Download the truth about search 2.0

TH E
TRU TH
ABOU T
SEA R CH
2 . 0
SEO – A WORLD OF
PERPETUAL CHANGE
Twelve months ago we launched the Truth About
McCann Connected is a top 50 UK digital
Search in a bid to simplify exactly what is going
agency according to Econsultancy’s 2015 report
on in the world of search.
and we’re 140 people strong, spanning the entire
Within the last year much has changed but there
paid, owned and earned landscapes including
are an equal number of key issues which are
content production.
as important now as they were then.
McCann Connected was created to help our
We felt the time was right to build on the insights
clients make sense of the complex journeys
and authoritative commentary we created with the
consumers
Truth About Search, with a second edition, The
solutions
Truth About Search 2.0.
by doing so, help consumers connect with brands,
One key thing that has changed is our name.
make
without
and
develop
borders
or
marketing
bias
and,
technology and ultimately each other.
Last time we were operating under the banner
We believe the truths contained in this short
Lakestar McCann, having been acquired in 2012
summary document will resonate with you and help
by McCann Worldgroup. That acquisition is now
you make sense of the environment in which you
complete and we’ve been fully integrated into the
are operating – and maybe even act as a catalyst
McCann family, which means this year’s report is
for a conversation about how we can help you
published under the McCann Connected banner.
address your digital marketing challenges.
I look forward to speaking with and hopefully meeting you in the months ahead.
Neil Yeomans
Search Director
McCann Connected
TRUTH
1
COMMERCIAL INTENT
ISN’T ENOUGH ANYMORE,
MICRO-MOMENTS DEFINE
HOW WE SEARCH
Typically, search marketers look at keywords as being informational,
navigational, transactional and locational in nature. These define the type
of search query, but don’t define what the searcher is doing. Mobile has
changed everything. People don’t have a static browsing experience anymore,
they experience the web in terms of ‘micro-moments’ – it’s in their pocket
or by their side at all times, ready to be picked up in an instant. Google defines
micro-moments as being: “want-to-know-moments”, “want-to-go” moments,
“want-to-do” moments, and “want-to-buy” moments. It is Google’s way
of progressing ZMOT, or Zero Moment of Truth. A zero moment is the
point at which a person develops a need, which they go on to research
online before making a decision. Critically, it doesn’t matter who is selling
the desired product online at this point – the internet empowers consumers
to learn more about a potential product they want to buy – it is “pre-shopping”.
For brands to win in today’s space, they need to be visible during these millions
of micro-moments, before people have even searched for traditional ‘money
keywords’ or seen the brand’s products and services.
TRUTH
2
WEB DEVELOPERS ARE
LOSING TOUCH WITH
SEARCH (AGAIN)
We spent years advocating web standards and avoiding web technologies
such as JavaScript and Flash to present content because the search engines
couldn’t crawl them. We got clients to drop their splash pages and have a real
homepage, and we got clients to use our ‘SEO Guidelines for Web Developers’
framework to ensure that SEO featured at the heart of web development.
Things became good, developers listened and issues were resolved.
Fast forward to 2016, and Google is much better at crawling and rendering
JavaScript-heavy sites, but there’s been a huge uptake in developers creating
websites that are heavily JavaScript dependent again – using AngularJS
or other JavaScript MVC frameworks to create an “application” rather than
good old static HTML. What can look pretty on the front end can be invisible
to the search engines; technical SEO expertise is more vital than it’s been
in a long time, because the web development rules have changed.
TRUTH
3
GOOGLE’S ALGORITHMS
ARE LEARNING
FOR THEMSELVES
Intent can be very fuzzy to an algorithm. For years search engines have tried
to move beyond simple keyword matching to ‘understand’ how humans search.
You may be surprised to hear that of the 3.5 billion plus queries processed
by Google each day, 15%, or an incredible 525 million per day, have
never been seen before. Enter RankBrain – it is a machine-learning/artificial
intelligence (AI) algorithm, which is able to make “educated guesses”
about what a search query means. Better still, it can learn from its mistakes.
Keywords are still critical to a search marketing campaign’s success, but the
correlation between keyword targeting and ranking has been decreasing
in recent years – search engines are much better now at going beyond keywords
in a search query, and understanding human intent. They’re getting very
good at doing this for queries, however, the search engines still have armies
of “quality raters”, who trawl the search engine results, classifying results based
on relevance, quality of site, etc. Needless to say, it is only a matter of time
before machine learning and AI are up to the task of doing the quality rating,
and getting better as it goes along. This all signifies a great step forward for
the image of SEO, because future-proof strategies are based on improving the
user experience and quality of a website, using natural language and a deep
understanding of the audience to drive search growth.
TRUTH
4
ALGORITHM CHANGES
ARE NO MATCH FOR
SOLID TECHNICAL SEO
Each year, people put out their industry predictions in search. There’s a lot of
chatter around mobile/app indexing in 2016 and of course the usual “Panda”
(site quality) and “Penguin” (link spamming) updates. These are all important
topics, search is always evolving, but there is a refreshing constant – how
technical SEO is delivered. Solid processes built over decades of real-world
experience in this area just don’t go out of date, if you’re doing the right thing.
We have undertaken huge taxonomy projects, opening out highly specific
category pages to the search engines, years ago and it still drives results
today. This is because we have always looked at information architecture and
web accessibility as fundamentally linked to technical SEO best practice.
Search isn’t just about finding the next new trend, it’s about understanding
what has worked, is working now, and will work into the future.
TRUTH
5
EVERYTHING
AND EVERYWHERE
IS CONNECTED
From the internet of things and the connected home through to wearable tech,
we’ve never been as closely linked to the internet on a day-to-day basis.
From a technological perspective, web analytics can tie together multiple user
journeys, across multiple devices, offering an end-to-end view of customer
behaviour online. Search isn’t just about SEO or PPC, it is about an understanding
of how everything else around these channels can directly influence them.
Search is about equipping anyone from web developers, to marketing managers,
to PRs, merchandisers, copywriters and countless other roles with the tools
they need to influence and understand the different micro-moments that
prompt someone to research online. We’re called McCann Connected for
a reason. And that’s because our search teams, UI designers, UX specialists,
content producers, Conversion Rate Optimisation teams and social media
specialists work without borders or bias to deliver connected customer journeys
for our clients.
THE COMPANY
WE KEEP
When we created our first The Truth About Search booklet, we realised offering
our thoughts on such a broad scale may have been considered to be quite
a bold claim.
The reaction we received to our first booklet made us realise that many
of the issues we touched on are faced by an incredibly broad spectrum
of organisations and are not just confined to the clients we work with.
That said, the insights we have brought together in this booklet have been built
on the experience of working across numerous different market sectors and
with countless different businesses. We are confident they will raise questions
about how your business is approaching search.
Some of the brands we work with are detailed opposite and we’d be delighted
to share case studies with you that show how we’re applying our thinking
to these and other brands we work with.
We hope the truths that follow will provoke thought and discussion within your
organisation and among your colleagues. They may even prompt you to give
us a call for a point of view on your business challenges.
CONTACT
DETA IL S
GARY WILKES
NEW BUSINESS MANAGER
M: +44(0) 07810 117 339
E: [email protected]