You Don't Get Visible On The Internet And Then Become Successful You Are Successful And *Then* You Get Search Visibility
Google will love you when a) your products are loved offline, in real life, and b) when people love your website – or both. And at no point before that. Your organic SERP (Search Engine Results Page) location is a lagging-edge outcome derived from already being popular and/or successful. The only way around that is to pay (AdWords, GDN), and to enjoy absurdly low click-through rates.
“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.” – Wendy Piersall (author, artist & social media expert)
We’ve had a saying at FlashPointLabs for the better part of a decade: “There are 15,000 Ph.D.s at Google – you are not going to outsmart them.” Their bread and butter are determining relevancy and separating the wheat from the chaff. If it were easy to dupe them and find your self ‘no. 1’ on a SERP for a given keyword, everybody would be doing it, and Google would be out of business. Google’s entire brand and livelihood rests on search being credible; on it being difficult or impossible to manipulate their Page Rank. If it could be gamed or outsmarted, masses would do that, rendering the value of Google as worthless.
But they aren’t worthless, or out of business.
We find it astonishing that, while there exists an unprecedented collection of brainpower at Google, WordPress developers on Fiverr, working out of developing countries, are happy to take your money and tell you they can circumvent Google’s brain trust, and make you ‘rank no. 1’, for $10 worth of backlinks.
Not so much.
About 80% of search rank is people already loving your product and already loving your website/web experience.
The other 20% is ‘technicals’ like page load speed. Even backlinks and bounce rates (and other technical aspects of page rank) are indices to being loved.
About 80% of search rank is people already loving your product and already loving your website/web experience.
Keyword stuffing, paid backlinks, article spinners, turning out loads of low-value content – they will fail you, ultimately.
There is a de facto ‘SEO Arms Race’ between search engineers and unscrupulous webmasters, but the engineers at Google always end up having the last laugh.
In other words, if you’re not getting more traffic, it’s because you’re not actually great.
Honey, lately your low self-esteem is just good common sense. ~ Spanglish, Albert Brooks
