Today I wish you to question everything and see where it leads you. How do you like your SEO? How do you arrive at a decision on how to approach your next Search Engine Optimisation task? Have you put yourself in the seat of your customer? In all of our hourly discussions on this immense topic you cannot fail to miss who the intended target of our work is. Who is SEO for?
It’s people on the move, they’re mobile, they’re impatient and they have no time whatsoever to click past three Google ads, an answer section and then click back and forth between results. Forget about them even landing on your website via Chrome if you don’t have https and site is anything slower than two seconds it’s beam me up Scotty. The UX baby had a tantrum and Mummy is no longer in control and Daddy quite simply went down the pub. Is there a new SEO service in town? Yes and you had better be on to it.
While we can prevaricate and consider the many Google algorithms, the speed of our websites and the use of secure https, amp and exclusive ip addresses. Is it businesses we work for or are we offering a service to the world’s population or perhaps garnering the attention of a certain subset in a small corner of Yorkshire? Digital marketing today is about meeting the demands of the layman rather than trying to play a game of risk with a search engine although unequivocally we have to do both.
As I study competitors of client’s websites I am often amazed at the techniques, such as using the most recent date within the title tag for freshness – does that work? Egyptian hieroglyphics and smiley faces for professional website marketing. While it is eye catching it is not especially pleasing on the eye nor the image you may wish to portray of your company. SEO is still an important factor. But evidentially our fellow SEO’ers know a thing or two about the modern user experience in relation to search results and gaining all important traffic.
Or do they? Have they tried voice search? When was the last time a person asked “Plumber, Dover, November 2017 please” or “How do I pronounce the hieroglyphic I saw so I can find that website again?” Without a shadow of a doubt the search industry is at a crucial point in history, twenty years later and technology that we was promised via WAP has finally arrived. People no longer have to head to the equivalent of a red phone box and a desktop PC to buy something. The internet is everywhere and with AMP it just got told to be faster or you’re no longer Johnny 5. In fact the desktop just got told to get out of the way with mobile only results AMP-lified.
The search engine doesn’t care about hundreds of websites it only cares about one with the answer it needs. One website out of what could be hundreds, one page in amongst millions and half of your content is going to be lifted (stolen) and presented as a FAQ and read before UX Baby even visits your website. But that is what the user wants. Mobile and desktop apps have taken on board speciality tasks while Google has demonstrably lost the battle with shopping portals, so what exactly are we SEO’ing?
That’s the question, while I could respond with 42 I’ll be more clear. The answer to the question is a question. What is my service? Where is my service? What services are related to my service so that I can relate to other people asking questions about their service? It’s Rankbrain, it’s the answer engine it’s Ask being pinched and used by Google. It’s the end of SEO and the beginning of QEO – we call it Question Engine Optimisation. Are we the first with that phrase? The path to success cannot be reached without first understanding the user experience, incremental chains of events that lead to a happy user that has gleefully given you the contents of their wallet.
Search > QEO Optimised
Content > Engaging
Statistics > Refining Bounce
Viral > QEO Boosted into Socialdom
Whether you’re using an Apple phone or Google voice search there is one element that rises again and again and that is our information, no matter how rewritten it is from somebody else’s quite similar information, is irrelevant in an age a where users only wish to have one answer. To have the correct answer and to have it at the first time of asking.
We have all been or come across that annoying little child who when asked a straight forward question delivers a bible verse and never actually answers. No one wants that child and Google is never going to adopt him / her. Google is dead, long live the Google. If you’re seeking out an SEO service that doesn’t walk like an Egyptian or speak hieroglyphics and wants to provide modern day marketing of your website that is based on sound questioning and answering of the UX baby, vox search no more.
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