“Good website practice and optimizing for conversion usually makes for good search engine optimization. These work together to ensure you drive quality traffic and can persuade that traffic to help you meet your business goals.”
Marc Ostrofsky, author and venture capitalist
Search engine optimisation (SEO) has changed radically in recent years, largely because of Google’s constantly-changing algorithms. The search engine giant is perfecting its process to favour well-written, useful content and penalise low quality content and dubious links.
As time goes on, the search engines are getting better and better at weeding out poorly-constructed sentences, and giving website owners greater room for a better quality of writing.
Content that is written for its target audience will provide greater long-term benefit for businesses than pages that have been manipulated to perform higher in search engines.
Hence, optimising content for discovery and conversion provides a bottom line promise that SEO could never give.
SEO isn’t bad, it just became misused
The terms itself has become muddied. Partly because the process has widely been abused, and partly also because the methods have switched completely from technical to creative.
Where once, calculated measures could be used to push a site higher and higher up the ranks, more weight is now being given to well-written copy and natural links, instead of keyword-written fluff and link schemes.
This change is very important, and Copyblogger, the blogging resource website, has coined the new phrase which describes the ethical, long-term process of search marketing as ‘Optimising Content for Discovery and Conversion’.
This is a superb way to explain just what search engine optimisation has become.
Overly optimising content for search engines led to abuse and in some cases, severe penalties for companies that pushed the boundaries too far. If optimising wa for search engines, then it was those that became the measure of failure or suu=ccess. Unscrupulous practitioners would score their work on increasing traffic, not on increasing sales.
Today’s optimisation is a very different kettle of fish, we’re not necessarily optimising for search engines, but as the phrase explains, for discovery and conversion.
It does what it says on the tin… optimises content for discovery and conversion. Let’s break it down
Optimising
Understanding first how your website users consume your content and then optimising it so that it meets search engine guidelines an dbest practice is a long-term strategy that won’t need constantly updating. In the old days, optimisig meant counting the frequency of keywords and phrases, generating links form directories and using other techniques that are now so bad for readres that search engines punish websites still doing it.
Content
Without content, your website will never stand along in the croded online space. No amount of search engine optinisation, social media, email marketing or PR will work its magic on a dull site. Content is King and your website is the palace.
Discovery
Your website visitors come to you lookig for a solution to their problem. If you know what they’re looking for, you can create content that attracts them. They may well come to you from a search engine, but they might also be on a journey odf discovery where you’ll need to convince your prospect that you meet their needs and they have no need to carry on seeking a solution.
Conversion
The final piece in the jigsaw and reason for everything. You have your prospect, now you need to convert them into a customer. That may be direct through online sales, or may be less so, through enquiries, downloads, signups, etc. The conversion is the crucial and old-school SEO rarely took the ecological view that we do at Canary Dwarf.