Before the birth of the internet, businesses built reputations based on a combination of effective marketing and public relations, customer relationship building, and good old fashioned word of mouth referrals.
Businesses would succeed or fail built on their reputation, merit with customers and how well they executed above-the-line and below-the-line promotional activities. Successful businesses also had an inherent understanding of the importance of good customer care and effective communication with those customers, handling queries and requirements and catering to preferences – rewarded with customer loyalty.
According to a well-used adage favoured by traditional marketers, every dissatisfied customer would share their grievance with at least 10 other people, hence the emphasis on customer care, and those that got customer care and communication - including marketing, advertising and PR - just right, thrived.
Digital revolution
The dawn of the internet era signalled a complete revolution in retail, business and marketing. Rather than relying solely on expansive advertising, marketing and PR budgets, businesses refocused their efforts and budgets to allow for the additional and very crucial activities of search engine optimisation (SEO), social media and e-mail marketing and website development. A rapid transformation of the business landscape from offline to online required an ‘adapt or die’ attitude.
In the scramble to be top of the Google rankings, businesses in their droves employed the services of one of the highly profitable SEO agencies which had sprung up in response to this burgeoning online marketplace. For a time these agencies enabled their clients to climb in the search rankings very quickly, thanks in part to ethically dubious techniques. These techniques included spamdexing (also referred to as Black Hat indexing) the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes by repeating unrelated phrases to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system. In addition to these on-page spam techniques, many SEOs supplemented them with off-page spam too – links scattered across other page locations regarded as bad neighbourhoods by Google or using link farms – pages created specifically to host links back to sites.
Essentially, many SEO firms used tricks which drove a business’s website listing further up the search results page by manipulating the way search engines worked. This unfair and improper practice meant businesses that had worked hard to gain market share and respect in their sector were quickly surpassed in the rankings by virtually unheard of start-ups who were able to pay their way rapidly to the top.
Returning natural order
In reaction to these improper practices, Google has introduced a number of initiatives, the Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird algorithms, which are game changers for the digital search and content industries. Combined, they provide a nemesis to lazy marketers.
Undoubtedly the most important change Google has implemented in the quest to drive up content quality was the introduction of its Panda algorithm in 2011, and then increasing the frequency of its updates to every 10 days, rolled out this summer. The Panda algorithm and its frequency pushes sites with poor quality or duplicate content further down the rankings, achieving its objective of increasing pressure on businesses to ensure their web content is consistently high.
Google’s Penguin updates are conducted a few times a year to fight and cleanse linking spam including automated directory submissions and article marketing, forum and blog comment spam, social bookmarking spam and paid links. Guest blogging has also been placed under the spotlight, now being reviewed in spam reports. Google has flagged a distinction between organic guest blog content and paid links and Matt Cutts, head of Google’s spam team, identifies specific differences between them. According to Cutts, spam content fails to match the subject of the blog itself and contains keyword rich anchor text.
Penguin had a significant impact on the industry, and in combination with Hummingbird, introduced in October, spells the end for dubious SEO practice. Hummingbird was designed to improve the accuracy of search results, particularly when taking into account more conversational search terms and voice search capabilities – key changes in people’s online behaviour. With the ability to better understand natural language rather than simple search terms, the Hummingbird algorithm takes into account a number of factors. These factors include the value the page provides to the searcher, whether the page itself is unique, well regarded by others, presented in the best format for the searcher and whether the location of the business serving the results is relevant for the searcher.
Google’s move to a deeper understanding of web content in this way means that online businesses with websites designed to provide keyword matches to a range of search terms will lose out, whilst sites that provide detailed, useful and highly regarded content will win.
These changes place an emphasis on the importance of quality content on websites, which in turn requires a completely new approach. Rather than looking for ‘quick wins’ businesses need to carefully consider the value of what they publish to those reading it, an ethos which harks back to the PR and marketing activities employed pre-digital and SEO days. These changes have also affirmed the value of these activities – often outsourced, in optimising business’s Google rankings.
Valuable contents
As PR and marketing content is designed to work using the principles of psychology; understanding the behaviours and motivations of potential customers to guide them towards and through the purchasing process, so should online content. Examples of improved content include building in common customer service query and site search information, testing site usability and taking into account online reviews of the business. Presenting useful information to target audiences in easily usable formats - which have different benefits at different stages of the conversion funnel - such as whitepapers, online tools, infographics and mobile apps, is excellent content marketing practice.
In order to succeed within this new landscape, rather than keyword focussed SEO, digital marketers are now focussing on segmenting their target audiences into personas and understanding the way these personas conduct search queries. They are examining their behaviours, interests and preferences in the same way that marketers and PR professionals would research their audience at the outset of a creative campaign. Relationship building with key target sites and publications and differentiating the product or service through content targeted at them - again echoing PR techniques, is also crucial.
The ‘new world’ of search presents many opportunities for businesses, not least of all the chance to create real brand affinity with customers and differentiate themselves as a firm which has a true understanding of what makes it stand out, and how that relates to what makes its customers tick.
Done successfully, the creation of this quality content will help guide customers through to a purchase or transaction process, as well as building lasting, meaningful relationships with them which form the basis of a strong, dedicated customer base which will last for years to come.
By Kathryn Dawson, Creative Director at Strategy Digital.
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