Product Owner Talks: Google and SEO Best Practices for Business

These days a landing page is a must-have for effective business growth. It describes your product or service, benefits for potential users, and articulates your goals. It is where a customer comes clicking on the ad or performing a search. And most importantly, a well-thought-out page can easily become the primary sales tool or literally revenue generator.

Being a product manager and working with a number of digital ecosystems, I usually pay attention to web pages describing products. There are a few moments that I care about:

• Brand voice. It reflects how you communicate your values and defines how every member of your team interacts with customers. All branding elements — communication, differentiation, positioning, and others — should be characterized by a common style and be consistent within the overall business strategy.
• UI/UX. In today’s world, people expect websites to be intuitive, quick, and smooth. Responsive design is one of the basics since it makes browsing experience pleasant, no matter the device.
• Performance. Site speed is one of the crucial criteria since it affects not only the user satisfaction rate but also your position in SERP (Search Engine Results Page). At some point, I can sacrifice animations to speed up the performance.
• Search engine optimization. All my work can bring no result if a web page is not ranked by Google correctly, and as a result, people don’t visit it.

The latter may sound too simple at first glance. However, as soon as you decide on the implementation, you may face issues related to selecting the best SEO tools, building a website semantic core, or developing a SEO strategy. While some simple answers may be found on the Internet, in other cases, you’ll have to call on the experts’ assistance. That’s why landing page development and optimization are widely outsourced.

The goal of this article is to provide a clear explanation of Google search engine optimization processes and help you create a checklist on how to attract more clients.

How can SEO make your website popular and business profitable?

Google has created unique algorithms analyzing web page content, metadata, user behavior, and performance characteristics. It has specialized page crawlers that check web page updates. When you, as a user, enter a search request like “the best UK bank for a business account,” the search engine puts the most relevant results to the top of your results page. And this is the place where all the world-wide brands are eager to get. But how to succeed in that, especially since algorithms are becoming more and more complicated? That is where SEO comes in.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and involves a series of actions aimed at boosting users’ activity on your website. It has grown into a buzzword about ten years ago and still remains the number one go-to strategy for brand promotion. In contrast to the paid traffic sources like ads or sponsored posts, it refers to the organic search engine results, when people google questions and find answers on your website. But how does it work?

On-site SEO presupposes creating optimized valuable content, and introducing the necessary changes to the HTML code, paying special attention to keywords and tags which make your site visible. However, these techniques are not enough to win the race for the top place in query results.

What is off-site optimization?

Google does not rely solely on how well your website content and metadata are optimized. Otherwise, anyone knowledgeable about page structure optimization would be able to outrank other sites without regard to their validity as a vendor. At the same time, there are companies providing high-quality services that may fail to create a customer-attractive page structure, and so end up with no clients.

To maximize users’ benefit and match them with the most reliable providers, Google has started paying attention to external links mentioning the website on a particular matter. It tracks all the references to the web page and analyzes the source along with relevant messages. For example, if Google crawlers find a forum message concerning my outstanding services with many comments from different respectful users, it will rank my web page higher.

To stay in line with algorithms, you should work on external SEO, including activities on other websites, news platforms, forums, and social media networks. Off- and on-site SEO rules are strongly interconnected, and with each Google search engine update, they get more and more complicated.

For example, one of the latest features resulted in Google paying attention to article authors. Each blog article should come with a real author’s name with a link to their profile on social media. Moreover, the content on the social media page should be relevant to the one that is written in the blog. In other words, when crawlers analyze my article about product management in fintech, they check my name, go to my profile and see that I currently work as a VP of Product Management and Digital product manager for a UK fintech startup. For Google, it demonstrates my expertise and proves that I know what I’m talking about in my article.

General recommendations for effective site promotion

First of all, it is crucial to focus on the content quality and make sure that each page provides users with exhaustive information answering their queries. The following list summarizes the main points to be checked before launching a website:

• Analyze your target audience and discover a way to reach them. Try to walk in their shoes: find where they ask questions or read information, engage in discussions, and help them understand your product, its benefits and goals.
• Make your content helpful. Your articles and overview pages should contain answers to common questions, facilitate the onboarding process, and make their product-use experience smooth. For instance, if I seek information on how to choose a bank for my business account, I want to find a step-by-step guide that will help me make the right choice.
• Satisfy search intents. Google tracks how much time the average user spends on the page and tracks their actions. Consequently, if a user visits your website but goes back to the search results immediately, the system perceives that your content is irrelevant to the query. Google search engine analyzes the frequency of such user behavior and can lower your ranking. On the contrary, if a user stays on your page, reads your article, and then surfs the website, it becomes a good reason to put your site higher.

It is worth mentioning that crawlers can detect pages with poor content. They usually contain less than 150 words and are not logically structured. For example, it may be some additional page listing keywords and offering no value for the user. Such pages are to be deleted or rewritten. One more thing that is strictly forbidden is pages with duplicated content and metadata, which you should definitely avoid.

Easy ways to boost your website online presence

Now let’s move to actional tips that we often share with our client and partners, and that can be applied as soon as your page is created. I’ve elaborated the following checklist with short explanations for each item:

1. Start with the correct metadata. There is a place in code used for putting additional information about the page itself, like title, SEO description, and keywords. But the most important thing is that they should be unique for each page.
2. Use appropriate header styles for crawlers to understand the content structure, since the text is interpreted differently by the algorithms depending on the header preceding it. Additionally, you can make the article more precise and readable by using bullets or numbering.
3. Don’t forget about keywords in URL, headers, and content as a whole. Keywords reflect typical user requests and follow the same word order, grammar, and orthography.
4. Link to other pages. You can do crosslinking for all the pages on your website. For example, if you write about mobile banking applications, you can add a link to another article of yours describing the authorization process in detail.
5. Check readability and UX. Your content should be easy to read on both desktop and mobile devices.
6. Optimize your web page for both high- and low-speed Internet. This improvement should be made on two levels - code base and hosting. Developers should review the code and fix performance bugs, error messages, as well as improve the entire code structure. Additionally, you can use CDN (content delivery/distribution network) to reduce content delivery time.
7. Use HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure). Even a landing page requires the use of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates to show Google that you care about users and their security.

These are the main, but not the only requirements. If you want to keep your page highly ranked, you need to regularly update content, re-optimize titles, and add new keywords.

Conclusion

As you can see, a website needs constant re-optimization to remain attractive to Google algorithms that are regularly changed. If you neglect basic SEO rules or fail to take proper care of your content quality, the next update can lead to traffic drop from 20 to 80 percent per day. Therefore, working with clients, I pay additional attention to the quality of the web page SEO, especially before they set to run a marketing campaign on Google, or Facebook, or any other social media.

Follow the tips mentioned above to get the most out of your website, making it appealing to both people and crawlers. To ensure that the optimization process runs smoothly and effectively, do not hesitate to turn to our experts, always ready to assist with your business growth.