Back in the day, SEO focused on pleasing algorithms. The goal was to create sites that appealed to them. Algorithms were especially happy with lots of keywords. They also liked many links with relevant anchor text.
The natural result was sites that appealed to algorithms, but weren’t quite up to snuff for human beings. Over the years, however, Google has improved its ability to determine what human beings like in their SERPs. Consequently, many previously successful SEO methods have become obsolete.
Anyone who keeps an eye on the SEO blogging world can’t have failed to notice the shift from “50 Ways To Build Links” type articles to the current overabundance of “Content Marketing is Where It’s At” articles.
That’s a symptom of SEOs realizing the sea change that has occurred in the range of effective SEO techniques as the search engine algorithms have increased in complexity and accuracy.
Google’s aim
To make its algorithms as human as possible, and beyond that, as specific to particular humans as possible. It wants to know what you like, what you want, what you need, and it wants to give you that along with some advertising.
Unfortunately, some SEOs don’t seem to have understood this. The recent InterFlora debacle clearly demonstrated this. Presumably, InterFlora paid SEOs a lot of money. However, they were harmed in return. This was largely because those SEOs didn’t act like humans providing something other humans wanted or needed.
British newspapers made the same mistake, which says a lot about the state of journalism. If anyone should be aware of the need to create content for humans it’s journalists.
Big cases like this are going to jolt even the most entrenched and obtuse out of their sense of complacency.
Technical SEO isn’t going away.
We’ll still need multiple IP hosting, on-page optimizations of tags and metadata, conversion rate optimizations, and so on, but the heart of SEO is going to be content that goes above and beyond, and that is sharable because it is admirable and compels a response.
Think of a Venn diagram. One circle represents algorithms. The other represents search users. Over time, the overlap between these circles will increase. Perfect overlap is unlikely unless Google solves hard AI.
However, if anyone can, it’s them. Eventually, the overlap will be significant enough. The SEO world will then need to target human search engine users. It will shift away from solely targeting algorithms.
