The Truth? You Can’t Handle The Truth About Search Marketing

Thinking about the future of search marketing?

Think of Colonel Jessep in the 1992 movie A Few Good Men: “The truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

Just in case you can handle the truth and are still reading, here’s my take on the big picture.

Let’s back up a little first.

Google has always said, in essence, the same thing: “Give me relevant, entertaining, informative and/or authoritative content that real people searching on Google will appreciate and we’ll give you search rank.”

That’s the basic deal.

That seems like a fair trade, right? Just give Google what it wants (a good result) and get something back of equal or greater value… search rank. Maybe not immediately, but hopefully over a period of time.

Google has always had only one basic method to apply to figuring out the trade and what to rank… math. So, somewhere in the Google Empire exists a really big math formula that Google applies to decide which web page gets what rank for which search terms.

It’s a really big formula and it’s not getting any smaller. I’ve heard from folks at Google that the algorithm takes into account something like 200 elements. Think of a chalkboard with 200 numbers all in relation to each other. How do you even begin to comprehend that?

The fact is, you don’t. For starters, you’re not told the formula. Google’s algorithm is like the recipe to Coca-Cola. It’s a secret. Google’s formula is its weapon in the Spy vs Spy game of search marketing. Google is not going to give you a tour. That would only help you trick it.

So over the years, the 1/4th of planet Earth’s population involved in search marketing has tried to trick Google into bad trades… getting good search rank in return for bad content.

Who hasn’t experienced the result of this? You do a search and here comes a lot of irrelevant junk.

To rank for search terms a decade or more ago, maybe all you had to do was repeat the term a lot. Here, I’ll do that now and if this was 1999, I’d be ranking this page, maybe on Alta Vista: The future of search marketing. The future of search marketing. The future of search marketing. The future of search marketing, The future of search marketing,

Do I have rank yet?

Sadly, no.

Or, back then, I could load up the tags (unseen page code) with a whole bunch of words, like the Oxford English Dictionary and, voila, rank for almost everything!

Over time, Google’s formula has gotten smarter. It’s like the notion that good judgment comes from experience and a lot of good experience comes from bad judgment. At this point, Google has had a lot of experience and has gained increasingly better judgment.

Also, the reason that 1/4th of the Earth’s population is pursuing search rank (okay, not the Yanomami tribesmen, but almost everyone else) is because search rank equals money. So, competition is way up!

So, Google has gotten a lot smarter and now it looks at a wide variety of elements… user behavior (time on site, bounce rate), social signals (Google +1, Twitter, Facebook), the relationships between words, the relative value of links and maybe 196 or more other things.

So what are two billion search marketers to do?

The answer is obvious; “Give Google what it wants.” Give Google content that visitors will appreciate. It’s almost that simple.

Is that really all you have to do?

No, I was making it overly simple for the sake of raw impact,  but good content is a great foundation to build on.

To pull a quote from Winston Churchill (because it’s about time for another quote) about where we are on the search algorithm timeline (because Churchill was way into search marketing):

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

It’s the end of the beginning where Google could easily be tricked into giving good rank to bad content. Now don’t freak out… the web will always have plenty of bad content. Hopefully, less of it will show up in your search results.

As a search marketer,  what do you do? Join the Yanomami?

No, they don’t want your lousy content either.

The place to start is to make really good content that’s usable or entertaining to real people.

With Google looking at so many clues about what real people actually appreciate, one would be crazy to follow the Wile E. Coyote method of tricking the Road Runner… painting pictures of tunnels on rock walls, elaborate jet packs, catapults with anvils… these methods will only backfire and plant you in coyote-shaped hole.

Ask yourself, “what would a real person actually appreciate?”

Also, be creative and take chances.

Start there.

Yes, we’ll still apply a lot of SEO and marketing know-how, but we’ll be applying it to good content.

Why?

Because we’re pragmatic and bad content is too hard to make work. Also, bad content, if it works at all, works for a shorter amount of time.

Q. Mike, why did you think I couldn’t handle the truth about search marketing?

A. Because people, sadly, often don’t think in terms of what does the other person want. They think in terms of “here’s what I want.” And then make content accordingly.

Making content that serves others is often a higher hill to climb. Going forward, it may be the only real path to search success.

In closing, don’t be Wile E. Coyote. Be smart. Make something good.

Coming up:

– How To Start

– What Do You Do With Your Content After You’ve Made It?