Remember when you would fold a piece of paper as a kid and end up with a finger-operated fortune teller like the one in the photo above? “Pick a number between 1 and 8,” you’d say. Then you would count down your pal’s magical reveal. Oh, how easy “search results” were back then!
Luckily, you’re here at Inquiseo, where the mystery of ranking high in Organic Search—in good times and bad—is solved.
Organic Search seems rocky these days
Organic Search has long been a source of website traffic that businesses around the world have tended to both rely on and take for granted. Just about anyone who has worked a dot-com job for even a fairly insignificant number of years has experienced or heard about the stresses inherent in weathering too-common, unexpected, and dastardly algorithm updates by Google. The last several years have turned even this familiar experience on its head.
The advent and rise of artificial intelligence has especially been a Search-changer. Even before Google added its “A.I. Overview” to its search engine results pages (SERPs), they had been redesigning and transforming SERPs from the tried-and-true format of paid ads on top with free results below. Google added e-commerce tiles, image results, Knowledge Graph, maps and local search, even more ads here and there, Answer Box, and more. You’ve seen it. And you’ve likely noticed those free organic results getting pushed farther and farther down the page, getting more and more obscured in the process.
If you’ve noticed less Organic Search traffic over the last year or two, the rise of A.I. is at least one likely reason why. Not only are clicks harder to get when your search results are farther down the page and are competing with lots of other SERP features, but the A.I. Overview is also surfacing recommendations and content prominently at the top of the results that past users would have needed to click to read. Google has used its SERPs and its A.I. to try to keep users coming back to, and stuck inside, the search results versus keeping search results as a primary hub to route users to the best websites for those recos and content. They’re changing user behavior by changing their user interface.
All this being said, now is not the time to throw up our hands and abandon SEO. It’s actually time for full-on search engine optimization. That’s because it is more important than ever for your web pages to rank higher than those of your competitors, but also for your products, content, services, and more to be optimally discoverable, which will help them to appear in the A.I. results as well.
Make Organic results reliable, without magic!
With Inquiseo at your fingertips, Organic Search becomes strategic and dependable. It is no longer seemingly random. I’m no longer the kid with the magical paper fortune teller. I’m a dedicated, enthused SEO expert who has spent more than two decades helping direct clients and also FTE employers to improve their rankings in Organic Search. As a result, I have hands-on experience making traffic and conversion attributed to search engines far more stable and reliable for some of the top brands in the United States.
How keyword research gives your website stability
Right now, there are untold numbers of users searching for content, products, services, and more that could lead them to your business. They are typing or speaking these words into a traditional search engine or into an A.I. search. We will all keep seeking the stuff we want and need. As a result, when your business knows the keywords and their associated data points, you’re empowered. After all, knowledge = power.
Keyword research will provide you with insights that can be used on your website to make it more stable and also help it to perform better. Here’s how:
- Search volume maximizes users: When you have data around each keyword’s search volume, you know whether the terms you’re currently using are most-searched, or whether they should be replaced with more popular terms. This information helps you to make decisions that could attract more general (and even branded) traffic to your website.
- Target keywords clarify your site purposes: Once you have settled on the best, most applicable, highly searched keywords to use to describe your brand, products, and services and have updated your web pages accordingly, your site will be broadcasting a clearer, more stable message throughout the search landscape.
- Ongoing keyword monitoring identifies gaps: Once your keyword strategy is implemented, it is easier to find additional ranking and traffic opportunities in keyword gaps. Whether keyword phrases that are natural outgrowths of your targeted product categories or terms your close competitors are ranking for, ongoing keyword analysis and reporting keep your SEO both solid and growing.
In other words, keywords are the solid foundation on which the rest of your website’s identity, brand, and content all rest.
Why SEOing your content solidifies site performance
Plugging your keyword strategy into your content roadmap electrifies your website. Your whole site becomes more powerful. And a more powerful website is more stable during both halcyon and harrowing days. That’s because all of the content that you make available on your website—from navigation menus to product pages to blog posts—is strengthened by data that document bonafide search interest. You aren’t using terminology that just feels right: You have the verified search volumes, ranking numbers, and user intentions behind each term.
It’s not only about data, however. Keyword targeting is a kind of compass. It points you in the best direction. But you still need to write quality, engaging, helpful content. That’s the part of SEO that makes your content performant, because you are intent on presenting real solutions, beneficial information, and authentic answers—all of which are geared toward aiding and fulfilling the readers of the content versus simply seeking their clicks.
Core to performant content are guidelines like Google’s E-E-A-T and Y-M-Y-L methodologies. I will write more about these in coming posts on Curiouser!, but the main point to understand is that these methodologies impart to web pages and their associated content a validity that sets them apart from most other websites. This is especially important if your website may affect the livelihood, health, or other aspects of a person’s well-being, but ensuring that content that your website presents is expert, authoritative, and trustworthy will help to ensure that it performs as solidly as those words sound.
How technical SEO undergirds reliable ranks & traffic
There are supposedly more than 200 different ranking factors in Google’s famously secret search algorithm. The main point about that is that it is complex. It is also very complicated to build a website whose infrastructure meets all of the various different technical requirements of providing the kind of user experience that Google prefers when it is going to rank such sites high enough to get the most clicks from Google search results. Technical SEO is the expertise behind auditing and understanding a website’s infrastructural strengths and weaknesses while safeguarding the pros and addressing the cons through a prioritized strategy that keeps the site evolving.
The end result is a website that continues to become more and more technically sound, which means web pages whose back ends more reliably support the content, product listings, and other offerings that live on the front end. Think of a holistic approach to healthcare. If you only ever brushed your teeth, shampooed your hair, moisturized your skin, and took care of the important but exterior aspects of your self, your overall person would suffer.
Technical SEO is the website version of getting your steps in, learning a new language, and ensuring that your nutritional needs are being met. You end up with an internal system that provides comprehensive support. With technical SEO, we fix broken links, speed up and improve user experiences, render code more efficiently, and so much more. The long story short is that we keep monitoring the system and ensure that it is more and more healthy and capable of responding athletically when called upon to, let’s say, leap higher into those search search results.
Now, more than ever, is the time to SEO
Change happens. That goes for search result pages almost more than anything. They’re always changing, and A.I. is only going to keep that true. So be sure to prioritize the search engine optimization of your website. That’s the best way to be able to stay close to the top of the Organic Search results, and also to stay calm and reassured during the unpredictable times. Click the button below for a free audit of your website’s current SEO.