SEO Evangelization: Explaining the Value of SEO by Connecting the Data Dots

SEO evangelization is the continuous process of advocating the awareness of search engine optimization (SEO). It sheds light on how SEO works and helps businesses align their SEO goals with wider business objectives. 

As a valuable marketing tool, SEO improves website visibility, drives traffic, enhances user experience, and raises your website’s credibility.

In a survey conducted by Hubspot, 88% of marketers using SEO strategies plan to invest more in SEO. Elsewhere, 49% of marketers say that organic search has the best return on investment (ROI) compared to other marketing channels. 

This shows that SEO is a viable business investment, so you should make it a fundamental part of your digital marketing plan. 

The article will connect the dots between data and reveal the true value of SEO and why it is important for businesses to prioritize it.

Understanding Search Engine Algorithms for SEO

Search engines locate, understand, and arrange online content to present the most relevant results to the user's search query. 

Google is the leading search engine, with a 91.02% market share. It is followed by Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo, with each accounting for less than 10%.

Google also processes an estimated 8.5 billion searches a day. This is a lot of search queries to sift through, and for your page to be among the search results, your content has first to be detected by its crawlers.

If they can't find your content, then there's no chance your site will ever appear on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Ideally, this is the most vital bit of the SEO puzzle. So, knowing how Google’s algorithm works to rank information is critical for your business.

Notably, Google search works in three phases (crawling, indexing, ranking), but not every page goes through to the final stage.

Let’s now closely examine each stage.

Crawling

Crawling is simply finding available pages on the web. Keep in mind that Google doesn't have a central registry for every web page, so it has to constantly look for new and updated pages to include them in its record of discovered pages.

After a URL discovery, Google may crawl the page using its Googlebot. Googlebot applies an algorithmic process to decide which site to crawl, the crawl frequency, and the number of pages to fetch from every website.

Google crawlers are programmed in such a way that they don't crawl the site rapidly to prevent overloading it. But Google crawlers don't crawl every discovered page. For example, if you have disallowed your page for crawling, Google won't crawl it. Also, if some of your pages are only accessible after logging into the site, Google doesn't crawl them.

Crawling frequency varies depending on the website’s size and complexity and can take a few days or weeks. You can monitor the progress using the Index status or the URL inspection tool. 

If you add or make changes to any of your pages, ensure you request Google to re-index the pages. However, if you have site sections that you don't want Google crawlers to access, you can create a robots.txt file with the applicable rules.

If your site has over 10,000 unique pages and changes rapidly, say daily, or it has many URLs classified as 'Discovered - currently not indexed,' you need to manage your crawl budget. 

What is a Site's Crawl Budget?

This is the cluster of URLs that a Google crawler can and seeks to crawl. It is simply the sum of crawl capacity and crawl demand. 

To ensure Googlebot crawls your site without straining your servers, it computes the crawl capacity limit based on:

• Crawl health: If your site reacts rapidly, the crawl limit increases using more crawl connections. If it delays or causes server errors, the limit decreases, which lowers the crawls.
• Google's crawling limit: Though Google has numerous machines, they are not infinite. So, it chooses the resources to use when crawling.

Google isn't in a rush to crawl your site. Google takes as much time as needed, depending on your site's update frequency, size, page relevance, and more. 

Hence, the crawl demand is dependent on:

• Perceived inventory: Googlebot automatically crawls all of your site's URLs. If you have URL duplicates or other URLs you don't want crawled, it wastes more crawling time.
• Staleness: Google systems regularly recrawl documents to capture any updates.
• Popularity: Google crawls popular internet URLs for fresher indexing.

How to Improve Your Crawling Efficiency?

Here are the best practices to increase your crawling efficiency.

• Merge duplicate content to ensure crawling is focused on unique content instead of unique URLs.
• Use robots.txt to block pages you don't want displayed in search engines. This remarkably lowers the likelihood of unnecessary URL indexing.
• Return a 404 or 410 status code for pages you've permanently removed. The status codes signal Google not to recrawl your pages. But, your blocked URLs stay on your crawl queue longer to be recrawled after removing the block.
• Remove soft 404 errors, which unnecessarily lower your crawl budget.
• Update your sitemaps by including every content you want crawled. If your site has updated content, use the <lastmod> tag to let Google discover when the page was last updated.
• Optimize your page load speed to enable Google to load and render your pages swiftly.
• Keep track of your site crawling for availability issues and find methods to boost your crawling.

Indexing

After crawling, Google seeks to understand your page’s content, including tags, attributes, images, and more. The process involves judging whether your page is similar to another web page or canonical. Canonical is the page that may be displayed in search results. 

Google clusters the pages with the same content and chooses their best representative. The other grouped pages become alternate categories to be served in various contexts, such as mobile device searches or users searching for a particular page in that cluster.

Also, Google gathers canonical page signals, which may include page language or page usability and may be used to serve the page results.

Some issues that may prevent your page from indexing include:

• Low-quality content: To determine the quality of your content, Google examines the Search essentials, including technical requirements, spam policies, and central best practices. 
• Disallow indexing: noindex rule prevents Google from indexing your content. When Google crawler finds and pulls out the tag, it completely drops the page from Google search results, irrespective of whether other sites are linking to it.
• Website design: Ensure your website design does not block indexing. It should be user-friendly and easy to navigate.

Tips to Optimize Indexing

• Ensure your content is unique and high quality and your links lead users to relevant and credible information.
• Read the webmaster guidelines and ensure your site adheres to them. Keep in mind that your site isn't meant for search engines but for users. So, if it doesn't meet the webmaster guidelines, it will most likely not index even after submitting a sitemap.
• Avoid using hidden text as it won't be visible to visitors but only gives Googlebot divergent content.
• Ditch keyword stuffing and focus on unique and high-quality content related to your chosen keywords.
• Avoid buying links or engaging in link exchange programs that are worthless to your visitors. Ensure your links are genuine and help your visitors find better content.
• If using a SEO company, ensure they follow the correct SEO information and not shortcuts to manipulate the search results.

Ranking

When a visitor types a search query, Google machines look for relevant pages in the index and display the results to the user. The relevance of the results may be determined by the user's search device, language, or geographical location. 

Say a user searches for "auto repair services." The search results would differ for a user in Germany from one in Italy. 

Note that the features of the search results also vary depending on the user's search query. Say a user searches for "auto repair services," the search results would likely include local businesses and probably exclude images. 

You can use Google Search Console (GSC) to check whether your page is ranked. If the page doesn't appear in search results, check if:

• Your page content is irrelevant: Anticipate the user's search behavior, such as different search terms and writing, and tailor your content with your readers in mind.
• Content quality: Create helpful and relevant content, and use phrases that users would likely type to search for your content. Ensure these key phrases are strategically placed in the title, alt, and link text. You can also use content optimization tools to analyze your content.
• noindex rules: Ensure these rules aren't preventing serving because Google won’t pick up the page.

Adapting to Google Algorithms 

Google makes several algorithm changes in a year, and some of the updates are so tiny that they often go unnoticed. However, it periodically rolls out extensive algorithm updates that considerably affect the SERPs.

The latest was the explicit fake content update to deal with explicit deep fakes. Google also implemented the June 2024 spam update targeting websites that violate its policies. These updates, among others, affect your website's performance. 

For example, the core algorithm update caused some websites to lose 60% of organic traffic.

Here are significant past Google algorithm updates.

Since Google algorithms keep unfolding, you need to be updated on the latest trends and developments and adjust your SEO strategy to stay ahead of the competition.

Here’s what you can do to adapt to an update.

• Stay calm: Avoid making huge content changes unless you certainly know the improvements to effect. Wait until the update is complete to get enough insights on the signals Google is prioritizing.
• Examine your SEO data: Use GSC to get analytics data at least 7 days before the update starts rolling out and 7 days after. Compare the changes in site impressions, clickthrough rates, and average position.
• Determine major changes and patterns: Take an open-eyed and detailed look at your website to find the extent of update impact and significant patterns. This will help you spot issues that may hurt your rankings and strategize how to deal with them.
• Follow SEO best practices: Audit your content to ensure it follows Google’s best practices to give users the best experience and avoid Google penalties.

Key Metrics for Measuring SEO Success

Monitoring your SEO performance based on key data metrics like traffic, ranking, and conversions helps establish the value of SEO and how it aligns with your marketing goals. 

Ever heard of the saying  'If you can track something, you can upgrade it?' That also applies to SEO. Examining your SEO success helps you hinge your content when issues arise. 

Let's look at the SEO success metrics. 

• Organic traffic: On average, the first five Google SERPs get 67.60% of clicks from desktop searches, and 66.93% from mobile searches. So, if your page ranks on the first page but gets no clicks, it’s a point of concern, and you should examine the cause.
• Keyword rankings: They measure your website's position on the SERPs for a specific query. The higher your keyword ranking, the more traffic your site is likely to get. Always track your rankings as they often change, especially after a major Google update.
• Conversions: These are "key events" that measure your site's effectiveness in transforming visitors into customers or leads. You can use Google Analytics to track your key events.
• Impressions: This refers to how often your site is visited over a certain period. Your aim should be to attract meaningful impressions from users who find your content useful. The saying "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is definitely not applicable to users' best interests. This is because getting clicks from users who don't find value in your content and leave immediately is an unhealthy method to build your website traffic and brand loyalty.

Aligning SEO with Business Objectives

In SEO evangelization, ensuring your SEO goals align with your business goals is important for your business’s long-term accomplishments. 

Your goals should match the SMART framework (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) and demonstrate to stakeholders how the strategy expands your market share.

SEO should be tied to your objectives to ensure your business has a purpose and avoid resource wastage.

Here are key SEO goals and how they impact your business.

• Lead Generation: Qualified leads are likely to convert. Ensure your data collection forms are short to make the user sign-up process easier. This also helps optimize your sales funnel for increased conversions.
• Sales: Good SEO strategies increase your online business visibility and exposure to prospective customers. Ensure you identify your audience and keyword and use conversion rate optimization (CRO) to simplify the transaction process.
• Brand awareness: SEO enhances brand awareness by making your site visible in SERPs. You can boost brand awareness by targeting non-branded, long-tail keywords with lower keyword difficulty ratings. Optimizing your content for specific search terms raises your chances of appearing in SERPs, and potential clients will often interact with your content, raising your brand awareness.

Turn SEO Perspectives into Action

SEO is a powerful digital marketing technique that helps boost sales, raise brand awareness, and secure a competitive edge. This is why SEO evangelization is important in ensuring your organization’s team members understand SEO’s value and its impact on business. A shared commitment helps in developing approaches that drive satisfactory business growth.

Search engine algorithms are always updating, so you should stay informed and continuously adapt. This ensures you don't miss opportunities or have your business knocked out of the race. 

When you prioritize SEO and leverage data, you set your business above the competition and secure long-term growth.