Googling can be a vexatious business

If you’ve searched for consumer products of any kind on the web lately you will probably have experienced frustration from crafty SEO manipulation that produces pages that are only tangentially relevant to your search. Or they may direct you to aggregator sites that send you down a wormhole of myriad onward links.

SEO (or search engine optimisation) helps make sure your website comes up near the top of any search on Google, most importantly, but also any other search engines used by potential customers. Google’s searches and classify websites and ranks them according to their perceived usefulness against searches by Google users.

At the end of the day, to maintain its prized position as the most useful and most used search engine, Google seeks to produce genuinely useful search results so that web browsers can find the info, services and products that most closely match their needs. Google provides some useful guidelines on producing authentic and sought-out copy for websites. There’s no trickery – it’s all common sense stuff and essential requires content producers to put themselves in the shoes of their audience and create copy that meets their needs.

Integrity gets the best reward in the long run

The cleverness of Google means that as fast as manipulative SEO tactics evolve, they’re identified and sidestepped by the indexing algorithm. But it’s getting harder, with AI-generated text and automation helping to continually adapt content and SEO, favouring big brands with big budgets or content producers with a single-minded focus on gaming the SEO algorithms.

As a consumer or a professional, it’s frustrating when you have to scroll for pages to find independent sites or distinctive information. But relevant, original, interesting and well-written content is worth hunting for, and worth providing. It’s more likely to be shared by genuine reviewers and peers, which will help to increase its visibility. It may even be selected as the cherished featured editorial snippet at the top of the search page.

If you add content that your customers and prospects want to read, they will return to your site and recommend it. The Googlebots will take note and reward your integrity and relevance with a rising search position. There are some technical conventions to follow as well – Google gives clear guidelines although understandably does not reveal the details of its current algorithm and weightings.

Keep them coming back for more

Keeping things current and fresh is important. You want customers to bookmark useful information, and find even more of it when they return to your site. That’s the way they’ll become regular visitors and advocates.

The chances are, your colleagues have a wealth of knowledge and experience that customers would love to share in. But they may not have the time to produce web content or they may not feel confident in their written skills. A writer with knowledge of your market and the capability to come up with original ideas and approaches could solve the problem. It can simply be a case of getting content from a quick phone chat then writing it up in the right style for the web. Or you might ask a writer to come up with ideas for content and research it themselves.

Because web content needs to be kept brief and digestible you shouldn’t need to pay for too much of the writer’s time. So it’s a cost effective way to keep your customers and prospects interested and to attract new visitors, as well as improving your searchability.

This article was updated in November 2023.