The Three Pillars Of SEO

The 3 Traditional Pillars Of SEO

• Content
• Technical
• Outreach

Content

Content has been the backbone of SEO since its inception. It includes text, images, video, tables, PDFs, and much more. Search engines extract meaning from each webpage based on the content on the page.

Therefore, from an SEO perspective, choosing the right content to place on your website is key.

Technical

These elements drive your site’s performance and crawlability from behind the scenes. Your site should have a clear and simple structure for search engines to scan and index your content effectively.

Outreach

SEO is about so much more than just your website. It is also about your website’s trust and authority on the internet.

You could design the best website in the world for a pizza restaurant in New York City. Excellent food, testimonials, and lightning-fast service. You name it. Google will not trust this website and will not display it prominently in search results unless it receives confirmation from 3rd parties that you are indeed New York’s finest.

The 3 Contemporary Pillars Of SEO

Focusing on these three pillars of SEO will increase the opportunities for your content and attract more organic traffic over time.

• Authority
• Relevance
• Trust

Authority

For most queries, there are thousands, if not millions, of sites that can be ranked.

Google wants to prioritise the results that are most likely to provide the user with accurate, dependable information that fully answers the query’s goal.

Google is concerned with serving users the most authoritative pages for their queries because users who are satisfied with the pages they click through to from Google are more likely to use Google again, resulting in more exposure to Google’s ads, which are the primary source of revenue for the company.

Relevance

Relevance in SEO is a reflection of how well the search engine results page (SERP) aligns with the searcher’s intent. You must be relevant to the topic at hand.

Many people have become so accustomed to automatically relying on the first or second results in the SERPs that they don’t even realise it. This is exactly what search engines like Google strive for: to provide users with a seamless, natural experience.

For Google, providing that experience is dependent on returning the most relevant results in the most visible location — and the most visible location, especially when using a list, is at the top.

Since the words in a query and the words on web pages—and the manner in which their meanings can change over time or in different contexts—can influence the relevance of search results, the value of relevance cannot be considered constant.

A search for “apple” could indicate someone looking to buy computers or someone interested in learning about fruit. The searcher’s intent and the various modifiers or contextual signals that can assist in revealing that intent determine which results are more relevant.

Relevance can be literal or semantic. For example, if the word “apple” appears on a page about fruit trees but links to a page about MacBooks, that link may be literally relevant in context, but its semantic meaning—the specific, case-specific meaning and intent—is not. SEO requires both literal and semantic relevance.

Relevance can be determined by distinguishing between head terms and keyword modifiers, comparing keywords found in similar queries, ensuring that multimedia on the page (images, sound bites, videos, etc.) complements the page’s content, and ensuring that the article’s title accurately corresponds with the page’s content.

Aside from knowing how to determine relevance, you should also be able to recognise the various types.

Trust

Google urges all site owners to provide material that gives visitors the impression that it is authoritative, trustworthy content created by someone with relevant knowledge.

However, how much they do or can analyse such categories is still debatable.

The essential thing to remember is that the more YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) your website is, the more you should focus on E-A-T.

E-A-T in SEO stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

People started talking about E-A-T in August 2018, and it’s been mentioned in hundreds of SEO articles ever since.

E-A-T is important for all queries but more important for some than others.

For example, If you’re looking for pictures of cute cats, E-A-T probably doesn’t matter. It’s a personal choice, subjective, and it’s not a big deal if you disagree that a particular cat you see is cute.

However, E-A-T is crucial if you are trying to determine the safest and most effective aspirin dosage for pregnancy. The likelihood of erroneous or misleading information is increased if Google provides results on this topic written by an inexperienced writer and published on a low-quality, low-authority website.

Demonstrating EAT is crucial if your site is built around a YMYL topic.

YMYL sites are ones whose primary material addresses issues that may have an impact on people’s health or finances.

If your site is YMYL, you should go above and beyond to ensure the accuracy of your material and demonstrate that trained professionals wrote it.

Demonstrating good E-A-T on and off your website can potentially help improve Google rankings.

Google’s Quality Raters’ Guidelines discuss this concept in great detail.

Evaluate your current SEO using these pillars. Start strengthening your website’s authority, relevance, and trustworthiness to improve rankings effectively.