SEO is Solved. Long Live User Experience.

Google has told webmasters time and time again that they should focus on providing a good user experience. The SEO industry didn’t get the memo, or at least didn’t take it to heart. Every few months I see people complain about how Google is unpredictable because they worked hard to optimize their SEO (aka try to game the system) and Google pulled the rug. First, this was stuffing pages full of backlinks, then people started using ”spun content”, and now they make unique but repetitive structured content, believing that more content = more traffic…

When you work in the industry it feels like every couple of weeks people are scared an apocalypse about to happen. Partly, this is to be expected, since SEO’s market themselves by hyping up changing strategies so they get more eyeballs on their content. But it also reflects a deep problem with the industry.

I would never say that “SEO is dead” (although I wouldn’t be the first), but I will say that it’s more or less solved. Beyond the best practices that will only change slightly over time, investing time and energy optimizing your website for google is wasted.

Yes, there is still a need for SEOs test strategies and find what works best for a website.But more and more, new writing on this topic is painful to read for anyone that understands how Google works.

Sorry, but moving 6 characters in your title tag will not make Google like you more … and you’re looking desperate.

How Google Works

Here’s a traditional explanation of how Google pull out the best websites for your query: you type something in, Google ranks the most important keywords in your query and figures buckets the intent of your search (local, commercial, informational, etc). Then it looks at its index of websites and balances “over 600” signals to find the best sites. (Things like number of links pointing to the page, whether the keyword is in the title, etc.).

The natural response for an SEO guru is to say, okay, lets deconstruct how important these various signals are and make sure we really optimize those parts of our website.

Here’s the problem: Google doesn’t want you to manipulate its algorithm. Sure, they’ll say, we want SEO optimized pages insofar as they are accessible, well formed, semantic HTML with rich meta data. But beyond that, their only concern is the searcher’s experience of the results: did they find exactly what they wanted, and did it satisfy them.

When SEOs talk about optimization beyond the basics, there’s a strong whiff of futility. How can I say with any confidence that any strategy can consistently give you a 10% lift in traffic? Not only is this a race to the bottom (your competitors will copy you), but it won’t matter anyways, because within the next few years Google will complete its transition to powering it search with deep learning algorithms, and it will be impossible to interpret which individual signals are more or less important.

And guess what data Google will inevitably use to train it’s models? User experience metrics. For me, that’s why I’m focusing more time on software development and design (it’s more fun anyways).