The Transcript

Does SEO Still Matter?

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Jessica Frick: Hi. You’re listening to the Digital Entrepreneur. I am Jessica Frick.

Sean Jackson: I’m Sean Jackson. Last week, Jess, we had a question that you posed: does SEO still matter? I was sitting there going, “Does she not remember that I actually know a lot about SEO?” I am going to push back and ask you why do you think it may or may not matter, from your perspective?

Jessica Frick: Search engine optimization, obviously, is about distribution and discovery. The main reason you would want to optimize for search engines is to be discovered. I think there are a lot of advancements that have come along that make search engines less relevant.

Sean Jackson: Ooh, like what?

Jessica Frick: Social.

Sean Jackson: What else?

Jessica Frick: Email.

Sean Jackson: What else? Maybe Amazon.com?

Jessica Frick: That’s a big one. No doubt.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, I understand your point. For people who’ve been digital entrepreneurs for a while, SEO has certainly been something that we’ve all talked about, primarily because it’s been and continues to be … A large source of referral traffic to one’s site is coming from search engines, with Google being the predominant one in there. Certainly it used to be this preconceived notion of a black box.

There was a dark magic to it, and only certain practitioners knew how to do it. Obviously, over the years that’s thoroughly not only been debunked, but it’s also something that it’s become a science, if you will. There’s certain things that we know work. There’s certain processes that you have to do, which have changed over the years as search engines like Google have gotten a lot smarter.

I think it’s tough to push back and say, “Does it still matter?” in so far as it really is a fundamental part of the content marketing process. I think that’s the broader context of it, that it’s not just SEO only — as you pointed out. There’s other platforms. There’s other vehicles. It is this idea, like you said, of really thinking about how this content is going to be discovered out there. To that, though, this is where I say SEO still matters, because some of the root principles of SEO still are applicable even though the world has completely changed.

Number one: headlines still matter. Keywords in headlines still matter. Your description — even though it has no ranking value — still matters in drawing attention, especially when you look at all of the different Tweet cards and Facebook things and the Open Graph system. Even the basics still matter in that discovery process, with search engines certainly still leading the way. I would say, yeah, SEO still matters. I think if you’re looking at putting content out there, you’re still going to want to know, “Is this going to be easy to be found? Does this have relevancy to be linked to?” However, Jess, you would say …

Jessica Frick: I would say that you can’t consider SEO to be what it used to be. You can’t just say, “awesome bike shop” for 26 towns nearby.

Sean Jackson: Right.

Jessica Frick: And put it in purple ink for your purple background, so that you can only see it when you hover over it. Those sorts of tricks are gone. Google has wisened up to that. Yeah, as you said, it’s part of the content marketing strategy. With Google being predictive now, you just write good content and make sure that you’ve got your data structured in a way that Google can read it, and I think you’ll be fine — so long as you’re good.

Sean Jackson: I think so, but I think you also have to pay attention to the nuances. This is where I would say that the typical tactics of SEO that many people had done in the past still are relevant, in so far as this. You still need to think about images. Certainly, with all the social media out there, how you put those images on a page and the text that you put around them, that does matter, because it helps people understand — when I say “people,” I mean the people using those discovery engines — to understand the context of it. Anyone who’s been a food blogger probably knows exactly what I’m talking about with Pinterest and Instagram and all those.

Jessica Frick: Oh, gosh. Yeah.

Sean Jackson: I do think that you still have the mechanical components that you’ve had since the very beginning that you still have to do. But I agree that it definitely has evolved to a much more elegant way of helping other systems understand what you have. Again, if you look at video, for instance, there’s whole ways of optimizing video, and I think this still blows people away.

YouTube is the second-most searched on system on the web, outside of Google. Think about that. You got Amazon, YouTube, and Google where searches are conducting. Each of which have their own things that require you to optimize that content for discovery, which still rely on your basic SEO-esque type of tactics, though less spammy than they’ve been in the past.

Jessica Frick: You know what’s awesome, is I don’t even have to be the best. I just have to throw a couple of bucks, and Google will put me first anyway.

Sean Jackson: You know, Jess, I’m going to leave it at that by saying that not only are you wrong, but on this show today, we actually bringing in a expert that’s going to debunk that and many more myths. Stay tuned after the break, because we have an awesome interview with Eric Enge from Stone Temple Consulting who is going to show Jess how she’s wrong this time in our little debate. Stay tuned after this break.

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Sean Jackson: Welcome back from the break, everyone. Jess and I have a very special guest today, Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting and co-author of The Art of SEO. Highly recommend that book. It’s been around for awhile, and it’s still the definitive source. More importantly, you can learn so much about Eric and his whole thinking about SEO by visiting his site with all those fun videos. Eric, welcome to the show.

Eric Enge: Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to it.

Jessica Frick: Eric, we are so excited to have you. I need to ask you a question. Does Google hate SEO?

Eric Enge: Oh, my. Not in such a generic way or not in a simplistic way. There are people that do a lot of really great SEO work. It’s really, in its ideal world, about helping websites be better understood by search engines. Google doesn’t hate that. But they do hate people who go out of their way to dream up schemes to manipulate Google search results based on things that probably shouldn’t matter that much. Unfortunately, there’s been a lot of that history in the SEO industry. But Google doesn’t hate all SEO.

Does SEO Still Matter, Given All the Options for Traffic?

Sean Jackson: It’s funny, because obviously with Matt Cutts leaving Google — who was definitely a big part of the webmaster community and a very much of a definitive source out there of information … Over the years, Google has, in using the terms of somebody being much more predatory in their data aggregation, how they pull things. I want to talk about the fact that I think there’s some people who feel like, “Look, SEO was all about link building way back when. Now Google has figured that out, there’s really no value other than just putting a title and some content on a page and calling it a day.” All the old black hat SEO — all of the magic mystery of SEO is gone now, and really it’s not as important in the discovery process where you have an active role in manipulating it, if you will. You’re just going to have to sit back and take it as it is. What do you say to that?

Eric Enge: That just leaves more traffic for me and the people that our agency helps, because it’s a very inaccurate view of today’s SEO world, to be fair.

Sean Jackson: Well, correct me then.

Eric Enge: Not to offend anybody who has that point of view. Look, SEO today is becoming very centered on things like the quality of the content you can produce, how that’s received by the world at large, and how users engage with it. This is something that most websites do poorly.

Sean Jackson: Really?

Eric Enge: Oh, yeah. It’s easy for an agency like ours to go in — we do this for a lot of major global brands, as well as some smaller companies — you just go in and you help them improve their content quality dramatically. And guess what? They’re suddenly getting a lot more traffic from Google. It’s not an accident. The link building side of things isn’t dead either, it’s just the way people thought of it is dead. If you’re doing the right things to promote your brand and get a great deal of visibility, and as a result, more people are linking to you, yeah. That still moves your ranking.

Sean Jackson: Let’s go through that. You bring up a point that we make all the time on Copyblogger.com when it ever comes to topic of search optimization, or what I like to call content optimization, the ability to create a content that enhances its discovery online. Is it really still the focus by the search engines on surfacing great content? Does content on the page really matter versus just trying to get as many links as you can to that damn page?

Because I know there’s a lot of people out there that are saying, “I’m writing great content and nothing is happening, but I see Bob over there. Bob went to that link farm over in the Philippines, and man, his rankings have skyrocketed.” Talk about that contrast between that quality content that you mentioned that does improve it and the way that link building — I wanted you to dive into those two topics.

Why Making Your Content More Reader-Friendly (Versus Keyword Stuffing) Is Hugely Important

Eric Enge: Sure. Let’s take the first one first. Content quality. We had a situation last year with a client where we modified 300 pages that they had on their e-commerce site. A very large, well-known brand. There were some texts that had been put on those pages previously by another SEO agency. That text fit the classic definition of what people might call “SEO text.” It wasn’t written for users. It was about 250 words. It was using a lot of related keywords, but it didn’t flow well, etc.
Across 300 articles, we replaced their text with our text, which was the same length — in rough terms — but was designed for users, is what I mean to say. It was definitely designed for users.

The pages we worked on were up 168 percent in traffic. The pages we didn’t work on — just so that you understand there was a control group — were also up, but they were only up 17 percent. The difference of 151 percent. By the way, I’ve got multiple versions of those case studies I can tell you. Another one where it was 149 versus 32. Another one where it was 68 versus -11.

Sean Jackson: Wow.

Eric Enge: It makes a difference. The whole key is we design the content for users. In the process of doing that, we did still write semantically-rich copy, but we created something that people would actually engage in. So that’s the content side of things.

Sean Jackson: Let me add to that, because here’s another aspect. There’s a commonly held belief out there that, “Okay, you rewrote the copy and you made it better. Obviously your studies showed that you got a big lift — not doubting that. But maybe it’s because people are spending more time on the page or people are clicking on that revised heading that you did, and because of that time they’re spending on there, that’s a ranking factor now. Forget links, because now it’s all about time on the page versus trying to keyword stuff the page.” What say you?

Eric Enge: First of all — I’m actually going to disagree with what you just said in a moment, but before I disagree with it — do you care?

Sean Jackson: That’s a great point.

Eric Enge: I mean we just talked about how you could get 150 percent lift of the underlying technical thing that Google looked at. Does the reason really matter? It doesn’t. I think everybody listening will agree that we don’t. Now, let me get over to the user signal side of things. I have no doubt that Google is finding some specific scenarios where they can use user engagement data as a ranking factor.

But I will tell you that Google’s Jeff Dean — who’s a Google Fellow, which is a very senior technical title, and the head of their machine learning or artificial intelligence program — when interviewed … I don’t remember the magazine it was in, but it was a while back. He was asked about user engagement signals, and, “You should just use user interaction with your pages and use that as a ranking signal.” His response — and Jeff Dean is not this guy who is giving you four layers of obfuscation. It was immediate. He just basically said, “Yeah, it’s kind of a poor ranking signal. It’s really hard to get a clean ranking view of how you should rank things based on things like how people are interacting with the page, how long on site, bounce rate, or things like that.” He was really quite clear about it.

I’ll give you an example to help illustrate it. Imagine that I want to...