Choosing the right words – an introduction to Search Engine Optimization

Search and the Web

When the web started, you could find all the pages you needed in one simple list. (Take a look at the list for June 1994.) In contrast, over 20 million new websites were created in 2010. Although nobody knows for sure, most estimates agree that there are around 350 million registered domains, hosting around 45-50 billion web pages. In 2008, Google announced that it was indexing over one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) URLs. IBM alone has around 4 million web pages.

This massive proliferation of content meant that simple browsing very quickly became impractical. In addition to search, the first attempts at organizing the web mainly focused on classifying web pages into “portals”, but even this approach could not keep up with the explosion in content. By the end of the last century most of these were dying out with the dot-com bust around 2000-2001.

Google was founded in the late 90s, and by the end of the century the Google search was already the most popular way for people to find information on the internet. Today Google provides over 70% of the searches in the US and over 90% in Germany, France, Italy and the UK. This means that Google and other search engines are the single most important channel for delivering content.

Paid vs. organic Search

Google (and almost all the other search engines) finance their operations by selling advertising on their search results pages. Organizations pay to be listed in the results for specific search items where they cannot get a high enough ranking in the standard search results. Many studies have shown that the standard “organic” results get more user attention than the paid ones (see graphic showing eye tracking results on a Google results page). This observation has led most companies to dedicate huge effort to getting good organic results. This activity has become known as search engine optimization.

Graphic: Eye-tracking results for a standard Google results page.

SEO is more than just advertising

Much of the attention surrounding SEO is focused on trying to get customers to buy more products – this is clearly what every commercial organization wants. But recently it has become clear that the information created around a product is crucial in how the product is perceived by customers. Critically, the “after-sales experience” and customer satisfaction are increasingly seen to be a question of getting the right information to the right people at the right time.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization describes the process of improving the way content is indexed by search engines. However, it has nothing to do with optimizing search engines, but rather optimizing content for search engines. Most of the time, this actually means Google. The aim of SEO is to make your content findable, by being highly ranked by search engines. The vast majority of people looking for information will only look on the first page of results they receive and only at the first few links. 400 million searches were performed on Search Engines last year. 40 million of those were with the intention of buying something (www.Place1.co.uk). This means, logically, that 360 million searches were for information – many with the intention of finding out how to get microwaves, cars, printers and computers to work properly.

Why is it important?

SEO is critical in the context of information delivery because, in many contexts, if search engines do not find your content, it is invisible. You are competing with content written by reviewers, by customers and by the competition, and the customer is going to take the first information they find. Of course, you can try to buy visibility with AdWords, but as discussed, this will not give you anything like the visibility that good organic search performance will.

Why is this relevant for technical communicators?

For technical communicators, the same imperative applies. An increasing percentage of customers will reach for a search engine when trying to solve issues that they have with a product. They know that they can get answers instantly either from the manufacturer or from other customers.

But getting answers is becoming ever harder. As products get more complex and smarter, it becomes harder to document everything – and harder to justify from a cost point of view. Companies are increasingly moving their published content exclusively to the web or delivering it embedded in the product. In these contexts, search also plays a critical role in helping people find the content they need.

Many companies, especially in high-tech industries, actively promote customer forums, where customers can help each other, and in many US organizations this has become the most important customer support channel. Several large high-tech companies have re-focused efforts and headcount away from technical publications and towards support and interaction with the customer community. This model is not just more cost-effective, but also leads to higher customer satisfaction. But in this model the need for complex product information does not disappear.

On the contrary, it becomes even more critical to make the right information available (which means findable) to the right people as efficiently as possible – whether it’s to your own support staff or directly to the customers themselves. Getting your content to a customer first helps you to ensure that they engage with you and trust you as a company they want to do business with in the future. As the saying goes, good customer service is the best marketing.

Why is it difficult?

So, search optimization of your content is critical to increase the chances of your content getting found and read by customers. In many ways it justifies writing the content in the first place. But why is SEO so difficult? Unfortunately, as we have seen, the world wide web is huge, and it is often very hard to get attention. A search strategy involves not only an understanding of your product but also a very detailed understanding of your customers and the way they think. It is no longer enough to shout very loudly and hope that they will hear – you also have to listen.

The rest of this article describes some simple steps to improve the way your information can compete in the race to be found.

How to do SEO

The critical factor to achieving good search performance is to get the right keywords in the right places in your content – this is sometimes called keyword optimization. This is essentially the main task of Search Engine Optimization. The difficulty lies in the detail: what are the right keywords for my products, what are the right places, and how to do I get my keywords in the right places? Many consultants and gurus promote a certain mysticism around “the Google algorithms”, but in fact Google is quite open about how to make content work well – they even publish articles on it (just search for “Google SEO”). There are four basic steps to improving your findability:

1. Find your keywords
2. Analyze your content
3. Deploy your keywords
4. Kaizen – continuously improve

1. Find your keywords
Keywords are the words, which are important for communicating a message. Linguistically these will often be nouns or noun phrases, but they may equally be verbs describing actions. Many of these keywords will relate to your product and its features. A keyword many organizations forget is the name of the company itself! The reason for this is that it is easy to forget that you have to think like your customer to be successful at search optimization. Therefore, it is useful to look at Google Analytics to see what people are searching for. But you should also analyze your content for keywords – quite often this might hold a few surprises! Keywords change constantly as your products evolve and your customers get to know them better. To give an example from my own experience, as Acrolinx’s first product “acrocheck” evolved into Acrolinx IQ, we still had to manage both keywords in our content while promoting our new Acrolinx IQ brand. Keywords may also change for reasons beyond your control, like government legislation or something the competition does.

Once you have your keywords, the task remains to see if your content is using those keywords. Best practice for using keywords can get quite complex, but there are four guiding principles:

• Use keywords that customers are likely to use (the ones you just discovered)
• Include keywords in titles
• Mention keywords early
• Include keywords in the metadata

2. Analyze your content
As with any project, it is a good idea to set a baseline before you start working and measure how well your current content is using the keywords that you want. A content audit can check your content and deliver detailed reports on findability, as well as give you a clearer picture of how many issues you have, and where to start addressing them. This analysis also needs to be tied back to your general strategy around your content: who are you writing for and what do they need to know.

3. Deploy your keywords
Currently most companies are doing something for steps (1) and (2). In other words, they know they have a problem, but many are struggling to find out how to address it. Service companies are emerging whose sole business is built around trying to fix broken content. In many cases the actual work of fixing the content is outsourced to contractors who often haven’t had the time to understand the content strategy of the company they are working for. It makes much more sense to promote findability as an aspect of content quality – after all if your content is not found, it doesn’t matter how well it is written. For this reason, we have developed the concept of “search-ready writing” to allow companies to include strong keywords into their content during the creation process.

4. Kaizen – continuously improve
Like all other customer relations, your work with search optimization is never done. Following the proven Japanese quality mantra of kaizen, in order to maintain good findability, you should continuously monitor the search behavior of your customers, then audit and change content for new keywords as they arise.

More than just keywords

When people first started working on SEO, there was a natural tendency to test the limits. The story of why Google blacklisted BMW for trying to manipulate search results shows the risks of trying to “cheat” the system. Good SEO is not just about sprinkling your keywords across your content. Google has recently developed new algorithms under the name Panda, which are specifically designed to punish low-quality content, often to be found in so-called content farms. At the same time, keywords are also important in the structural organization of a website, and good search practice also involves user-friendly URLs and a simple, understandable website structure. But it is always worth remembering that the actual words that you use will always have the most dramatic effect on your search performance.

How to do multilingual SEO

Everything we have discussed so far concerns the content in a single language. It also applies to translated content, only with the added challenge of how a company can communicate and validate keywords with global marketing, sales and support operations. Of course, delivering content to a global market often means translation and localization of products and product content – but translation is never enough.

No company can translate all their content into all the languages in which they sell their products – most are lucky if they can translate 50%. Thus, your original content needs to be optimized for search across the language barrier. This means discovering translations for keywords. Unfortunately, most companies are doing this now by getting their keywords translated without context by localization companies. Not only is this unlikely to lead to good target-language keywords, but it misses the point of trying to think like your customers.

To do multilingual SEO, you need to analyze all the different ways in which your keywords can be translated and will be used by your customers. These lists can only be discovered with tools, such as Acrolinx IQ, which can find translations for keywords from existing content. Once you have the list of global keywords, you can work on deploying them in metadata for your non-localized content. Bear in mind that in many countries Google is not as dominant as it is in Western Europe and the US. In Russia, China, South Korea and Japan, Google has less than 40% of the search market.

Summary

In summary, the most successful organizations are developing a process of optimizing content, which is not a reactive separate operation, but rather an integrated part of implementing a content strategy aiming to deliver the right information to customers at the right time. If you ask Google to sum up how to get good search results, they will reply: Don’t try to cheat, simply create high-quality, relevant content.