The function of SEO is not what you think.
Hey Rankers. What is SEO? It’s not what most people think it is. The closest to optimisation you will get is to improve your site for the user. Publishing all the content in the world won’t help sell a product if it’s only information. Optimising your site helps Google find it better and delivers a great customer experience.
What I learned
- SEO isn’t what most people think it is.
- None of us owns a search engine.
- Can the search engine find your site?
- How is your user experience?
- The benefits of strong SEO.
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers. How are you going? This is just a reminder about what SEO is. Now we know it stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is a terrible, terrible phrase because we don’t own a search engine, so we can’t actually optimise it. What we can do is optimise your site, so that the search engines like it. Why will the search engines like it? The search engines will like your site if you provide content that’s useful to their user searches. Now, of course, Google’s the main one we’re talking about here, and they’re a little bit different to all the others because they understand intent. So, if you are doing a search for “how to polish my five-pound bowling ball,” Google’s going to serve up the best piece of content for that.
Can you be found?
And that might be a blog post, and you might be selling bowling balls, but you’re probably not going to sell too many bowling balls off that blog post because you’re just telling people how to publish a bowling ball. One of the most important things that SEO does though is make sure that the search engine can find the site and index it correctly, and it’s clear and it makes sense. That’s why they have so many rules and they make you jump through so many hoops because they want to make sure that their bots can understand the site, and that the site is going to be great for their users. So, for instance, I was searching for a product on the weekend, a natural product and I couldn’t find it anywhere in Australia.
The only place I could find it was on Amazon or on eBay, and it was from international sellers. And I thought, that can’t be right. We ordered it from Amazon anyway, but I went digging on the weekend and I had another look, and eventually I found someone in Australia, this place. Hello, call me. My wife said, “How did you find them?” I said, “I’ve got superior search skills of course, I’ve been doing this for 20 years.” However, when you have a look at this site, the URL doesn’t make any sense, right? It goes on forever. I don’t know why; I haven’t looked into it. And look at this. We’ve got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen slides you want me to sit through. No, Google’s not going to surface this site for the product I was looking for because even though it’s an e-commerce store and it sells the product I want, it’s a really poor experience for the users and I can’t really understand it because it hasn’t sign posted everything properly.
The benefits of good SEO
That’s what a lot of the cool web vital stuff is about. That’s what the Lighthouse scores are about. Go and have a look at those and you can see what Google’s trying to do is to make it easier to understand. And guess what happens? Guess what the added benefit of this is? When you make it easier for Google to understand those things, you get more traffic from Google, all of a sudden your ads will start to work a lot better because the artificial intelligence that is looking at the site and trying to work out what’s what will understand the site a lot better. That’s why it’s important to do your heading tags and a lot of SEOs don’t think it is. It is, it’s really important. It’s important to name your images properly, give them descriptive names.
It’s important to use old tags, not only for people who use screen readers but for the Googlebot and other bots who are trying to work out what the site is about. And it’s going to help your ads, you’re going to get a higher return on your ads, and you’re going to spend less. Hopefully that’s helpful. Tell your friends. Like, share, and subscribe. If you want to reach out to me, maybe to take a look at your site, you can contact me at “[email protected]. Hey, I’m back on Twitter big time and I might be doing some ads on it soon too, so stay tuned for that. It’s the only platform in the world now that you can actually advertise some things that other platforms won’t let you advertise. Tell your friends. See you next week. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
