At Content Thread we are frequently asked, "Will our site experience be SEO-friendly?". Our response is generally to turn this question into "Yes, we ensure your site will be GO-friendly". Google-Optimized. This response is laden in the sheer market dominance of Google for querying the web for data (estimates over 90% of searches); adding in the browser market share (upwards of 70%). The result is a single "engine" for searching the web.
There is a glimmer of competition from companies like DuckDuckGo and Bing, but these account for a tiny fraction of the market.
Given this dominant market position, this leaves Google setting the goal-posts and defining the typical monopolistic practices expected from an organization with outsized market share.
How Content Thread achieves Google-Optimization
At Content Thread we focus on delivering high-quality, standards-based HTML. Adding to this we ensure the following items are addressed:
- Catalog our sites with JSON-LD attributes which in essence map content to Google "influenced" specifications schema standards.
- Mobile optimize the site UIs to Google's standards
- Draft content to match Google's inherit preferences
- Custom enhanced AEM components to support the above items without heavy development cycles
To ensure we have met the specifications, we spent lots of time in Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools). A recent update to this experience provides a clean way to navigate the Google crawler results and potential issues related around sitemaps, mobile usability and page experience.
Google has a very opinionated perspective on certain items such as mobile font size. Reading through the documentation, a developer will discover it is not as simple as modifying a font size but more related to how the viewport is managed for the application.
Content Thread front-end developers are seasoned in addressing these items in a fashion that can help not compromise the design experience but also keep the Google "machine" happy.