Why Search – and SEO – Is Important

In 2009, Bill Gates delivered a speech at a special gala dinner where he famously said, "The future of research is deeds."

Gates was not talking about people's words in the search boxes, but talking about why people were searching.

Before we understand why research is important, we need to go back and understand why people search.

What peoples are looking for?

In the early days, people searched for a list of documents containing the words they wrote. This is no longer the case.

Researchers today are looking for problem solving, doing tasks, and "doing" something. They may be looking for booking a flight, buying something, learning the latest Taylor Swift words, or browsing cat pictures - but these are all actions. Or, as Gates told them, acts.

When the user initiates a search, it actually begins a journey. Marketers like to talk about something called "consumer journey". It's a great way to point to a user's path from beginning to end - and most of these trips start with a search.

Consumer travel has been playing a bigger role in research over the past decade. This old journey to consumers, originally described as a conversion path that users move from awareness to purchase, is described as a very old journey (though we still use this model for illustration purposes and to make searching for a personality easier).

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Evolution of research and consumer journey

The modern consumer journey is no longer a path, but it looks like a crazy straw - with the various twists and turns that represent the different channels, media, and devices that users interact with today.

In order to fit this new model, the search must evolve from just words on the page to understanding the user's goal at each stage of the journey. The search is no longer just about keywords, but is also evolving to provide the right content for the right user at the right time in his journey to help him accomplish his mission.

For users, it's about actions. For search marketers, it's about helping the user on their journey (ideally, influencing them a little along the way).

By adhering to the crazy straw model, today's consumer journey is no longer happening on one device. Users may start a search on their mobile device, continue searching on a tablet or laptop for work, and then eventually buy from the desktop at home.

Search is not limited to computers or phones. Users can now search from a variety of devices, including watches, smart glasses, Bluetooth headset assistants, and even kitchen appliances. In today's world, even my refrigerator has its own Twitter account - market marketers need to understand how different devices are connected and play a role in the user's search experience.

There is some honest debate about whether this is always the case, but in our world always in a highly connected world, SEO has turned into what we call "real marketing".

Gone are the days of penetration, tricks, and reverse engineering algorithms.

SEO today focuses on:

·         Understanding persons

·         Statistics based on data

·         Content Strategy

·         Solve technical problems

3 main tenants of any marketing strategy or campaign

Research touches on all three areas:

·         Attract.

·         Engage.

·         Conversion

But the research focuses heavily on the first stage: attraction.

"If you create it, it will come" may apply to baseball fields, but it does not work with websites.

It's no longer enough to have a great product. You must actively attract customers across multiple channels and ports.

This is why; despite some claims on the contrary of clients or design agencies, each web page is, in fact, an SEO page.

If a web page is common to attracting visitors, attracting visitors, or converting them, there should be an important component of SEO engines on this page.

Why SEO is important?

Well, users, journey, search, verbs - got it. Users are important and many start searching, so research is important.

But why is search engine optimization important? Is not SEO just something developer? I heard there was an accessory for that. Cannot Google and Bing just discover my website?

We started this story with Gates' quotation, but Google instead of Microsoft is the one that took philosophy to heart.

Things like Hummingbird, Panda, Penguin, Rank Brain, Mobilegeddon, Possum, Pigeon, Entities and AMP were all attempts by Google to adapt the search algorithm to move from words to actions - helping users accomplish the tasks they might focus on - but not so simple to understand.

SEO has come a long way from the days of metadata. Of course, there are many best practices involved in "must" being covered by the development team or component (or included in the framework of * alcoholic cough * angular, reaction, I am looking at you) - but often are not.

Today's websites are more applications than websites, and provide applications with many great features that do not always play well with search engines (hello again, zoom and reaction.)

Good SEO today

Good SEO can not only focus on content, but also helps:

·         Navigate across multiple versions of the same page.

·         Resolve technical issues that make content invisible to search engines.

·         With the appropriate server settings

·         Integrate with social media, content, creativity, user experience, paid search, or analytics.

·         Look for ways to speed up your site.

Good SEO professional not only understands the researcher, but the competitive landscape as well. It is not enough just to understand the user's task. Marketers need to understand other options in the market and how they can fill the gap to provide a better solution to the user's task.

We have come a long way from keywords to pages to full marketing services. SEO pros to wear multiple hats as they help to link development, information engineering, user experience, content strategy, marketing, social media and paid teams. It's a game of giving and taking - all in an attempt to create something that works for search engines and users.

There are a lot of cautionary tales about things like simple sounding to redesign a site or a new CMS system, resulting in low site traffic or disappearing, resulting in business abandonment. The simple fact is that most of the changes to web sites these days affect search engine optimization - and just by including SEO in the foreground and throughout the project, any business can see positive results.

So why is research important?

Search matters because users matter.

As technology evolves, search engine optimizer will always look for new ways to search, new devices to search for, new types of searches (like voice search, or searches by the oven), but the only thing that will remain constant is search. Verbs will not disappear.