Image courtesy Google.
This month brought the digital marketing community an increasingly-rare occurrence: a video straight from official leader of webspam at Google, Matt Cutts, who is also the unofficial public face of all things relating to algorithm changes at Google.
Cutts’ video details somewhat exactly what SEOs (or search engine optimizers) should be expecting in the coming year from the search engine giant. Needless to say, this video provides some valuable insight as to where this industry is headed, the potential ramifications, and some greatly awaited benefits for small to medium sized businesses.
Along with this analysis of the video, this guide will also discuss the major aspects of SEO pre-2012 vs. 2013 for small to medium sized businesses, why pre-2012 SEO is dead, and future expectations for the industry from our SEO experts. And as always, feel free to email our team if you have any questions.
While major algorithm updates from Google (such as Panda 1.0 in February 2011 and Penguin in April 2012) have become the ire of a vast gang of digital marketers who employ cheaply created content and SPAM, we at BWD have never been more excited for the changes coming with Panda 2.0. This feeling is founded in the fact that our clients have understood the need for high quality content and creative digital network building as a means to SEO, and that these latest changes will only further pay off their great work.
Why Pre-2012 SEO is Dead
Google’s Panda update in February 2011 ate up cruddy search results faster than this real life pand could eat her bamboo.
Prior to the latest major hit to Google’s search results with Panda 1.0 and Penguin, inbound links–the gold standard in driving up one’s rankings in search engine results pages–were available cheaply and in great volume. A few snippets inserted into your website, a batch of 100 links purchased from a Chinese link building farm, and boom, many businesses were set. Low-end firms out of the Middle East, China, and other under developed countries would produce these batches for pennies with just a minimum amount of creativity and strategy baked in and certainly no employee benefits to be heard of. Whoever managed to reign supreme in purchasing masses of links, won on search engine results pages. Thus, big boy brands with plenty to spend saw their pages rise “artificially”–as was the case with the JC Penney SEO debacle in 2011–and the little guys continued to remain stuck in a mud of linkless purgatory, many pages down no matter how helpful their content would have been to a searcher.
Panda and Penguin changed this all, and in April 2012, the SEO landscape became decidedly must stricter for good. While many marketers cried that entire online businesses were ruined, and massive budgets now became meaningless, Google forged on in explaining that their mission was only ever to provide the most high quality, relevant pages possible, and to get spam out, of course staying relatively tight lipped as to how those provisions actually worked.
At this point, the cheap link building tactics via tireless foreign outsource teams have been over for quite some time, and gone with them, any notion of SEO framed around April 2012 practices or prior.
What the term “SEO” means in 2013 and onwards
Matt’s latest video is just one of the many pieces of evidence supporting our belief that Google is headed in a long term direction in ensuring “paid SEO link building” stays in the past. Instead, Google continually notes that website owners should be creating real, organic connections with other websites, building social capital thanks to excellent content, and producing more and more content that is just so great, it just has to be shared.
In this way, paid SEO companies, agencies, or consultants should only ever be working to achieve these ideals, and as one may suspect, the price of outsourcing real SEO to a third party has increased somewhat due to the skill required to create these connections. However, there’s a greater chance than ever for small and medium sized businesses to achieve these tasks cheaply and effectively in house if needed, and well within a responsible monthly budget if they cannot spare the resources. Otherwise, larger small businesses and medium sized businesses should actively be auditing their SEO’s work, or consider moving forward with an agency of a higher caliber.
Low Cost In House Solutions for Very Small Businesses
The added–and arguably more important–benefit of Penguin 2.0 is that the process of high quality, organic link building through creative digital networking is now more easily possible for the average website owner to maintain, given an expertly crafted content platform–like WordPress–from which to do so. While the actual process of creating the platform and initial copy strategy needed for an explosively impactful front page (for example) should still be left to a professional, all other SEO opportunities now lie in the hands of anyone with a creative mind, enough time, and an interest in producing content to share with a friendly, responsive network of others. In addition, there are increasingly few–if any–rigid guidelines to follow as they create that content, expect the natural inclusion of keywords relevant to their products and services such as locations, brand names, and basic product/service keywords or parameters.
Our Key Takeaways from Matt’s Video and Google’s Message
Check it out for yourself, and review our comments below:
Make a great site: We love this quote thanks to its true simplicity:
“Make a great site, that users love, that they’ll want to tell their friends about, book mark, come back to, visit over and over again. You know, all the things that make a site compelling. We try to make sure that if that’s you’re goal, we’re aligned with that goal [and will show users your site.]“
Matt further reassures websites–like our client’s–that have long stayed away from cheap tactics that,”If you’re doing high quality content whenever you’re doing SEO, this shouldn’t be a big surprise. You shouldn’t have to worry about a lot of different changes. If you’ve been hanging out on a lot of black hat forums [then you'll have problems.]”
Penguin 2.0 will be super thorough: Penguin 2.0 will only be more deeply rooting out the cheap tactics from pre-2012. Given the whirlwind reaction we had with Penguin 1.0 and Panda, many big brands and “cheaters” may be reeling even further in a few months when Panda 2.0 is released.
Traditionally, advertorials were found in newspapers or magazines as advertisements meant to blend in as editorials. These days in the digital world, it’s important that you clearly mark this paid type of advertising content as an ad, to ensure that 1. Google doesn’t penalize you for tricking visitors, and 2. to make sure that Google doesn’t carry any page rank or value over to the links in the advertorial. As Google reassures, digital advertorials are OK and a great way for digital publishers to make money, but they must be clearly marked. Check out Matt’s video on the topic of advertorials and search here.
Paid advertisements will be more easily found and penalized only if they’ve used with trickery to promote clicks: Penguin 2.0 will more clearly identify paid advertisements–of course through secret, properietary means–ensuring that no clicks pass on page rank or SEO value to the end website. Clear and conspicuous notices must to be included for advertorial type pieces of content–which Matt reassures us are absolutely OK–but these should never float page rank or value either. View another great video from Matt on advertorials and native editorial on YouTube here.
Penguin 2.0 will be more sophisticated than ever: The parts of the algorithim that focus on link analysis are becoming increasingly more sophisticated. While Matt is murky on the details here, we can only imagine this means more benefits for the little guy with great value in his or her company that shines through content marketing, and less for the giants who intend to do things cheaply and without much creativity at all.
More exposure to smaller, lesser known authority sources: Matt explains that Penguin 2.0 will focus a part of its energy on making those who are great authorities in a specific field more searchable and findable. Although the details on this angle are intentionally amorphous, we anticipate Cutt’s statements to mean that websites who are consistently publishing quality, organic content–through the king form of digital marketing these days: content marketing–will see even greater returns in the coming months.
Clusters of repeat results will be cleaned: As a searcher, have you ever become frustrated with search engine results pages (SERPs) just inundated with blank pages from the same source with little to no valuable content, but “pretending” to be valuable thanks to tricky keyword placement? Good news: these guys will be scrubbed out–whether they’re huge or small–in favor of more distinct, meaningful results.
Benefits for small and medium sized businesses will be palpable: Thankfully, Matt couldn’t have said it any clearer:
“We have a lot of changes queued up that will help small to medium sized businesses and regular web masters as well [with SEO.]“
Penguin 2.0 timeline is end of summer 2013: And as Matt says, “I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.” We agree!
Old School “SEO” is scummy
Update: Legendary leader in the SEO space, SEOmoz has completely rebranded to simply “Moz” as of last night. A major industry shift, indeed.
Thanks to these recent and large upsets in the industry, many individuals, such as leading search engine expert and CEO/Founder of
SEOmoz
Moz Rand Fishkin state that they would really like to rebrand the idea of “SEO” all together:
“What we’d really like to do and what we’ve been working hard at as an industry is to try to change and broaden the definition of SEO. I can tell you one of the things that I feel very passionately about is changing that branding and working really hard to not have the word “SEO” be associated with scumminess and bad companies and irresponsible behavior. But that perception of SEO is so hard to change. It’s been established for such a long time now, and the small efforts of quite a few of us in the field to try and change that perception have not been successful, at least not outside of the online marketing world. Inside that world and with a small portion of the developers and designers who get SEO and get marketing, it’s true.”
Fellow leading SEO authority Oliver Carding also adds:
There’s a movement happening in our industry, and many folks are changing their practices and titles from “SEO” to “online marketing, inbound marketing, and/or earned media marketing.” Where did this shift originate from, and where is it taking our industry as a whole? Is it enough to just be an SEO in today’s game, or are we missing the bigger picture?
Here’s an example of one of the dozen super low-quality SEO solicitations BWD and our clients receive every day. Avoid these messages at all costs.
So what is SEO in 2013? 2014? 2015?
The future of SEO is everything.
It’s the way you build your business, and build your products. It’s diversity and creativity. It’s the way you build relationships with small bloggers and major digital publications alike, and the way you also share high quality representations of your products and services on an ever adapting set of social services. It’s the kind of content you produce, and the way in which you are able to create an “elixer” in your content style that makes viewers wanting to come back for more and more, especially with their friends. It’s about making it clear that your business is an absolute authority in the industry, through publication of case studies, internal reviews, client interviews, and much more. It’s about connecting with the brands that you mention in your content through social networks, and letting them know that you’re talking about them, too.
While page structure, keyword placement, etc… will continue to play an important role, what’s more essential is a continual network of creatively and organically sourced inbound links thanks to a wide network.
And finally: it’s about building a company that is valuable, and making sure as many individuals as possible know it, too.
Think our agency, BWD, might be up to the task of helping your small or medium business achieve these goals? Give us a shout and say hi.
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