Massive investment in search engine optimization (SEO) has been a pillar of online marketing for decades now. But in the last few years, many companies have been flustered, flabbergasted and confounded by changes that they really didn’t fully understand.
It’s not the company’s fault – for a time, Google was rather tightlipped about their algorithms, and there’s still not a very clear road map as to exactly what to put into a site to make it rank. However, there are some general overarching guidelines that executives really do have to understand that help them to optimize a web footprint.
Essentially, things have changed, and Google is rewarding rich content, rich user experience and user-friendly features. It’s looking for sites that really give people what they want – real information, and a way to engage with the company and its products or services.
Marketers can think about this in various ways – the need to tell a relatable story, the need to integrate gamification or events, the need to properly display products and services in a user-friendly way, and last but not least, responsive, mobile-friendly design.
What they don’t need to think about as much is that old practice of scrawling in longtail keywords and metadata in web pages – that kind of stuff still exists and has some value, but it’s not really the primary way to rank anymore. It’s all about creating the virtual space that people will use online. You may remember the websites of the 1990s where car dealers used neat little geo-targeting keywords like ‘auto sales in Georgia’ and product and service companies simply grabbed the web domain that fit their tags and stuffed keywords into every corner of the site.
When we say that SEO is dead, that’s what we’re talking about. There’s still SEO, but it’s not this simple proliferation of keywords and tags. It’s much more comprehensive than that.
For companies that are looking for more of a roadmap, it’s very useful to think about practical benchmarks for a website in terms of user support. How does content flow throughout the site? How easy is it to access key features and content? And what’s really there on the site for the reader? What facilitates better page views and bounce rates – and what is a good linking strategy?
In these days of web 2.0 moving to interactive web 3.0, having an applet function or a relatable story is worth much more than creating rote SEO on large site maps. It takes brainstorming and putting yourself in the customer’s shoes. It means figuring out how to welcome people to your little part of the web – and that’s what we’re good at. WebSubstance excels in helping companies to move forward into the future with better and more competitive web sites. We know that yesterday’s SEO practices are no longer cutting the mustard – we know that it’s time for change. And we can take you there!
