Another Nail in the Coffin of Old School SEO

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For the last several years, Google has been in the midst of a huge sea change in search engine optimization (SEO) that completely changes how you should tackle content on your website. As I’ve written about before, old school SEO is dead.

Google’s Bert is a new search engine algorithm update that applies natural language processing to searches. In other words, Google is now much better at understanding what you mean.

Google provides a great example:

You can see why the first search result would come up, just based on matching the words between the search and the resulting website. The second result, with Bert, actually provides the right answer by understanding the meaning of the search.

What does this mean for your website? In Old School SEO, you essentially build two websites at once: one for Google and one for your clients and prospects. Now Google is smart enough that Old School SEO is actually more likely to hurt your website’s performance, and you can focus just on sharing your expertise with great content. It’s not only how you turn prospects into clients, it’s also the best way to help those prospects find you via Google.

Bert most affects searches at the informational level, when someone is first starting to understand a topic. In B2B, this is when you want to be found, showing off your expertise. We’ve found the most effective way to do that is to have a regular stream of new articles, each focused on a specific topic. For most businesses, our goal is to have two new articles per month, every month.

We then use that same insight-driven content to send out via email and posts on LinkedIn. It’s a core content-driven marketing approach that drives SEO and keeps you top-of-mind with clients and prospects.

All the best,

Bill Bice
CEO

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