Make Your SEO Relevant
3 Things to Consider
Is your SEO relevant?
If you’ve recently updated the SEO on your website, all is good to go, but you’re not seeing immediate results, don’t worry. Results of modified SEO aren’t instant. SEO takes time.
Search engines need to crawl your site again. Then they need to reindex everything, which includes using algorithms to make sure your SEO changes (keywords, keyphrases, etc.) make sense. Simply adding a keyword doesn’t work.
For example, I’m writing this about SEO taking time. I could throw the keyword “chihuahua” into my SEO, but that doesn’t make sense. Search engines would not rank this page high for a search about chihuahuas. Because other than this quick example, this article has absolutely nothing to do with them.
Things to Check
User Search Intent vs. Content
Google is constantly updating its algorithms to improve searching. One of the the major things to note is Google likes to attempt to display search results that correspond to the user’s actual search intent.
What is a user’s search intent? Put simply, it’s the why of the search. For example, a search for “chocolate chip cookie recipe” should display results for that type of cookie recipe. What it should not display is photos of my chocolate chip cookie recipe, with no actual recipe. Algorithms attempt to display the search results that really answer users’ questions. Not just ones that have search terms as keywords.
If your content doesn’t answer users’ intended search questions, you will not rank very highly.
Content vs. Keyword/Keyphrases
Using keywords and keyphrases, you basically tell search engines what the pages of your site are about. This helps search engines index the insanely large amount of content across the internet in a more organized fashion.
Search engines look at your keywords and keyphrases, along with your actual content. The goal of the search engines is to display the best possible results for every search performed every day. Make sure your keywords and keyphrases on each page actually match the written content and are relevant.
Relevance really matters. If your content is not relevant for the chosen keywords, you won’t rank very high in the results.
Keyword Competition & Relevance
Depending on the industry you’re in, keyword competition could be very high. If you’re trying to rank high in search engines for the same keywords/keyphrases as thousands of other companies, the odds are against you.
You want to choose keywords that are relevant and are searched for frequently, but may need to tweak it some for your specific content. Ranking number one for a specific keyword that nobody ever searches for won’t do you much good. But neither will ranking 500th for keyword that has a high search volume.
This doesn’t mean you can’t accomplish your goal of ranking high in search results. It just means you might have to work at it a bit harder and write a lot more content for your site. Conducting keyword research ahead of time will really help.
The SEO End Goal?
Make your SEO relevant. Consider user intent when writing content. Ensure your content is relevant in terms of your chosen keywords/phrases. Take the time to do some keyword research to make sure you have good keywords for your goals.
Happy SEOing!
