Content marketing has many aspects and can be done through different channels. Today we’re going to understand the 3 pillars of SEO and why they are so important for your strategy.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps a website to rank better on search engines such as Google. This makes it easier for people to find it through organic searches. This generates great results at a low cost.
What are the pillars of SEO?
In SEO, there are three pillars that are fundamental to achieving your SEO goals:
- Authority.
- Relevance.
- Experience (of users and bots visiting the site).
When combined, these three elements provide a solid and consistent foundation for your strategy to scale strongly and healthily, without suffering any kind of penalty.
Why is authority important?
You can imagine that. Someone with authority gives you more credibility and trust when communicating information. That way, if you needed to take a medication, you’d listen to a doctor because they have expertise and know what they’re talking about.
In SEO, authority refers to the importance or weight given to a page in relation to other pages that are potential results for a given search query.
Thus, there are many factors used to evaluate a site’s authority.
For most queries, there are thousands or even millions of pages available that can be classified. However, Google wants to prioritize those that are most likely to satisfy the user with accurate and reliable information that fully answers the intent of the query.
How do I know if my page has authority?
Understanding how to measure and evaluate page authority is a significant challenge for search engines.
Some of the first search engines relied on human evaluators, but as access to the internet and the number of users grew, this quickly became impossible to scale.
With this in mind, the creators of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed the idea of PageRank. It uses links from other web pages as weighted citations to assess the authority of a page.
Page and Brin realized that links were an existing system of constantly evolving searches, in which other authorized sites gave a “vote of confidence” in pages they considered trustworthy and relevant to their users.
In this way, the credibility of each of the sources they cite also comes into play. So, of our three pillars, authority came first because it was the simplest to decipher, given the ubiquity of hyperlinks on the web.
The other two, relevance and user experience, would get more attention later, as algorithms based on machine learning/IA developed.
The use of backlinks to build authority
One of the great innovations that earned Google the top spot as a search engine was the use of web link analysis as a ranking factor.
In the article “The anatomy of a large-scale hypertext search engine”, Larry Page and Sergey Brin go into depth on the subject.
So the main idea of the article is that the web is built by linking documents together, what we now call backlinks.
Putting a link on your site to another can cause a user to leave your page, so it’s interesting to do this when the benefits have a positive impact and great value for the reader’s knowledge.
By choosing to link, you are giving a “vote of confidence” to the content of that page. The more referrals it has, the more the search engines recognize that the page really does have something interesting and positive that is worth looking at.
So, in principle, the more votes you get, the better and more trustworthy a search engine would consider you and therefore you should have a higher ranking.
What not to do to have authority?
There are good practices, but there are also a number of attitudes that can lead the authority in the opposite direction.
Certain practices can even cause your site not to be indexed by search engines, so pay close attention!
Google actively discourages and, in some cases, punishes schemes to obtain links artificially.
If they do any of the following, it’s probably not a good source for a link:
- Having poor quality content;
- Buying and selling links for SEO purposes;
- Breach people’s websites and point links to their content;
- Access forums and blogs and add comments with links to your site;
- Distributing low-quality infographics or widgets that include links to your pages;
- Offer discount codes or affiliate programs as a way of obtaining links.
- And many other schemes in which the resulting links are of an artificial nature.
Quality of backlinks
Sometimes the quality of a backlink is much more important than the number of links pointing to your page. This is because a more credible indication generates a better perception on the part of search engines and also in the user’s own view.
If you have a page about camping equipment, links to a restaurant or an electrical store won’t add much.
However, if that page receives some backlinks from sites that talk about the benefits of being outdoors, travel and related things, the likelihood of having more qualified users is very high. As well as increasing the relevance of that site on the web.
Relevance and quality of content
The content pillar shows us the importance of offering content that is relevant and in line with what your audience is looking for. You can translate this into attractive images, videos and texts that capture the user’s attention, increasing the time they spend on your site and creating a bond.
But thinking only about the user won’t get you to the top positions. You need to show Google what you’re talking about and that’s why it’s important to work on using keywords, according to what your audience is searching for on search engines.
Put together a good structure, work on coherent and optimized titles and CTAs (call to action). Of course, the most important indicator of a page’s relevance should be its content.
Due to advances in natural language processing and machine learning, search engines like Google have greatly increased their competence in their ability to evaluate the content of a page.
Aspects that Google takes into account when evaluating the relevance of a page
Key words
Having quality keywords is an effective SEO tactic for optimizing user and search engine searches.
Adding common key terms between the best-ranked pages on a topic is often very useful for increasing organic traffic to a page.
Depth
The best-ranked pages on a topic usually cover the topic in the right depth.
In other words, they have enough content to satisfy researchers’ queries and/or are linked to pages that help them delve deeper into the topic.
Structure
Structural elements such as HTML H1, H2 and H3 tags, bold topic headings and schema-structured data can help Google better understand the relevance and coverage of a page.
What is EEAT? How does it impact on SEO?
EEAT is a Google acronym that stands for:
- Experienced;
- Expertise;
- Authoritativeness;
- Trustworthiness.
EEAT is a framework of guidelines that assess the quality of research.
Search quality evaluators assess the pages ranked in the search for a particular topic using defined EEAT criteria. From there, they judge the extent to which each page meets the needs of a search user who visits it in response to their query.
These rankings are accumulated in aggregate form and used to help adjust search algorithms. (They are not used to affect the rankings of any individual site or page.)
Of course, Google encourages all website owners to create content that makes the visitor feel that it is official, trustworthy and written by someone with appropriate knowledge or experience of the topic.
The main thing to keep in mind is that the more YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) your site is, the more attention you should pay to EEAT.
YMYL sites are those whose main content deals with things that can affect people’s well-being or finances.
If this is the case for you, you should work harder to ensure the accuracy of your content and show that you have qualified experts to write it.
Read more: Search engine optimization (SEO) guide for beginners
The User Experience
Google began by focusing on ranking pages by authority and then found ways to evaluate relevance.
The third evolution of the search was to evaluate the experience of the site and the page.
In fact, this has two separate but related aspects: the technical health of the site and the actual user experience.
The two are related because a technically sound website will create a good experience for both human users and the crawling bots that Google uses. This way, they can explore and understand a site and add pages to its index, the first step to ranking in search.
Human aspects of the user experience
Google realized that authority and relevance, as important as they are, were not the only things users were looking for when searching.
Users also want a good experience on the pages and sites that Google sends them to.
A good experience for readers includes:
- The page the searcher sees is what they would expect to see, without click baiting;
- The content of the landing page is highly relevant to the user’s query;
- The content is sufficient to answer the intent of the user’s query, but also contains links to other relevant sources and related topics;
- The page loads quickly and the relevant content is immediately apparent;
- Page elements position themselves quickly (all aspects of Google’s Core Web Vitals).
Thus, the perception of quality for people accessing the site is an essential aspect to take into account when building a site.
Technical aspects of the user experience
In SEO, the technical health of a site refers to how easy and efficient it is to be crawled by Google’s search bots.
Broken links or things that slow down the progress of a bot can drastically affect the number of pages that Google will index. Consequently, this decreases the potential traffic your site can qualify for from organic search.
The practice of maintaining a technically sound website is known as technical SEO.
In short, Google wants to rank pages that it can find easily, that satisfy the query and that make it as easy as possible for the searcher to identify and understand what they are looking for.
Putting the 3 pillars together in your SEO planning
Each pillar has its importance within an effective SEO strategy, so take the time to make a plan that brings together criteria such as:
- Understand your business objectives with SEO;
- Measuring the production needed to verify the objectives;
- Designing and evaluating metrics;
- Study your competitors;
- Get your hands dirty!
All this is indispensable for your content marketing efforts to return a solid Return on Investment (ROI).
Search engines want satisfied users who will come back to them whenever they have a question or need.
To keep their users happy, search engines must be able to understand and measure the relative authority of web pages for the topics they cover.
Focusing on these three pillars of SEO – authority, relevance and experience – will increase the opportunities for your content and make it easier to get links.
Now you have everything you need to know to succeed in SEO, so get to work! See you next time 😉
