SEO Super-Signals

The overwhelming majority of sites that I audit have been hammered by either Panda, Penguin, or both. Sure, there are some sites where the drop in rankings can’t even compare to a known Panda or Penguin update. Some of those can track with quite high confidence to other updates, such as the EMD update, and some just show a steady, more time-neutral drop in rankings.

Apart from of the source, by the time I am even partway through a forensic site audit, enough patterns have emerged to inform me that weakness exists across the same common range of problems. And whatever that ranges is, the patterns that stand out consistently in regard to what’s wrong can be summed up in five words.

•     Quality
•     Uniqueness
•     Authority
•     Relevance
•     Trust

Whether it’s on-site or off, content level or code level, visibly identifiable as user experience-related or muddier as far as “is this truly a user experience issue?” — or some blend of these, it always comes down to the big five, or as I like to refer to them, “Super-Signals:” QUART
.
All SEO Super Signals

It’s important to understand that all signals count in SEO.  And when it comes to the 5 super-signals, if you come up little in any one signal, you need to recompense for that shortcoming with even more crack across the other four. If you come up short in any one too much, or fail on too many of the five, your site will inevitably suffer.

Quality: It’s not an island unto itself

Create grand content. Obtain high-quality links. Create quality user knowledge. These are the oversimplified statements most often associated with the Q in QUART. When you bake serious thinking into it, we’re talking about “match the content to your business’ purpose AND searcher intention.” Take the time essential to craft content to convey the highest level of relevance, to strengthen to the visitor that your brand is trustworthy, and you have the knowledge (authority) to provide the best solution for that sole need.

Quality here also means exclusive content – not something people can find seven thousand other places on the web. Which means something about your products or services, or something about the supporting services around those, or other authority or trust signals really do set you apart from the competition all in ways that users are naturally able to see, read and identify with.

Users, users, users

Since SEO is really communicating that your site is a brand to be trusted (even if it’s a new site with only three pages and no existing customer base), and since that is resolute at least partly by how people react to your presence, user experience really is golden for SEO.
Individuality without excellence is useless

Basic dictates you need enough content that is truly sole to a given page, and within a given section of your site, and across your entire site, to even have a chance at ranking for any given phrase. Yet we can’t end there. Within the unique content, you need to also talk quality, relevance, trust and authority. Because no matter how many sites you’ve been able to create, or your SEO source created that were pure garbage and “tricked” the search engine algorithms over the years, the days of those methods are quickly winding down.

And while you still may be able to have a fake blog where every article contains four paragraphs and you stick three relations into every article, and you have a link wheel that YOU think is good enough for link signals to a site you really care about, that crap is going to take all of three seconds where a real human will know it’s a part of crap.

Even if you THINK that’s helping you now, or if you need to pick up from Penguin or a manual link penalty, or you want to avoid a future iteration of Penguin or a future manual penalty, you need to stop playing those games. Instead, recognize the long-term value of unique content that really does bake in QART.

Influence – Either You Are the Best or You Are Not

What are you doing to express that “in this field, area, market, we are the go-to source for the most trusted quality” or in a way that conveys “these people are hacks?” Have you taken the time to make sure your blog article authors have a consistent web of multi-point presences across the Internet that reinforces the notion “this person knows what they’re talking about” or are all your articles written by “admin” and posted to “unspecified”?

Have you recognized your brand authority signals through Publisher markup, or is one author given the complete control over authority signals as if they are the entire group?

Are you taking steps required to reinforce authority through quality relevant customer relations on multiple channels online? Or are you bombarding everyone everywhere with low quality noise because “we need a presence”?

Holistic significance Wins

Nearly gone are the days of “relevance means matching keywords from page to page, link to link, site to site… today, if you want the true win, you need to do what was forever the best practice about relevance. Every angle you come up to the need to match your content with searcher intent, every signal in the multi-signal assessment of relevance on site at the content and code level, and every signal in the multi-signal evaluation of relevance from off-site points of reference needs that relevance to also meet the QUART litmus test.

Relevance applies to a web site’s purpose in regard to transactional or informational. And that needs to match significance of searcher intent along the decision making timeline. Relevance applies to topical focus grouping .And it applies to your presence in social media. Are you obtaining social profiles on “all the sites” or those aligned with where your customers / clients / prospective customers / clients are spending their time?

Faith is all about User Experience

If you’re obtaining profiles on “all the sites” because you heard it’s important for ORM, do you realize you need to build every one of those up in an secluded organic way so as to prevent “low quality” presence signals?

Have you so polluted every signal on site, at the code level and off site with keyword filling that real humans scratch their head and say WTF? Or do you go about that work understanding that on-site you need consistency of signals without crossing into obnoxious? And do you go about the off-site link anchor effort in an abusive way or in a way that reflects the random nature of the larger web ecosystem?

SEO is an ecology

In my audit work, all too often, I find situations where signals clash. They oppose each other, and often cancel out any value that would otherwise live.

Note how, all over this article, I mingle each of the five factors among the others? Note how I frequently reference “multiple signals”? That’s because it’s an ecosystem. When there is proper diversity and each individual signal is one that reflects and represents verification to all the other signals specific to any single aspect of SEO, you ensure a healthy and elastic ecology specific to your presence across the web.

If you don’t slow down the decision making process in your SEO efforts, and if you don’t then consider the interwoven nature of true SEO, you end up with a site that’s a complete mess, and an off-site attendance that just makes it worse. Then you come to me and say “help – we’re in crisis”. Yet if you just slow down, and take the time essential to realize these relationships and cross-point considerations, then apply QURTA to every decision, you’ll be light years ahead.