As we head into 2020, businesses of all sizes are getting ready to implement their carefully thought-out marketing plans.

All I can say is, hope those plans don’t include a lot of spending on SEO.

As a recent article in The Drum notes with a fair amount of rigor, Google is pretty much eradicating the business of SEO, algorithm update by algorithm update.

To which I respond, hooray.

SEO always was a broken marketing concept. As practiced by “experts” and hacks alike, it made websites less readable – and by extension, less usable – by attempting to emulate what human beings think would look most attractive to a computer with a continually updated algorithm that scans and evaluates every piece of content on the web.

It’s a little bit like the Aztecs tearing the hearts out of human sacrifices because that’s what they thought the gods were in the mood for – as opposed to a nice shrubbery.

Such a stupid causal chain. And so wrong – wrong because while the SEO hucksters were peddling magic formulas to shoot your site up the search pages, the search engine itself was taking a 180-degree different view of the process.

As The Drum notes, the more than 3,000 algorithm updates Google made last year (!) were “designed to provide people with the best result for their search – not the company with the best-optimised [sic] website.”

In other words, while you were playing reindeer games with keywords, Google was moving toward a customer-experience-based evaluation algorithm for websites.

This should be the bit of news that convinces you to jump off that merry-go-round for good. And when you do, you need to pour yourself a cup of tea, relax, and ask yourself: What do I want visitors to my website to experience?

If you have your priorities in order, that will quickly expand to, “What do I want visitors to my brand to experience?”, because your brand lives most fully on your website.

I would respectfully suggest that you would want people to experience the following:

Factual information.

Some folks are all-in on external sources of factual information, or information about their broader industry, as opposed to information about their brand. That sort of information is very good, and you should strive to have that sort of information on your site, in the form of white papers, industry analysis, and links out to material that you believe your customers would find valuable – but you don’t have to focus on that information to the exclusion of information about your brand.

As a brand, you should strive to educate your visitors as part of the bigger process of convincing them to use your brand. You want to be seen as the experts; you want to provide a repository of useful information, because that’s part of what your customers are looking for. However, you want that information to point back to your brand as the best – because if you’re not actively trying to be the best, what the heck are you in business for?

Ease of use.

The best brands make things easy for their customers. Long ago, I was working with a company that made sports trading cards, and I asked the question, “Why are you putting so many barriers between you and the person who wants to buy your product?” The company’s cards were hard to find, and packaged and displayed in a such a way that you had to seek them out and have a good chunk of money in your pocket to buy them – but they were an impulse buy at heart. Your No. 1 job as a brand is to eliminate any unnecessary friction point keeping people from using your brand. That’s especially true for your website.

Video.

We were talking about this today with a client that has a lot of heavy factual material to present on some of its back pages. Adding video to those pages gives customers the information they need without having to do a lot of heavy lifting – though if they want to do the lift, the info will still be there for them, providing SEO value in the process.

Video has the added bonus of being incredibly portable, and able to cut and recut and be inserted into social posts, emails, newsletters, and more.

Testimonials.

We were also having a conversation about testimonials. They’re important on your site because they provide:

Site authority, which Google loves; and
A close imitation of a friend sidling over to you and saying, “Hey, you really need to try x,” which I love.

Testimonials that involve people just like your target customer talking about why they love your brand work because they break down the skepticism that’s been hard-wired into our brains. The academics would say it falls under the category of “uncertainty reduction theory,” which is just another way of saying that when we talk to people we try to find ways that they are like us.

Testimonials are a shortcut to that common ground. Use them in that manner, and you’ll reap the benefits.

Keywords.

Hold on; wasn’t I just dancing on SEO’s grave? I was – but just because SEO’s excesses are on the outs doesn’t mean that you should cleanse all keywords and search terms from your site. It’s important to know what people search for in regard to your products and services, and then it’s up to you to integrate those words and phrases into your site organically. Don’t force things; instead, understand what your customer is looking for and talk to them about those things in their language.

You can call it SEO if you want, but it’s really just an extension of the customer experience. If you truly understand your customer and what they want, you’ll talk to them in ways that resonate with them – and your site will rank highly as a result.

Clear CTAs.

Here’s what I recommend you do on the first workday of the new year: Look hard at your website. Ask yourself whether the navigation is as simple and logical as it could be.

Look at your calls to action next. Are they the calls to action that you really want – or could they be simplified and/or made more direct? If they need work, work on them now – and put the reworked ones above the fold. If you’re not sure, do some A/B testing and pay close attention to the analytics, especially your goal conversions.

Avoiding the Avoidable

How about the things to avoid on your site? There aren’t many, but here are a few suggestions:

Unreadable type.

For the most part web designers are exceptionally talented individuals who do remarkable work with difficult projects. If you think designing a clean, effective website is a snap you’ve never designed one.

However, occasionally designers are assigned too daunting a task – keyword-stuffed headlines or unmanageable graphics. The result can be unreadable type, either because there’s too much of it or because it’s placed on a variegated, poorly colored background.

Unreadable type may not matter to Google, but it matters to your customers … and remember: This is all about maximizing the customer experience.

Do this eyeball test: Look at your site, but “soft-focus” your eyes and notice what you see. If you see thick blocks of bold type or words that melt into images, fix it. Make the headlines more natural and do what you can with the images.

Again, this doesn’t have a lot to do with helping your site perform better with Google; instead, it’s about helping your site perform better with real people. You decide what’s more important.

Stilted prose full of “stuffed” keywords.

Earlier today I was reviewing new web copy for a major consumer brand, and I was shocked to see that they were still trying to stuff keywords into headlines and body copy. The result was the website version of the new Cats movie – essentially unwatchable except for those with an interest in the perverse.

For the last time, keyword-stuffing is passé. It’s day-before-yesterday’s news. It has no place in a modern website. Get it off of yours. Now. Your customers will thank you for it – and that’s what you want in the first place.

Influencers.

One of 2019’s big marketing trends, if you ascribe to such things, was the down-scaling of influencers. In the course of 12 months we went from influencers to micro-influencers to nano-influencers. I expect the next thing will be a 1/64-scale Rick Moranis encouraging me to buy Cheerios.

I understand that everyone is at their own unique point on their influencer journey, but let me just suggest this to you: How about viewing and treating every customer as an influencer – because the truth is they are the most important influencers you have?

Realize the potential for each customer to tell countless others how wonderful you are; give them the experience and the means to do it, not because you want to be puffed to the skies but because treating your customers well is the most cost-effective form of marketing, with the greatest residual benefits.

Treating every customer as a potential influencer and maximizing their customer experience makes it possible for them to do your heaviest marketing lifts for you. Also, because treating your customers well requires you to treat your employees well, you’ll experience greater employee retention, lower employee-acquisition costs, and a more positive work environment where your employees also work (on their own time) as influencers.

At this time of year where Snoopy and the Red Baron raise their glasses in a mutual toast, it also seems that Google and I are on the same side of the SEO question … which really isn’t a question and isn’t about SEO, but instead is a customer-experience opportunity.

Who’da thunk it?

Extra! Extra! CX Kills SEO!