What is Search Experience Optimisation?

Search Experience Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising your site or site pages to get your company a higher ranking on Google.

It’s a term that describes the “best practices” SEO professionals use to help their clients outrank their competitors and achieve higher search engine rankings.

First, let me state that to obtain high search engine rankings, you will still need to provide search engines with technical search engine optimization elements like Titles, Meta Tags, ALT tags, etc. But now, marketers must also include the user experience elements so search engines will judge a website as worthy of high rankings.

New search engine algorithms (search formulas) use behaviour metrics, user interface, site speed, site structure, mobile optimization, SSL, and meaningful and valuable content, rather than just digging for keywords on a webpage to determine how to rank pages. It’s time to combine search experience and search engine optimisation to achieve high rankings.

What does SEO aim for?

Search engines, such as Google, allow users to find information in many ways, including using keywords or keywords in the search bar or via a search engine. As a business owner, you would like your website to show up when people search for relevant keywords. Search Experience Optimization (SEO) aims to rank your website highly in the SERPs for keywords that are relevant to your business.

Rankings and Link Building are still the primary focus of most marketers today. They are essential factors but no longer the most important. What is most important is a holistic method to optimize a business website. The best course of action is to combine traditional SEO practices with new techniques to place users’ experiences first.

Don’t know how your website and pages stand regarding the latest search algorithms? I always suggest that a complete and detailed audit be conducted on a website. An audit will definitely show the gaps in your current optimization strategy.

Businesses must understand that engines no longer look at your website with the cold eyes of a computer. Today, the latest machine-learning artificial intelligence systems look at a website more like a person would than a computer.

What is SEM?

There is no secret how well a website ranks on search engines. Many tools and methods can be used to analyze this data and make improvements to your website. However, one factor is not measurable: the user experience.

The user will leave if a website is challenging to navigate, slow to load, difficult to scroll through, etc. If users leave, they may never return. That’s where search engine marketing (SEM) comes in. SEM is creating a smooth user experience for a site so that it’s not only visible on the first page of search results but also on the first page of organic search results.

Is content still KING?

I think so. Without content, what is the worth of a web page anyway? But there is a catch. You might think you are getting good results from your current content, but are you writing for your business/ management, or are you writing for the reader of your content, a potential new customer?

You can create content using technical, sales, marketing, or any other voice, but stop thinking again about who is consuming your content. The new Search Experience Optimisation is simple; you write to engage the reader. You give them the answers to their questions; you give them what they are looking for, not what search engines are looking for.

I compare old SEO and new SEO to an old car and a new car. Maintaining an older car was relatively simple. Most teenagers could tune up a really old car. However, today, you need a specialist with all the knowledge and tools to maintain a new car.

If you want to rank high on search engines, you should seek out an SEO specialist who knows the ins and outs of Search Experience Optimisation.

Is SEO dead in 2023?

Many people do not get results from their SEO efforts and make a statement that SEO is dead. But it is not the case. We already know that if Google changes its ranking algorithm, it’s going to affect SEO. It doesn’t need to tell us that because we can see what it’s already done when it makes changes to its algorithm. We saw this with the penguin and the panda. The changes were huge, and SEO experts were not surprised that Google made them. It’s not much of a surprise to see that Google might make another big change.

It’s no secret that Google is changing the way its algorithm works. When Google does this, it makes changes that affect search engine optimisation. But Google doesn’t really tell us what it’s doing in terms of changing the algorithm. That is not to say that it doesn’t change things at all. It changes things every single day, and it’s changing them for all of us.

The short answer is that SEO will not be dead in 2023. But SEO experts have to make more trials and errors to cope with Google algorithm changes and measure and enhance the user experience, besides content and site optimisation.