Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been around a long time. And it has changed a lot over the years. But one thing that has been true for more than a decade is still the source of confusion for my clients. The conversation usually goes something like this:
Client: We’ve done keyword research and we decided that there is a really important keyword that we have been completely missing, so we build a new page and optimized it, but it’s not ranking.
Me: Well, it often takes a while for a new page to rank, but is this the only page on your site for this subject?
Client: Uh, yeah, but why does that matter?
Me: [Sigh.]
SEO is not a set of parlor tricks where your company is the magician. SEO is a transaction between content owners, searchers, and the search engine. Unless the transaction works for all parties, it is probably a technique that won’t work, or won’t work for very long.
So let’s think about this from the searcher’s point of view. If the searcher enters this newly-discovered critical keyword, would they rather land on a site that has a hundred pages on that subject, a dozen pages on that subject, or, uh, one?
Seems kind of obvious when you think about it that way, right? They want to go to a site that has a lot of content on that subject, because if they don’t find their answer on that one page, they can probably click around on that website and find it. And they can explore more deeply if they want.
So, if the searcher wants to find a site that has the answer, rather than just a page, what do you think Google wants to show them? That’s right—they want to show that expert site on the subject. And Google can easily determine whether you have one page on a subject or whether you have dozens or hundreds.
So, the searcher wants more than one page and Google knows how to deliver it. That means that you better have a better site on that subject than the ones that are already ranking, not just one really good page.
This isn’t new. And I don’t think it’s going to change. So what are you waiting for?
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