46 . Glasgow Business February 2016
BIG TALKS By Iain Muirhead, Senior Account Manager, The BIG Partnership
Beware the powerful all-seeing critic
How do you tell your story? If you have a product to sell, a cause to champion or news to share, you’ll almost always need to find the right words...
T
he trouble is, the right words aren’t what they used to be. Tere’s now a powerful, all-seeing, emotionless critic looking over your shoulder
every time you put fingers to keyboard to create a blog, tweet, news article or ad. Its name is Google. It maters what Google thinks about the
words you’re using. Like it or not, if your message doesn’t rank prominently in online search engines then your message is never going to reach the audience you’re targeting. Te bad news is that Google’s taste in what
warrants top ranking is constantly evolving. What worked yesterday may not work today. It may even work against you. In the early days of the internet, Google
could be tricked into taking more notice of your website, blog or product promotion piece. If you had something to sell, swanee whistles for example, you simply dropped the words ‘swanee whistle’ into your article as many times as you could. Some even slipped under Google’s radar by
hiding a hundred mentions of ‘swanee whistles’ in white text on a white background, duping the search engine’s robots into thinking yours was THE definitive source of info on the subject. Now, such black-hat tactics are prety-much guaranteed to consign your message to the cyber wilderness, along with the countless others who ignore the modern imperative for search engine optimisation (SEO).
”The moral of this story is that, to make a mark in today’s digital world, your website, blog or social media output needs to be high-quality, well-designed and optimised”
Google keeps moving the goalposts, and
won’t even tell you where the goalposts are, so keeping pace with SEO best practice really is a full-time job. However, hard-earned experience reveals general trends that at least give us a fighting chance of scoring. Today, the emphasis is moving rapidly in the direction of quality, authority and meeting your readers’ needs. Google is a business. It wants users to keep
using its service, and is in a prime position to gather the intelligence it needs to maintain its market-leading position. It knows how people
came to your site, how long they spent reading it
and how much faith the rest of the online world puts in what you have to say or sell. Te moral of this story is that, to make a mark in today’s digital world, your website, blog or social media output needs to be high-quality, well-designed and optimised according to the latest SEO best practice. Tis means that, in addition to having a
good-looking website which is easily readable by all the major browsers, your online copy needs to be clear, valuable and of good quality. When it comes to telling your story, focus on quality. Otherwise, no mater how amazing your swanees are, you’re liable to be whistling in the dark.
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