Does Google Actually Give Your Business Any Benefit? (2019 Archive)

Recorded in July 2019 and published as part of a dated historical record. It reflects how search worked then, not current advice. This video is the sixth artefact on the receipts.

Does paid traffic help you rank?

Does Google give any benefit to a paid advertiser in terms of SEO results? Google would say absolutely not — there's no association between paying for traffic and placement on Google. Well, unfortunately, people — that is absolute rubbish.

We've got tons of clients, and I can demonstrate it hundreds of times over: if you have a PPC account and you're trying to rank for a keyword, and you drive traffic from Google Ads to a page relevant to that keyword — ad talking about the page, page talking about the same thing, page properly optimised — that page will rank. There is absolutely a tie-up between paid and ranking. The reason: when you launch a page, there's no ranking and no traffic, so Google knows nothing about it. As soon as you start sending some traffic to a page, Google gets an opportunity to think "oh — what's this about?". Paid purely gives a page a kick up the backside and gives it some visibility.

One of the strategies we've used: say you've got a blog ranking 40th on Google. It's getting no traffic; Search Console doesn't see it; no click-throughs on any terms. At that point you could PPC it and send some traffic to that page. The best advice is to send traffic from various sources — promote it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all your channels — then hit it with a bit of PPC. You might see that page come up to 7th for its keyword. Still not great — the old saying in the industry is that the best place to hide anything is the second page of Google; honestly, the best place to hide anything is probably anywhere from number four downwards. But once you get onto the front page, you can judge: let's put some real effort into this term. Then you add subcategories, maybe some video — video works really well — some questions and answers, sub-pages. Once you can get a page to rank, you can start adding all of this into it.

Why do video and live rank so fast?

Videos, particularly, we can get to rank on the first page of Google pretty much immediately — I've seen videos ranked in an hour, done properly. And with video, live is massive. Hardly anybody's doing it, because — well, you tell me — nobody really wants to go live; none of us are TV presenters. But you can schedule video, list it as an event. Where people go wrong: they don't put the keywords in, they don't promote that it's coming up, they don't try to get organic traffic to it. And after it's gone live: add subtitles, add links, put it in a playlist. People can't be bothered to do this stuff, and it's an amazing ranking technique if you get it right.

Why are questions and answers so powerful?

One of the other things you're going to want to do is questions and answers, and this is really, really powerful if you get it right. Q&A — you've got things like Alexa, Siri, Google Home. Nobody can tell me that in — well, it might be ten years, twenty years, it might be in two years — we'll still be typing into these devices. At some point we're all going to start talking and asking questions of devices. We've seen this week the NHS tying up with Amazon and Alexa, trying to become an online home doctor. Alexa currently will say "sorry, I don't know the answer to that".

One of the biggest signals here is intent. Customer intent: "do I want this", "can I find this", "how do I do this", "where is it" — all of these words have the buying signals in them, and the reasons for coming to your website. And the questions are all out there — it's easy to find what they are. Go onto Google and type "what is the best piece of software for X" — Google conveniently gives you a massive list. Start clicking on those answers — click, click, click — and you get a massive long list of all the questions people are typing in.

How does that help us with SEO? First, it tells us what people are typing into the search engine. But it also gives us an opportunity to list our site at the top of Google very quickly for a particular question. We already know that if someone's asking the question, they want an answer. What you need to do is write a 45-to-90-word answer — that's what it takes to get into the Google answers. You also need to be an authority site, and by that I mean a site that already ranks in the top 20 for that keyword. Once we can rank in the top 20, we're classed as an authority, and at that point we can fill the pages with questions and answers on that topic.

If you're a salesperson selling a product, the chances are you get asked the exact same questions over and over, every time you present to a potential customer. So why not have those questions and answers already written and presented on your website, on topic, shared through social, with a video made about it? You rank well already, so you're an authority — and that's when you start delivering a lot of quality traffic to your website.

That's aside from the fact that you are getting your business ready for what is called answer engine optimization. All of these devices are answer engines. They're going to give us the answers — the key is in the name. I'm going to ask a question; I want the best answer. And that's what Google can't do at the moment — it doesn't even do it properly in text search.

Where is search going next?

When we're typing, Google's aim is to give the best result. But the best result for me won't be the best result for someone different to me. A 47-year-old guy searching "Italian restaurant in Manchester" gets a list of Italian restaurants in Manchester. If a 20-year-old girl searches the same thing, chances are we currently get the same or similar result. That is not where search is going.

Tailored search — what Google is trying to do — is look at the way I react to things: the reviews I've given, the types of places I've been before. Do I like live music? Do I like a quiet restaurant? Do I mind paying a fair bit? (As it happens, I don't mind paying, and I'd rather not have a chain restaurant.) My suggestion wants to be markedly different from the person who's different to me, searching in a different location, who doesn't want the same experience. Search has a long way to go in that respect — and a lot of it hangs off reviews, my social profile, what I've shared and liked before, and what my wider group of friends like, because the chances are I like the same sort of things they do. That's where custom affinity audiences come in — a bit deeper into the way search works.