Tran

Francis
S4065604

Assignment 2

I/ Seo and it’s tools

Search engine optimization refers to ways a business can improve their position on the
web page on search engines such as Google. SEO is important for firms as it is a cost-efficient
way to do marketing all the while encrusting yourself into the digital landscape. In fact, 49% of
surveyed shoppers have stated that they use Google to discover new brands or products (Google,
Nd). There are two different kinds of SEO, organic and paid. Paid SEO is when firms pay search
engines to display their website at the top of the web page. A popular example of paid SEO
would be when searching to apply to a university, you can see various websites for different
universities that sponsor google. Organic SEO is a lot more cost efficient. Organic SEO bases
itself upon three things: Technical, referring to whether the structure and the set-up of the
website is good, On-site, meaning if the content on the website is well structured, and Off-site,
referring to whether other websites advocate for yours through backlinks. Firms, to have a good
SEO, need to research extensively their targeted audience as well as trendy keywords. To
understand their target audience, firms can create a customer profile to learn how to better tailor
our services to the wants and needs of our customers. This is not only applicable to just SEO, but
generally as well. A business needs to know their customers’ ages, genders, incomes, professions,
education, hobbies, their tastes, and interests, to be successful (Hall, 2012). This in turn helps a
business to understand what exactly their customers will search for and the keywords they will
use. Keywords range from short-tail, ranging from 1 to 4 words using general vocabulary, to
long-tail, being more specific. Firms can use tools such as Google analytics to search for trendy
keywords that could be used by the search queries of their consumers. Now knowing what SEO
is, we may now look into an example of a business that practices SEO.
II/The business and its SEO strategy
 Our chosen company for this assignment is Sentient media, a non-profit news company
Based in San Francisco that was founded by Mikko Järvenpää (Sentient media, Nd) in 2018 with
the goal to report on issues concerning animal welfare and bring them to mainstream (Sentient
Media, Nd). They offer many stories regarding animal cruelty and actions taken against it. Their
main competitors are Peta, Humane league and Quora (Moz, Nd). Their website’s URL is
sentientmedia.org and it contains over 100 web pages of articles arranged in several categories:
Climate, Food, Health, Policy, and science. These categories are then divided into subcategories
providing a numerous number of articles for the consumers. The website is the sole touchpoint
that the business has with its consumers. Meaning that their website is the most vital part of the
firm. Which is why search engine optimization is severely important to this organization as to
achieve their mission of shedding light on animal cruelty, they would have to appear at the top of
the web page to have more traffic. Knowing how essential SEO is for this company, we will
delve into how the business practices SEO and whether they are succeeding.
III/Audience Analysis
The main audience of the website are animal lovers who are appalled with the cruelty
committed against animals and vouch for their rights. According to a survey, the dominant
gender among animal activists were female representing 80% of the individuals surveyed, and
the average age of these individuals was around 34 (Faunalytics, 2014). This presents several
differences in the keywords found in queries made in the search engines based on the age as well
as the gender of the individual who submitted the query. The difference in queries between
people of different ages is the length of what they type into the search bar. A survey found that
individuals from Gen Z prefer to use longtail keywords when searching, using 5 words per
search, whereas individuals from older generations prefer to use short-tail keywords with fewer
words, using only on average 4.2 (Fractl, Nd). Not only are there differences in keywords
between old and young individuals, but there is also evidence that the use of language is also
different between genders. A study has shown that women when searching queries usually use
long tail keywords as well as either use very little reformulations or reformulated more than 5
times (Parinaz et al. 2010). Sentient media thus can expect short keywords. We can also factor in
the location of the users of the website as variables in potential search queries. Most animal
activists don’t exist solely within a singular country and are spread out throughout the world.
With potential consumers being spread out in many geographical locations comes potential
differences in the keywords searched for by consumers. The most obvious difference is the
linguistic difference. Although the company is based in the US, any animal activist can read the
articles produced by Sentient media as there are not many restrictions on who can read what on
the internet. As such, the website’s language is in English one of the most spoken languages in
the world. However, there are slight linguistic differences in the spelling between UK English
and US English with the example of the spelling of the word Pyjamas in the UK and Pajamas in
the US. Sentient media will have to consider the spelling their consumers will use in their
keywords as well as understand the source of the traffic to know who, how, and where to reach
out to. The source of all the traffic from their website is mostly derived from Facebook, with two
of their articles reaching a total of 57 980 visits, and Google with an article reaching 50 872
visits (Ubersuggest, Nd), with the primary access modes being through mobile phones and
desktop. To generate more traffic, digital businesses must pay attention to several things: the
customer experience, the digital customer experience, and most importantly the user experience.
User experience or UX promotes the idea that anything that the customer can interact with must
be made as easy, smooth, and enjoyable as possible (Workshopper, Nd). A good UX must fill
several criteria: Useful, to be able to fulfill a purpose, Usable, to be easy to use by customers,
Findable, easy to navigate, Credible, whether or not consumers can trust the company, Desirable,
does it make people want it, Accessible, is it easy for consumers to attain it, and Valuable, does it
provide value to the customers. For Sentient media to have a good UX on their website, they
need to facilitate more the use of mobile devices on their website. As it stands, their website is
not mobile friendly, which hinders the user experience. When opening the home page of the
website, the mobile user is assaulted with a long page full of the featured articles where they
must scroll down an extensive amount of time to find an article that interests them. This is both
an issue in the usability of the website as well as the findability of the website. Users on mobile
have a difficult time finding articles they want to read and scrolling down countless articles is not
a satisfactory experience. This will deter mobile users from visiting the website, lowering traffic.
This is one among many issues with Sentient media’s website. Now that we have analyzed the
audience, we can explore what are the keywords used in search queries.
IV/Keyword research
As stated previously, keywords are mainly categorized into two groups: Short-tail and
Long-tail. Short-tail keywords are limited to around three words, whereas long-tail keywords are
at least four, usually starting with words such as: How, where, what, why. Several popular long-
tail keywords are as follows: Smartest animals in the world, how long do cows live, animals that
are smart, what is Jello made of, what animals are smart, how long will a cow live, why eggs are
expensive, among many others (Ubersuggest, Nd). These keywords when searched by users will
refer to several articles created by Sentient media as the titles of the articles bore similarities with
the keywords written by the user or the contents of the article refer directly to the query. Among
this extensive list of keywords, the ones that Sentient media should target are: What is Jello made
of, what animals are the smartest, why eggs are expensive and how long do cows live. All these
keywords lead to articles created by Sentient media. For each of these four keywords, the
consumer is at the awareness stage. These keywords are questions that individuals concerned for
animal welfare frequently ask with monthly search volumes as high as 22,000 (Ubersuggest,
Nd). As these articles are the answer to the questions posed by said individuals, they will draw in
organic traffic. With commonly asked questions however, Sentient media also must keep in mind
the competitiveness of each keyword as other websites may outrank the SERP position of
Sentient media if the keyword is too competitive. The monthly search volumes and difficulty for
each of the suggested keywords are: “How long do cows live” with 12100 with a difficulty of 53,
“Why eggs are expensive” with 9900 and a difficulty of 75, “What animals are smart” with 8100
and a difficulty of 68 (Ubersuggest, Nd), and “What is Jello made of” gaining 4950 searches
with a difficulty of 59 (Moz, Nd). Sentient media is doing rather well as they rank first on several
SERP compared to their competitors such as Quora and Peta who rank lower (Moz, Nd). Sentient
Media using these keywords has ranked first on several SERP, however, there can still be
improvements to their SEO.
V/On-Page SEO
The page in need of improvements in terms of SEO is the homepage. The homepage is
the most important part of the website as it is the first thing readers see when searching up the
website as well as being the central hub for readers to search for other articles. The customer will
be in the consideration to purchase stage in their journey, debating on whether they want to use
the website regularly. The URL of their homepage is https://sentientmedia.org/ the webpage uses
“Sentient: Stories + solutions for a changing world” as both their title and meta description (see
figure a. and b.).
Figure a.

Figure b.

The webpage has several flaws. Upon performing an SEO audit, the webpage lacks an H1.
Readers cannot know whether the homepage is the page they are looking for as a title isn’t
sufficient and it lacks an H1. This could harm the goal of the business to spread awareness of
animal cruelty as readers are deterred from entering unsure if they have the webpage they want.
As stated previously, Sentient media should make their website mobile friendly. As it stands,
mobile users must scroll an extensive amount to find articles on their homepage. With most of
their traffic deriving from Facebook and with 98.3% of Facebook users being on mobile
(Mohsin, 2023), mobile friendliness is a must for Sentient media.
VI/Technical and Off-page
Several other aspects of SEO include the page’s loading speed as well as backlinks. If a
page takes too long to load, consumers are inclined to look elsewhere due to impatience. Sentient
media’s home page however loads in 0.06 seconds (Seobility, Nd). Backlinks are also important
as they give authority and veracity to the content that Sentient media produces as well as drive
additional traffic. Currently they have 7.7k linking domains from reputable and high authority
sites such as Wikipedia, the Washington Post, Yahoo and Forbes (Moz, Nd).

VII/Conclusion
 To conclude, SEO is vital for the mission of Sentient Media of exposing issues on animal
rights. Their SEO is okay, having topped several SERPs, however they can still improve. Their
focus on improvement should be to make their website mobile friendly. This would attract more
potential readers furthering their goal.

References
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Hall (14 June 2012), To Succeed as an Entrepreneur, Know Your Customer, Forbes, Accessed 5
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https://sentientmedia.org/author/mikko-jarvenpaa/#:~:text=Mikko%20is%20the%20founder
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