Every business owner dreams of a stream of free traffic piling onto their website, like lockdown-starved consumers to a freshly opened McDonald’s, clamouring to buy.
Effective Search Engine Optimisation is the holy grail of the marketer. It’s a worthy quest; if you get it right, all those leads piling onto your site are free! You didn’t advertise and you didn’t cold pitch. They came because they were actively looking for something that you offer, and they found you; Google (or other search engine) did a match-making job.
The quest can involve endless hours keeping up with what search engines want, deciphering Google’s secret and ever-changing algorithms. Of all the people constantly typing (or saying) things into search engines, surely you should be able to attract some of them?
So if you can figure out what search engines want, and offer that up on your site, it’s a match made and happily ever after, right?
People make a full time living out of this quest. How can you, as a small business, hope to get a slice? It feels overwhelming and impossible and you can end up frozen in inaction because of the sheer size of the task.
People make a full time living out of this quest. As a small business, trying to get a slice feels overwhelming and impossible, and you can end up frozen in inaction because of the sheer size of the task.
But here’s a thing to help unblock you:
What search engines really want is to be human. They watch our every move because they want to understand us deeply, to give us what we want. (Well, ultimately it’s to sell ads, but they have to make the free rankings very relevant otherwise no-one would use them).
When we type in a half-baked search term filled with typos, or when we have only a vague idea what the thing is called that we want…search engines figure it out because they know us, and they serve up the results we need.
That, in effect is the goal of all the genius work going on at Google: their search engine is getting “smarter” because it’s getting more human - understanding what humans want.
What search engines really want is to be human.
In the early days of its evolution it learned to do things such as ignoring typos in searches. It’s now extremely sophisticated. If it receives a query for “Chinese takeaway” it will guess you’re looking for dinner tonight and will give you a list of local takeaways first, not a Wikipedia definition. When it receives a query for “best bike helmet,” it knows that person is close to the point of buying a bike helmet, and they want reviews and information to compare different brands. If it receives a query on “how fix a bike puncture”, it knows that person has got their bike tyre off and wants a YouTube video.
In other words, it understands the intent behind the search. That’s quite sophisticated, and is just one element of its evolution.
So when you’re looking at optimising your website, don’t get hung up on what search engines want; get hung up on what humans want. It makes it a lot easier to follow the logic of what you need to do to improve your ranking. Know your customers. If your site delights humans, the search engines will notice, and suggest it to other humans. Boom.
Don’t get hung up on what search engines want; get hung up on what humans want.
With that in mind, the better you understand your customers, and the nicer and more value-packed you make the experience for them on your site, the better your site will rank. It will rank because people hang around reading stuff, getting value, clicking through to different pages, maybe filling in a form and maybe even buying, if you’re an e-commerce site. Google watches all this, learns and knows to suggest it to others.
Conversely, if visitors “pogo stick” - arrive on your site then bounce straight back off – Google concludes it was a bad experience and won’t suggest it to other users. "Pogosticking" happens when, at a glance, the visitor decides it’s not for them, not the place they thought they were coming to, the product/service isn’t what they were looking for, or they get an instant feeling of mistrust in the company because the site looks bad.
Over time, poor quality content - such as waffly writing with no real information - is penalised. Google can tell if you’re waffling to fill a page, or stuffing keywords where they have no business to be. Put keywords in the title tag, and in the heading tag (H1), and judiciously throughout the page; but if you try to entice visitors to your site by any other method than good, solid value for them when they arrive, you’ll eventually be penalised. Authority and quality are ranked well; poor quality is not.
Google can tell if you’re waffling to fill a page, or stuffing keywords where they have no business to be.
Googlebots read and index every word, so full detailed content is good; and besides its own bots reading, it watches to see how the humans are reading.
You’ve simply got to have good quality copy, and plenty of it, for long term SEO success.
There are a range of other ranking elements, and yes, technical knowledge is required for some of them. You need a sitemap and your site’s got to be submitted to Google for indexing. The architecture is very important, so that the search engine crawlers find it easy to crawl, index, and understand what is on each page. Your site has to load fast.
But the most crucial ranking elements that you can work on without needing technical knowledge relate to the depth and quality of your content, and you can make a start now; it will stand you in good stead as and when you get a handle on the technical elements. Is your content genuinely useful to visitors? Does it match the search intent? Are the keywords included properly? Is it authoritative and trustworthy? Are visitors getting annoyed and leaving, or getting value, staying and sharing? Beautiful graphics won’t make up for the fact that if people don’t find the information they want or trust, they will leave without having taken any actions.
You’ve simply got to have good quality copy, and plenty of it, for long term SEO success.
Google is only going to get “smarter” (i.e. understand humans better).
It has just announced that there will be a major algorithm change next year. There’s not usually much advance warning, but this time there is; plenty of time to optimise your site. This time it’s about the finer details of the user experience on your site.
Obviously as a copywriter I’m focused on the words – but truly, from the title tag; the page description; keyword research; headings; subheads; quality, authority, readability and relevance of your main content on every page; alt tags on your images; button copy … your road to the holy grail is paved with good copy.
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