Winning at SEO: Search Engines Don’t Hate You

One of the most common misconceptions about SEO that I encounter when working with clients is that search engine companies, especially Google, secretly hate you. They don’t like your site. They don’t want anyone to find you. They think you smell, you’re ugly and you dress funny.

The fact is, nothing could be further from the truth. Search engine companies actually need you more than you need them. Understanding why is the secret to winning at search engine optimization (SEO) as well as winning customers.

The Truth About Search Engines

The first thing to understand is that search engine companies are just that: companies. They are in business to make money and, if they don’t, they will soon be out of business. The way search engines make money, as you can guess, is advertising.

Every time a person searches, the “natural” search results (i.e. not paid for) are nestled within ads. Each time an ad link is clicked, the search engine company makes money.

From there, it’s simple math: more people using the search engine means more opportunities for ad clicks, which means more money for the search engine company.

Therefore, the goal of each search engine company is to draw as many people to their engine as possible. And the best way to do that is by providing the best natural search results possible.

Results that lead toward great content.

Your content.

It’s All About Results

Search engines were created to help people find what they’re looking for online. The search engine company that does this best has more users and thus, as noted above, an increased chance of having their ads clicked on which makes them money.

The key to “doing this best” is good search results; results that link to website pages that:

• Answer people’s questions,
• Sell people the products they are looking for, and
• Generally fulfill people’s needs.

Providing good search results however, is very challenging. There’s a lot of content out on the web and it’s changing all the time. Indexing and ranking that content is a task too big for humans, so the engineers who work at search engine companies created software to do it for them.

In simplified terms, this software has parts that crawl the web all the time, looking for new and updated content. Once found, other parts of the software analyze and rank the content (as well as many “off-site” statistics) so it can determine on which search results page the content should be shown. (This is where they decide if a page from your site is listed on page 1 or page 100.)

The goal is to rank online content in the same way that you or I would; in other words, like a human. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of math, a whole bunch of psychology and likely some branches of science of which we’ve never heard.

With all that science and brain-power behind the way search engines rank your site’s pages, it may seem daunting to get your site’s pages ranked highly so they show up on page one, but it’s actually easier than you think.

Just write for humans.

Getting Found Online (and Winning Customers!)

Being found online should be a goal for every small business and is the ultimate aim of search engine optimization. It does not matter if you sell products or services or even if you conduct business online at all, the fact is that your customers are searching online and you need to be there. Yes, even you brick-and-mortar folks (see my previous post, “Location, Location, Location: Why Google Matters for Offline Business” for more insight).

Writing for humans means writing meaningful and useful content which provides value. Content that answers questions. Content that helps people choose which products to buy. Content that generally makes life easier for those reading it.

No matter what your business does or provides, there is a never-ending stream of topics to write about. Here are more than 250 topics to help get you started:

1. 100+ Killer Blog Post Ideas
2. 100+ SMB Blogging Ideas to Kick Start 2010 (still applicable today!)
3. 50 Blog Post Ideas for Business Blogging

Writing this content for your site does more than make search engines happy and get you found; it also establishes you as an authority – a business that knows what it does inside and out. It pre-sells readers by warming them up. You’ve already provided value and they didn’t have to pay anything – that goes a long way in the sales process.

Warmed-up prospects subscribe to your e-mail list (yes, you should have one). They come back to your site often to learn more (and get exposed to your messaging on products and services).

Warmed-up prospects turn into customers at a much higher-rate than cold ones.

Is That All There is to SEO?

No, there is more to SEO than just writing useful content.

There’s metadata such as keywords and descriptions. There’s other ranking criteria such as the number of inbound links from other highly-rated sites. However, all the metadata and links in the world won’t matter without useful content that fulfills the needs of those searching the web.

The Bottom Line

Search engines need good content so they can provide good search results. They want those of us with websites to provide that content and, if you are the one to do so, they will reward you by ranking your pages highly and listing you on page one of their search results.

While search engine companies are not your enemies; they are also not your friends. However, they are very happy to help you meet your goal of being found online if you help them meet their goal of providing good search results.

Don’t you just love a win-win?

What Next?

Learn about all the different ways Pitney Bowes can help you communicate better with your customers.

“Matt Mansfield is the Head Tour Guide at Matt About Business (http://www.mattaboutbusiness.com) where he helps entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 companies use the web to manage and market their business by connecting online strategies and tactics with real-world results. Matt is not a Pitney Bowes employee and shares his insights on this blog as a paid contributor.”