Chain Reaction SEO Workshop

Presented by Furat Jarad, Mohammad Ghazawi and Mortada Jaber

The Chain Reaction team had recently conducted an SEO workshop for the whole Chain employees on Thursday, 3 August 2017. The workshop covered topics of SEO insights, SEO UX design, SEO vs SEM and how they can complement each other, SEO vs social media, Google AMP update, and App Store Optimization (ASO).

The workshop lasted for one hour where they covered many elements of SEO and how one aspect of digital marketing can affect SEO one way or another. That said, SEO continues to be an important aspect in our digital marketing lives, which is why it’s important to understand why we need it and how it can help on all aspects of the marketing field. This is why Chain Reaction chose to expand knowledge on SEO; you can find those insightful facts here, plus enjoy some funny facts about SEO along the way! Like did you know Google penalized itself at one point?

SEO insights

The SEO insights cover many facts and statistics about SEO and some interesting information on why SEO is a major element in the digital marketing spectrum. Here are some of the facts worth noting:

Search

Google owns 68% of the search engine market share (2016)
93% of online experiences begin with a search engine (2016)
The search engine industry is estimated to be worth more than $65 billion (2016)
There are over 1.2 trillion global searches being conducted each month (2016)
91% of internet users use search (2016)

Mobile

Mobile internet usage passed over desktop searches in 2016
The average user spends up to three hours a day on a mobile device (2016)

SEO vs UX

The Chain team also covered the connections of SEO and User Experience (UX). It’s important to keep your site or page structures SEO-UX friendly at the same time – as well as the content.

UX affects SEO directly which is why it is important to think of a user-friendly page to help boost your SEO results.

SEO vs SEM – how to complement each other

Combining SEO Services and SEM is important to get the utmost level of efficiency; that said, it’s important to understand that SEO and SEM are dependent of one another, not independent. Below are some confirmations on that:

Both SEO and SEM use keywords.
The Main Goal of both is acquiring traffic and leads. Research had also shown that revenues for E-commerce sites increased by 44% when the campaigns combined SEO and SEM.
Immediate and long-term results. SEO is a long run process and it needs time – maybe months – to begin noticing improvements in keyword ranking and organic traffic, however, SEM has direct effects on the spot that is needed for brand awareness and tactical campaigns.
Dominate search results (branded) and improve CTR. Combining both has proven to dominate the search results and increase CTR! Check out the table below!
Improving quality scores, thus lowering the CPC. SEO guys do deep technical changes and keyword related changes that will benefit the SEM guys in their work for something called “quality score” of the ad campaigns and this for sure will decrease the CPC.

SEO and Social Media

SEO and social media marketing have direct effects on search results. Below are just a few:

Social share and rankings. Social shares and rankings are just like backlinks for search results. By combining the use of SEO and social media, we can reach more people on a larger level, especially with the access of shares and likes.
Facebook search engine. Facebook has an advanced search engine that gets more interests by time. SEO is the right tool to work with social media in order to optimize Facebook posts to boost rankings in both Facebook and Google search engines.
YouTube search engine. As like Google and Facebook, YouTube also has its own search engine and there are many techniques to fetch out YouTube keywords – as well as optimize videos for search.
Use of keywords in social posts. By identifying the right keywords to use in social media – to include in their posts and hashtags – you can improve the chances to get more traffic from search.
Index social channels. Once you create your own channel on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or more and people are looking to see it live and indexed on Google, then all you need to do is type in “submit URL to Google” on Google search and you will receive the correct tools to do live indexing on Google search.

Google AMP update

AMP or Accelerate Mobile Pages is an open source initiative by Google launched in October 2015. These are lightweight pages designed to load quickly on mobile devices. Below are some of the benefits of AMP:

Improve search engine ranking
Faster loading pages for mobile users
Increased visibility for publishers (by displaying AMP symbols in SERPs)
AMP reduces bounce rates

AMP provides many benefits for its implementation, however, if you do not implement it just yet, don’t worry, your site will still work the way it always has, but if you are looking for greater results, it won’t hurt to implement some AMP technology.

Now what?

Chain Reaction’s SEO team is looking to create bigger and more improved workshops inside and outside of the company — whether for university students or external companies – the SEO team suggested that all companies out there need to start utilizing their SEOs!