Internet Is Noise – Here’s How You Can Still Be Heard

There’s so much junk on the internet these days. Have you heard that before? You might even think so yourself. It’s a bit of a strange opinion, kind of like saying there’s so much dirt in the world.

In the same way that a gravel road is made of dirt, the internet is made of junk. Of course, it’s also made of lots of useful things, but the “junk” is an important component. What’s junk to one person isn’t necessarily junk to everyone. And just like dirt, when it’s collected and organized in the right way, it can turn into a road. Trying to clean up the internet is like trying to sweep sand off a beach – it’s not only pointless but also such an enormous task that it becomes unmanageable. No matter how powerful your vacuum is, the gravel road will never be clean – it’s dirty by nature. What we can do, however, is use the road, and we can be fairly certain that it will take us forward. In many ways, Google has been the organizing force of the web. By sorting, filtering, and structuring almost all the information online, they’ve built their success.

SEO starts with why, before how

The very core of SEO is making sure you’re the one Google chooses to highlight rather than filter out. Instead of getting stuck in details like on-page markup, content production, or HTTPS (all of which matter and should be considered), you need to start with the question: Why should this website appear in the search results?

If you run a print shop, there’s a lot Google doesn’t know – or can’t know – about you and your business. For starters, the search engine doesn’t know that you actually own a print shop. It also doesn’t know that you’re incredibly skilled at what you do, or that people should choose your services. Google simply can’t measure that. Having a good service isn’t enough to appear in the search results, no matter how good it is. Even we don’t rank as well as we do just because we’re good at SEO – we rank because we talk about SEO. Of course, being skilled at SEO helps us later on, but at the core, this site performs well not because our service is good, but because we answer people’s questions about SEO.

In the same way, the print shop owner has to think. It’s not by simply printing well that you get visibility – that’s not value in Google’s eyes. You need to provide value to the visitor. So how do you provide that value according to Google, if just having a good service isn’t enough?

Some ideas to start from

Consider these questions as inspiration for what kind of value you can provide – they’re simply starting points to help you think in the right direction, and they align with much of what marketing in general is about. Remember, it needs to be closely tied to your own business and it has to be something you or your organization can realistically carry through. For example, this site has been blogging about SEO for years. It’s not strictly necessary for us to fulfill our client work, and it requires quite a bit of perseverance – especially during the early, often too long, period before SEO starts paying off.

• Can you teach something?
• Are there news or updates you can share?
• Can you build a sense of community?
• Are you very different in some way?
• Can you explain something complex in a simple way?

How we did it with Brath.se

This site has had many years to grow. The basic idea was to teach marketing managers, entrepreneurs, and our industry colleagues to become better at SEO. The goal has always been to explain the complexities of SEO in the simplest possible way. Never oversimplify, but never make it unnecessarily complicated either. In situations where two approaches seem to compete – should you choose .se and .no or .com/se and .com/no – we explain the pros and cons of both, instead of simply declaring one as best practice. The value we aim to provide is increased SEO knowledge for those who want it.

• That’s why we have a comprehensive SEO school.
• That’s why we run our email school.
• That’s why we make YouTube videos.
• And that’s also why I’m writing this article.

In itself, this isn’t particularly revolutionary – many companies educate within their field. But it does provide value in Google’s eyes, and it’s a kind of value that we can then leverage with the SEO work we do for the site. It’s when these two go hand in hand that you manage to break through the noise.