Quick question: what skill is the most crucial indicator of success in search engine optimization? 

You might think it’s critical thinking, that you need an analytical mind and the capacity to parse and understand search analytics. You may think communication and social skills are key, as a good SEO professional needs to be able to not only communicate the results of their work, but also use that work to generate compelling content. Alternatively, you might point to the fact that, as an inherently technical pursuit, a skilled SEO professional needs to be tech-savvy. 

The above skills and characteristics are all important, but none of them constitute the true foundation of SEO. Even a powerful tool like SEMrush or AHrefs is functionally useless if you don’t know how to perform efficient, effective research. This is doubly true if you’re combining optimization with content creation. 

Without research skills, you can’t: 

• Brainstorm new topic ideas. 
• Assess how your competitors are performing and what they’re doing. 
• Stay aware of ongoing trends and news in your industry. 
• Determine the most effective keywords and keyword permutations for a particular topic. 
• Identify opportunities and content gaps.
• Gain an understanding of your audience. 

The good news is that you can very easily learn to be a better researcher; it just takes some practice and a bit of a mindset shift. The first piece of advice we’ll offer you is to learn to think outside the box. Consider leveraging something like a mind map alongside your keyword research tools to help identify keyword permutations you may have overlooked. 

Beyond that, we’ll refer to an excellent article on research skills published by online learning agency MasterClass, which offers the following advice: 

• When researching, always start broad before diving into specifics. There’s nothing wrong with using basic, generic search terms to help you narrow your scope. Research is a step-by-step process and should be treated as such. 
• Train yourself to identify a low-quality source. Red flags include thin content, spammy website practices, poor spelling/grammar, absurd or false claims, and a lack of knowledge and/or authority. 
• Always verify your sources. This is particularly important if you’re making factual claims in your writing. 
• Keep an open mind and understand that you probably don’t know everything about a topic. 
• Find a way to organize your research results that makes sense to you. 

That’s basically all there is to it. Keep following the process above, and over time, you’ll start to find it easier and easier to carry out research. Eventually, it might even become something you do automatically, and you’ll have difficulty even remembering a time when you struggled to gather information.

We’ve all met at least one search engine optimization (SEO) snake oil salesman. You know the type. 

Grandiose and sweeping promises. Language bogged down with so much jargon it’s functionally meaningless. An endless barrage of gaslighting and cold opens. 

To hear these people talk, SEO is some sort of mystic art, and mastery means you’re guaranteed to dominate the search engine results page (SERP). 

Anyone who’s spent even a little time studying the craft knows this to be a blatant lie. SEO is valuable, indeed—it’s a powerful lead generation and marketing tool in the right hands. But it’s not some secret weapon, and it won’t allow you to seize control of Google’s algorithms. 

In order to leverage it effectively, you need to accept that—you need to understand the limitations of SEO.

It Can’t Save Low-Quality Content

All of Google’s most recent algorithm updates have been deployed with the goal of making the search engine better at recognizing whether content is valuable to the audience. Rather than operating exclusively on keyword matching, the search engine is increasingly focused on intent. It’s focused on understanding what the searcher wants and providing them with the content that best fulfills what they’re looking for. 

For this reason, if your content is poor quality, it doesn’t matter how much time you put into SEO. It’s not going to generate any meaningful returns. 

Google’s Algorithms Are Mercurial, at Best

Google releasing an algorithm that completely upsets our understanding of SEO and penalizes countless websites is very nearly an annual tradition at this point. It’s easy to forget that, regardless of how much effort we put into optimization, we’re ultimately at Google’s mercy. A single algorithm change could wipe out our progress. 

It Doesn’t Provide Immediate Returns

Unlike other paid promotion strategies, SEO is more of a slow burn. It rarely generates fast traffic or an instant return on investment. Instead, it’s more about gradually cultivating your website, building up a reputation and a rapport with high-quality content, and ensuring that content is seen by targeting the right keywords. 

It takes patience, in other words—and some people lack that patience. 

It Might Not Be A Secret Weapon, But SEO Is Still Valuable

We’d like to conclude with a bit of a disclaimer. We spent a lot of time today talking about the limitations and drawbacks of SEO. We are by no means trying to say that SEO isn’t worthwhile. 

Quite the opposite, in fact.

Even though it’s relatively slow and heavily relies on Google’s algorithms and inbound marketing content, an effective SEO strategy is ultimately a cornerstone of every successful business. It’s not a magic bullet or some holy grail of marketing. But it’s still more than worth exploring. 

A sales funnel—also known as a conversion funnel or a marketing funnel—is basically a visual representation of the different stages a prospect goes through before converting. Within the context of search engine optimization, converting could be anything from purchasing a product to signing up for a newsletter to simply accessing a specific page on your site. Most funnels consist of some version of the following stages: 

• Awareness. People at this stage may or may not know about your company. This is where the majority of your prospects start and where most will likely remain. 
• Interest. These prospects are intrigued but not necessarily hooked just yet. They’ve probably spent a bit of time on your website looking at what you have to offer. 
• Consideration. People at this stage are doing their research into both your company and its competitors in an effort to decide who to choose. 
• Decision. The tipping point. These prospects are on the verge of converting.
• Conversion. The people at this stage have done what you wanted them to do, but you aren’t finished yet. Now you need to put time and effort into nurturing a relationship with those customers in order to keep them loyal—and maybe inspire them to tell their friends and colleagues about your business, too. 

But what does any of this have to do with SEO, exactly? 

A great deal, actually. For each page on your site—each keyword you choose—you need to think about what segment of the funnel you intend to target. A how-to guide, for instance, is likely targeted more toward the top of the funnel, people who may be interested in whatever you want to sell them but aren’t necessarily ready to commit to anything. 

Different stages of the funnel also require a slightly different keyword strategy, as noted by SEO expert Neil Patel: 

• Top-of-funnel content typically involves long-tail keywords or questions that may lack the necessary traffic to appear in any keyword research software. Tools and sites like Answer the Public, Infinite Google Suggest, Quora, and Ubersuggest are invaluable at this stage.
• People in the middle of the funnel are strongly considering making a purchase and likely researching different options. At this stage, you’re generally focusing on long-tail keywords, though understanding the questions people are asking about a particular topic is still incredibly important. 
• People at the bottom of the funnel are one step away from converting. Keyword research is less important at this stage than understanding your audience’s intent. You need to ask what they want to know about your business and its products. What information will cause these prospects to tip over to customers? 

 So, to answer our initial question of where SEO fits into your business’s sales funnel? The simplest answer is everywhere. You can (and honestly should) optimize for every section of the funnel individually, ensuring that you can draw in, hook, and guide visitors toward a sale.

There was a time when search engine optimization(SEO) was all about gaming the algorithm. A time when keyword density and backlinks were the exclusive determining factors in where one appeared on the search engine results page(SERP). But that was decades ago. 

Modern SEO is different. It’s less algorithm-focused and more user-focused. Keywords are still important, certainly—but not more important than creating relevant, high-quality content. 

The problem is that too many so-called SEO agencies ignore this shift. They obsess over pointless metrics like what percentage of a blog post consists of primary and secondary keywords. And in the process, they ignore content quality. 

When you load a piece up with keywords or obsess over the specifics of what someone is searching for, you’re creating content for algorithms rather than for human beings. That kind of content is very easy to recognize. It’s laden with unnatural language and awkward phrasing.

It’s packed with sentences that clearly exist solely to insert more keyword variations. 

This approach demonstrates a foundational misunderstanding of SEO. Every algorithm update Google has made for the past several years has been an effort to move away from this type of thinking. An effort to make the SERP about content that’s valuable and relevant to human beings rather than content that plays nice with robots.

We will be blunt. The days when you could outsmart Google to outrank your competition are gone. As noted by inbound marketing blog Rock Content, Google has been trying to tell us that for years, both directly and through content penalties. While the technical details are still important—and always will be—the needs of the user always come first. 

What that means is simple:

• Prioritize the experience. Your site should load fast, be easy to navigate, and not contain any deceptive or underhanded content. 
• Create for intent. For each piece of content on your site, ask what the user is looking for, and endeavor to provide that as concisely and effectively as possible. 
• Focus on quality. Your goal should always be to create the highest-quality content possible, with everything else as a secondary concern. 
• Privacy is key. In an era of legislation such as the GDPR, customer privacy is front-of-mind. Even if your business isn’t headquartered in Europe, you must always think about consent and transparency when dealing with user data.
• Connect and engage. Modern marketing and SEO are ultimately about building relationships with your audience. Your inbound strategy should therefore be linked with social media, and your business should look for opportunities to interact with and personalize content for customers at every touchpoint in their journey. 

Ultimately, the User Comes First

Keyword stuffing. Link Farming. Deceptive and hidden content. These black hat tactics used to be tools in the arsenal of every SEO professional. 

Today that is no longer the case—if you obsess over technical SEO without thinking about the people on the other side of the screen, you can and will be penalized by the same algorithms you’re attempting to game. Need more info? Check out our previous thought-piece on our 5 Top Tips for SEO in 2022!

To say that search engine optimization (SEO) has changed a great deal over the past several years would be putting it lightly.  Today’s SEO landscape is nearly unrecognizable compared to what it looked like in 2018. And even now, it still continues to change. 

Here are a few tips to help you keep pace. 

Put the User Experience First

We’re just about rounding on the one-year anniversary of Google’s Core Web Vitals Update. Also known as the Google Page Experience Update, Core Web Vitals officially establish a website’s user experience as a ranking factor.  If you haven’t already started prioritizing things like interactivity, load time, and ease of use by now, it’s past time you do so. 

Because if you don’t, it’s not just your PageRank that’s going to suffer—your audience is going to ditch your website for a competitor that provides a better experience. 

Content is Still King

Fortunately, not everything has changed. Content is still the best tool in your marketing and SEO arsenal.  As long as you provide your audience with content that’s relevant and valuable to them, everything else will fall nicely into place. 

See, there’s a common thread in the majority of Google’s algorithm updates. Every single one is ultimately designed to make the search engine better at recognizing quality. The better your content, the more beneficial these updates will ultimately be for you. 

Rethink Audience Research and PPC Targeting

Arguably one of the biggest news stories of the past several years has involved Google’s decision to retire third-party tracking cookies from its Chrome browser. Unsurprisingly, this created a massive ripple effect in both advertising and SEO, effectively setting an end of life date for behavioral targeting. To replace behavioral advertising, Google is currently testing a new ad feature known as Topics, which consists of three broad components: 

• A website or ad network’s topics/subjects
• The topics a user is interested in, based on their browsing behavior
• Alignment between user topics and website/network topics. 

Basically, it’s contextual advertising with a slightly different coat of paint. 

Now, it’s important to note that none of this is going to really come into effect until 2024, the current deadline for phasing out cookies.  Alongside Topics, Google is reportedly also testing multiple new Privacy Sandbox technologies. While much of these are still under wraps, it may be worthwhile to start assessing how you target content and research your customers now. 

Consider Exploring AI

Over the past few years, artificial intelligence has evolved in leaps and bounds. Many SEO tools now leverage a combination of AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to handle much of the backend work, from keyword research to topic suggestions. If done right, implementing them within your own organization could give you a considerable competitive edge. 

Empathy, Not Analytics

People are exhausted, and you can hardly blame them. The past several years have been some of the most emotionally trying in recent memory. What that means for you is that customers have less patience than ever for overly-salesly or irrelevant messaging. 

It also means that a little empathy can go a long way. Shape your content to be more conscientious, more focused on social responsibility, and more aware of your audience’s needs.