SEO: Introduction and stakes for businesses
Before diving into the world of SEO, quick warning on the content of this article which will focus on Google Search only. However, SEO also applies to every search engine.
INTRODUCTION
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This brings together all the criteria put in place by Google to highlight websites in the most relevant way in their opinion.
It does not matter whether brands have online commercial activities or not, as all brands need to have a website or an online presence. Besides, most of them use digital advertising to create awareness around the brand or to drive sales/app downloads.
According to Forbes (2021), extensions included, global online media was expected to generate $537 billionin 2021 which represents 64.4% of global ad spent.
SEO, however, allows a business to leverage the incredible amount of queries Google receives every dayalmost for free!
This graph shows the surge of search queries from early 2000 when google receive 30 million queries a year (30 000 000) to late 2011 when it reached 1200 billion queries a year. (1 200 000 000 000)
HOW DOES SEO WORK?
CONTENT
Content is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Google takes into account the content of a website to establish its search engine ranking. Content is mainly oriented by page category and keyword search volume.
Content can be optimised at different levels of the HTML code which is the structure of a web page. They are called meta tags:
-Meta title (link name)
-Meta description (description of the link)
-Meta text (keywords within the page text)
If you search “Dior Jasmin” on Google, the first organic link that you will find is from dior.com meaning these 2 keywords are very relevant to the page content, title and description of the link from which it redirects.
You can see that the meta title contains the name of the fragrance “Jasmin des Anges”, the keyword “fragrance” and the name of the brand.
Then the description describes the product very well using a lot of keywords related to scent and ingredients using a luxury tone of voice.
This strategy works very well as keywords are relevant to the brand, and the product and redirect towards the right landing page.
Content SEO is important as using the relevant keywords and writing a relevant title and description allow your website to be shown in thousands of searches :
Thanks to the Google Ads Keyword Planner, you can find that the words “parfum femme” are searched about 90 500 times every month and it also represents the user/session reach of the relevant pages for your website if it is well content optimized.
LINKS
Links are another important feature in Google’s PageRank which is Google’s famous algorithm for ranking its index pages.
However, these are not just any links in this case. They are called backlinks.
Backlinks are links from one’s website redirecting a user towards another website. They are considered by Google as recommendations.
The more relevant the backlink is according to which page it comes from and which page it redirects to, the more popular and well-ranked the website is, the better the backlink is.
For instance, if Vogue.com which is one of the biggest online newspapers in the world writes an article to talk about Dior’s new flagship and includes a link redirecting to Dior.com’s relevant page talking about the history of the house, Google will find it extremely relevant and take into account this backlink as the best recommendation they could possibly receive.
Backlink strategy is well-known in SEO and probably the most important one in the PageRank criteria. Therefore, agencies are dedicated to the creation of backlinks by sending article writing proposals to relevant websites on behalf of the client.
USER EXPERIENCE
User experience is all about making sure that a user is satisfied from the moment they arrive on the site until they leave.
From the moment they arrive, this means that they are coming from a relevant organic link, hence the importance of optimising the meta tags.
If a user lands on a page that does not match their initial search, for example by typing ‘’lipstick’’ and landing on a range page dedicated to perfumes, they risk leaving the website immediately and increase the bounce rate of the page and the entire site.
The bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave the first page on which they arrived on the website without going further. A high bounce rate is a bad indicator because it implies that either the navigation is not smooth, or the content of the page is not relevant, or there is an error on the page (e.g. 404) or other factors that will cause the website to drop in PageRank.
TECHNICAL
Technical SEO is, hence its name, the most technical part of SEO. It involves site speed, a mobile-friendly version of the website but also barbaric webmastering words such as XML sitemap which is a kind of coded summary of your website that you give to search engines in order for them to better understand your website.
You can use various online tools to help you with technical SEO.
Fortunately, technical SEO is not the most important criterion that Google takes into account in its PageRank, but it is still a way to improve an overall SEO strategy.
SEO is free, useful for a business in terms of content optimisation, user experience, site speed and many other criteria to go up RageRank. We may wonder if one day, SEA (Search Engine Advertising) could completely replace SEO and Google become a giant advertising search engine.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
