Modern SEO began around 2007, and we can call that the year some things changed at the root. I remember these three stages of the move to modern SEO very clearly.

  • Google announced Analytics in 2005, and it came into full use in 2006.
  • In 2006 Google Search Console was released
  • In 2008 Chrome was released

Those three systems, and access to their data, served as a magnificent lighthouse on the journey of the world’s best search engine. Before we could reach those basic metrics, understanding quality was a matter of interpretation, from the website design we used to the content and those small touches of ours. Backlinks were of course very important in that period, and there were two areas of SEO work. We assessed them in two parts, on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Technical SEO has since been added between them as a science of its own.

With this new data Google was ranking far more successfully, and while we were going through an intense filtering process against spam at Dmoz, Google was already understanding it far better than we were. So much so that when I was undecided about sites on Dmoz.org, I would study Google’s approach to that site.

The Millisecond at Three Levels of SEO

We can explain those three levels like this.

  • Time spent on the site actively and usefully
  • Return visits and how people act on them
  • Appearing in the results and how much they are clicked

When you take on a project, you have to set out which basic problem you solve for people on this new website of yours and what makes you different enough to keep them there one second longer. In the old days the smallest unit of SEO rested on links; today that unit is the millisecond, the expression of how long people benefit from your site. In other words, the time a user spends on the site actively and productively. Sometimes doing something a little better than your rivals, and getting a small lead on them in productive time, can make your company’s work far more valuable.

Features that open faster, produce results faster and keep users on the site longer will naturally improve return visits, and will encourage the user who sees your site in the search results to click through to it.

Interpreting It at the Very Start

While I was studying tourism at Boğaziçi University, the first thing written on a blank sheet of paper when developing a project was the definition of the target audience. It is not very different in web projects. You have to write down your target audience and which of their needs you solve. Every successful feature you add that improves the millisecond figures on your site will make the site more valuable overall.

Developing your project afterwards is usually the general approach, but the site you first publish is tested on certain searches. The traces of the visitor arriving on that query are analyzed. If there are things you have left for later and the site is incomplete, your millisecond figures will come out low and you will have to wait for your next chance. And who knows when that next chance comes?

Running surveys before you publish and analyzing user behavior matters a great deal. A technical problem you miss can strike at the productive time spent across the whole site. In your analysis you can ask people what they expected and what they met. From the beta stage to real publication, you should interpret users’ traces with Google Analytics and Search Console, and this endless journey towards better should keep changing shape according to the conditions and the wants and needs of the day.

Türk SEM’s Conversion Mechanism, Built Into the Core

One of the first things we do in an SEO project is to work with our software team to build an analytics and conversion system into the core of the system, interpreted in our own way. In this system, whose mathematical formulas we developed ourselves, we see how long a user arriving on which keyword stays, what the rate of return visits is, and which form of conversion they use. Separating the conversion rates is genuinely critical for us: we handle the conversion patterns of users who message on WhatsApp, who call by telephone or who fill in the quote form separately from one another.

Thanks to this system built into the core of our SEO partner’s website, we do not use third-party tools, and so we keep our own statistics without running into various blockers. And we do it in a way that is easier to read and of real use to SEO. Even a general glance at that single statistics page lets us understand the value of the project, and when we go into the detail, discover which pages are failing.

On the HotelWD project we have been working on for a long time, hoteliers cannot read this data as well as we do. We have been doing this since 1999, and the figure 0.1 means something to us. On HotelWD, Gemini, which thinks the way we do and serves as our intelligence engine, assesses the data within our own line of thinking and presents the coming flow and the unproductive content of the past to hoteliers very successfully.

Yes, the matter is absolutely the millisecond, and for us SEO can be explained with the word “value” that is produced and placed there.