A blogger describes their “best SEO tactic so far”
The single most successful strategy I’ve found for getting search engine traffic for a more niche site has been to pay very close attention when something is difficult to find online. This isn’t very difficult to do, since it’s easy to notice when something is frustrating. The key is to be aware and take notes.
Look at your browser history and write down the exact queries you typed…
… after you’ve learned what you were trying to learn during your frustrating search, create the very thing you were trying to find… Make your own version of the resource you finally found, but fix whatever issue made it difficult to find.
This strategy tends to be stable because it works with the search engine and doesn’t tend to get crushed by updates the way more aggressive techniques do. It leads to creating genuinely helpful resources for people to find online and Google has every incentive to return them in its results.
Content created this way tends to rank well because the entire strategy revolves around escaping competition.
This is less a tactic or a hack than the essence of SEO – literally optimising for what people are searching for. No wonder it is resilient to search algorithm updates – it’s not optimising for the algo. It goes straight to the human.
This made me think of what I learnt at some point when building direct to consumer products. When talking to your customers, pay attention to the terms they use to describe their problem or their current solution.
Often the designer or copywriter will use ‘industry’ terms on the site, in literature or within the product, because those are what the team uses to communicate with each other internally. You’ve probably noticed this yourself as a customer when you’ve called a helpline.
This is why it’s important for you, as a product manager, to handle customer support and have product-market-fit conversations regularly. Understanding words, phrases your customers use helps make your product more relatable, more human and ultimately more attractive in an environment saturated with options and alternatives.