Lessons From Google On Optimizing Your SEO

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Google UK’s Managing Director, recently revealed that Google’s infamous 2007 “50 Shades of Blue” experiment involving ad links in Gmail increased revenue by $200 million a year. These results switched the balance of power from design-driven to engineering data-driven decisions, and famously led Google’s top designer, Doug Bowman, to ultimately to resign in frustration.

Search professionals have since observed and reported hundreds of UI experiments, and the search engine results page has gone through dozens of iterations since the days of 10 blue links.

Universal Search, embedded local with the 3-pack, 5-pack and 7-pack variations, rich snippets, authorship, the knowledge graph, and of course the carousel have all become part of the SEM lexicon. You can be confident that all of these changes were A/B (or multivariate) tested and vetted against some conversion goal.

So what does this have to do with SEO?

How Does Google Measure A Conversion From Organic?
If every change to the presentation layer is driven by conversion optimization, it is reasonable to assume that organic rankings are also informed by the same approach. The dilemma is that we do not know what criteria Google is using to measure a “conversion” out of organic results.

The first concrete example of Google using user data to influence SERPs appears in 2009, when Matt Cutts revealed that Google site links are partially driven by user behavior. This tidbit surfaced during a site clinic review at SMX West when he noted that their Store Locator is buried in their primary navigation, but that it is a popular page “because it appears in your site link.”

Store Locator is the top choice in the site links, despite the fact that it is still buried in the global navigation and the page is essentially devoid of content.

A quick look at the AdWords Keyword Tool shows that “meijer locations” is the 12th most popular query, well below “ad” (#2) & “weekly ad” (#8), “mperks” (#4), and “pharmacy” (#6). Even if you were to group these keywords by landing page, it is difficult to imagine behavior in the SERPs that would elevate the Store Locator to the top of the sitelink. The only thing maintaining the prominence in the sitelink appears to be user behavior after the query.

The second confirmation of user behavior affecting ranking came with the Big Brand Bailout which was first observed in February of 2009: big brands started magically dominating search results for highly competitive short-tail queries. Displaced site owners (many with lead gen sites) screamed in protest as sites with fewer backlinks suddenly vaulted over them. Google called this update Vince; @stuntdubl called it the Big Brand Bailout, and that is the name that stuck.

Hundreds of pundits suggested how/why this happened. Eventually, Mathew Trewhella, a Google engineer who was not yet trained in the @MattCutts School of Answering-Questions-Without-Saying-Anything-Meaningful, slipped up and revealed during a SEOGadget Q&A session that:

Google is testing to find results that produced the least subsequent queries, from which we conclude subsequent queries are a “conversion failure” when testing organic results. Matthew said the Vince update was about Google minimizing the number of times people have to search to find the products or information they are looking for. Every time a user has to perform a second search, Google regards it as their failure for not bringing up the right result the first time.

Google is using data on users’ subsequent query behavior to improve SERPs for the initial query and elevating sites for which users are indicating intent later in the click stream. In other words, Google is using user behavior to disambiguate intent and influence rankings on the original query in an attempt to improve conversions.