Published on December 03, 2017 and updated on November 02, 2021.
Update November 02, 2021: since this post was published, Google announced several new features for its search engine, the most notable being BERT, a unsupervised natural language processing model. On June 2021, user experience related metrics were added to ranking criteria.
The intelligence behind search
Search algorithms are black boxes. It is not properly known how they work, but there are many guesses from those who try to reverse engineering them. Despite what do we know about their inner workings, we do know that providers always try to improve them to achieve one specific goal: solve problems. Consider this graphic, available in a post from Avinash Kaushik:
Google Search update timeline. Source: Avinash Kaushik.
Many features were introduced into Google Search. In 2010 Google Instant was launched, an updated derived from Google Suggest, an autocomplete box with search suggestions. This launch was part of Google’s objective to change how search works. Since before 2010, Google search was already trying to deliver the best content for each search term. Gradually this goal shifted to solve user’s problems instead. For that, the search engine was more and more capable of “understanding” the reason behind searches, something nowadays known as search intent.
This paradigm shift started on February 2011. As Google was indexing more and more content, users started complaining about search quality being shown on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). In answer, Google launched an update to its algorithm called Panda, changing the rank for 12% of all indexed websites. Three months before, Instant Previews was launched, allowing users to sneak preview pages before entering them. Around the same time, websites that were trying to bypass the algorithm in order to be on the first page were being punished.
Fast forward from 2011, many updates focused on user experience were launched. Known tactics like keyword stuffing on content, meta tags or buying links were losing its effectiveness, and improvements like mobile navigation were increasing the chances of a website being shown on search results.
User intent
To follow up changes, SEO professionals started to focus on what was called Search Task Accomplishment. The goal now was to know the intention behind each search and optimize content to match that intent, not only bring more traffic anymore.
In case you’re familiar with CRO, you should have noticed how things are connecting with one another. Since SEO professionals should now look inside the product, a partnership with CRO professionals become indispensable.
Conversion optimization outside the product
CRO specialists can spend all their time looking only inside the product, working with whatever traffic is available. This raises a problem when what brought the visitors to the website is unknown, since it is not possible to deliver the right content at the right time. Organic search visitors typed keyword that brought back results related to the query. One of these results caught the attention and resulted in a click, which brought the visitor. There is an expectation to be matched on “the other side of the search”. If the content doesn’t match with that expectation, chances are that the visitor will leave the product and click on another result. CRO specialists should have this in mind in order to capture their attention the second they enter the product through a search result.
Unlike explorers, visitors coming from search engines very likely already know what they're looking for, or at least that they need to learn more about a particular topic. Understand search intention and create content that match that intention as soon as the visitor enters the website is fundamental to keep that visitor engaged. CRO specialists can identify who came from search engines, the keyword that was used to show the website at SERP and optimize the content for those visitors by testing.
A team focused on solving people’s problems
A team with SEO and CRO professionals have vision and competence to adapt customer journeys to match what is expected from those who will experience them. It is possible, though, that in some circumstances, members of each team disagree with one another on how this should be accomplished. CRO specialists focus on conversions and SEO specialists optimize content to drive traffic to the product. In an hypothetical example, a CRO team member may propose to remove content in order to remove friction, but someone from the SEO department can counterargument that this is harmful since will mismatch search intent and what is being offered inside the product. Communication problems like those can be extinguished if both teams work together to improve the entire customer journey, from search to conversion.
Further reading
- Folks at Moz and Omniconvert recorded a webinar explaining in details the relationship between SEO and CRO, and the slides that were presented are available online.
Let’s solve problems!