I know you know Google makes money from ads. That is the obvious part. The more important part is how you can help them make money and therefore make money yourself. No, I am not selling you an affiliate marketing site. I am trying to help you get more traffic to your site and therefore sell more of what you are already selling. Yes, this is about SEO. However, instead of approaching talking about keywords, PPC or backlinks (all relevant), I want to talk about content creation and working within the Google’s framework. Naturally, this applies to all search engines but honestly who is using Bing or Yahoo at this point (I <3 Marrisa Meyer… more on that in another post).

So to get more traffic you need to show up higher for pertinent keywords and for more keywords. Start asking “why” and let’s go down the rabbit hole. How do you get Google to reward you? Do what they want by helping them make more money. So we have established they make money off ads. Now why do they make money off ads? They get lots of clicks on those paid results. Why do they get so many clicks on paid results? Because everyone uses Google. Why does everyone use Google? You use Google because you trust that when you type in a keyword you will get real results. If you typed in “surfing” (a favorite search of mine) and were given elephants you would probably stop using Google. So Google wants to make sure when you put in a search term you keep getting the best results. This means the most new and relevant.

How do you become the most relevant result? Have the most relevant content. If I type in “surfing” I probably don’t want an article from the 70’s about the Z-boys. I want something new and relevant. Google pays attention to what people are responding to with clicks, how new is the article and who else is paying attention to it (backlinks). As Google continues to be best at serving up results, they continue to be the top search engine, and people will continue to use those paid ads on the top and on the side.

This is also why it is so important to pay attention to mobile friendliness. Is your site responsive? Google doesn’t think a website is a relevant search result to someone searching for surfing on a phone if the site only works and looks good on desktop. This actually makes lots of sense because someone on a phone probably has slower internet access and definitely has less square footage on the screen. They don’t want a page they are going to have to wait 3 minutes to load and then when it does they are going to have an issue clocking buttons and having to pinch and zoom on sections to read it. That is a poor experience and as people have a bad experience they begin leaving and Google sees that. They see that user has hit back and starting looking for other results. This tells Google the result was no good and this hurts that pages in future searches. Of course if this happens once or twice, it’s no big deal but over and over again and Google notices the trend. This is why those black hat marketers can get away with short term tricks. Google wants to see a lot of data (people clicking) to make that decision but Google has so many people clicking they can gfigure it out relaitviely quickly.

So what does this all mean? Do things the right way by giving your customers or guests of your site the actual content they are looking for. Don’t try and put a bunch of keywords in that are not natural or get back links just because. Get back links that are a good resource for each other and put content that is relevant to the topic at hand. Google will reward you for the long run and this will help you drive the right kind of traffic.