When I was about 18 years old I met a very special man named David. It happened that I became almost completely consumed with thoughts about David. What was he doing? Where was he going? What was he thinking? What was REALLY the motivation behind this or that that thing he had said or done? In retrospect, I suppose it really was the full-on adolescent infatuation experience. Nonetheless, with 20 years of perspective, I see it as sort of silly; and perhaps maybe it could have qualified as obsession. What does this have to do with search engine optimization? Well. I’ll tell you. I am about to draw some very close comparisons between that experience and that of my contemporary relationship with my current significant other: Google. YES, I KNOW there are other fish in the search engine sea; but my eyes are admittedly firmly set on that one.
What is going through that magnificent head of his?
I find that I spend an absolutely enormous amount of time trying to reason through what is going through the mind of that great and mysterious search engine monolith! I also find myself constantly trying to communicate to people the very complex nature of search engine algorithms, or in other terms, why Google doesn’t “love” them enough or sometimes even “know they exist.”
What can I do to make him notice me?
In my early years, I was pretty easy on the eyes, I suppose. But, so were a lot of other girls. Therefore, I had some competition. It’s the same way today with Google. Our site is perfectly optimized. When we run SEO Report cards on it, it scores in the 90’s every time. Our MOZ domain authority it 43, which is pretty high. We have almost 4,000 backlinks to our site, which is great. So why do we struggle so hard to hold on to our page one rankings for our most heavily sought after key term of “Web Design Raleigh?” One word: competition, baby. We are competing with the best of the best. No matter how expertly our site is optimized, there always seem to be 7 or 8 others who are more attractive in the eyes of my Google boyfriend.
I know; I’ll pretend I don’t want him notice me
I used to read all sorts of relationship books back in college. Not to mention those terrible articles in fashion magazines about how to keep your man interested (LMAO now…). Anyhow, I’m sure more than one of those things I read suggested playing hard to get… BUT NOT TOO HARD. Well, in a sense, that’s probably relatively good advice when you’re pursuing a relationship with a search engine. You want to make sure you let him know you’re available by subtly targeting your key terms without overdoing it. Additionally targeting other similar, yet different, keyphrases is sort of the equivalent of casually batting your eyelashes and then looking away.
Sigh…When will he wake up and realize I’m the one?
20 years later, I am happily married to David. As for my relationship with Google, it’s still rocky at best. One week we’re on, and the next week he’s cast me off to his page two ranks in favor of other arguably less impressive web design companies. I do know that that I am not quitter though. I may even be a stalker. I will be watching Google’s every move and saying a prayer each night that he will one day realize I am awesome.
