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Posted by randfishSatisfying your searchers is a big part of what it means to be successful in modern SEO. And optimal searcher satisfaction means gaining a deep understanding of them and the queries they use to search. In this section of the One-Hour Guide to SEO, Rand covers everything you need to know about how to satisfy searchers, including the top four priorities you need to have and tips on how to avoid pogo-sticking in the SERPs.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to our special edition One-Hour Guide to SEO Part III on searcher satisfaction. So historically, if we were doing a guide to SEO in the long-ago past, we probably wouldn’t even be talking about searcher satisfaction.
What do searchers want from Google’s results?
But Google has made such a significant number of advances in the last 5 to 10 years that searcher satisfaction is now a huge part of how you can be successful in SEO. I’ll explain what I mean here. Let’s say our friend Arlen here is thinking about going on vacation to Italy.
So she goes to Google. She types in “best places to visit in Italy," and she gets a list of results. Now Google sorts those results in a number of ways. They sort them by the most authoritative, the most comprehensive. They use links and link data in a lot of different ways to try and get at that. They use content data, what’s on the page, and keyword data.
They use historical performance data about which sites have done well for searchers in the past. All of these things sort of feed into searcher satisfaction. So when Arlen performs this query, she has a bunch of questions in her head, things like I want a list of popular Italian vacation destinations, and I want some comparison of those locations.
Maybe I want the ability to sort and filter based on my personal preferences. I want to know the best times of year to go. I want to know the weather forecast and what to see and do and hotel and lodging info and transportation and accessibility information and cultural tips and probably dozens more questions that I can’t even list out here. But when you, as a content creator and as a search engine optimization professional, are creating and crafting content and trying to optimize that content so that it performs well in Google’s results, you need to be considering what are all of these questions.
How to craft content that satisfies your searchers
This is why searcher empathy, customer empathy, being able to get inside Arlen’s head or your customer’s head and say, "What does she want? What is she looking for?" is one of the most powerful ways to craft content that performs better than your competition in search engines, because it turns out a lot of people don’t do this.
Priority 1: Answer the searcher’s questions comprehensively and with authority
So if I’m planning my page, what is the best page I could possibly craft to try and rank for "best places to visit in Italy," which is a very popular search term, extremely competitive? I would think about obviously there’s all sorts of keyword stuff and on-page optimization stuff, which we will talk about in Part IV, but my priorities are answer the searcher’s primary questions comprehensively and authoritatively. If I can do that, I am in good shape. I’m ahead of a lot of the pack.
Priority 2: Provide an easy-to-use, fast-loading, well-designed interface that’s a pleasure to interact with
Second, I want to provide a great user experience. That means easy to use, fast-loading, well-designed, that’s a pleasure to interact with. I want the experience of a visitor, a searcher who lands on this page to be, "Wow, this is much better than the typical experience that I get when I land on a lot of other sites."
Priority 3: Solve the searcher’s next tasks and questions with content, tools, or links
Priority three, I want to solve the searcher’s next tasks and questions with either content on my own site or tools and resources or links or the ability to do them right here so that they don’t have to go back to Google and do other things or visit other websites to try and accomplish the tasks, like figuring out a good hotel or figuring out the weather forecast. A lot of sites don’t do this comprehensively today, which is why it’s an advantage if you do.
Priority 4: Consider creative elements that may give you a long-term competitive advantage
Priority four is consider some creative elements, maybe interactive tools or an interactive map or sorting and filtering options that could give you a long-term, competitive advantage, something that’s difficult for other people who want to rank for this search term to build.
Maybe that’s the data that you get. Maybe it’s the editorial content. Maybe it’s your photographs. Maybe it’s your tools and interactive elements. Whatever the case.
Do NOT give searchers a reason to click that back button!
One of the biggest goals of searcher satisfaction is to make sure that this scenario does not happen to you. You do not want to give searchers a reason to click that back button and choose someone else.
The search engine literature calls this "pogo sticking." Basically, if I do a search for "best places to visit in Italy"and I click on, let’s say, US News & World Reports and I find that that page does not do a great job answering my query, or it does a fine job, but it’s got a bunch of annoying popovers and it’s slow loading and it has all these things that it’s trying to sell me, and so I click the back button and I choose a different result from Touropia or Earth Trackers.
Over time, Google will figure out that US News & World Reports is not doing a good job of answering the searcher’s query, of providing a satisfactory experience, and they will push them down in the results and they will push these other ones, that are doing a good job, up in the results. You want to be the result that satisfies a searcher, that gets into their head and answers their questions and helps them solve their task, and that will give you an advantage over time in Google’s rankings.
All right, we’ll see you next time for Part IV on on-page optimization. Take care.
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