Outside the Box SEO with SXO

The days of formulaic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are long gone. While before SEO was rooted in meeting guidelines set by the bots Google uses to crawl through sites, now it is more about pleasing users. The latest S.E.O guidelines take into account user experience through different statistics. Using machine learning, Google knows the quality of the mobile experience, bounce rates, loading speeds, and more.

Welcome to SXO.

Having successful SEO now requires looking at the site as a whole. That means having good design for optimal UX, accessibility, and more.

Optimization with SXO

Since it’s come down to pleasing users, the future of marketing is SXO (search experience optimization). Finding out how to do that lies in research. That means gathering information, by asking questions and getting answers. This means thinking from the point of view of users, and not bots when optimizing for SXO. Thankfully there are a number of tools that serve this purpose.

Examples include but are not limited to:

People will look for and find your website through searches in most cases. That’s why its important to know what exactly they type in. Depending on the business and the products, people will search specific terms. The way it used to be, people would type a generic phrase and scroll through results. Nowadays, people type in full on questions, and find what they are looking for at the top.

With this, the approach becomes thinking like a customer, and actually valuing their questions, instead of just plugging in keywords everywhere. Companies that successfully manage to answer customer questions become trusted names in lifelong customer-business relationships.

Focusing on Mobile

Let’s face it, it’s much more important nowadays to have a mobile friendly website than it ever has been before. What does just about every person have on them at all times? Their own trusty pocket computer. And people are using them more and more, especially when it comes to searching for things online and shopping. For this very reason, it is absolutely vital to be mobile friendly to the maximum. Make mobile traffic appreciate your site by having fast load times, easy navigation, large text, and more. Google’s algorithms specifically look out for sites that are well received by mobile users in terms of optimization. These kinds of sites will be more visible within search results as a direct effect.

Data Backed SXO

Optimizing everything for the ideal user experience was just the first part. Continuing on with that requires solid data driven research. This means analyzing your website and figuring out to the point how users interact with it across the spectrum of devices. The best way to do that, is by using an analytics platform, such as Google Analytics (the usual choice). Analytics will be beneficial in helping determine the satisfaction of a user visit from a data driven view.
Factors that will help determine what needs to be improved include

Bounce Rate
Conversions
Average clicks and time spent

This is just a basic outline, for obvious reasons there are many more statistics that are important to look out for. While the data is in essence just numbers, it can give you a seriously beneficial glimpse into what users are thinking as they browse through your site. Through this figure out which pages and aspects are problematic, and make changes as needed.

Wrapping things up

Now that you’ve become aware of these new search engine standards and the magic behind SXO, it is time to make changes. Focus efforts on user experience and forget about solely appeasing bots who cling onto nonsensical metrics when it comes to daily browsing. Optimizing isn’t that difficult when all it demands is understanding which questions are being asked, and how to ideally find your own website through search engines.