraging webmasters to stray from this unhealthy obsession with keywords and create a better internet experience for the users. Along with penalizing unnaturally over-optimized keyword-rich anchor text and taking exact match domains down a few pegs, it’s now important more than ever to design the experience for the searcher landing on your page. You have to identify their intent and give them what they want. SEO is evolving and the distinction between SEO and online marketing is fading more and more.
In 2013, internet users also bore witness to how sophisticated brands have become at social media. As social media is becoming a much more accepted business tool for interacting with customers, integrating social into your marketing strategy shouldn’t just be considered, it should be implemented immediately. Big brands that we only ever saw on TV and in supermarkets are suddenly developing increasingly stronger personalities on the web and having friendly conversations with its customers over Twitter and Facebook. Unhappy customers who tweet complaints about a company are finding to their surprise that they are being heard by that company. Using social media, big brands are pacifying angry customers intelligently and doing wonders for their image. The distance between the customer and the company is closing in, allowing for more personal relationships and, if executed successfully, a more positive brand identity. Most companies already own social accounts as placeholders to ensure brand protection over the username. In 2014, if you haven’t already, you should be digging out the passwords and putting them to use. It’s no longer expected for brands to show up at the social media party merely to make an appearance; they’re now expected to be throwing the parties themselves.
Image provided by Huffington Post
This has been the first installment of My Week of Search. 2014 promises a lot more changes to the online world and I expect more than a couple of SEO game-changers by the end of the year… Stay tuned to this weekly blog series for the latest!
Happy New Year!
