Introduction - Google’s Perfect World
In this post, we introduce a new technical SEO framework called “Google’s Perfect World” where the optimal crawling and indexing experience is at the forefront of every content decision. Websites designed in this fashion convert content into flat HTML, contain world-class structured data, and load instantly for Search Bots. These technical optimizations work in concert to drive significant increases across the board in the organic channel.
Importance of Google’s Perfect World
People say content is king. Perhaps, that is true. But what happens when Google can’t crawl and index that material? Because here is the fact of the matter: search engines don’t have the time and resources to index the best content all the time. That is still a pipe dream. Instead, they prioritize the content that is the easiest to crawl and understand. There is simply too much growth and complexity across the internet to keep pace (at this time). Until Google's crawling ability improves, websites need to go the extra mile to make work easier for their Search Bots.
Why does this matter for enterprise businesses in particular? The larger the website, the greater the probability Google is leaving important content out of its index. The latest research indicates Google could be missing up to 50% of the content on most enterprise sites. By designing your website for Google’s Perfect World, you are ensuring that Google can discover, understand, and index content as quickly as possible. Think about it from a funnel standpoint. In the same way a purchase starts with awareness, an organic ranking stems from a Search Bot's ability to discover the content.
Elements of Google’s Perfect World
These three initiatives, which collectively make up Google's Perfect World, can be leveraged to optimize the fundamental stages of the organic channel funnel.
Initiative #1 - Dynamic Rendering
The first element of Google’s Perfect World is dynamic rendering. Dynamic rendering allows you to simultaneously serve versions of your website optimized for Search Bots and humans.
Google endorsed this workaround initiative at their 2018 I/O conference precisely because resources like Javascript are time and resource-intensive to crawl. So a version optimized for Search Bots, for example, would be converted into flat HTML, load instantly, and contain structured data. By contrast, the version optimized for humans would retain all the bells and whistles of Javascript and other web technologies that provide great user experience, but are difficult to crawl.
As we mentioned earlier, Google has limited time and resources to do its job organizing the world’s information to make it accessible and useful. They have a budget to work with. Dynamic rendering optimizes your website for the first two steps of the SEO funnel. By converting heavy resources like Javascript into flat HTML, Google is able to crawl and render more of the website. That means more content goes into the index, number of ranking keywords increases, and so on. It creates a cascading, positive long-tail effect in other areas of SEO.
Initiative #2 - Structured Data Markup
The second element of Google’s Perfect World is structured data. Sometimes referred to as “schema markup”, you can think of structured data simply as the language of search engines.
Structured data helps Search Bots understand content so they can serve it to the most relevant queries. For example, on one of your products pages, you might add “SoftwareApp” schema. When the Bot crawls the associated content, they won’t be confused by industry jargon or your own company’s unique terminology. Because structured data is considered the authoritative language of search engines, they will recognize that they are crawling a software product and add it to their index for associated searches.
Perhaps the most important benefit of structured data is that it qualifies your content for a new organic search experience called “rich results”. When Google crawls a website, they rely on this structured data to take applicable content - like ratings, reviews, FAQs, and recipes - and display it directly in the search results alongside standard blue links. These “rich results”bring a number of benefits. For example, by covering more real estate in the search results they improve brand awareness.
You’ve heard folks say that Google is becoming less of a search engine and more of an answer machine. Likewise, they are also becoming the “presentation layer” of the web. The inception of rich results is the proof point. The easier you can make it for Google to extract content from your website, the better off you will perform in organic search. That’s why structured data is so important.
Initiative #3 - Page Speed
The third element of Google’s Perfect World is page speed. Page speed reflects how fast a website loads for humans and robots.
Google cares a lot about page speed. Simply put, fast-loading sites help Search Bots do their job better. Like any business with limited time and resources, Google operates on a budget. If you can maximize the output of their time spent crawling your website, you will stand to benefit greatly in terms of more content indexed, improved rankings, and so on.
Like we have talked about with dynamic rendering and structured data, one of the initiatives to pay attention to these days on the page speed front is the use of http/2 technology. By opening up one connection to each server and pushing assets across at the same time, http/2 solves one of the most frequently cited violations of page speed: the number of http requests.
Benefits of Google’s Perfect World
A strategy for Google’s Perfect World optimizes every stage of the SEO funnel.
- Discovery - Google is able to see more of your content because it has been converted into flat HTML.
- Crawling - Google is able to understand more of your content because it has been marked up with structured data.
- Indexing - Google is able to add more of your content to it’s index because it can load pages faster.
- Ranking and Conversion - Google is able to make your links more appealing and helpful because it can add rich results.
Conclusion - Google’s Perfect World in the 2020s
The framework for Google’s Perfect World is a response to (a) the fact that the internet is growing in size and complexity and (b) the fact that Google is only partially rendering a significant portion of the internet in order to save limited time and resources.
Enterprise websites are especially at risk in this predicament. Remember those old “Can you hear me now?” commercials? It’s kind of like that for enterprise sites, but for indexing. Fortunately, the problem at hand can be solved by this group of technical SEO optimizations. And if you are looking for a fix, the Huckabuy Cloud platform delivers on every aspect of Google’s Perfect World with a dynamic rendering solution, a structured data solution, and a page speed solution.
Remember - technical SEO is the foundation for all other optimizations like quality content. Additional efforts don’t pay off if Google can’t find and interact with them in the first place.