Discover the three crucial pillars of SEO success: authority, relevance, and user experience. Learn how optimizing these factors can significantly boost your website’s search rankings. While SEO can often seem complex—due to intricate search engine algorithms, website coding, navigation, KPI evaluation, and content strategy—it’s essential to recognize that a small set of factors primarily drive SEO success.
At the core, there are three foundational pillars in SEO:
- Authority
- Relevance
- Experience (for both users and bots visiting the site)
Nutritionists emphasize the importance of balanced protein, carbohydrates, and fats for a healthy body. A successful SEO strategy requires a balanced focus on authority, relevance, and user experience. Neglecting any of these pillars can lead to suboptimal SEO performance, much like an unbalanced diet affects overall health.
Authority: Do You Matter?
In SEO, authority is the importance or weight given to a page relative to other pages that are potential results for a search query. Modern search engines, such as Google, use factors when evaluating a webpage’s authority.
Why does Google care about the authority of a page?
For most inqueries, thousands or even millions of pages are available that could be ranked. Google aims to prioritize the pages most likely to satisfy the user with accurate and most reliable information that fully answers the query’s intent. Google’s focus on serving users the most authoritative pages ensures user satisfaction, encouraging continued use of Google and greater exposure to its ads, the primary source of revenue.
Authority Came First
Assessing the authority of webpages was the fundamental problem search engines had to solve. Initially, some search engines relied on human evaluators, but this approach quickly became unscalable as the web grew exponentially. Google outpaced its competitors because its founders, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, made the idea of PageRank, which used links from other pages on the web as weighted citations to assess a page’s authoritativeness.
Page and Brin recognized that links functioned as a constantly evolving polling system, where other authoritative sites “voted” for pages they deemed reliable and relevant. This concept is similar to scholarly citations: the more relevant scholarly papers that cite a source, the more authoritative it is considered.
Links Still Primary For Authority
Google’s game-changing innovation was analyzing links on the web as a ranking factor. Their critical insight was that the web is built on linked documents. Since linking to a third-party site could cause a user to leave the original site, there was little incentive to do so unless the linked site was highly valued. Thus, a link acts as a “vote” for the linked site, endorsing it as a valuable resource.
The principle is that the more votes (links) a page receives, the more authoritative the search engine considers it, and therefore, it should rank higher.
Passing PageRank
Much of Google’s original algorithm was based on PageRank, a system for evaluating the importance of pages based on the links they receive. Pages with many valuable links pointing to them have a higher PageRank and are more likely to rank higher in search results. When a page links to different page, it passes a part of its PageRank to the linked page, allowing pages to accumulate more PageRank based on the quality of links they get.
Not All Links Are Created Equal
While more votes (links) are generally better, the situation is more complex. PageRank scores can range from a base value of one to values exceeding trillions. Higher PageRank pages can pass significantly more PageRank than lower PageRank pages. A link from a high PageRank page can be worth more than a million times a link from a low PageRank page. Additionally, Google considers the linking page’s topic and the link’s anchor text, which ties into relevance and will be discussed later. Google’s algorithms have evolved significantly from the original PageRank thesis, and how links are evaluated has changed in known and unknown ways.
What About Trust?
You may hear discussions about the role of faith in search rankings and link quality evaluation. While Google states it doesn’t use a concept of trust as some describe it, these discussions often stem from a Yahoo patent on TrustRank. The idea was to use a seed set of hand-picked, highly trusted sites and measure the number of clicks from those sites to yours, with fewer clicks indicating higher trustworthiness.
Although Google says it doesn’t use this metric, it was granted a patent in 2013 related to evaluating link trustworthiness. However, the existence of a patent does not mean it’s used in practice. Nonetheless, considering trusted links is not a bad idea when assessing a site’s trustworthiness as a link source. If a site sells links, has poor content, or appears disreputable, it’s probably not a good source for a link. While Google may not calculate trust as you do, its system likely devalues such links through other mechanisms.
Fundamentals Of Earning & Attracting Links
Now that you understand the meaning of obtaining links for SEO success, it’s time to develop a plan to acquire them. The key to success is that Google prefers a holistic approach to link-building.
Google actively discourages and sometimes penalizes artificial link-building schemes. These practices are considered flawed:
- Buying links for SEO purposes
- Adding comments with links to forums and blogs
- Hacking sites to inject links into their content
- Distributing poor-quality infographics or widgets with links back to your pages
- Offering discount codes or affiliate programs to get links
Instead, Google wants you to create a fantastic website and promote it effectively so you earn or attract links naturally. Here’s how you can do that:
Who Links?
Understanding who might link to your content is crucial. It’s not the laggards or the early or late majority. The innovators and early adopters might link to your site. These individuals often write for media sites or maintain blogs and will likely add links to your site.
Additionally, there are other sources of links, such as locally-oriented sites like local chambers of commerce or local newspapers. Colleges and universities may also provide link opportunities if they have pages related to your market space.
By targeting these key groups and providing valuable, high-quality content, you can naturally earn and attract the links crucial for your SEO success.
Relevance About Will Users Swipe Right On Your Page?
To succeed in SEO, your content must be relevant to the topic. Think of each visit to a page as an encounter on a dating app. This highlights a limitation on the power of links as a ranking factor and tells how relevance impacts the value of a link.
Imagine a page selling a used Ford Mustang. A link from Car and Driver magazine would be highly relevant. Car and Driver has evident expertise related to Ford Mustangs. In contrast, a link from a sports site would be less helpful, as there’s less evidence to Google that the sports site has significant knowledge about used Ford Mustangs. The importance of the linking page and site impacts valuable a link is considered.
The Role Of Anchor Text
Anchor text is another crucial aspect of links for Google. It helps confirm the content on the linked page’s topic. For example, if the anchor text is “iron bathtubs” and the linked page has content on that topic, it further confirms the page’s relevance.
Be cautious, though. Don’t aggressively obtain links with your main keyphrase as the anchor text, as Google can detect manual link manipulation.
Internal Linking
Google uses internal linking to evaluate a site’s relevance to a topic. Properly structured internal links connecting related content show Google that you cover the topic well, with pages about various aspects. Anchor text is essential for internal links, just like external inbound links.
Your overall site structure should be user-friendly and make sense hierarchically, which will likely benefit search engines as well.
The Content Itself
The most crucial indicator of a page’s relevance is its content. Assessing content’s relevance has become more sophisticated than having the right keywords. Advances in natural language processing and like machine learning is vastly improved search engines’ ability to assess content.
Google likely looks for several things to determine a page’s relevance:
- Keywords: While keyword stuffing is outdated, having certain words on a page still matters. Adding key terms standard among top-ranking pages for a topic can increase organic traffic.
- Depth: Top-ranking pages usually cover the topic comprehensively. They have enough content to satisfy searchers’ queries or are linked to/from pages that help leave the topic.
- Structure: Structural elements such as H1, H2, and H3 tags, bolded headings, and schema-structured data may help Google understand a page’s relevance better.
What About E-E-A-T?
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s a framework from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, used to train evaluators on how to assess page quality. These ratings help refine search algorithms.
Google encourages content that feels authoritative, trustworthy, and written.
Experience: Crafting a User-Friendly SEO Strategy
As discussed earlier, Google initially focused on ranking pages by authority and later on relevance. The third evolution in search engine optimization is evaluating the overall site and page experience. This encompasses two closely related aspects: the technical health of the site and the actual user experience.
A technically sound site creates a positive experience for both human users and the crawling bots Google uses to explore, understand, and index pages, which is the first step to being ranked in search. Many SEO professionals (myself included) prefer to think of SEO not like Search Engine Optimization but like Search Experience Optimization.
Let’s delve into the components of user and technical experience:
User Experience
Google realized that authoritativeness and relevance, while crucial, were not the only factors users valued. Users also want a seamless and satisfying experience on the pages and sites they visit from search results. A good user experience includes:
- Matching Expectations: The landing page should align with what the user expected to see based on their query. No bait and switch tactics.
- Relevance: The content on the landing page may be highly relevant to the user’s query.
- Comprehensive Content: The content should sufficiently answer the user’s query while linking to other relevant sources and related topics.
- Page Performance: The page should load quickly, with relevant content immediately visible, and page elements should settle into place quickly. These are aspects of Google’s Core Web Vitals.
Many recommendations for creating better content also apply to improving user experience.
Technical Health
In SEO, the technical health of a site refers to how smoothly and efficiently it can be crawled by Google’s search bots. Issues such as broken connections or anything that slows down a bot’s progress can significantly impact the number of pages Google indexes and, consequently, the potential traffic your site can receive from organic search.
Maintaining a technically healthy site is known as technical SEO. Although the many facets of technical SEO are beyond the scope of this article, you can find comprehensive guides on the topic, including Search Engine Journal’s Advanced Technical SEO.
What About the Google Leak?
You’ve likely heard about the leak of Google documents containing thousands of labeled API calls and countless attributes for those data categories. Many assume these documents reveal the secrets of Google’s search algorithms. But is that assumption warranted?
While examining the documents is intriguing and reveals various types of data Google may store or may have stored in the past, some significant unknowns should make us cautious:
- Lack of Context: As Google has pointed out, we lack context around these documents. We don’t know how they were used internally by Google, and we don’t see how outdated they might be.
- Data Collection vs. Ranking Factors: It’s a massive leap from “Google may collect and store data point X” to “therefore, data point X is a ranking factor.”
- Unclear Usage and Weight: Even if we assume the document reveals some elements used in the search, we do not indicate how they are used or how much they are given.
Given these caveats, while the leaked documents are interesting from an academic perspective, they should not be relied upon to form an SEO strategy.
Putting It All Together
Search engines aim to create happy users who return to them repeatedly when they have questions or needs. They achieve this by providing the best possible results that satisfy those questions or needs. To maintain user satisfaction, search engines must understand and measure the relative authority of webpages on various topics.
You’ve gained authority when you create beneficial, engaging, or entertaining content for visitors – and when those visitors find your content reliable enough to return to your site or seek you out above others. Search engines improve their ability to match the human quest for trustworthy authority.
As discussed, quality content is vital to earning the kinds of links that assure search engines you should rank highly for relevant searches. This includes content on your site that others want to link to and content that other quality, relevant sites publish, with appropriate links back to your site.
Focusing on the three pillars of SEO will increase the opportunities for your content and make link getting easier.
You now have the essential knowledge for SEO success, so get to work! If you still need help finding it, check out our monthly SEO packages and let the experts help you.
