As highly technical as SEO often is, it’s easy to forget exactly why you’re optimising your site. The goal is to draw the attention of the search engines and boost your ranking, but the ultimate goal for every business should be a human one.

A lot of the advice Google provides for webmasters centres on the idea that search engines are built to please humans. Google tells us again and again that anything a website does should aim to add value to the experience of its viewers. This is why the rules are constantly shifted to cut out tricky techniques that will appeal only to search engine spiders. Google isn’t interested in sites that engage well with its technology. The search engine giant is interested in sites that viewers will like when they pop up on the search engine results page, because this encourages viewers to keep using Google.

Too many businesses get bogged down in the technical details of their SEO campaigns. It’s entirely common to come across a website that features clunky content, with keywords sticking out awkwardly within trite phrases. The perception seems to be ‘if you rank, they will come’, which is true, but what a website really wants is for the viewers to stay. A clumsy use of SEO techniques will ensure that their visit is brief and never repeated.

When designing your SEO strategy, bring everything back to the human level and whether your changes be of benefit to your site’s viewers. Not all of your tactics will appeal to your viewers in such a straightforward manner, but if a change ignores your viewers completely it is a sign you need a rethink. Any changes made solely for the benefit of search engine spiders should set off alarms, not least because they are likely to get you kicked off a search engine’s index if spotted. Even if they are within the rules, such changes can prove to be off-putting to your viewers and eventually affect your traffic.

Sometimes room for error will creep in through the fine details of your campaign. Your main keyword list will contain related terms. In many cases, some of these related terms just don’t fit with a website’s style, meaning that casual and friendly content winds up containing formal synonyms. If your keywords are technical and your viewers aren’t, you might be barking up the wrong tree. At SEO Consult we can help you develop your keywords for SEO-friendly content that fits in organically.

Patience is the key to the success of search engine optimisation. The potential of many a site has been crippled by the impatience which has led the site’s owners to stick SEO in any way it will fit. Discuss with your SEO consultant the kind of schedule you see your optimisation campaign on so that you can plan your business accordingly. Realistic expectations of an SEO campaign can not only help lessen frustration, but prevent rash moves whose ramifications could affect your business well into the future.

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