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It can be a melancholy feeling when summer comes to an end and the last patches of sunburn are still itching on our skin. But search engine optimisation is exempt from these feelings, as our time is only just getting started. You can find out all about it in September’s SEO News.

Freedom through SEO

The attractiveness of search engine optimisation lies in its great degree of freedom and independence. Multinational corporations are not making money from it, and, when it comes to good conduct in the SEO industry, Google, Microsoft and other major players are not investing much more than some cheap stationery from the Far East. It is therefore with great pride, that we can hold our heads high and say that in our discipline, it is the most creative minds and not the biggest budgets that determine success or failure.

But that doesn’t mean that we get it right every time. In the fight for visibility and conversions, search engine optimisation has also left a trail of devastation in its wake over the last 20 years. Blogs, user forums, bookmark collections, infographics – whenever there has been an opportunity to misuse a meaningful feature through overpopulation and overstatement for our own purposes, we have usually taken it. For the majority of content and formats concerned, this usually meant the end. Nobody really likes to remember the ugly, keyword-filled spam pages promoting “cheap car insurance” from the middle of the last decade.

But every ending must have a beginning. One collective achievement of our industry that cannot be overstated is its evolutionary professionalisation. As a consequence of this, both spam and black hat SEO have been marginalised, and sometimes it puzzles those who take an interest how a relatively small, scattered crowd of enthusiasts across the globe managed to tackle a problem that few people at the time ever anticipated could become one. From its beginnings with nerdy, lone wolves who organised in loose networks, our discipline has evolved into a veritable agency business. Today, search engine optimisers are also firmly established in-house at most companies with a digital business presence.

The NOFOLLOW frenzy

Something that has changed little over the years, however, is the incredible tendency of the SEO industry to throw itself into discussions and conflicts with genuine enthusiasm, as if there were no tomorrow. A topical example at the moment is the discussion surrounding NOFOLLOW links. To quickly bring everyone up to speed on the issue, NOFOLLOW is an HTML attribute that can be used to tag links to control the crawling of a website by search engines and to differentiate relevant content from promotional offers. It is a method that is 15 years old – almost as old as search engines themselves.

There was great excitement earlier this month when Google published an article on its Webmaster Blog announcing an evolution of the NOFOLLOW concept. From March 2020, two new link attributes will be activated to help separately display sponsored and user-generated content. This is a meaningful extension of the existing concept, which is particularly useful for large marketplaces and shops with different forms of content.

And the entire SEO industry quickly jumped onto this latest bandwagon. Between wanting to deliver the best result to the client and the fear of missing out on an important innovation or trend, news is rapidly being spread that suggests immediate action, prophesies nightmarish scenarios for the future, or advises that it is best just to wait. As is often the case, only the Google liaison officers Gary Illyes and Danny Sullivan have been able to provide some calm to the SEO bubble.

SEO – a collaborative model with a future

However, this process is a fine example of how search engine optimisation has maintained its pioneering spirit despite larger budgets and increased responsibility. We discuss and experiment passionately across borders, even at the risk of this being an exhausting experience at times. The result of this 20-year passion project is ultimately a clear increase in the quality and user-friendliness of digital products.

For example, the transition to mobile Internet without SEO as a catalyst would, between industry standards and users, have run much less swiftly and smoothly. The channel of “organic” coverage, which is often ridiculed today, has lost nothing of its importance in information-finding and e-commerce. And that is why specialists who can navigate between closed systems and highly polished “user journeys” on the wide river of human intentions and needs will continue to be of key importance in the future.

The fact that digital marketing can only be successful with teamwork always becomes clear when half of your colleagues are on their summer holiday. In this holiday edition of the SEO News for August, we therefore take a look at the best colleagues in the world.

The engine room is where it all comes together

Beyond the glossy campaigns, big budgets and sparkling offices of advertising, there’s a world without whose dedication and expertise the lights would only shine half as bright, reach would only be half as wide and many grand promises would merely remain empty words. While the combination of creative ideas and empirical analysis may be seen as the future course of the digital transformation in marketing, its successful development in many areas has so far remained nothing more than betting on technical skills: the R&D department. But this doesn’t have to mean reinventing the world.

Even beyond disruptive transformations, internal and external developers, database experts and software architects are responsible for building and maintaining our digital marketplaces, networks and service platforms. In their hands lies the key to excellent performance and the targeted connection of current content with a user experience suitable for everyday life. They can also safeguard faultless data collection and, above all, legally binding business transactions. It’s not a matter of chance that all these points have become the focus of search engine optimisation in recent years.

The search engine optimiser – a digital caretaker

Tongue in cheek, you could say that search engine optimisers (SEOs) take on the caretaking work for the Googles, Bings and Baidus of this world. They ensure barrier-free access and use clever markers to provide the necessary orientation for search engines within their digital real estate. In the case of renovations or conversions, the search enginer optimiser also makes sure that loads and costs are avoided for users and owners where possible. This job necessarily involves tinkering in the engine room and seeking a constructive relationship with colleagues at the controls.

In an article for the magazine Searchenginejournal, Rachel Costello, technical SEO at the US technology provider Deep Crawl, has now accused developers of having a lack of understanding for the implications of their work. Costello claims many technicians are unaware of the potential consequences for the volume and quality of organic reach that “simply changing or removing a line of code” entails. In milder words, John Müller of Google advocates more understanding on both sides: “I’d like it if more SEOs would work together with developers,” the Swiss Webmaster Trends Analyst responded at the end of last year to a question about which topics should be the focus of the search industry in 2019. Unfortunately, experience shows that understanding for the work of other colleagues is rather lacking.

Mutual misunderstanding leads to wasted time and money

There’s not only a lack of knowledge of abilities and tasks. More importantly, marketing and R&D departments rarely get together to discuss how shared priorities could be organised and managed. Since SEO-relevant changes are often not entirely critical for a website’s operation, communication can drag on for weeks or months before they are implemented, especially for large, international platforms. The consequences of inadequate understanding and deficient communication are wasted time and money in a business environment where taking up the cause of agility and efficiency can’t come fast enough.  But it’s also true that the engine room feels pressure from many sides as the technological bottleneck in the company, and that its operations are shaped by standardised processes.

Likewise, it can hardly be an advantage if a large share of SEOs in companies and agencies come out from the “content corner” and often struggle to follow the relentless technological change of the web.

It’s the users who suffer

But ultimately, it’s not the developers or marketing staff who suffer. Instead, it’s the users who have to deal with slow webpages, awkward user guidance or frustrating 404 error pages. For this reason, it’s the job of search engine optimisation to leave the confines of caretaking and seek active collaboration with developers and technical service providers. This primarily includes taking ownership of processes and priorities in the technology department as well as clearly formulating the goals and dependencies of SEO work. Our experience has shown that, as an agency and tool provider, it is important to be flexible and to limit SEO roadmaps to what is feasible. This doesn’t mean getting as many measures off the ground as possible, but identifying and prioritising appropriate and manageable actions together.

The challenge for modern, successful SEO work lies precisely in this interface role between marketing and developer teams. Being mindful of the possibilities and constraints of the client and actively sharing knowledge with technical staff create the basis for establishing active governance with the aim of efficiently and profitably activating the search channel.

After all, once R&D and SEOs get talking and begin to learn from one another, they may soon realise that they simply work on different sides of the same coin.

At 40 degrees in the shade, Germany’s favourite pastime – watching television – is suddenly becoming irrelevant. A shame, because just as the summer heatwave is setting in, the relationship between TV devices and search engines is being newly configured. Find out why this is, and why special consideration should be given to voice-based search technology when it comes to younger and older target groups, in July’s edition of SEO News.

TV and search engines – two very different siblings on a bonding session

As we swelter our way through the summer of 2019, the global economy is beginning to look distinctly overcast, with world export champion Germany particularly badly hit. These developments force many companies to review their spending on marketing and advertising. Digital advertising channels provide the advantage (at least in theory) of permitting a direct comparison between costs and benefit, with the price of a conversion or ROI and ROAS with respect to budget allocated being generally straightforward to plan and calculate. This is less easy in the case of TV campaigns, however, which have an extensive reach that cannot be assessed with the same precision.

That’s why it’s in the interest of the advertising industry to start paying closer attention to the interplay between the two channels, in order to explore possible synergetic effects.  Although the question of how TV/display devices and search engines impact on one another is by no means a new one, the interesting thing is that both organic and paid searches are increasingly coming to be seen as the link between a sometimes diffuse TV impact and a company’s actual turnover.

Calls-to-action as a tool for generating higher demand

As New York trade journal Digiday reports, increasing numbers of American companies are beginning to examine their attribution models in order to establish how their TV presence is reflected in organic search requests and in the performance of their paid search campaigns. An increase in search requests for brand terms in particular can be stimulated not only by increased investment in TV and display device campaigns, but also by direct cues to search such as “Just Google XYZ”, or “Search for XYZ”, which can significantly increase search volumes via conventional media channels, the report reveals.

Although this creative approach has been in use for some years in the USA and the UK, in Germany it remains the exception rather than the rule. The setup enables analytics data from searches to be harnessed to optimize cross-media campaign planning throughout the customer journey. The approaches that enable conventional high-reach campaigns to stimulate awareness can be measured in the form of changes in search volumes, and the cost of paid search conversions used in turn to deliver the TV campaign’s ROI/ROAS. Sustained SEO work also enables newly-gained organic search volumes to be directed to landing pages with high conversion rates in a targeted way. This makes it possible to ensure an optimal user experience all the way from couch to conversion. As agency Mediaplus has established in a joint study with SevenOne Media and Google, similar advertising effects can also be achieved with the help of Google’s video search engine YouTube. This is why it’s high time that the long-standing competition between marketing siblings TV and search engines was ended, so that tight budgets can be used more effectively and efficiently in times of economic difficulty. After all, family needs to stick together.

Who’s talking to Alexa?

Even in an industry as latently hypereuphoric as ours, the tense hype about the possibilities and blessings of voice search technology has finally given way to a sober realism. We’ve pointed out here many times in the past that voice search is little more than an extension of the human-machine interface for search engines, and that its substantive developments in terms of new forms of interaction would most likely be unable to satisfy the high expectations surrounding them. As is now being reported, the expert prediction that by 2020 around 50% of all search requests will be made using voice technology was simply the result of an incorrect interpretation of data from the People’s Republic of China.

Voice search user numbers are also growing independently of this minor market research fail, of course. This is primarily due to the likewise inflationary market launch of dialogue-capable devices. US marketing agency Path conducted a global survey to investigate how the new technology is being used by different target groups on different platforms. The study delivered multifaceted results: Around 70% of participants reported using voice search on a weekly basis. A quarter use the technology as often as three times a day. When the respondents are divided into age groups, it’s striking that users at the lower (13-18 years) and upper (65+ years) ends of the spectrum in particular report using voice technology on a regular basis.

A glance at the used search systems reveals that the oldest user group communicates most often (approximately 57% of all group respondents) with Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa. Around 28% of respondents in the youngest target group aged between 18 and 22 likewise prefer the Echo/Alexa family produced by the technology giant from Seattle. This suggests that the best way to reach these especially solvent and tech-savvy groups is to employ a combination of conventional voice-based SEO with structured data and product data automation, like Amazon SEO. Such a combination is something that many agencies on the German market have yet to offer.

As we sweat through the first heatwave of summer 2019, Google is slowly but surely coming under pressure from the US antitrust watchdogs. That’s why in June’s edition of SEO News, we will be examining whether the search engine should be seriously concerned about the possibility of being broken up.

Google is set to become a global portal

Since Donald Trump’s election to President of the United States, governance on the other side of the Atlantic has not been quite as rigorous as it once was. Given that no important legislation is being passed in Washington D.C. anymore, politicians are even more eager to figure out how they got into this mess in the first place. That’s why the bosses of digital giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple are being summoned by Congress, in no particular order, for the purposes of fact-finding and damage limitation. With the threat of antitrust laws being used to break up the corporation hanging over his head like a sword of Damocles, last December Google CEO Sundar Pichai was also forced to answer the question of what his company is doing with its legendary reach. More precisely put: How many hits does Google forward to third-party sites as a conventional search engine, and how much of this reach does the company retain for commercial exploitation and monetisation on its own Alphabet Holding websites and apps?

The answer Pichai gave at the time was not terribly helpful; rather than citing specific figures, he instead made vague statements about the distinctive characteristics of the user journey in Search. The search engine from Mountain View is also about to turn this user journey completely on its head: At the recent search marketing conference SMX Advanced in Seattle, observers were in agreement, for example, that Google is becoming increasingly less a search engine and much more a portal.

Clickstream data confirm the trend

A recent blog post from SEO aficionado Rand Fishkin conveniently fills in the gap in the numbers. Using clickstream data from analytics firm Jumpshot for the US market, he showed that around half of the approximately 150 billion Google hits in the US in 2018 were so-called ‘no-click searches’ – in other words, end points of the user journey, with no further click to a third-party site following the search request. This means that Google answers every second user’s query on its own website, thereby itself becoming the end point of the user journey.

New design layouts and clickable features in its once cleanly structured search results give the impression that Google is increasingly taking on the function of a classic web portal, according to the intention of the user request. What’s more, Google forwards around twelve percent of clicks to its own third-party sites, such as YouTube, according to Jumpshot data. According to Fishkin, what is not known is how many search requests are forwarded to a Google app such as Maps or Gmail on mobile devices and opened in those. This still leaves a significant proportion of more than 40 percent – over 60 billion clicks annually – that are forwarded to third-party sites as organic traffic on the Internet.

His traffic analysis also shows that the total number of these clicks has remained relatively consistent overall over the past three years. On the other hand, organic traffic from mobile end devices is falling sharply compared to desktop devices. This can be attributed to the increasing preference for paid and local search results on the small screen. The reason this decline in organic traffic from mobile searches is not yet being felt by website operators, according to Fishkin, is that Google’s reach continues to grow rapidly.

Google is standing at a crossroads

Let’s recap: Google is capitalising on most of its traffic growth on its own websites and apps. This loss of potential visitors to third-party websites is currently being offset by Google’s steep overall growth, however. One of the major reasons for this development is that the search engine from Mountain View no longer differs all that much from its commercial competitors – the price comparison and shopping platforms – when it comes to certain structured search requests, such as for flights, hotels or cinema listings.

The hearings before Congress and investigations reportedly launched by the US Department of Justice are therefore coming at the right time. Google must decide whether it wants to be a search engine or an omniscient universal portal. The diversification of its business model should not come at a cost to other market players.

The best way forward is always together. This key phrase characterizes not only the message of the Easter holiday, but also the SEO news for the month of April.

Why IT security is so relevant for SEO performance

Search machine optimisers are happy to label themselves as their customers’ caretaker. After all, SEOs stick their noses into almost all areas of the organisation and operation of digital assets such as websites or apps. Conscientious SEOs are not only required as strategic analysts, but also as nagging quibblers who are at some point confronted with security issues in addition to structural, content-related, and technical problems. Marketing staff are not responsible for IT security, of course, but a lack of awareness of online security is certainly capable of negatively influencing performance in search engines. Today’s basic SEO knowledge base should include the fact that the use of secured client-server connections by means of the HTTPS protocol of search engines has now become an essential quality factor. At least as important as these formal security components, however, is the monitoring of automated bot traffic on one’s own servers, for instance. The multitude of bots has perfectly legitimate purposes when it comes to website crawling. The best example of this is domain indexing for a search engine. According to a current study from the US bot specialist Distil Networks, however, around 19 percent of all active bots have darker motives. These include copying copyrighted content, looking for potential vulnerabilities on a given server, or even the distribution of malware. In total and over time, these generally unproblematic bot attacks can cause throttling of the loading speed or even completely prevent the delivery of websites.

Both have immediate negative affects on visibility within search engines. In addition to automated attacks, the topic of hacking in particular also takes the limelight. The term hacking refers to the act of changing content on a website through illegitimate intrusions from the outside. According to information from an analysis from the world’s largest domain handler, Go Daddy, around 73 percent of all hacked websites are taken over and changed for purely SEO reasons. In most cases, sites with relatively high authority are hacked in a specific topic area in order to deter potential visitors or to set up illegitimate links. The gravest consequences of such a hack would not only be the potential damage caused via search engines, such as a loss in incoming traffic and visibility, but also direct harm to website visitors due to fraudulent acquisition of their personal data (phishing) or direct infection with malware via infected downloads.

Strong together

The consequences of insufficient IT security for marketing and searching can be so severe that this creates a great commonality between the two areas. Neither effective search engine optimization nor comprehensive IT security can be outsourced; they must be the result of shared responsibility and teamwork. Those who continue to compartmentalise their thinking and organisation will not really be successful in either area.