The Future of SEO in India

What Top 23 Experts Think!

We asked 23 experts, 4 questions regarding the future of SEO in India:

  1. What is the importance of Rankings today as far as you're concerned?
  2. What are your favorite strategies to get your site or content ranked in the Google SERPs?
  3. What would you say are the 3 critical elements to be covered in an SEO site audit?
  4. What features do you think are missing in mainstream SEO tools? Are these any processes you'd love to see automated?

The Future of SEO in India according to Kaushal Thakkar, SEO and Digital Marketing head at Myntra

KAUSHAL THAKKAR

SEO and Digital Marketing head at Myntra Twitter: @kaushal_t
Rankings help in understanding the ranking improvement a site had over a period. This is a basic indicator to understand if your SEO efforts & spends are helping.
Importance of rankings?
Rankings were important for measuring search performance a decade back and remain important today as well. Rankings help in understanding the ranking improvement a site had over a period of time. This is a basic indicator to understand if your SEO efforts & spends are helping. It is also one of the most important metrics for competition analysis.

However crucial, ranking is not the only metric that an organization should look at to get an overall view of SEO performance. They should also include other related metrics to organic search traffic such as click share, conversion, sessions, bounce rate, engagement etc.
Favourite Ranking Strategies?
I follow a three-pronged strategy for getting a site ranked in Google SERP.
  1. SEO compliance of platform - It is important to ensure that the bots crawl only unique and relevant content on the site. If this fails, all other SEO efforts would go down the drain.
  2. Implementing a good content strategy - Create content for users and not for bots. Many people ask me if they can automate the generation of content for gaining search rankings. Doing so will not only will increase the bounce rate of users but it will also be a hanging sword over your neck. Remember that Google is smarter than you. Even if a black hat technique works today, you do not know when Google comes up with a new update that will crash your ranking and reputation. It's better to follow ethical ways to generate content and rank on Google.
  3. Relevant links to important pages - It is said that "Doing business without marketing is like winking in the dark, you know what you are doing, but nobody else does." Creating relevant links from various other locations is like advertising since it helps users discover the critical pages on the site. This also enhances the authority of the site.
Elements to be covered in SEO site audit?
The 3 most critical elements to be covered in SEO audit are
  1. User & Bot eXperience (UBX) audit - Ensuring that the experience of Users and Bots is the best on the site is one of the most important elements of an audit.The Site should be simple & easy to navigate. Many times the crucial pages of the site that are expected to bring the maximum revenue are found 3-4 levels away from the home page. This is neither good for the business nor for the users & bots.
  2. Thin content review - Creating pages that add little value to a user can be termed as thin pages. E.g. "casual shoes size 10", "casual shoes size 11". 99% of the products displayed or content written for such pages would be the same. There is no need to create this level of detailed content and URLs. For websites with high dynamic content (e.g. E-Commerce), it's better to keep the site lean with relevant URL's instead of bulky with not so relevant URLs.
  3. Backlinks - It's important for a site to be linked from relevant websites and not from irrelevant websites. If your site is being linked from sources that are irrelevant please request the owner of such websites for removal of such links to your site or Disavow such links from your search console.
Your Dream Feature not present in current SEO tools?
It's important to look at search rankings from a holistic view. I see many mainstream tools only reporting the average ranking change on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. While this is important it is also important to understand the search volume of keywords.

E.g. Search volume for the keyword "Online shopping" will be much more as compared to "Nike casual shoes". Let's say site X gained 5 rankings on "online shopping" to move to the first position & site Y gained 5 rankings on "Nike casual shoes" and moved to the first position. If these were the only keywords for which the rankings changed over a period, the average search ranking metric for both these websites would increase in the same proportion. However site X would have gained much more visitors from search because of the higher search volume. So we need a better metric like click share.

A click share can be calculated on the basis of rankings, CTR of the ranking position & search volume of the keyword.

Yes, I would like to see this automated in the mainstream tools.
Rohan Chandrashekhar
Rohan Chandrashekhar Zubin Kutar
Zubin Kutar Deepan Siddhu
Deepan Siddhu Somesh Khandalkar
Somesh Khandalkar Kamaljit Saini
Kamaljit Saini Vishal Dutta
Vishal Dutta Jignesh Gohel
Jignesh Gohel Sandip Shetty
Sandip Shetty Tushar Pant
Tushar Pant Pankaj Chauhan
Pankaj Chauhan Lalit Kataria
Lalit Kataria Agha Mateen
Agha Mateen Sabyasachi Mitter
Sabyasachi Mitter Biplab Das
Biplab Das Honey Singh
Honey Singh Devranjan Dash
Devranjan Dash Madhusmita Panda
Madhusmita Panda Ramprabu
Ramprabu Viraj Mehta
Viraj Mehta Devesh Verma
Devesh Verma Rahul Setia
Rahul Setia Rahul Kamal
Rahul Kamal

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