The Future of SEO is User Experience

Last week AdAge reported that Google CEO Eric Schmidt, while speaking with a group of magazine executives, referred to the internet as a “cesspool”.  What is even more noteworthy, to us a search engine optimizers, is his statement that “We don’t actually want you [as SEOers] to be successful [at gaming the system]”.

The vast majority of us, as SEOers, are still stuck in 2006 when it comes to our SEO practices.  We’ve generally ignored that the search engines have built countermeasures to our SEO tactics.  As producers of real content have slowly moved up in the results, system gamers have moved down.  So what is the solution?  Better title tags?  More links?  In my opinion, it’s none of these.

The solution is to create pages with value …And to do that, there are two facets to creating pages that the search engines find valuable.  The first one is relevance.  The second is user experience.

While relevance determines the search phrases for which your web page is displayed, user experience determines how high your page is displayed within those results. Until now, relevance has been the primary SEO focus.  However, I’d argue that user experience is just as important to high search rankings, if not more.

User Experience in Rankings

Make no mistake.  The search engines, themselves, are striving to provide the best user experience.  They know if they deliver great results, we will be more likely to use them in the future  …and the only way they know to do this is to ensure that the pages they return to us include the best experiences in relation to our search.

User experience isn’t about the aesthetics of a website but about its usefulness to the visitor.  Wikipedia is the perfect example of this.  Sure, it’s not the most attractive or exciting site we’ve ever visited, but attractive and exciting does not equal great user experience.  Great user experience is about solving a job to be done, and every search query is a question about a job to be done.

For example, why is Wikipedia’s Eric Schmidt page ranked above his biography on its own site within a Google’s own results for Eric Schmidt?  Yes, it has a single topic focus, making it more relevant, but that’s simply what connected the page to the search query.  It ranks higher because it provides a better overview of the guy.  While you’d leave his google.com biography with many unanswered question, you’d leave his Wikipedia page with most of your questions answered.

In this instance, Wikipedia has provided a better user experience and deserves the higher placement …which is exactly what Google has done in their search results.

Build Pages Worth Linking To

The age of “cesspool” web pages is coming to an end.  If we want to rank highly now, and in the future, we have to start creating real web pages for real people that solve a real job to be done.  We can no longer create useless web pages targeted at specific search phrases.

If you can look at your web page and honestly say that a good amount of people would be motivated to link to it using words that express the page’s topic, you will do well.  If you can’t, it’s time to go back to the drawing board; because sooner than later, that page will be hard to find in the search results.