Writing to be found: what counts, what achieves nothing
Google ranks what is genuinely useful first. What "helpful content" means in concrete terms, the two tags that decide the click, and the official list of dead ends. Beginners' SEO series, part six.
Everything before this point in the series is plumbing: necessary, never sufficient. Once the page is reachable and indexable, there remains the question Google asks at ranking time: does this page do a service to the person searching?
What Google calls helpful content
The documentation on helpful content comes down to one idea: write for people first, for the engine second. The test Google proposes is brutally honest: after reading, does someone leave with what they came for? Does the page bring something the pages already online do not, first-hand information, real experience, a more complete explanation? Or is it just a summary of what already exists, written because something had to be published?
Concretely, for a business site, usefulness takes very simple forms: the services page that gives the prices instead of hiding them, the page that answers the questions customers actually ask on the phone, the explanation of how a job unfolds. What you repeat ten times a week out loud is exactly what your site should be saying.
The two lines Google displays, and that you control
On the results page, your site boils down to a title and a snippet. These are the only two elements of that page you truly control, and each has its documentation: the title link, generally drawn from the <title> tag, and the snippet, often drawn from the meta description. One title per page, specific, saying what will be found there; one description per page, an honest sentence rather than a slogan. Neither one lifts the ranking: they decide the click once the page is shown, which, from the till’s point of view, comes to nearly the same thing.
The official list of what achieves nothing
Google’s guide draws up the list itself of the beliefs not worth a minute of your time. The meta keywords tag: ignored for years. Piling keywords into the text: counterproductive, it belongs to the practices the essentials sanction. Keywords in the domain name: effect close to nil. A minimum article length: it does not exist, a short text that answers beats a long text that pads. Duplicate content as a “penalty”: the penalty does not exist, the real cost lies elsewhere and it is mechanical, two identical pages fight over the same spot.
This list does the beginner a precious service: it frees up time. Everything you stop spending on incantations can go to the only thing that is never finished, the quality of the pages. And that quality starts before the writing: deciding on your site’s pages before writing the first line is design work, not copywriting.
Next part: the Google Business Profile, for companies serving a local clientele. It is a project in its own right, with its own rules.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.