Over the last few years Organic Search engine optimization (SEO) has become a core concept in online marketing circles not to say a source of constant concern and worry. There are different views and discussions on the role and importance of SEO but there is general agreement that good SEO can funnel in a lot of high value traffic and boost online sales.
One very common question I often hear and read about is “what is more important – optimizing for Organic search or optimizing for social media (or that is people)?“. Now this may seem like a dilemma for some marketers who would like to know where to focus their strategy but it need not be. I believe it only sounds problematic because it is not put in a wider framework.
What is Organic Search Engine Optimization? (yep…it’s healthy to ask basic questions from scratch)
Let me take two steps back and skim over what is meant by optimizing for search and optimizing for social media. Search engine optimization in its narrowest form is having your website content and structure developed in such a way that it is easy for search engines to get your content pages indexed in their search results and rank high for the particular keywords you are trying to optimize. The latter is the ultimate goal of SEO
For example, if one of your product pages is optimized for the keywords/phrases ‘outdoor sports gear‘ and ‘adventure sports equipment‘, it means that if the organic search optimization is done well your page should appear in the first few results returned by that search engine whenever those phrases are searched for.
As most of you probably know very well hands-on, this entails doing some keyword research (using the keyword research tool of your liking) first to find out those keywords that best fits your product page, which also have a substantial monthly search volume and which preferably are not overly competed for (otherwise it will be harder to rank for those keywords).
After choosing the keywords you want to optimize your content around, you strategically insert those keywords in your meta-tags, title, body and even alt-image tags. This is what is called ‘on-page optimization‘. Going back to the dilemma, this is where the wrong turn can be taken. Some people may be very tempted to overdo this on-page optimization and have their content twisted around the keywords instead of the other way round. The result is low quality content at best, jibberish and garbage at its worst. Here is where the question of ‘writing for search bots or writing for people?‘ comes in.
At this point if you had to ask me again what is more important, I’d definitely tell you optimization for people and target audience. I’d rather have content that is of good quality, helpful and which resonates with the reader’s likes and needs.
An article, page or blog post that ranks high in the search engine but is almost unreadable is worth little if anything at all. On the other hand a piece of content which doesn’t rank on search engines but is of high value to whoever reads it will be very readily shared or discussed thus giving it the potential of going massively viral. Don’t forget that Social Media is an ‘emotional eco-system’ driven by people and not machines.
Content that is optimized for people means content that is consumed, sharable and easily linked to.
Really good SEO= Content Optimized for People first
Looking at the wider picture, good SEO is also good optimization for people. First off if when searching for keywords in your niche to write interesting content about, you are already planning to write what people want to read, hence optimizing for a particular audience. Makes sense?
Moreover if we look beyond the narrow definition of SEO as I described above, we find that real search optimization can also mean aligning people’s needs with your content.
For instance, I was lately analyzing the website of a medium sized enterprise when I realized (through Google Analytics) that a moderate but consistent amount of traffic was coming from a keyword in Italian. When I typed in the keyword in Google search, I was given the main homepage in English in the results. This means that those potential customers who were looking for the Italian version of the page could have been turned away by not matching the content with their expectation. This is an SEO problem and it was one of the things I suggested in my SEO report.
The bottom line is that both optimizing for people and optimizing for search engines are important as long as one doesn’t interfere with the other. Understanding how people interact with and consume content is crucial to understanding the how content should be optimized from a strategic point of view.
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