I’m sorry to say it, but somebody needs to. You’ve been lied to about SEO.
You’ve been told SEO is something to game. You’ve been convinced you need a consultant to make SEO work for you. You’ve heard SEO needs to be bought, optimized, and carefully researched and planned well in advance. You’ve learned that the SEO robots need to be beaten, and the algorithms need to be gamed.
The people who have sold you on SEO like this are snake oil salesmen. They’re the new hucksters of the online world. They’re stressing you out so you’ll spend more money on their services. Every real marketer I know is bummed out about these scammers.
So let me help you out. I’m about to tell you how to succeed with SEO. This trick will save you a whole bunch of time and money, and it’ll take your SEO game from “Confucius Say” to “Piece of Cake.”
Are you ready for it?
All you need to do is this: don’t write for the robots and the algorithms. Write the way you would if you were sharing your product or service with another human being.
Search engine crawlers have become so good that there’s no need to be robotic about the way you speak any more. You don’t need any fancy hacks, optimizations, tricks, or anything like that. In fact, those hacks are more likely to get you into trouble and blacklisted for abusing the system.
You just need to write as if you were talking to people.
Search engines aren’t nefarious or mysterious, or at least, they shouldn’t be. They try to provide the most accurate search results for people, not other robots. To do that, they need to read the way a human does.
I know this might be hard to swallow. After all, it’s the opposite of what almost every marketer would tell you. But I don’t sell “SEO” as a service, so I can tell you the truth. It really is this simple.
If you want to write a landing page that associates your product with lawyers (for example), then write a page that will include the phrases you think lawyers would search for. Then let the search engines do the rest. If that doesn’t work, tweak it and see if you get better results.
(In the marketing industry, we call that technique A/B testing. And you’re usually charged a lot for it.)
In today’s world, optimizing the content on your website for search engines is over-rated. The web would be a much better, friendlier place if we made websites people want to use and read. Writing your website for people, instead of optimizing it for search engines, is a good place to start.
And starting with that might just benefit your SEO too.