SEO is not about FIRST, it’s about BETTER

Lori Ballen
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

Old school SEO taught us to publish first and often. The goal was to create so much content that something was bound to stick, even if it was crap.

Today, things have changed. Thank God.

In order to rank on the search engines today, which still has MASSIVE value, in spite of the arguments had by social media gurus, it’s about quality.

Imagine that you are Google? What’s your 1 thing? What’s your specialty?

Today, it’s SEARCH.

For Google, it must remain the top search engine of choice.

How does it do that?

By returning the most relevant web pages on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for that consumer.

If the searcher finds what they want, and has a good experience, they will return to Google. BINGO! That’s what it’s all about.

This is why Google has become obsessed with returning not just a relevant webpage, but a quality one.

How does it measure quality? It focuses on the user experience once they perform the search and click through to the website.

  • Did the user stay on the page or bounce back to the search engines performing another search?
  • Did the page load fast? Did the user stay and wait for the page to load or did they exit?
  • Did an annoying forced pop up occur on the landing page that the user couldn’t exit from?
  • Did they take action? Click, Plays, Comments, Downloads etc. ? How many?
  • Did they spend some time on the website? 1 minute? 2? 3?
  • Did they achieve the goal for that page?

There’s a great tool called CLICKY that we use to measure user interactions on our website.

Better Content is simply that — Better

The growth of this website was created purely by creating quality blogs and videos that rank on the Google.

Growth of a Website through Organic (Earned in Traffic) created through SEO blogs and videos.

A blog or article should never be longer just because someone told you it needs to have more words on the page.

It should be longer because you are diving deeper into the topic truly giving the visitor the best possible information on what they were searching for.

Generally, these high ranking, in-depth articles or blog posts do happen to have well over 1000 words.

These are often specialty “niche” blogs created around long tail keywords such as “Will I make more selling my house if I scrape the popcorn ceilings?” rather than just “Staging a House” that can be generic and applied anywhere.

These blogs are about quality, unique, timely, relative content that a visitor can’t find everywhere else on the web. They are special. Seth Godin would say “They are Remarkable” (Purple Cow).

Sounds like a lot right?

If you were to break a topic into in depth portions, maybe 4 paragraphs, it would be easy for each one to be 400–500 words creating a 1600–2000 word blog.

The best blog topics answer questions your clients and customers are asking every day.

You are the specialist.

Answer their questions on a blog or video just like you would do for them in person.

Are you working on Real Estate SEO? Check out these real estate blog topics if your mind goes blank.

Google Loves Media

Why does Google live media? Because the customer does. Today, visitors want to watch video, click through images, scroll through slides etc.

A great way to increase time on site (which is a quality signal to Google) is to embed a video.

Did you Know that you can go to Youtube, type in a topic, find a video you would like to use, and embed it right on your website without creating copyright infringements?

If the video has the embed code option under the share link, you have the rights to use it. You can’t change it, but you can use it.

Isn’t SEO Dead?

No. It isn’t. While it’s true that social media is growing, and offers a huge opportunity to those who learn to work it at a high level, ranking on the search engines can still generate a large amount of traffic and leads becoming sales.

While people go more and more to social search to find a “people solution” or service provider, most go to Google to find information, how to, locations, products, and so forth.

They may not google “real estate agents in San Diego” to find someone to sell their house. They will google “how much is my home worth?”.

In fact, there are 18,100 monthly searches for the term “Home Value Estimator”.

They don’t want a service provider, yet. They want a product (home value). They want information (how to get more money when selling a house).

Hopefully, they register for an item of value and the funnel begins, placing you in the mind of that consumer before they ever go to social media to ask “who do you know”.

Summary

There’s no doubt that this is work.

Creating a content strategy requires purpose and planning.

Learning what to create content around, and how to optimize it for the search engines is a skillset.

The good news is, it can be learned, and it can be leveraged.

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Lori Ballen

Written by

My passion is “filling the gaps”. I love to find a challenge in an industry or market and solve it. I like to squeeze in where nobody else has and dominate.

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