Make the search engine embarrassed that your site isn't ranking for your target terms

Barry says: "The number one goal for any SEO or site owner is to make a website, and have a Google (or other search engine) algorithm representative notice it should be ranking for the relevant keywords but is embarrassed that it isn't."

What would make a Google engineer embarrassed that your site isn't ranking number one for relevant terms? Is it typical on-site SEO, content or relevance?

"It's not even thinking about SEO. You can build a website any way you want and create something you think your users would find really valuable. Search engines are going to want to rank it, even if it's a flash website that couldn't be indexed. I don't think you should really think about the fundamentals. When you build your website, you are building your business, and you should be thinking about what you're marketing, selling, and putting on your domain name that is useful for the user. You want them to read it, and for your site to be more useful than your competitors.

It's thinking of the way Apple releases their products. They put them in really nice boxes because it represents something that is very valuable to the company and the brand. You want to make sure to package your website, and your content, in a way that represents the highest level of quality possible."

In the future, will keywords and the standard optimisation of things like titles or headings be less important, and will it all be about thinking about the user?

"If you look at the progression that Google has been making with MUM, RankBrain, BERT, and all these different types of algorithms, AI and machine learning they've been deploying - it's about trying to find content that isn't optimised. They're looking for content that SEOs haven't had their hands on, trying to convince Google this is the best type of content, because Google wants to truly find what the best type of content is.

Not every website published every day is thinking about SEO. They just want to produce the best type of information for the users. This is why Google, and other search engines, are building the technology to find this type of content, even if it isn't optimised."

Does that mean you still do competitor analysis and benchmarking?

"You should definitely look at your competitors. However, I don't think you should get bogged down in what they are doing in an obsessed way. When I build products, I think about the user, and I don't want my thinking to be affected by what my competitors are doing. You need to think outside the box, think differently and come up with a new solution to help your customers. I've built many software applications and apps over the years, but I never try to replicate what the competition is doing in any way. Yes, I monitor them, but it's more about finding a new approach to what they're doing."

How do you define who the user is, and how do you build your site for them?

"Usually, the best businesses, and the best products that come out, are solving a need for the founder of the company. They need something and hate the way existing tools solve the problem. They build something that is great for them, knowing that other people will want it. That's how the best products are built - building a solution that fills a gap. They already think from the perspective of the user, so they don't need to do much market research.

You just have to have a passion to meet a need. Square was a company built based on this principle: I need a credit card machine that I can carry around with me and plug into my phone. It's simple concepts that solve big problems."

Are you advising SEO to stay one step ahead of Google in terms of what they're using to rank today?

"You won't lose if you're just thinking about where Google wants to be in the future. If you think that Google wants this type of content to rank, you will probably be one step ahead of the game, no matter what you do."

Do you think that the same will be true for the other search engines out there?

"That's the goal for any search engine - to rank the most relevant search results because they are the most helpful for the user. Google and all other search engines want to send you to the best type of search results, and the best website for that query. This will mean the user will come back to that search engine in the future when they have another query to make."

How do you measure the value of doing this if you're not looking at more traditional SEO metrics?

"You can still look at those metrics. It takes a while to build this up if you're doing something new and out of the box. But it will all lead to traffic on your website, engagement on your pages, and hopefully, your revenue goals. Maybe it's a form being completed or a download of a white paper. All these things are still accessible and trackable via Google Analytics, or any analytics tool.

All these SEO metrics are still relevant, but I think the best sites don't necessarily worry about measuring them. I don't think they care. They're just passionate about building something that they think is very valuable to the users in a way that people haven't been thinking about before. That's the way to approach it - but it's easier said than done."

For the last 15 years, we've seen blog posts saying SEO was dead. Are we actually heading towards this now?

"No, I don't think SEO is dead. You still need to do the basics at some level. You can't launch a WordPress website and use the title tag: 'homepage'. Well actually you can, because Google recently made some changes to how they handled title tags and titles in the search results because they see a lot of people are not implementing titles in the 'proper' way. Google's now going to try to use other methods, maybe the header of the page or anchor text, to come up with a new title for your result.

But the point is, you don't want to give Google mixed signals. You don't want to have anchor text saying your website's about blue widgets, while the title tag says it's about red widgets. That just doesn't help."

How do you implement this advice in a larger organisation that has several hundred people within a marketing team? Do you formally have to sit down with all the different elements and decide on an approach together?

"If you're a founder, you have the vision and the idea, but you want to hire the best UX person that maybe thinks outside the box to bring your vision to life. You want to hire the best programmers that have a unique way of using a new technology. And of course, you want to hire an SEO that's able to implement this in a way that's search engine friendly. You want to hire people that are able to deliver stuff and produce your vision. You need a whole team behind you to make that possible. Deciding on an approach together is definitely the right route to take."

If your clients are used to focusing on traditional SEO metrics, how does an SEO agency articulate the value of doing this?

"Traditional SEO metrics are short-term and available after three to six months of SEO. This new approach is much longer term. It could take a year or so to see results - which is hard. It's hard to say we should be doing Y, when all the competitors are doing X - and doing well. The answer is, eventually Y is going to be the thing that actually gets you more traffic. It's a bigger risk, and it might not work. But those who take risks usually get the biggest reward.

Larger businesses can actually handle this. They have budgets and resources to take the bigger risks. But smaller businesses have so much more flexibility to make these things happen. It's basically about understanding who you're working with and making that pitch for them directly."

How do you articulate this approach to your marketing team?

"Marketers would probably eat this up! Most of them aren't worried about title tags, technical SEO, or boring stuff they might not care about. Ask them what you could build that is unique and out of the box without worrying about SEO. What do they think your users are going to love? Maybe it's a creative widget, maybe it's a mobile app, or maybe it's a cool marketing campaign. It's a good thing to go to marketers and ask them to forget about SEO and instead tell you what they think is great for your users."

What can SEOs stop doing to spend more time thinking out of the box to create incredible and unique content?

"That's the hard part. You have your SEO daily tasks, and you do your SEO audits and reporting every day, week, or month. Getting bogged down in the routine takes out the creativity in your experience. And without creativity, and thinking about things at a higher level, you're not going to produce the stuff that Google is looking to rank in the future. That's an issue.

Focusing too much on domain authority or looking at different link metrics is looking backwards. Google can make one change tomorrow, and links could suddenly become unimportant. A lot of these things we're doing are focused on the minutiae, and they're preventing you from thinking on a higher level. Step back and think strategically about what you can produce. Stop wasting your time on the smaller SEO metrics."

Will there still be room for more conservative and technical SEOs in the future?

"100%. There are massive sites that do this really well, like Amazon. On the other hand, you might have somebody building crazy, amazing stuff that users love, but you have six different domains with the exact same solution, and there's duplicate content all over the place. That's confusing the search engines. A lot of this SEO stuff is just common sense. It's about making sure you're consistent and have everything in one domain, in one brand. Sometimes you can lose that focus if you don't hire the right SEO - who knows what they are doing."

If you are doing a one-off incredible creative project, is it best to do it on your core domain name?

"Keep everything on your brand, on your domain name. Your domain name is your brand. You could make a subdomain if you think that's applicable for this specific type of thing, but I wouldn't publish it on Facebook - I wouldn't publish it on somebody else's thing. You could share it there, but I wouldn't make it live in those areas. You want to control it for the rest of your life."

You can find Barry Schwartz over at rustybrick.com.