Three main players that impact your SEO efforts

Search Engines

Search engines set the rules to play by. They decide which information sources get shown, in what order, for which search query.

Their aim is to organize information and make it easy for searchers to find for what they are looking for. You have the same job.

Understand their rules and play by them. Make it easy for search engines to find your information.

Searchers

Searchers' attention is what you are playing for. They determine website popularity as searchers decide which websites provide good information and which ones not to visit.

Their aim is to find information that answer their questions. Your job is to provide that information in a user-friendly format.

Understand their information needs and provide information accordingly.

Business Environment

Other information providers shape your information space. They decide which topics become competitive by also covering those.

Their aim is to also provide information to relevant topics. Competitors who inform better than you do can harm your visibility.

Understand their information strategies and outsmart them. Also, identify enhancers (like business news sites) and partner up with those.

How do search engines impact your SEO efforts?

In order to win for SEO, you need to understand that search engines are businesses, too.

Search engines generate revenue from selling ads. Each time a user clicks on ads, the advertiser (mostly a business) pays a fee to the search engine.

Advertisers want their ads to be seen by many people to attract potential customers. So, search engines need to attract many people to use their search function. To do so, they have one goal: make searchers happy.

Searchers are happy when they easily find information they are looking for. Thus, search engines aim to provide a great search experience. To do so, they provide content to their searchers that is valuable and that is from sites that can be trusted.

How do search engines find information?

Search engines are answer machines. They exist to discover, understand, and organize the internet's content in order to offer the most relevant results to the questions searchers are asking. To do so, search engines work through three primary functions:

Crawling

This is the discovery phase.

Search engine robots (known as crawlers, bots, or spiders) continously crawl the Internet to find new or updated content.

Content could be webpages, images, videos, PDFs, or similar, that have a unique URL.

To discover new content, spiders crawl the web by means of links. A new webpage that has been published on a website can only be discovered if old pages are linking to the new content. This is why links play an important role for SEO, as they are the highways of the information space.

Indexing

This is the organization phase.

The crawlers collect information of the discovered content (such as the title, content type, topic, keywords, publisher brand, etc.) and add it to a massive database of discovered URLs. This database is called the index.

Imagine the index like the Shop.Vestas product catalogue. New products are being added regularly. To keep track of which products we have, product names, IDs, descriptions, images, and other details are being added to our database in order to later show them to customers on Shop.Vestas.

Ranking

This is the ordering phase.

When you perform a search, search engines go through their index for relevant content and then order that content in the hopes of solving the search query. This ordering of search results by relevance is known as ranking. The higher a website is ranked, the more relevant the search engine believes that site to be for a search.

To be ranked high in searches, website owners try to provide well structured content on their pages that use the same language as searchers.

How do searchers impact your SEO efforts?

Searchers determine the popularity of websites.

Searchers' interaction with our website in search results as well as searchers' behaviour when visiting our website sends signals to search engines. Poor interaction, such as quickly leaving without clicking anything, signals poor user-expereince. Search engines favour popular websites and tend to rank them higher, as those seem to do a better job at satisfying users' search intent.

To provide a good search experience, we want to understand

- What types of people are we trying to attract into your website (investors, potential employees, industry experts, potential customers, etc.)?
- What topics and what type of information are they looking for? What format should we provide this information as (pdf, diagram, list, catalogue, etc.)?
- What words are they using to search for information? Do we speak their language or do we only use industry terms only experts know?

Understand search intent

So what are they looking for? The good news is the answer is already on search engine results pages. Google your ideal keyword to see the search results that the search engines have deemed as the most appropriate for what our audience is looking for.

This is a crucial step not to leave out before creating content for our audience. Inside Vestas, we talk a lot about blades and blade replacement. Your mind is set up to think of a wind turbine in that context. The majority of searchers, however, are looking for razor blades or tutorials how to replace lawn mover blades. Make sure you understand the searcher's intent!

The key to understanding search intent: step out of Vestas and take an outside-in perspective. Do you communicate in industry-jargon or can you explain things to your mum?

Focus on topics over keywords

It’s important to understand that entire websites don’t rank for keywords – pages do. Ideally, you want to create one page (and one page only!) for each topic that you want to appear in search results for.

You basically want to look at each page on your site and assign a central topic to it. If you need to assign multiple topics to one page, you may need to optimize. If you have multiple pages covering the same topic, you may need to optimize. If you find that you don't have a page for a specific topic, you may want to create one. The goal is to be the most comprehensive page that fully informs about one topic.

The key to good content: it's like a mini skirt – long enough to fully cover the subject, short enough to keep things interesting. If readers have to look elsewhere in addition to your content, you need inform better.

How does your business environment impact your SEO?

There are two aspects to how your business environment impacts your SEO efforts:

Internal Business Environment

Your internal business environment determine strategic business goals that you need to take into consideration for SEO activities. So, for example, whether your goal is to get more traffic or to get more conversions, you need to focus on different things. So always look at your key metrics and goals and work from there. Tip: define in advance to not loose focus.

Your internal business environment may also set restraints on resources and capabilities needed for SEO and content efforts. Maintaining a large website takes time and efforts. SEO is not something you do for one month and then you are done – it's an ongoing initiative that requires multiple teams to agree on and work towards shared objectives.

Your brand identity and brand recognition also determines the types of content you need to focus on. If your content doesn't align with your brand in the long run, it's not really a very good use of your time.

External Business Environment

Many of us are familiar with who our direct competitors are in terms of products or services. But when it comes to SEO, there are informational competitors we need to get to know.

Informational competitors are information sources providing information to our ideal audience. Their aim is to attract the same readers to their webpages that we want to reach out to, which takes away the attention from our brand.

Informational competitors are not necessarily companies within our industry. They could also be industry blogs, wind energy industry associations, technical forums, e-commerce websites, or the media. We may also have different informational competitors for different parts of our website. For example, we compete against associations and blogs when talking about sustainability and energy transition topics, but we may compete against e-commerce sites when selling spare parts.

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