From start-ups to high-street companies, I’ve worked with businesses of all sizes. Their digital presence mattered to all of them. And if there’s one question that I’ve been asked more times than I care to mention, it’s this:
What’s working with SEO right now?
You see, the issue with SEO is that it’s always changing. [Or at least, that’s the common perception.]
As you’re about to find out, it’s never been more simple for non-SEO savvy website owners to take their domain to the top of the SERPs.
Let me explain…
SEO is a combination of art and science. Everyone knows the importance of having a website that ranks highly in searches, but there’s so much [seemingly to it].
SEO tactics that worked years ago are no longer effective.
But you know what?
That’s actually a good thing.
As is all the changes to optimal SEO strategy.
Nowadays, SEO is neither complicated nor ever changing. SEO is fundamentally stable for the first time in ages.
And at the heart of the reason why is Google and it’s ability to accurately assess pages in such a way as to render underhand and black hat SEO techniques useless.
Ultimately, if website owners concentrate on providing value to visitors, then they stand a great chance of reaching page one.
Which is the big aim, since that will increase traffic, leads, customers and profit.
So, let’s massage this article into something strategic and practical that business owners or webmasters can use.
My biggest SEO tip for website owners in 2019 is to concentrate less on keywords and more on content topics in 2019.
The reason for this strategy is very straightforward:
Google now uses something called latent semantic indexing in its ranking algorithm.
Okay, well that sounds pretty techie, so allow me to explain what this really means.
Basically, Google is now way better at interpreting the wider context of articles than it was a few years ago and it no longer relies on one or two keywords for information.
Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean:
Suppose you enter the word “copywriting tips” into Google. How does it know how to differentiate between copywriting tips and essay writing tips, CV writing tips or novel writing tips?
It does it thanks to latent semantic indexing.
That’s the part of Google’s ranking algorithm that assesses the content of content and ignores bitty, old school SEO factors.
In years gone by, Google used to assess pages against individual keywords. If you targeted a keyword, your content would be judged against its relevancy in isolation. Depending on other factors, sometimes you’d rank well for that term, sometimes you wouldn’t.
Nowadays, all those ‘other factors’ don’t carry nearly so much weight. In fact, in 2019, if you satisfy the intent of a searcher, it’s possible for one piece of content to rank highly for 100s of terms.
That’s right – one solitary article can hoover up traffic from multiple sources thanks to being on page one for a while variety of keywords.
So, let’s revisit my search query for copywriting tips.
In this case, Google would analyse apparently relevant content for other words, phrases and topics associated with copywriting.
For instance, the presence of copy pertaining to blogging, business, sales and psychology within a blog post would indicate to Google that clearly this result isn’t about essay writing tips, novel writing tips or CV writing tips.
All things being equal, this indicates to Google that this kind of content is relevant to the search. It’s something the searcher might want to see. Of course, other ranking signals matter, but it’s a helluva good start.
If we follow through with this, we can deduce that it’s better to concentrate on topics rather than individual keywords. And at Splash Copywriters, it’s this very subtle shift to our SEO approach that has seen our SEO services deliver amazing results.
If we truly offer value then we can trust Google to interpret the versatility of our content far more accurately. For business owners in particular, this is great news, since it means that you can effectively power a website on just a handful of articles.
There’s no need to be constantly creating content.
Going forward, it’s far easier to create a content plan in any given industry. You can cover more topics and own more keywords on fewer URLs.
So, when people talk about the ever-changing landscape of SEO, that’s not really truly. There have been some huge changes over the past decade, but Google is now in a position where it only really has to tweak things. This can be related to the era of SMS Marketing. There was a time when Mobile messages were used by companies to target clients, people thought services like WhatsApp or Messengers would kill SMS Marketing but that did not happen.
The focus is back on what really matters: the searcher.
Essentially, black hat or white doesn’t come into it. In a way, if you ditch every tactic you have and simply try to serve the searcher in every way you can, you’ll win in the long-term.
About the Author: Matt Press is an experienced copywriter who has worked for some of the UK’s biggest brands, such as Sky,, Three and Vodafone. He now runs his own SEO agency, Splash Copywriters.
