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Changing processes is easier than changing minds. 

When attempting to change behaviour, we often focus too much on trying to change people’s attitudes rather than changing the processes that spark the behaviour in the first place.

Ajzen’s theory of planned behaviour shows us that attitudes alone do not result in behaviour, and people often behave in ways that conflict with their expressed attitudes. 

So, in order to truly enact behaviour change, focusing purely on trying to change people’s attitudes can be folly.

Balancing friction and fuel - Dan Ariely’s five step process

Effective behavioural change was central to the Behavioural Exchange 2019 conference last week at London’s QEII conference centre. 

The event saw people from over 65 countries across the world come together for two days of talks from the best minds in behavioural science.

Day Two’s keynote address from Prof. Dan Ariely was particularly relevant for marketing strategists. 

Ariely shared his rocket ship metaphor for decision making and behaviour change: too much friction and the rocket won’t fly, not enough fuel and it will not fly either.

 The idea of friction and fuel form the central part of Ariely’s five step process to help people make better decisions and spark behaviour change. 

The process, which I’ve outlined in more detail below, mirrors many of elements of strategic planning. But crucially, it offers a way to build in behavioural science considerations at each stage.

As strategic planners our job is to get to the root of the problem. But as Ariely pointed out, we don’t always know what the obstacles are. 

During discovery it’s important we define exactly what the problem is, find the appropriate data to investigate the problem and hopefully achieve insight from its analysis.

Once the problem is well defined and any obstacles identified, we then need to consider how we can decrease friction and remove or change any obstacles. 

Ariely demonstrated this by talking about an experiment that attempted to reduce the amount of cash that people withdraw from ATMs. Several approaches were trialled such as having a default withdrawal amount, and changing the fee from fixed to variable. 

Both approaches dealt with the friction involved in making a withdrawal, and both proved successful, especially in combination.

Alongside decreasing friction we also need to add fuel, i.e. motivation for people to perform certain behaviours. 

When trying to decrease no-show rates for medical exams, Ariely discussed how ‘fuel’ was added to pre-existing SMS reminders. For example, reminding people that another person could use their appointment slot, or highlighting that it is important to their family members that they go to their appointment. 

These very simple changes to the messaging decreased no-shows from 21% to 14%, demonstrating the power of motivational cues in sparking behaviour change.

In 1747 James Lind conducted one of the first control trials in medical science ever recorded, and discovered that lemon juice prevented scurvy in sailors. It took until 1795 for lemon juice to be compulsory on Navy ships but despite this sailors kept getting scurvy. What the Navy didn’t realise was that the method of preservation (boiling the lemon juice) destroyed the vitamin C which was preventing the scurvy.  

Ariely used this example to demonstrate that different considerations come into play when trying to enact behaviour change at scale. A principle that works in small tests may not have the same effect when rolled out to larger populations and could have unintended consequences. It's important to remember that this doesn’t mean the principle is flawed, just that its execution may need to be tweaked. 

Ariely focused the majority of his talk on the first few steps. However steps 4 and 5 involve equally important considerations for strategists:

Often we have multiple possible paths to choose between, and trade-offs have to be made when deciding which path to take. How we make these trade-offs is dependent on our goals and priorities. 

Social Science ≠ Physics. Social Science is much more dynamic, and can change both across cultures and within. Our social world is changing, and fast. What works today may not work tomorrow so we need to keep retesting and adjusting.

Dan Ariely concluded by expressing his views of the future of the field of behavioural science. 

In his view, a lot can be (and has been) achieved by applying these principles to existing strategies and making small tweaks. But it is even more effective if the above five steps are baked into process design. And sometimes that means starting from scratch.

Though Ariely focused largely on improving technologies for governments, it still rings true for the marketing world. The principles he shared give us a useful framework for strategic analysis - and a reminder that we need to continue questioning why we do things the way we do, and constantly be considering if they could be done better. 

Sparking behaviour change - a five step process for strategists

A five step process to help people make better decisions and spark behaviour change, as presented by Dan Ariely at Behavioural Exchange 2019.

A five step process to help people make better decisions and spark behaviour change.

It’s possible that you could sit down at your desk tomorrow and discover your website has very different organic search rankings and that you have a whole new set of competitors.

Google has announced a change to a fifteen-year-old rule that governed SEO.

Let's first quickly summarise what is going on and how it could result in Google looking at the internet with fresh eyes overnight.

You’re no doubt well aware that links are a significant part of Google's algorithm. A link from a trusted site is a strong signal that the editors of that site are endorsing the webpage they are linking to. 

For example, if an international newspaper publishes an article on their website about 'search engine optimisation' and it links to your page about SEO, Google responds by increasing the importance of your page because of that endorsement.

Fifteen years ago, Google had enough of spammers trying to game the system and introduced a way for websites to link to others, without implying that the mention was also a vote of confidence. That method was the 'nofollow' attribute for links.

From a technical point of view, when Google sees 'nofollow' on a link, it tends to ignore that link.

For example, Wikipedia was an early adopter and added 'nofollow' to all its external links by default. As a result, spam on Wikipedia dropped considerably, as unethical SEOs no longer had reason to edit articles to include links to specific sites. 

Wordpress also adopted the protocol to automatically make all links left in comments “nofollow links” as a way to reduce comment spam. 

Under Google’s new system ‘nofollow’ becomes more of a suggestion to Google, rather than a strong request - and two alternatives have been introduced. Google’s machine-learning enhanced algorithm may come to assign some SEO value to these new link types. Or Google may conclude that a statistically high number of these new link types is a negative quality signal, rather than a positive one. As a result, Google will have a huge number of new data points to analyse. 

Yesterday, a prominent WordPress developer, Joost de Valk signalled that the blogging platform would quickly move away from ‘nofollow’ links.

Wordpress is not the only huge platform to use ‘nofollow’ links. I looked on the code search engine publicwww and quickly found 10 other large sites that might be tempted to swap ‘nofollow’ for one of Google’s new link types:

Why is nofollow so prevalent? Forum owners, sites with blog comments and similar, also added 'nofollow' to all the links in the user-generated sections of their sites. Again, this was an effort to remove the incentive for spammy content stuffed with links to be left behind.

Importantly, 'nofollow' also meant that sponsorships, PR activity and other content created as a result of compensation should have also used nofollow. For example, if a blogger receives a free product to review, then Google would expect that blogger to add 'nofollow' to any link back to the product sellers website.

Google’s new, more nuanced approach introduces two alternative (perhaps softer) values below 'nofollow'. 

One is 'ugc' (user-generated content) for sites like Wikipedia, and the other is 'sponsored' for bloggers and anyone media owner who might sell links.

I’ve gone into much more detail below about the reasons for these changes. But first, let’s consider a possible edge case scenario that would have a massive impact on what type of content appears in search results.

Last week, Wikipedia automatically added 'nofollow' to every external link. Unless Google has been making an exception for the hugely popular site, it means Google's ranking algorithm has been ignoring Wikipedia links as positive SEO signals for the sites that receive them.

This week, Wikipedia may decide that 'ugc' is a more appropriate value to add to its external links. If that happens, we could wake up to an internet in which Google credits some value to user-generated links and now has the entire scope of Wikipedia's vast bank of content re-examine with these new values in mind.

I think this is an unlikely scenario as my gut-feeling is Google already has special rules for Wikipedia and that Wikipedia has no real incentive to make the change. (The same could have been said about WordPress, though, and it looks extremely likely they will be making the change.)

Smaller changes that will impact SEO over time are also likely. In particular, blogger outreach can now be more liberal with freebies and sponsorships because PR and SEO agencies can negotiate for 'sponsored' links. 

Sites that want to encourage user-generated content might decide to soften their automatic 'nofollow' policies in favour of 'ugc' disclosed links in the hope of encouraging contributions. 

To fully understand these changes, it helps to take a step back to see the big picture. 

Google's original algorithm leaned heavily on a mechanic called PageRank. The first generations of PageRank used links from one web page to another in order to count and weigh the importance of the pages involved. The more inbound links a webpage had, the more likely it was to rank more highly.

The importance of links for SEO created a whole industry around chasing links. It manifested first in what I call the Industrial era of SEO and which Google's first head of webspam, Matt Cutts, once referred to as B.O (backlink obsession). 

Google had created two thorny problems which it needed to solve.

The first problem was spam. Sites that allowed users to generate content became riddled with poor quality, often inaccurate, content as people submitted links purely for gaming Google's link greedy algorithm. 

The second problem was bought links. The algorithm wanted to treat links as endorsements from one expert to a page that that expert trusted. However, brands began to purchase advertising space from bloggers, newspapers and magazines in the form of text links. These site owners pointed out that they should be able to monetise in any way they saw fit.

As I’ve already outlined above, the solution was the 'nofollow' value for links. Site owners could now add 'nofollow' to a link to remove that implicit vote of confidence for the page the link pointed to. 

In 2012, Google tripped up over its own rules. It had commissioned a series of advert videos for distribution bloggers via the platform Unruly Media. Unruly asked bloggers to write about Google's products and include the video. Some of those bloggers also included a link back to Google's Chrome page and did not add 'nofollow' to those links. It caused an outcry in the SEO industry. There have been other occasions when PR activity has resulted in SEO harm because neither the PR company nor bloggers knew or understood the 'nofollow' rules and accidentally created links that Google considered not sufficiently editorially pure.

The algorithm has changed since those early days. Google now uses machine-learning technology called RankBrain to assist its algorithm, and it uses human testers to help determine which version of the algorithm yields the best results, but links remain incredibly strong signals. 

It's only been in recent months that the majority view of 'search engine optimisation professionals' has come around to considering content more important than links. Rand Fishkin's survey of 1,500 SEOs for SparkToro puts 'Quality of linking sites & pages' as the second most important SEO signal.

The rise of content is due to two factors. 

The first is that Google has become much better at evaluating content. It now identifies and dislikes content with too many ads, or which offers up poor user experience. Equally, the algorithm is much better at detecting and rewarding content that is written by subject matter experts. 

The second is that to earn a link, without a 'nofollow', from a subject matter expert requires outstanding content. Successful brands invest hugely in user experience and content marketing, and that pushes average quality and expectations higher.

I labelled this trend the Renaissance era of SEO. 

An unexpected side effect of these changes is that Google finds it has to work harder to discover content.

To attract links, brands need people to see their new content. Social media is a great place to share content so that people can discover it and yet most social platforms use ‘nofollow’ links as standard.

If Google treats 'nofollow' as 'ignore this link' then it can't easily monitor webpages like forums or public Facebook groups. 

For example: A couple of threads of investment advice forums start talking about a new stocks and shares ISA, occasionally linking, but with nofollow values, to a newly created product page. Under the old system Google may have to ignore those user-generated links and wait to discover the new ISA page when it cycles back around to indexing the financial services company's website. Even then, Google's crawler might not notice the new page if it is buried deep in the site.

This example also works for how the new system might affect SEO. If those same investment advice forums start to use the 'ugc' value on links instead of 'nofollow' then Google will follow those links to the new ISA page and may count them as quality signals too. If the latter happens, then the company launching the new ISA will gain an SEO boost as a result of being talked about on forums. 

The 'nofollow' value for the relationship attribute is fifteen years old, but Signal's SEO team regularly encounters bloggers and site owners who have never heard of it, use it incorrectly or wilfully ignore it. 

Google has just made linking out to external sites more complex. It seems all too possible that bloggers and other independent publishers might fail to adopt rel="ugc" and rel="sponsored". If that happens, Google will probably drop its support for the newly created values.

If you are linking to a site that you do not wish to endorse in any way or where you want to reduce the incentive for others to leave SEO-minded spam as much as possible, use rel="nofollow". 

If you are linking to a site you have a commercial relationship with or if you're arranging a link from a website you have a business relationship with, ensure rel="sponsored" is used.

Lastly, if you are allowing users to create content and links on a platform you run but see no need to distance yourself entirely from that content, then add rel="ugc" to those links.

Google's new rules could change the SEO landscape overnight

Google's latest change to a 15 year old SEO rule means that you may now have very different organic search rankings and a whole new set of competitors. 

Google's new rules could change the SEO landscape overnight | Signal Blog 

Google's latest change to a 15 year old SEO rule means that you may now have very different organic search rankings and a whole new set of competitors

Us humans are not as rational as we’d like to think. 

We’re all prone to biases, or ‘errors in thinking’ that have the potential to negatively affect our ability to make good decisions. They are predictably irrational, and hundreds of them affect our decisions daily. 

Recognising how these biases affect the way we communicate with each other is a key aspect of Behavioural Economics, which provides a framework for understanding how psychological, emotional and cultural factors affect people’s financial decisions.

Behavioural Economics has been around for a while, and its application in one form or another is pretty widespread across sales and marketing in the Financial Services (FS) sector.

“Financial decisions usually have too many moving parts for the average person to make a rational decision. And that’s where Behavioural Economics fits in.” Martin Wheatley - Former CEO of the Financial Conduct Authority

However, we believe there is a massive area (certainly by volume, and arguably by importance to the customer), where the principles and practices of Behavioural Economics are pretty much universally ignored -  the world of Mandatory & Regulatory (M&R) communications. We’re calling it the Cinderella Syndrome.

The way a brand handles bad, complex and mundane news is often the truest test of its commitment to customer service, satisfaction and experience. 

So although it may seem counter-intuitive, M&R communications can have a bigger impact on customers than discretionary marketing. 

The big TV ad or the billboards they drive past on the way to work, even some of the perks you offer, really matter very little compared to being told that they – your loyal customers – are going to pay more interest, or lose benefits of their account that they’ve become accustomed to.

How you treat customers at critical touchpoints = your brand

Behavioural Economics reinforces this point in the principle of ‘loss aversion’. Studies on the topic repeatedly prove that people feel losses much more acutely than they do similar-sized gains. Each M&R communication could potentially spark negative emotional reactions that customers will forever associate with your brand.

In this context, it’s unfortunate that most banks’ marketing teams spend so much time and effort on their above-the-line activity and other discretionary marketing, while neglecting M&R communications almost entirely. 

The business benefits of transforming M&R communications

No wonder that these letters or emails with their dry, impersonal headings like ‘important changes to your terms and conditions’ followed by pages of dense copy and text, invariably end up being ‘filed away’ somewhere to gather dust. 

Even the most conscientious customers might only have a vague idea what the important changes are after reading them, never mind what the long-term impact is likely to be.

However, we’ve seen first hand with our clients in the Financial Services sector that the application of Behavioural Economics within these communications can drive significant benefits across brand, customer and business metrics, for example:

A 19% increase in NPS (Net Promoter Score) following the rewrite of a savings communication

Positive customer action improved by 35% in savings maturities with customers staying and taking up a better interest rate

Calls to the call centre reduced by 92% in comparison to a very similar communication prior to applying Behavioural Economics

Costs have been significantly reduced through enabling delivery through a customer’s channel of choice, but also by redesigning the layout, and the production of the communication.

The 8 biases that can make all the difference

From our experience, reducing the negative impact of biases is the best starting point for brands who want to improve their customer experience and make cost savings.

Signal - 8 most common Behavioural Biases.pdf

We begin by focusing on 8 key biases that have the biggest impact when it comes to M&R communications. Read short summaries of all 8 below, or download our handy PDF cheat sheet. 

Present Bias - We focus on our immediate wants and needs and give less attention to the future. For example: Not putting any money into a pension because we have immediate costs to cover, like childcare.


Defaults - A pre-set course of action that will take effect if the customer does nothing. It’s a really effective tool where there’s inertia. For example: Staying with a provider that gives poor service – even when we complain about them.


Reference points - We don’t evaluate things on their own merit but tend to assess them against false reference points. For example: Estimating the value of our house based on what we paid for it, not the latest market value.


Framing - We react differently to the same scenario if it’s presented to us in a different way. For example: Switching bank accounts because of an attractive offer without checking if it has the features we need, or how much the overdraft charges are.


Limited attention - We only pay attention when it’s grabbed, or if we force ourselves to concentrate. For example: Not transferring your savings balance at the end of a promotional interest rate because you didn’t read the maturity letter you received in full.


Mental accounting - We treat money differently in our minds, based on what we’ve decided it’s for. For example: Taking out a loan instead of dipping into savings. The interest we pay on the loan will be more than any we earn on our savings.


Loss aversion - We feel a loss much more deeply than we do a gain, so we try to avoid them. This can lead to us putting off more difficult decisions. For example: Taking out insurance we don’t really need – but we’d rather pay than face regret.


Social influence - We want to belong and be like everyone else. This means we might buy things based on social factors rather than whether a product meets our needs. For example: Using the same mortgage provider as our parents instead of shopping around for the best deal.

Knowing these principles is only the beginning however. Applying them consistently to your M&R communications is another matter entirely. 

Through our work with The London School of Economics, the FCA and CMA, we’ve created a behavioural approach that transforms content, design and the way data is used in M&R communications. 

And we’ve seen the results - better financial decision making and understanding for customers, and lower production and support costs for our clients.  

Get in touch if you’d like us to help you embed Behavioural Economics best principles in your organisation.

FS brands will get better results if they address these 8 biases

We examine the top 8 key behavioural biases that have the biggest impact in improving customer experience & cost savings when it comes to Mandatory & Regulatory communications.

Here are the 8 key biases that have the biggest impact in improving customer experience & cost savings when it comes to M&R communications. 

FS brands will get better results if they address these 8 biases | Signal Blog 

They’re not bright, colourful, fancy or loud. They rarely get to go to glitzy award ceremonies. And they’re never first in line when the budgets are handed out.

But every Financial Services (FS) marketing department has them. And in our experience they can make up around 80% of what your customers see from your brand.

Mandatory and Regulatory communications are the Cinderella of Financial Services marketing. Hiding away in a dusty corner, under the shadow of their higher profile big sister (discretionary marketing).

An unloved and overlooked underdog (think how your customers feel!)

We know these communications are tricky. We’re not denying that. 

They are expensive and a great deal of hard work. They need to communicate complex changes, bad news and mundane details to apathetic customers. And their effectiveness can be hampered by a lot of internal ambiguity, numerous stakeholders and a hard stop on the deadline (just don’t mention pumpkins). 

Yet these communications are crucial to the everyday experience of your brand. It’s these letters and emails (about changes to terms and conditions, fee increases, and bank errors) that customers remember when it comes to deciding on whether to take a new product or service from you, or switch to a shinier, sexier competitor (such as rapidly growing challenger banks like Monzo and Starling). 

This is the place where customer loyalty is won or lost. 

We strongly believe it’s time for these communications to be let out of the proverbial cellar, and put into the spotlight. Like Cinderella, they are destined for much greater things. 

A succession of external factors like GDPR, digitisation of services, and branch closures has meant that direct interactions between the customer and the brand are becoming less frequent. Therefore, mandatory communications have become an increasingly important brand touchpoint, perhaps second only to mobile apps. 

They ought, then, to be tailored to fit each individual customer’s needs as perfectly as a custom-made glass slipper. 

In reality, our research has shown that the bulk of what lands on the doormat is in fact a very poor fit for each individual customer. The communications we’ve reviewed tend to lack any of the same attention to best practice that you would typically see with discretionary marketing communications. 

And there will be hundreds of millions of them being sent to customers every year. Which means that timely, accurate and personalised delivery is a surefire way to secure a competitive advantage for your brand.

Financial Services brands could be missing out on millions

Of course, we understand that improving M&R communications is not as simple as waving a magic wand. 

That said, we believe there are very good reasons to tackle those challenges head-on in a way that reduces, rather than adds to the complexity involved.

For one thing, it’s not just the customer experience that suffers. UK Banks and Building Societies are throwing away millions of pounds each year on under-optimised M&R activity. 

Whether it’s high print and postage costs due to poorly constructed messaging; sending multiple communications to customers when one would suffice; perceived inability to use digital channels as the default medium; or the high costs of telephony support to customers that are concerned (or just confused) about what the latest letter actually means. 

The status quo is high on waste, low on efficiency, and few are pleased with the outcome. Surely that’s a good reason to recognise the hidden value in your M&R communications and elevate them to a starring role.

Thankfully, there are some proven tools for optimising these communications (that don’t awkwardly expire at midnight).

Behavioural economics holds the clues to radically better content design, with improved wording and layouts that take people’s natural psychological biases into account. And better content design in M&R comms means less printing and more informed, more confident customers, who go on to make better financial decisions. They also place fewer “what the hell is this?” calls to call centres. Better CX and lower costs. Win-win.

Channel choice. Some customers prefer to get comms through email, but many banks are still using print as the dominant channel for M&R comms. The requirement for a ‘durable medium’ is enforced by the FCA, but this needn’t rule out using email as the primary channel (albeit it helps to have automated bouncebacks in place like we do for our major clients).

One message per customer. With a UK average of 1.2 current accounts per customer, and that data potentially being held in multiple sources, it’s easy to see why banks might take the less risky route and send one message per account (rather than one message per customer). But with smart data aggregation in place, the process of removing duplicate messages and sending one message per customer can cut 20% of the total production cost of the project.

Smoother processes. The number of people and teams involved in M&R activity can lead to rushed processes, full of errors, rework, and frustrated staff. Yet, the risk of making changes to established processes (however painful and inefficient they might be) can be daunting for senior management and leads to inertia. By introducing a collaborative planning approach, we get client teams together early - across disciplines – to define the critical path for each project and prioritise the customer experience. This aligns the vision, clarifies the capabilities across data and content, allows for leaner production, and allows for change while also reducing risk. 

Ok, so maybe we’re stretching the Cinderella analogy to breaking point. We may not be able to guarantee a fairytale happy ending, but we can make a real impact that benefits both your brand and customer.

By using a truly behavioural approach to content and design, as well as changing the way data and content are processed, we’ve been able to help our Financial Services clients create millions of communications that deliver the right information, to the right customer in the most engaging way possible.

Better financial decision making and understanding for customers, which means happy regulators, increased customer loyalty and significant cost savings. As well as an invitation to every (award) ball. 

Take a look at how we helped Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) improve their Mandatory and Regulatory communications.

To find out more about how we can help you improve your customers' experience at every touchpoint, get in touch. 

The ‘Cinderella Syndrome’ that could be costing FS firms millions

Mandatory & Regulatory communications are often unloved & overlooked in financial marketing. However it's time for them to be put into the spotlight. 

Mandatory & Regulatory communications are often unloved & overlooked in financial services marketing. However it's time for these communications to be put into the spotlight. 

The ‘Cinderella Syndrome’ that could be costing FS firms millions | Signal Blog 

Mandatory & Regulatory communications are often unloved & overlooked in financial services marketing. However it's time for these communications to be put into the spotlight.

The ‘Cinderella Syndrome’ that could be costing FS firms millions | Signal Blog

SEO hasn’t got any easier since I entered the industry many moons ago. But it has changed significantly during that time. 

Considering the evolution of search engine optimisation might risk being nostalgic, rather than being forward-thinking - and being resistant to change, rather than embracing it. 

But I think it is worthwhile, because by understanding Google's trajectory we can make better decisions around content and discovery for our clients, now and in the future.

The rise and fall in popularity of different SEO techniques can be used to define three previous eras of search engine optimisation:

And I think we're now in the fourth era: Enlightenment SEO. 

Sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? I’ll try and justify the name by the time we get to the end of this article. 

I’ve graphed each of those eras below, based on my experience of each. I've put aside those aspects which will likely remain true forever (for example researching how potential customers search for goods and services, and competitor research). 

I then graphed, in percentage terms, how much of your SEO time/budget you would probably spend on a campaign on any given year.

According to my calculations, the shape of SEO changes dramatically as the years progress:

I’ve also expanded on each era with some quick (and more traditionally text-based) summaries below.

This first era of search engine optimisation is characterised by tech and meta tags. 

Engaging in SEO without speaking to anyone in the brand's marketing team was not unheard of back then. Search engine optimisation was a thing done to websites, and websites were run by a company's tech team. As an SEO professional, you would speak to a company's Head of IT, and entire sites might have been built by just one or two people.  

No one in IT wanted to write meta tags or had heard of Inktomi, and Google was the new kid on the block with a "Don't Be Evil" philosophy.  

Back then, technical SEO was important because web developers would routinely create sites that Google (and others) struggled to read. Common culprits were issues like entire sites built in frames, Flash or sessions in URLs. 

SEOs would spend time filling in 'guestbooks' on webpages, adding a link back to their client. When Google said these sorts of spammy links would no longer be counted, no SEO protested because no one had built a business or reputation dependent on the technique.  

The original set of meta tags stopped having value after they were systematically misused and misunderstood, and could no longer be trusted. 

SEO quickly proved its worth and attracted the attention of marketing departments.  

It was clear what was required to influence Google's algorithm: websites needed links.

Whole industries were born from the concept of 'link building'. Links from directory sites, article sites and press release sites had value (at least for a while) in Google's eyes. So people built directory sites, article sites and press release websites to cash in on this interest. SEO specialists built processes and teams around the mass production of links via these willing participants. 

Google responded by raising the quality bar. First, the search engine made it clear that link building - links created via a process rather than an editorial decision - would stop having value for their algorithm. Then, slowly but surely, Google removed directories, article sites and even press release sites' ability to influence rankings. Lastly, and in a project that continues to this day, Google started to fight back against websites that would sell links for money or services. 

Once again, Google reacted to the strip-mining and systematic misuse of quality signals its algorithm once considered as necessary, by discounting them entirely.

SEO adapted, as it always does, to the changes in the landscape driven through by Google.

The search engines continued to get better at spotting only those links genuinely created after editorial consideration. The company also continued to push the qualifying standards for websites to have an influence on the algorithm even higher. In response, SEOs got better at earning editorial links from well known editorial sites.

Social media, public relations and search engine optimisation overlapped, as in-house marketing teams and agencies pitched content and stories to bloggers, magazines and newspapers.  

Content marketing, creativity, design and SEO overlapped as the same teams collaborated on (or fought over) the creation and publication of 'content' that would earn links, convert customers, or both.

For a short but glorious time, the 'Renaissance era' felt right. Finally, SEOs were thinking about the content, and it wasn't something the industry could strip-mine.

However, we got the sausage machine instead. Content, even excellent content, was pumped out. Bloggers were inundated by pitches. The bar for success in terms of impressing audiences continued to rise. 

At the same time doubts over 'influencers' rose too. After all, most SEOs have been told by a site owner that they maybe could carry the story - but only if there happened to be some budget available...

The cycle continues. Those making the most out of the changing shape of SEO are already adapting. 

It isn't as if SEO is a dark art any more, though. Google now clearly communicates what it is trying to do. On the search engine's 20th birthday last year, Google said clearly it was moving away from queries and towards journeys and information. 

The first and foremost principle of their next 20 years will be a focus on the user.

SEOs debate how Google evaluates its success with pleasing the user. The search engine's spokespeople officially deny using measurements like clickthrough rate or bounce rate in its ranking algorithms. But we also know that the company are simultaneously patenting and developing technologies to improve search results based on those very same user experience signals. 

However, few SEOs will debate that Google rewards sites that do well in areas that search engine considers essential to users, such as page speed or mobile friendliness.

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Highlights from CSSconf EU 2019

Cheltenham

Edinburgh

London