Earlier this year, the first Dunelm discussion took place. Open for all colleagues across the SSC; it’s an opportunity to speak for an hour about a topic of your choice. Every fortnight, a different presenter, and a different discussion. With 4 months experience of SEO, I signed up to lead a talk titled ‘An Introduction to SEO’ and encouraged teammate Arun Adisesh to join me for the ride.

After an initial planning meeting, which featured a large stack of post it notes of content ideas, we whittled these down to suit our audience. We anticipated a room of people from across the business, so would need to be careful with the speed of delivery to keep everyone on board. Slides assembled; we had several practices run throughs to the point where we could deliver the full hour without additional notes. There were 19 booked in; yet 30 came to listen on the Thursday afternoon. In this article, I explain what we covered, and what I learnt from the experience.

The anatomy of Search Engines

I begun with a demonstration of how search engines return different result formats depending on the query type and user intent. We introduced the terminology of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), the framework of ranking positions and highlighted that the shopping PLA and text ads were not SEO. Through Dunelm examples, we returned featured snippets, image results, the knowledge graph, weather forecast, news articles, google maps, and the ‘people also ask’ box. The take-away is that SEO is not all about text links to our web page. It’s also about setting up our content to help Google feature us directly on the SERP.

With all the examples so far taken from the Google SERP, I wanted to raise the awareness of other search engines, even if only in passing. Relating global search query volume to the headcount in the Syston Support Centre, only 40 people would be using a search engine alternative to Google, such is their dominance in this market. We would be talking about Google for the remainder of the presentation and assured our audience that the situations were analogous for all other search engines. Feedback on this slide was that it could have been more interactive, perhaps using a quiz format for audience involvement early on.

How Google Works

You type your search query into the box (or maybe tap the microphone button and dictate aloud) and click enter. In the fraction of a second, a page of results is returned. Where are these results from? How does Google do it so quickly? How does it know that these pages are what you are looking for? In this slide, we gave an overview of how search engines manage this so quickly through crawling, indexing and ranking the web. Most of our audience were new to this, so we took it slow and explain each step a couple of times through.

When new content is posted online, Google doesn’t know it is there until it has crawled the page. Crawling is the algorithmic process of discovering new web content, The Googlebot programme, sometimes called a spider, follows hyperlinks and creates a list of all URLs on the web. We talked about how maintaining our sitemap and robot.txt file help ensure that all our desired pages can be crawled and indexed by Google.

Indexing is the processing of the webpages Googlebot crawled. It creates a huge index of page content. We explained that it’s at this step that Google “sees” what is on each page and stores this information in large datacentres around the globe. We mentioned that we use structured data to mark up our content and help Google understand our content.

Ranking is intuitively the simplest step to explain and understand. Given a massive amount of information about web content, a Google algorithm assigns a score to each page for the given search query. The content with the highest score if returned at the top of the SERP, that with the second highest score is returned in position 2 and so forth for all results.

404 Errors and Redirect Loops

Arun spoke about our SEO team, aiming to drive more natural traffic into dunelm.com through increased visibility in the SERPs. Arun talked about the idea of site equity and ‘SEO juice’: how links from pages with high authority pass on some equity through their links, so that page quality is influenced by neighbouring site content. We regularly use screaming frog for routine site hygiene checks and for the traders in the room, it was helpful to explain redirect loops and 404 errors, and how we eliminate these. Everyone could relate to the 404 errors but not necessarily why they occurred. Arun also explained how keyword research and content creation helped us stay relevant for our customer queries.

Improve your Google Rankings

We wanted to dive deeper into how our pages are ranked and to educate the commercial teams present about some things to take into consideration when uploading products to the site. Giving the example of house hunting, we talked about how we each have a list of what we’re looking for when searching and viewing for our next property. We call these our ranking factors. Our budget, the location of the house, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, the presence of a driveway, balcony or garden, the size of the kitchen and living areas, ceiling heights, broadband speed, any cosmetic defects and, if we are renting, the décor and provision of furniture. Within this long list, some requirements are more important than others depending on our preferences. As a juggling hobbyist, I certain considered ceiling heights when looking for a place to live last September and wasn’t too concerned about the size of the kitchen or whether my room was en-suite. For keen gamers, broadband speed may have a huge weighting, or for a family with young children, proximity to good schooling and having a garden may feature high on the list of priorities.

We raised the idea that Google has a list of ranking factors to assign a score to each web page, but that Google didn’t share a list of them, or tell us how much importance it placed on each one. With over 200 in total, the group were shocked how much uncertainty the SEO industry were forced to deal with.

Next up was a fun activity, putting our audience in the driving seat of the Google algorithm. I held up a sketch of a search box containing the query ‘Grey Eyelet Curtains’. The task was for the group to discuss with those around them their website ranking factors – what they’d look for in a page to decide it worthy of position one in the SERP and what they thought is the most important factor. With images our mobile PLP (Product Lister Page), our desktop PDP (Product Description Page) and an image of some source code to inspire, we gave the group 10 minutes to debate.

After some lively discussion we brought the group back together to share. Lots of sensible suggestions as to the factors which make a website better than others from the perspective of a visitor to the site. I explained that when Google indexes the site, it views only the source code. We spent a bit of time dissecting the title, meta description, h1 and image tags within the source code screenshot, then spoke about page speed, on-page content and the significance of hyperlinks within our site and from other relevant pages on the web. We drew similarities to the house ranking factors, comparing the décor of a house to the images and branding on-site, and the accessibility of the house to the page speed and time to first byte. Feedback was very positive on this section of the discussion. People left with a good model of how to think about potential ranking factors.

Off the back of this discussion we wanted to give an example of a known ranking factor, together with an unverified factor and talk about how the industry learns what is important. I spoke about alt tags – image descriptions processed during Google indexing, and used by screen readers for users with visual impairment. The Google webmaster blog gives examples of bad, better and best scenarios for their use which SEOs take as best practice for their own sites.

I shared an insight into the experimental nature of SEO. The group had suggested that the amount of text on a page could be a ranking factor. Sure enough, this study by SEMrush gives evidence for this. Whilst not confirmed by Google (at the time of print) it is good practice to produce content of a higher length, provided the content remains relevant and unique. The Brighton SEO conference is a fantastic resource for SEOs to discuss latest changes in the industry and hear from experts across the field. John Mueller gave the keynote in April and Rand Fishkin the October before.

SE Whoa… What not to do

In our grey eyelet curtain example, someone suggested that the presence of the keyword in our page content to be a ranking factor. In this slide, I aimed to illustrate the volatility of the Google ranking algorithm, together with a demonstration of ‘keyword stuffing.’

“Eyelet curtains are curtains that are eyelet. Eyelet, buy eyelet curtains from Dunelm….” This isn’t helpful for visitors, and Google penalises sites who practice this. The Google Panda update in 2012 clamped down on this issue and many sites experienced large ranking drops or even their site being deindexed.

Another example of bad practice is link farming, posting links back to your site on hundreds of pages across the web. The Google Penguin algorithm update in 2011 aimed to tackle this issue and penalise sites practicing this.

With our audience understanding both that Google considers over 200 different ranking factors and that the ranking algorithm is subject to change, we shared that the algorithm is in fact updated over 1000 times a year. In a tweet by John Mueller, he explained that with so many updates happening, it wouldn’t be practical to update the public on each of them. The group were realising the level of uncertainty across the SEO industry.

SEO Rank tracking

Arun spoke about how we track our ranking position for a selection of keywords. This is just one measure of visibility. There were some good questions about what we do if our rankings drop and on why we weren’t ranking at all for some keywords. Arun answered these questions clearly referencing that SEO is not a game of quick wins, and that we prioritise ranking for some queries over others. “If we don’t sell washing machines, then we aren’t interested in ranking for washing machines!”

Where is the best place to hide a dead body?

Throughout the promotion of our talk taking place, we hooked the office with prospect of answering: Where is the best place to hide a dead body?! To showcase the importance of ranking highly for site visibility, I shared the following graph comparing CTR (click through rate) to ranking position. Brushing aside the statistic that 62% of mobile search queries result in no click (perhaps a topic of another article), of those who do click, 30% is attributed to sites ranking in position 1 for the query. The graph shows that this tails off very quickly.

Page 2 of the SERP is the tongue-in-cheek answer to the question, though I think this left the audience disappointed. 

The central theme for the questions and discussion at the end of our presentation concerned a desire for SEO data to feed into decisions across the business, and for the team to apply their insight to work across other areas of the business. It was an important opportunity to consider who we work with, how we work with them, and who else might be able to benefit from our closeness to the Google algorithm. I took this away to talk through with the team. Upon reflection, this sharing of knowledge is best applied both ways: further connecting marketing channels will make each team more successful. An awareness of the social and trading plans helps us create joined up experiences on dunelm.com and to anticipate traffic and user intent.

What next?

I’ve been working on ways to improve the job advertisements Dunelmcareers.com to optimise our content through the lens of Google Jobs. It’s an exciting project which shines a new light on SEO for me – applying the same concepts to a different context. I look forward to sharing with Baz and the team next month. We’re aiming to see a rise in applications thanks to increased visibility in the jobs search results.

I’m moving into the PPC team next week, yet due to popular demand, Arun and I will also be delivering a re-run of our talk in July. There is no higher praise than that.

Feedback

“I just attended Scott and Arun’s intro to SEO session. Nearly 30 attendees from across the building. Really great – pitched at the right level, great engagement, and done without notes! No mean feat for an hour!! Great for them to have done this, and I think really beneficial for others.”

James Farnham, Digital Marketing Director

“I loved the presentation – You both spoke really well & with enthusiasm! I loved the use of analogies (e.g. the house) to explain ranking factors & the humour definitely kept everyone engaged. Allowing time for individual discussions was also good as it got everyone interacting and new ideas flowing. The matching t shirts were iconic.”

Olivia Nott, PPC Undergraduate

“Well done again!  You both presented confidently and calmly, and I thought your analogies around technical terms was a great way to address a mixed audience.”

Affiliate and Partnerships Manager

What did I learn?

 In my largest work presentation so far, 2 things become more apparent to me.

1. One can become a relative expert in a short space of time. I moved into the SEO team after, without any knowledge of the field. I feel proud of the progress I’ve made in only 5 months; to be able to speak confidently about the role of SEO to a group assembled from across the business. When I talk to others about SEO, they talk about how it is something a dark art. Sure, I say, but by following best practices together with an attitude of experimentation, building strong site equity is no more difficult than other roles.

• Sharing knowledge makes each other stronger. The enthusiasm sparked by our session is fantastic to see and marks the first step towards the SEO team working more closely with new areas of the business. Personally, I set up frequent introductions with colleagues from across SSC. I would encourage others to take the opportunity to share wider and present an overview of their department at a Dunelm discussion in the future.

If you were to explain your job or department role in a 60 minute session, what are the key points that you’d want the audience would take-away?

Until next time,

Scott