Prodcast: SEO Strategy III–Search Engines
So in part 1 of this SEO series, I gave a general overview of what SEO is and why it’s important, and in part 2 I joined Maalaea and the builders at the Designer’s Desk where she showed us how the builders and copywriters add SEO optimized content to our sites during not only the new build stage, but also afterwards in the Marketing Services stage as well. Now while we got great feedback about the videos, we surprisingly got even more questions, so what was originally supposed to be a two part series has now been expanded!
The Video
The Why
So in this edition of the Prodcast, we’re going to dive into the elements of SEO strategy starting with understanding search engines. Now why are we going so in depth on this? Because in today’s age, just creating and publishing a website is not enough anymore—it is now essentially a requirement that a website must be optimized for Google and other search engines in order to rank AND attract new traffic which means our goal is to make sure all of our WDS customers understand how important SEO is. So whether it’s during an initial consultation or a marketing services call, we want you to be able to confidently explain how important having good SEO is, so understanding search engines and their effect on SEO is a great place to start. Let’s get started!
The How
So we all know what a search engine is, and we know what the most used search engines on the internet are, but what exactly does a search engine do? I actually get asked this question quite a bit by website specialists, not because they don’t know what a search engine is or does, but because they aren’t sure how to effectively explain it to a customer who knows little more than how to click around a website.
So what happens when a site is published? Well as you can see here, spiders will crawl the site to index it under relevant categories and search terms so that it can be found the next time a user searches a topic that matches your content and will display…
So what actually happens when a website is published? When a customer publishes their website it’s now up to the search engine to discover it. Once discovered, a google bot, often called a spider, will crawl the website to understand what it is about. Google processes the website’s content and indexes it under relevant categories and search terms. When someone then searches a topic that matches your site’s content, then the website will display in a search result.
That’s pretty much what a search engine does in a nutshell. But keep in mind that this process can take weeks, or even months in some cases.
So one final thing that needs to be understood about search engines. They only crawl and index PUBLISHED sites. So our customer’s website can’t rank anywhere in search engine results if it hasn’t been indexed. It can’t be indexed by Google’s algorithms if it hasn’t been crawled. It can’t be crawled if it hasn’t been published. We think that getting customers to publish their site is so important that we actually have an Offboarding team dedicated to getting our customers published. It’s that important.
According to Google themselves, there is no set timetable for how quickly they will crawl a newly published website. Based on our observations and experience, this process can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks and even then Google doesn’t guarantee inclusion in search results or even at all. That’s why we want everyone published as soon as possible. If a customer ever feels like they’re being rushed or think we’re going too fast it’s important that they understand that we try to make the process go as quickly as possible not for us, but for their benefit.
So if a customer is resistant to publishing because they want their site to be 100% complete or maybe they have more WooCommerce products that they need to add in marketing services, let them know how important it is to be published by asking them if they’ve ever seen a business open before it was fully ready, just like what’s showing in this image. This business wasn’t about to wait around for their finished sign and threw up a temporary banner sign because they needed to get to work making money. And remember: Unless someone types in their specific business name or domain, they’re not going to get found right away because even Google says they may not even be indexed yet. So they might as well get the website out there.
Thanks again for watching this edition of the Prodcast and stay tuned for upcoming episodes as we continue to take a closer look at the elements of SEO strategy and how it affects our WDS websites.