Like social media platforms, search engines and other data aggregators and presenters have their own priorities and expectations that they wish to achieve for their user base.
Different data companies patent and protect their secret sauce for evaluating and presenting data, and these methods and formats are constantly being tweaked and tested for quality. However, at the end of the day the sophisticated algorithms really point to one clear truth that is very different now than it was a decade ago – rather than try to game the algorithms, understand the first rule of attracting traffic – content quality is king.
Improving content quality is the single biggest change that you can make to your site that will drive quality traffic into your customer experience. That experience, sometimes referred to as a customer journey, is an intricate interplay that is defined by dozens of web presence factors, but if you have not put enough time and energy on the quality of the content you present, your traffic will inevitably self-correct and suffer as indices and users discover your weak spots and bail out on the process.
Once you present high quality information, understand the second rule of attracting traffic – content accessibility is queen. Underlying the overall customer experience is the user experience or user interface design – the elements that provide access, form and structure for your content. This is a complex and evolving approach and does require a lot of experiential data to fine tune. Much of what interface designs you use will depend heavily on the computer savvy of your primary audience and on what devices.
Now that you have quality content that is accessible, we shift to the third rule – actionable content aligns with the purpose of search. Integrated into every search engine’s incentive is the provision of highly actionable items to people who are looking for something to do, something to know, or somewhere to go. If you align the modality of your content with actionable on-ramps into your customer journey, you provide search engines with the justification they need to rank your content highly. Do verbs or nouns dominate your space? Is your content passive or interactive?
Not everyone has the authority or brand knowledge to command high priority search results, but for each stage in the development of an enterprise there is an approach that will earn you the clout and standing necessary to move rungs up the ladder. Purpose-driven content with clear use cases will always stand out as the answer to specific problems. Getting solutions represented in well-establish solutions aggregator and review platforms is also an important way to get your foot in the door for industries where choices are plentiful and users benefit from being able to do comparative analysis between your offerings and your competition.
Properly leveraging reviews can not only help you in the social media space, but in the general search engine space – though the criteria for determining relevance to the query and the audience is a bit more opaque.
When it comes to data quality, advances are also developing in web standards that allow you to provide machine readable indexing and modeling cues to the automated process that peruse your web property for results-worthy content. Categorizing your data using rich metadata and structured content or JSON-LD gives search engines the ability to categorize and parse extra meaning and relationships within your content. This can provide access to more precise indices than you may normally get through a simple web page index.
In terms of accessibility and performance, there is a considerable amount of transparency that is provided by search engine companies regarding the priority they place on mobile accessibility, color accessibility, page loading time, when the layout last changed, when the last layout content piece was loaded, and many others. If you have not evaluated your web presence for how they perform in these categorize, you may find yourself missing out on ranking that your content deserves.
Finally, it is generally necessary to pull together well targeted and fairly prices paid positions – but this should always be done with a strategic eye towards increasing organic traffic. Truthfully, the ultimate goal of all of your traffic building efforts is to find ways to drive as much organic traffic to your web presence as you possibly can. The more direct organic traffic you can generate, the less you need to depend on the whims of data companies and their performance and user preferences and priorities.