What are people saying about you?

Miracle says: “In the past it was all about doing research, getting a bunch of keywords, and saying lovely things about your product/service. You optimised for keywords, considered the link engine and then ranked. Now, Google is so sophisticated it’s become less about what you say to your customers and more about the feedback your customers give to Google on how you’re performing. This will affect your rankings.”

In what ways do customers give feedback to Google? How do they actually deliver this feedback?

“Reviews and also what they’re saying about you on forums. Another feedback that’s become increasingly important is the volume of ‘brand + product’ searches. There are different kinds of industries where an increasing number of brands with high demand and ‘brand + product’ searches usually rank higher. It’s that kind of user demand/interest that’s fielded into the algorithm.”

What does treating SEO as a product mean?

“It’s about paying a lot of attention to your brand, which is something that used to be the primary domain of marketing. SEO focuses on generic, but you have to pay attention to your brand. Treating SEO as a product means knowing your PR agency, and being involved in social at a product level when people are making changes, creating products, etc. You need to know what your competitors are doing and not treat SEO like a silo or a department of its own. Treat it as an online owner. The more you progress in your career, the more leadership responsibilities you’ll have. Be the one to say ‘I know we’re creating this product, but if we don’t put this in at the end that’s going to affect our brand.’

Usually, all of these discussions are made way before the SEO team gets involved. The SEO team is presented with a topic that they now have to optimise and create visibility for. In 2023, the SEO will have to be in the conversation when new products are being created. SEOs have information on what competitors are doing online and what the landscape looks like. This is beginning to feed in.

It used to be that you could have your offline campaign drive everything to the SERP, but now competitors are searching social media and looking at reviews. There are so many other things fitting into that. You could be screaming about how you have the best online product in the world, but all the online chatter says your product is bad.

It’s really interesting to see how the power dynamics are shifting and the conversations that SEOs are joining. VPs from SEO departments have crept in, because people are beginning to understand the power of online marketing. It’s not like they didn’t understand before, but it was just easier to push money into different above-the-line campaigns and guarantee certain results.

The lines are now getting blurred, especially as above the line is getting more expensive and receiving less visibility. People skip ads all the time, and they want brands that aren’t constantly giving them the hard sell. Online marketing and visibility have been seen as cheaper, especially as ads continue to get more expensive. Competition is getting really tough and SEOs need to be involved for a successful outcome. You need to be involved at the core of what a product is. Do your research and get involved in those conversations if you want SEO to be successful.”

What kind of questions should SEOs be asking product teams, and what should they say to product teams to try and influence what is included?

“The first thing is ‘How does this translate in the online space?’ It’s good to talk about build because usually when the product team is talking to the developers, they’re building something they know will work.

The first thing they’ll want to do is put X into Y and get Z. They won’t be thinking about how Z is displayed online when you put X into Y. If you don’t get involved in those conversations about the build, then when they get to Z they’ll come back to tell you whether something displays well or not. This will be in retrospect and can lead to the implementation of hacks which can be too expensive. The more you get involved in conversations, the more you can think about how this translates online - and how you’re going to be able to display this.

As you’re building a product, you can look at what the journey looks like and how you’re going to be able to track the journey. What can you put in place that will make it easy to track the journey so you can get the data you need to make improvements? These are the kinds of conversations you need to be having. When you’re talking to your marketing team about putting a product out, what is so unique about the product that you can market from an online perspective when creating content? Yes, you can look for generic keywords and find out what a product does, but if everyone is saying that (in the era of useful, helpful content) how is this helpful and how does this translate online?

It’s interesting because you see above-the-line campaigns that focus on slogans, but they rarely translate online. Let’s say you create a marketing campaign about biscuits and say ‘biscuits make you happy’. That would be a lovely thing to take on during your above-the-line campaign, but it probably won’t translate when you come back to the web. It’s very unlikely that people will be searching for ‘biscuits that make you happy’.”

Should marketing and business departments be better arranged to ensure SEOs are offering input at the right time?

“SEOs should be given more seats at the senior table. We should start seeing more VPs from the SEO program. What usually happens is someone from PPC gets promoted to the directorate level and takes that top seat. However, you never see the SEO person become Head of Acquisition. We want to start seeing more SEOs in the head of acquisition roles.”

Why don’t we normally see this?

“SEO is less measurable. It’s easy to say ‘I spent 20k on PPC and got 40k parts.’ With SEO, there are more correlations than causations. Because of that, it’s not seen as a trusted medium. They know it makes money but it’s only when it stops making money that everyone panics. While it’s making money, everyone downplays the ‘dark art’ of SEO.

It’s not something that’s easily understood, especially when SEO gets simplified into things like ‘SEO is just about creating content.’ SEO is not easily measurable and when it’s working people tend to ignore it and simplify the SEO department by saying ‘They’re just content creators.’ It’s a difficult sell. With other departments, like PPC, it’s easy to say you’ve put X amount in and received X back - where the more you spend the more information Google gives you. You hear Google inviting PPC managers to the headquarters, they even pull reports for PPC. No one does that for SEO. SEOs don’t get the prime seat at the table until something isn’t working. The oversimplification and lack of direct measurement in SEO are real. However, more and more people are starting to understand the perils of not doing SEO. Hopefully, this will give us a better seat at the table.”

SEO is getting even harder to measure now. How can you measure what people are saying about you online?

“Those are not things that are easy to track using normal tools like Google Search Console, because they don’t update in real time. It’s mostly about getting really good data from people. Get people with really good data insights who can scrape, measure, and build tools that will bring all of this data together. Create really exciting dashboards that can help you identify trends, uplift campaigns, and know exactly where it’s coming from. It has a lot to do with being able to filter.

Data is becoming increasingly important to SEO. Everyone is trying to crack the nail on data, because we’re getting less and less from all the Google tools. We need to be able to scrape things like social media, understand what trends are there when you launch campaigns, and make sure you have responses in there as quickly as possible. These are the kind of things that will be really effective now.

Make sure you’re in the SERP when someone searches for ‘your brand + product’. It’s about understanding those brand results for key products and making sure you have an answer for everything. Ensure the right things are appearing. Have those difficult conversations and identify when something isn’t an SEO problem. Communicate when you’ve done everything from an SEO perspective, but the product is rubbish. As much as you could shout and say ‘This biscuit is going to make you happy!’, if it doesn’t, you’re going to get trashed online. SEOs can’t save this - even though they used to be able to years ago. Previously, you could just build links to rank number one. Google didn’t care as much, but now there are so many elements to the algorithm.”

If people talk about you online and you get nofollow links from social media, is there any traditional SEO value in that? Will your perceived authority increase as a result of brand mentions, social media, and nofollow links?

“Yes. You might not be able to see that there is a direct benefit, but you could definitely say there’s a correlation. A brand might launch a product or campaign that’s started to trend on social media even though Google doesn’t index on social media. However, the rankings could still increase and as soon as the hype dies down the product could drop. There’s always a correlation between things. Who knows what came first but if something is trending people will search more.

Google’s whole marketing approach is that they want to give the users what the users want. If the users are searching for you and they’re not clicking on the competitor, it makes sense for you to rank number one. All of these factors have a correlating effect on the fact that if the user demand for you goes up the product demand goes up.

There were lots of independent providers of medical services doing really well in the SERP during the pandemic. They were doing better than other, bigger competitors that were not providing personalised services. That was because of an increase in demand and people looking for those services and saying great things about them. This was driven by people not being able to access GP services and the presence of alternate services offering a GP appointment on the same day. The big services were still operating on old models, so smaller GP services started to kill it in the SERPs. There’s always a correlating factor. They weren’t even doing any outreach, but just because of the situation at the time - the surge in people searching for those services - they started to see rankings and their ‘brand + product’ search grew exponentially. It was interesting to see these companies’ brand searches grow alongside their generic rankings. As demand for providers went down in terms of brand search, their generic rankings also dropped.”

Do SEOs need to do a better job of learning from traditional PR, especially the measure of brand exposure based on perceived opportunities? Should SEOs not shout about the impact SEO can have on brand uplift as much as they do?

“Yes, but it’s a difficult space - especially now we’re moving away from traditional link building. Most companies use PR agencies that take credit for securing coverage. It’s all about who gets the credit for that: is it the PR agency or the SEO department? We all know that it’s valuable and that’s how traditional PR has worked. But if it was the SEO team who secured the link, you should by all means scream and shout about it. Do a dance, and really track and measure. Lots of people are moving away from old school link building and are now working with big PR agencies that know how to get better coverage.”

What shouldn’t SEOs be doing in 2023? What’s seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive?

“The Google helpful content update was a godsend because it destroyed the content landscape. You often see the same page titles, and it’s difficult to distinguish what content is good and what’s bad. The art of doing broad keyword research and writing about something because your competitor is writing about it is what needs to stop.

Offering no unique perspective is pointless, and it’s an approach that will be eradicated. SEO is not just about content creation - we need to be thinking about new ways to add value. If you have nothing unique to say, it’s not worth adding to the millions and millions of pieces of duplicate content out there. It’ll be interesting to see how Google polices this as a big brand with a big authority kind of view.

Hopefully, the helpful content update will kill the myriad of trashy, same-title types of content. People will write things from a unique perspective instead of just because a competitor has a page about something on their site. SEO is not just about content creation so we should be looking for new ways to add value.”

Miracle Inameti-Archibong is Head of SEO at John Lewis Finance and you can find her at miracleinametiarchibong.com.