• Why is Search so Important?
• Why do Content Teams Underplay Search?
• A Short History of Search
• What do we mean by Search Intent?
• This is How Google Actually Works
• Putting it All Together: A Beginner’s SEO Checklist
• How to use Google to create a list of requirements before you start to write

Search Engine Optimisation is the #1 skill missing from all the digital teams I have worked with. Yet, it’s the most important thing to get right for audience development. It’s understandable why many content staff are more interested in words and images than SEO:

• Nerdiness: SEO is full of terms that can be intimidating, such as “crawl budget,” “robots.txt,” and “canonical tags.”
• Requires Tools and Spreadsheets: Advanced SEO involves tools like Google Search Console and spreadsheets, which are a turn-off for people who prefer working with words and images.
• Not as glamorous as Social Media: SEO simply doesn’t have the same immediate gratification or allure of social media. 

The good news is that you know more than you think. After thousands of searches, knowingly or not, you’ve worked out how to get what you need. I’ll show you how to ask straightforward questions, reverse engineer expertise, and channel it into your content decisions.

Why SEO Should be Front of Mind, Not an Afterthought

Three stark statistics underscore the audience growth publishers are denied by not taking Search more seriously:

• It’s the biggest source of traffic: 53% (Source: BrightEdge Research, 2019)
• We’re all addicted to Search: The average online user searches 3-4 times per day (Source; Moz)
• The vast majority of webpages (96.55%) get no traffic at all (source: AHREFs)

How We Got Here: A Very Short History of SEO 

The history of Google has been a constant tussle between delivering high quality search results, attracting advertisers, and dealing with bad actors.

The Early Days: When Google launched in 1998, SEO was primitive. People typed words into a search engine, and all they did was return results that included those keywords. Early search engines like AltaVista and Yahoo were easily manipulated. This era was characterized by “black hat” SEO tactics, such as keyword stuffing, invisible text, and link farms. 

Google aimed to deliver relevant, high-quality links to information, so it introduced PageRank. This revolutionized search by valuing links from other sites as “votes” on a website’s credibility. Getting such links remains a top priority for content producers.  

The Rise of Content and Quality – 2000s: Major updates to the algorithm that punished manipulative tactics started with the landmark Florida Update in 2003. This included statistical analyses of page structure to uncover spammy sites. Panda in 2011 targeted ‘link farms’, and Penguin in 2012 focused on suspicious patterns of incoming links.  

Mobile-first Search and Uncovering Intent – 2015: As mobile usage overtook desktops, Google introduced mobile-friendly ranking signals in 2015, a move christened ‘Mobilegeddon’. It heralded a move towards crawling mobile sites ahead of desktop sites.  

RankBrain (introduced in 2015) marked Google’s first significant machine learning algorithm. It began understanding search intent beyond literal keyword matching, making SEO more about user experience and contextual relevance.

Expertise, Authority and Trust – 2018: It’s not widely understood that Google uses humans to assess the quality of websites. How this influences rankings is unclear, but the company has emphasised expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T) in site assessments since 2014. A 2018 algorithm change deprecated sites involved in Your Money or Your Life content (health and finance) in cases where limited expertise was detected. And in 2022, Google added ‘Experience’ to the E-A-T structure to clarify that first-hand sector knowledge was most valuable. The implication is that publishers should produce original content only in the sectors in which they have real expertise. 

User Experience and Core Web Vitals – 2020: Google increasingly emphasises page speed, mobile responsiveness, and overall user experience. Of the very many Core Web Vitals tests, mobile speed is thought to be the most important. 

AI and Zero-click Search (2023-Present): With the advent of the AI-assisted ‘Search Generative Experience’ (SGE), users’ questions are often answered on the search results page. This is a ‘zero-click search’, and the rising frequency of such results has raised concerns that webpage referrals will suffer. 

A Word on Search Intent

It’s essential to understand what ‘intent’ means. SEO experts divine four types:

1. Navigational—Make it easy for users to find your site via a search on your name by following basic search hygiene.

2. Informational—People are looking for answers to their questions. Satisfy these, and you will increase your relevance and quality ranking and raise your brand’s visibility and awareness. 

3. Commercial and Transactional—A typical buyer’s journey runs like this: 

• Awareness: The buyer recognises they have a need and searches for general information on how to satisfy it. Informational content is important here.
• Consideration: The buyer evaluates options by researching products, services, or solutions. ‘Salesy’ content, like comparison pieces and detailed product information, is crucial at this stage. 
• Decision: The buyer has all the information they need to make a Purchase.

Audience development requires you to think hare about different kinds of users. And you need to be similarly discriminating in the SEO tactics you employ for different kinds of intent – broader for Informational content, narrower for Commercial and Transactional, and very narrow for Navigational.

This is How Google Actually Works (and what it means for making yourself more visible) 

1. Crawling: Google uses ‘bots’ or ‘spiders’ to crawl the web. These bots follow links from one page to another, collecting data about each webpage. For your content to be found, it needs to be accessible to these bots:

• A clear user-focused site structure helps the bots identify your top content. The most common mistake is to have a top navigation that focuses on your organisation rather than on the topics you cover.
• Make sure you have a visible sitemap. Up to a quarter of sites don’t have a functioning sitemap that helps Google understand their structure. Use seositecheckup.com to check yours.
• Ensure your site is being crawled. Type ‘site:[site address]’ into Google, and if it’s being crawled, you’ll see a set of results.

2. Indexing: Once a page is crawled, it’s indexed. This is Google acting as a librarian. It has two indexes – on the one hand, it has a bank of the key phrases that searchers use, and on the other, it has the categorisation of every web page it can see. 

You have considerable control here over how Google Indexes your content. This is the heart of SEO and the area that is least understood by content teams: 

• Keyphrases: Put some quality time into thinking through what kinds of words and phrases would be typed into Google by the kinds of readers you want. It is best to do this before you start writing.
• Create a checklist to ensure that those words and phrases and their variants appear in all the most important places—headlines, subheadings, URLs, images, and meta descriptions. 
• Develop a culture in which the checklist is viewed as more important than related social posts. 
• Check indexing is happening. This is more technical and requires Google Search Console (GSC) access. Ask someone with access to GSC (dev team?) to look under ‘Settings’ and ‘Crawl stats’. There’s a handy graph that shows crawls over time, which will instantly tell you whether there’s a problem.

3. Ranking: Google has to rank all the pages that look like they have answers. It does this  based on over 200 factors, the most important of which are:

• High-quality, original, engaging content that addresses users’ needs.
• Good user experience, especially mobile site speed and easy navigation. 
• Backlinks from other sites (viewed as votes of confidence).

For a content creator, you must think about addressing users’ needs. Practically, that means putting yourself into their shoes and working out the obvious questions your piece needs to answer. Then, use the kind of language used in search queries. 

4. Display: The results of a search are shown on a page. Nowadays, this page is complicated and has many units, and the harsh reality is that few people bother with anything beyond the first page.

• Strategy: focus on key phrases that will put you in the top 10.
• Be realistic—unless you’re already big on Google, you will likely focus on more specialist terms where you stand a chance. Key phrases with four or more words have the greatest potential for conversion. 
• Metadata is your Google Ad, so give it the same kind of TLC that social posts receive.

Putting it all together—A Really Simple SEO Checklist 

Search is easier than most people think. Fixing SEO issues can get technical, but working out if you have issues needs nothing more than a Google Search Box. There are three overlapping questions that SEO addresses

1. Is my site Search-optimised? 
2. How do I put SEO at the heart of my content strategy?
3. How do I embed SEO thinking in my post workflow?

Expert agencies can help you with the first two and possibly the third. But it’s a good idea to have at least a basic understanding of how things work before investing in third-party expertise. 

Use Google to Answer These Ten Questions to See If You’ve Got an SEO Challenge

1. Is your site fast enough? Type the URL into your mobile browser and time how long the homepage takes to resolve. Google says this should be under 3 seconds. For an accurate test, use PageSpeed Insights. 
2. Are your posts visible to Google? Type ‘Site:[website URL] into Google. This will show you everything Google has indexed. 
3. Is Google indexing posts quickly? Add a time filter to Google Search (e.g., “past month”).
4. Do you show in image search? 20% of search volume is for images. As for 2, but look at the image tab. 
5. Do my images have alt text? Many sites don’t provide alternative text for images. To see this text, right-click on the image, click on inspect and then search for “alt text”.
6. Do you score on core topics? Write down your top 5 topics. Write down what questions you answer about those topics. Type those questions into Google and see if you appear on the first results page for any.
7. Discovering user intent: Search your target keywords to analyze the top-ranking pages. Observe titles, meta descriptions, and formats.  
8. Peer pressure: Run all these tests for your competitors and peers to get ideas on how to upp your SEO game.
9. Are you advertising your content well? Study the results from 2. Be honest and ask yourself, “How likely would I click on one of these links?”
10. Are people linking back to your content? Remember that links are votes of confidence in the quality of your content. See how many you have by typing Link:[url]. Are there patterns in the type of content getting most links?

How to use Google to create a list of requirements before you start to write a post

Once you have a consistent SEO strategy, it’s important to make sure that everything you publish follows the same principles. To get started on this, extract as much intelligence as you can from Google Search itself:

Topic alignment: Write down your story pitch. What core topic(s) does it come under? Can you justify investing time in this if it doesn’t feed into one?

Keyword research: What questions might someone have typed into a search box that this story answers? Search on the questions, look at the autosuggestions, and review the first results pages.

Competition: Who scores well on this? How long are their pieces? How richly illustrated? How many backlinks? 

Specificity: Realistically, are you likely to displace any of them from the top 10? If the answer is no, get more specific with your question.

Do you answer the obvious questions? Study the ‘people also ask’ box: do you see fresh ideas for informational posts or refreshing existing content?