Google is a Relational Database

By that I mean just because we observe “a” website in the number one slot does NOT mean that website “earned it”. After all Someone has too be number one.

I’ll explain with a fictitious aggregation of real brick n mortar shops that I’ve done Local SEO for:

Let’s say there are 5 hairstylist shops competing in a given geographical area, could be a city or a municipality or a community, and all 5 shops have similar websites – all image heavy, little or no text copy, all 5 have large header graphics, some of those header graphics are sliders.

They All Look The Same, How’s an Algorithm Going To Tell?

In this set up let’s say it’s obvious all 5 hair salons invested in a graphic logo. The intent of all of this marketing is based on the assumption that a picture tells a thousand words, and it does ( IF YOUR INTENDED AUDIENCE WAS HUMAN )

A Human is NOT your intended audience.. the Algorithm is

Ultimately for a website to earn it’s keep, it’s useless unless a human customer picks up the phone and orders, or clicks on the “directions” button on the Google Maps listing with the intention of driving to your brick n mortar shop. But that’s not gonna happen UNLESS and UNTIL the prospective client or customer finds your listing ( notice I said find your Google listing, NOT find your website, more on that later )

If your Google listing isn’t at or near the top of the search results page for what ever your product or service is… you don’t have a human audience to worry about.

in the hypothetical hair and beauty salon competition above the website that’s currently #1 isn’t there because the web developer:

• discovered what criteria Google uses for that keyword phrase in order for Google to consider what websites are THE AUTHORITY in which genre for which geographical area
• translated all of the data ( documents, images, text copy, listings, PDF files, white papers etc ) that describes your company into DIGITAL versions that Google can “parse”
• reordered the internal site structure in such a way that Google can clearly see what we want it to see and mark “ignore this because it’s a duplicate of that” to what we don’t want indexed
• On site optimization
• Off site optimization

The current number one ranked hair stylist is there because it sucks “slightly less” then the other 4 competitors.

Relational Database

relative to the current crop of candidates.. Google will award ( bless, bestow blessings upon ) Google Trust NOT in accordance with strict guidelines… if all 5 competitors suck almost equally, that does not translate into: they did this, so should I.

On the other hand.. if everybody else is zigging and we’re the only one’s zagging.. we win, and they won’t see it coming.

There’s a story where two guys are running from a bear, one says to the other: “we’ll never out run this bear”, the other guys says in reply: “I don’t have to outrun the bear, all I have to do is outrun YOU”

Moral of this SEO Story?

if you all you do is the same thing your contemporaries are doing… there’s no reason for Google to even think about moving you up and the other guy down.

Your first task is to get in front of a human audience, that’s not gonna happen unless and until you ignore humans and realize your intended audience is Googlebot

This ignoring of a human audience doesn’t need to go on forever… all we gotta do is keep it up long enough to outrun the other guy, once we dominate Google local search results, the other guy gets eaten by the bear and NOW we have a human audience to communicate to.

Stop the insane thinking that you’ve got to Always Be Closing, because you don’t even have a human audience until you Earn Google Authority

Yes, I Am For Hire

David Bruce Jr

Web Developer/ Search Engine Marketing for
All Saints Media

240 490-4646
davidbrucejr@allsaintsmedia.com