If SEO optimization is based on known and stable foundations (technical, content, popularity), Google’s developments often force you to review your priorities, or even to carry out projects that you may not have expected until then. Who would have thought that it would become complicated to index the new urls of a healthy site? Why does the user experience factor into any SEO thinking? How does Google make it easier for us to get into the minds of our customers by going beyond the concept of keywords? This is why we present to you 3 SEO issues that we believe should be addressed in 2022 and in the years to come.
1/ Optimize the crawl and indexing of your site
URL indexing is no longer automatic for Google
Crawl and indexing have been major SEO issues for several months: webmasters are having difficulty getting their new urls indexed by Google. When the process of detection, crawl and then url indexing only took Google a few days, it is not uncommon to now have to wait weeks, if not months, for a new page to appear in Search results.
And the difficulty in having a new URL indexed by Google does not only affect new sites, which by nature suffer from a lack of SEO notoriety, nor poor or duplicate content, or even 100% SEO or spammy pages for the engine. This difficulty also affects old sites, enjoying good SEO authority, with qualitative and legitimate content for the user.
Why does Google no longer index your urls correctly?
The hypotheses are going well, but the most probable are the following:
Either Google encounters serious structural problems : this is Olivier Andrieu’s hypothesis . Faced with the continuous inflation of the web, the search engine would be in the process of setting up analysis criteria intended to index only the content deemed the most useful, qualitative and obtaining good SEO popularity. But the system would not yet be developed, hence the current concerns.
Or Google has drastically changed its crawl policy by rationalizing its resources. It is therefore not a bug but a paradigm shift: this is the hypothesis of Olivier Duffez . The cause is the same, Google no longer wants to index everything for the sake of saving energy and therefore financial resources.
Perhaps the truth lies between the two. In machine learning , the important term is “ learning ”. This would explain the indexing bugs officially recognized by Google in 2020. Bugs that would not be completely resolved in view of the current situation.
How to better index its content?
Attention ! There are no miracle solutions to have your pages crawled and indexed by Google. However, we can advise to assess:
The SEO technique of your site : crawl budget leak due to a large mass of useless urls or too heavy resources (JavaScript, images, etc.), poor management of canonical urls, etc.
The quality of its content : does it meet the search intentions of Internet users? Are the Titles optimized for the user and not just for the robot? Are they rich enough, precise, original, or on the contrary poor, generic, repetitive?
The structuring of the internal mesh : is the logic of links between your pages coherent? Are these links sufficient in number and quality to boost the money pages? Are there any orphan pages? Why ?
The notoriety linked to external links remains a major SEO factor.
2/ Put UX in your SEO
Is the on-page experience a ranking criterion for Google?
Since Google officially integrated its Core Web Vitals (essential web signals relating in particular to the display time.
Moreover, the official name of this update deployed in April 2021 on mobile and February 2022 on desktop is the Experience Update Page .
Note however that, if the slowness of a site does not penalize SEO, it can have an impact on its conversion rate, for an e-commerce site in particular.
To be convinced of this, it suffices to analyze the extreme variety of result formats for informational searches:
- I want to learn how to lay parquet → videos reign supreme in the first results.
- I wonder how to reduce my taxes → a zero position gives me the list of tax measures and financial products that I need to know.
- I wonder what an Australian Shepherd looks like → a Knowledge Graph box to the right of the results shows me some photos and the characteristics of this dog breed.
SEO optimization: show Google that you understand what it expects
With these first observations, you identify:
Google’s interpretation of Internet search intent : informational, transactional, navigational searches and their variants.
The type and format of content that will most appeal to the engine.
The addition of UX and SEO is ultimately a matter of common sense.
3/ Find the answers to your SEO goals in Google questions
Always more questions in Google results
Since the end of 2017, Google has displayed “People also asked” (PAA) in many search results. When Google identifies that the search intent is informational, 4 questions related to the initial search can be displayed in a dedicated “box”.
Cool feature, when you click on the questions, new related questions appear.
According to reports from Semrush, RankRanger or MozCast, “Other Questions Asked” now shows up in 60-70% of search results.
And, when we know that Google composes these questions precisely according to Internet requests in the form of questions, the cat bites its tail:
The Internet user launches a request (not necessarily a question)
Google translates this query into natural language: “duvet cover size” becomes “what is the size of a duvet cover?”
Google enriches its understanding of the relationships between the different questions and offers new ones that are more relevant
The Other questions asked: an infinite wealth or almost to feed your understanding of research intentions
You go beyond SEO optimization based on keyword analysis. Reductive optimization because it often only focuses on one page, or a handful. It does not take into account the Internet user’s search path towards your product or service.
Concretely, you can exploit PPAs with different SEO objectives:
Collect and logically organize the questions in the form of a graph formalizing your semantic cocoon. A mind mapping tool will be of great help to you.
Enrich and redirect existing content based on a refined vision of the information needs of your target Internet users.
Find new ideas for articles , advice, guides, to develop an existing semantic cocoon.
A bonus for the end!
Google occasionally displays ads in informational and commercial search results (Title + Description) enriched with 2 questions that can boost your click-through rate:
If you want to create more relevant content and capture the user’s attention in search results, use the “Other questions asked” to define a few questions related to your content.
They will always be more relevant than questions taken out of your hat because they provide a concrete service to the Internet user.
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