SXO sounds quite exotic, doesn’t it? Today we will clear up any doubts about it. When you think of SEO, keywords, backlinks and so on come to mind. But search engine optimisation is no longer quite about that. This doesn’t mean that SEO doesn’t include keywords or backlinks – these are the main pillars, but the premise of SEO was never to manipulate search results. That is why it has evolved, just as search engines and result rankings have evolved. Right now we are seeing another big change. It has been happening for some time, but now it is picking up speed. When you consider artificial intelligence, you will understand why this change is taking place. From this article you will learn what SEO really is, where it is heading and how to use it.
The history of SEO – how did it all begin?
In the early 1990s, when the internet became available, the first websites appeared, along with directories to which they could be added. If websites weren’t listed in them, nobody would know they existed.
Around the end of the 1980s, directories were used to index files. The first of this kind was Archie. As more and more servers went online, followed by more files, this process became time-consuming. Indexing the web required a lot of bandwidth. So in the early 1990s the first publicly available search engine, Aliweb (i.e. “Archie-Like Indexing for the Web”), gave the ability to add user-written descriptions of pages and keywords.
This was the beginning of SEO, because it enabled webmasters to submit their pages for indexing and define the terms under which users could find them. Search results contained everything in no particular order. But users could see the contents of these files only after downloading them.
What defined the internet was the creation of the hypertext protocol. Thanks to it, computers could visually display the contents of files using a tool called a browser. More importantly, it enabled pages to refer to one another through hyperlinks, which made it easier to find other related pages or files. As a result, more and more pages and websites appeared, and this slowed down the whole process of searching and wading through thousands of results.
A young Stanford student came up with the idea of creating a ranking algorithm = PageRank. Together with another student, he launched BackRub, a search engine that arranged its ranking according to a hierarchy of importance. BackRub became Google. And that is also an interesting story of how a brilliant idea waited for a sponsor, until it began to make money.. I recommend it!
What is the purpose of SEO?
Since the days of BackRub, Google’s goal has been and always was to offer users the best, most relevant search possible. They want to give users the best answers to their queries, without having to browse irrelevant results. But for this to happen, they must first find the right content and understand it.
SEO at its most basic level is the process of ensuring that your site is easy to find and index. That’s it. It’s not about building backlinks, which most people think of as SEO. According to Google it is: “Optimisation, i.e. the process of improving a site for search engines”. There are four scoring categories that Google pays attention to: performance, accessibility, quality and SEO.
SEO is described as follows: The page follows basic search engine optimisation guidelines, so that search engines can index and understand its content.
However, what Google is looking for are quality signals. According to Google, what matters are “quality signals that provide an excellent user experience”. So if you follow the guidelines and improve your quality signals, you will improve your ranking position.
Quality signals and SXO
SEO should make it easier for search engines to find, analyse and understand content. It should also make it easier for them to assess relevance and value, because they will refer directly to users’ questions and needs. “Quality” is relative. But that is exactly what makes SEO simple and, at the same time, so difficult.
Content can be of high quality, but if it doesn’t match the user’s intent and needs, it makes no sense to Google. Even if your content is better than the competition’s, but their content better matches the user’s intent and meets their needs, your content doesn’t matter.
Google uses thousands of algorithms in the hope of measuring quality as accurately as possible. It wants to give users the most accurate and most relevant results. Google’s mission is to deliver the high-quality content that users expect, while avoiding misinformation.
For content to be relevant and provide value, it must be useful, meaningful, true and important. Such content increases user convenience, and here we are heading towards SXO and a range of quality signals in the content and structure of the page. These signals differ not only in the way they are presented, but also in intensity. Among the guidelines found in the QRG, we find more than 120 mentions of EAT. Since it is talked about so often, it must be important. EAT stands for “expertise”, “authoritativeness” and “trustworthiness”.
Of course, these signals apply to different websites in different ways and to different degrees. For example, trustworthiness is less important in the case of, say, a free games website. Such websites serve entertainment. But entertainment has value and can be helpful to those who want to have fun. Moreover, if a site sells subscriptions or game-related gadgets and asks for personal data and credit card details, EAT may play a bigger role.
What characterises pages with EAT?
Such pages should, among other things:
- Have a specific purpose,
- Be mobile-friendly,
- Have a good reputation,
- Have positive reviews or ratings,
- Offer a satisfying amount of content and value,
- Answer the user’s questions,
- Adequately meet their needs,
- Not make it difficult for the user to find information,
- Have a secure connection and be updated regularly.
The content on such pages should, among other things:
- Be factually correct and verified in terms of facts or research,
- Be cited in trusted sources,
- Have appropriate, reliable sources,
- Be current and updated,
- Have good grammar and spelling,
- Not be copied from other sources,
- Not be offensive,
- Have an identifiable author,
- Be reviewed.
For some, taking all of the above into account can be quite a challenge, in particular “providing a satisfying amount of content” – simply my favourite! To be clear, SEO has nothing to do with the length of content (e.g. the number of words), nor does it have anything to do with the level of sophistication of the content — although longer content will naturally cover more topics and subtopics, and therefore will have a larger number of keywords. But that is a by-product, not a goal in itself.
What is SXO and does SEO still exist?
Yes and no, SEO comes down to two basic things:
- Content quality
- The quality of the user experience.
SEO has many layers and aspects, but essentially it comes down to high-quality content and high-quality UX.
SEO + UX = SXO, the solution to our exotic riddle!
and most importantly, the higher the quality of the content and the experience, the higher the quality of traffic and conversions will be. Take care of the great content that users need and a wonderful experience of using that content. It may not seem that simple, for three reasons:
- SEO can be perceived as convoluted because there are several hundred ranking factors, and learning and applying each of them can be time-consuming.
- Sometimes it is hard to understand because everyone says something different.. For example, applying SEO in a multilingual e-commerce store with thousands of products will be completely different from SEO on a small blog.
- Google’s algorithms are kept secret to prevent gaming the system, so experts give SEO a certain aura of mysticism, which, according to them, only a few skilled fortune-tellers can decipher. And here I come to the rescue, the SEO sorceress. 😛
SXO is a more holistic approach to SEO. It focuses on what is logical if we know what a search engine is and for what purpose users use it.
Factors influencing SXO
If you are serious about SXO, you need to know:
- What questions do users ask?
- What content will answer them best?
- In what format do they want these answers?
- What will they use these answers for?
- Are there any further questions they might ask?
It takes more than just understanding what people are looking for. It is also understanding how they search and why they search for it.
Google uses a range of different metrics that we are not 100% sure about. For example, we suspect they take into account click-through rates (i.e. how often a search result is clicked), dwell time (i.e. how long users stay on a page after clicking a search result), pogosticking (i.e. when users click search results and return to the search engine) and many other data.
What are the factors influencing SXO? “It depends”. There are, however, a few important steps that will guide you in the right direction.
First, a piece of content should appropriately match the level of the user’s intent and awareness . Both are important and may differ depending on the query. In other words, make sure the content meets the search criteria.
Search intents can be divided into:
- Informational search (we want to find something out)
- Comparative search (we look for reviews, rankings)
- Transactional search (we want to buy something)
- Navigational search (we look for a specific company/brand/product model)
There are also five stages of user awareness:
- Unaware (they don’t know they have a problem).
- Problem aware (they know they have a problem, but have no solutions).
- Solution aware (they know solutions exist, but have nothing specific).
- Product aware (they know specific solutions).
- Decision aware (they know a lot about a specific solution).
What does it mean? It simply means that content should not only satisfy the user’s search intent and meet their needs, but also take their journey into account. This means providing additional information that answers other related questions they may have based on their current level of awareness.
Suppose you have a piece of commercial content, and the user is performing a comparative search that your piece of content specifically answers. It may answer that question well, but it doesn’t address the additional questions the user may have during their journey.
Try to answer all the questions and end the search. “Be first and be last.” Be the first search result they click. Provide high-quality content that satisfies their questions, as well as a wonderful experience of using that content. Finally, provide enough information that there is no need to go back to Google.
How to start SXO optimisation?
Here are a few ways to get to the forefront of the concept of search experience optimisation.
- Understand intent
Now more than ever you need to understand the purpose of search. What are people looking for when they type queries into the search engine? Very rarely is there a single answer to that question, and you should focus on long-tail keywords, which will form the basis of your content strategy.
- Create high-quality content
Content must be of high quality and written in a way that meets the needs of the target audience. When setting your content strategy, you should be aware of the types of search results such as: “People also ask” and other snippets delivered by search engines.
Your page can contain a combination of content of various lengths. You can include shorter snippets that provide accessible material, but combined with more complex pieces, logically and intuitively.
- On-site SEO
You must pay particular attention to meta descriptions and titles to make sure that the content on the site is what the search results page says it is. Otherwise visitors may be disappointed.
- Refine the user interface
Next, focus on the user interface, on the page elements people use while navigating. Make sure your site is well organised and fast? You have only a few seconds to attract the visitor’s attention, and if your page takes too long to load, you may have already lost.
The navigation structure should be unambiguous. If you have a complex site structure, take care of breadcrumbs and other internal links.
To sum up, SXO requires a lot of research and a lot of work. More about SXO in my online course.