That’s the truth.
You don’t need to ask your designer about SEO anymore. It’s been a common discussion point for many business owners and their designers. Focus on SEO has been important because free traffic from search engines can mean lots of traffic and lots of revenue. But the days of free traffic from search engines like Google appear to be coming to an end. In reality it’s not true that SEO is dead or even dying.
What is happening is that SEO is becoming less important. The truth is SEO has always been about making your website experience profitable for your company. Usually that corresponds with a satisfying experience for the people that visit your site. This is called user experience or UX for those in the design biz.
SEO is defined as optimizing a website for search engines, but search engines are optimized for people. Thus the search engines have always advised website owners, designers, and developers to focus on the best experience possible for the users and not for the search engines.
Google’s head of Web spam, Matt Cutts, gives great insight in this short video Does Google Consider SEO to be Spam?.
Cutts mentions usability. It’s in your best interest for your site to be usable by people and by the search engines. You know this. Your designer knows this.
What happened over the last five, maybe ten years is that people could profit by gaming the search engines. Sites would rank in instances where maybe they weren’t truly the best result. Since there was profit to be made people took to SEO and invested money into the field.
But really it’s never been about gaming the system. The true goal has always been about the user of your website. You want to optimize the site for their experience so you can achieve your goals.
On a similar note, Google has the same goals as you. They want to return the best results possible for their users. What they typically don’t say, even in the case of the Cutts video, is that they also want to make a profit. Since search remains Google’s main source of revenue it makes sense for them to pursue a search result page that is 100% paid advertising. Their view seems to be that if those paid results are truly the best results possible then why not charge for it instead of giving away free referrals.
Here is where I think things are going. I’ll say before I begin that I can’t really predict the future. I can only give my best guess based on what’s happening. Right now it appears that Google is focusing on profits. Heck, that’s what every business is doing. Why shouldn’t they? Over the past couple years the search results on Google have changed. No longer are there simply 10 blue links. Well, in many cases there are for the long phrases, but for many common keyword searches there are videos, images, and all kinds of different results. Many of the new results are paid.
Google also changed its Shopping search function recently stating that there is a new plan:
…to transition Google Product Search in the U.S. to a purely commercial model built on Product Listing Ads. This new product discovery experience will be called Google Shopping and the transition will be complete this fall. We believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date.
So it’s obvious that Google is changing things. Free lunch is probably over in many instances.
SEO will likely always have a place in the online world. I wouldn’t ignore the things Cutts mentions in the video. You want your site to be usable for your users. You want it to have the basic functionality that allows search engines to easily understand what your site is about. These are great things to focus on when working with your designer.
What you shouldn’t do is talk to your designer about how to rank well in search engines. That’s asking the wrong question. Instead you should ask them about how to make your site extremely valuable for your target visitor.
Outside of that is the need to get those visitors to your site. From now on it’s going to be about a variety of different traffic sources. Traffic has sometimes skewed toward organic traffic from search engines in the past, but a more diversified plan is better in the future.
I like the way Ken Krogue says it in his article on Forbes.
From The Death Of SEO: The Rise of Social, PR, And Real Content:
I asked, “So how has this affected you?”
“We hardly do any of the old SEO stuff. It still brings results, but not like it used to. Google is pulling the rug out to provide better search for their audience. They are routing out the counterfeiters. Now it must be real, valuable, content, and lot’s of community value and interaction.”
So how does it affect entrepreneurs and business executives?
Simple.
Invest in real, valuable, relevant content that your audience wants. Grow your internal thought leaders to where they can add value to your audience and positioning in the market. Follow internal SEO practices to make sure it is found and sees the light of day. Take the time to make it so compelling that people talk about it and share it.
Look to real social media community support, compelling PR, and real content; for that is where true SEO practitioners are turning more and more also.
Common sense, but not common practice.
There are traditional ways to focus on getting visitors to your site. You can advertise. Google has a pretty good paid advertising model.
You can also invest in content as Ken Krogue and many others suggest. In fact, many put the suggestion into practice.
Content that is valuable to your existing customers can be shared to new customers. Content is what has always driven word of mouth in the real world and it drives word of mouth on the Web. Content and connections are what social media is all about.
To recap:
Focus on business goals – determine what the goal of your website is for your company. Work with your designer to achieve those goals. Leave SEO out of the discussion unless it pertains to usability in regards to your visitors. You want them to give you money so it’s important to make sure the website achieves this goal.
Focus on content – Potential customers need a reason to visit your site. Content is what will drive this interest from visitors that are completely new to your company. SEO used to be a big part of this equation, but it is becoming less important. Focus on content that people will find so useful they will need to share it with everyone they know. It’s about getting referrals.
