SEO Is Both A Science & Art

By admin February 20, 2014
Blog, Digital Marketing 1

For businesses, their website is often the first point of contact between the brand and the customer. Most people discover businesses via search engines in todays connected world. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about making sure that your website gets a prominent placement in the search engine result page (SERP). SEO companies have professionals who make the necessary tweaks and take the necessary steps to give a website a better search ranking. SEO comprises of a set of actions that makes it both a science and an art form. Here’s how.

SEO is a “science” because there are known statistics about user behavior such as that most people discover websites via search engines and that most people click on the organic search results. A statistically high number of people click on the No. 1 result (or the result at the top) on the search result page and most people never go on to Page 2 of the search results. Hence it is very important from an SEO perspective to ensure that the website is listed on Page 1 of the search results and preferably near the top of the page.

Since Google and Bing have algorithms that compute where websites should feature in the search results based on a set of search keywords, presumably it’s all a “scientific” and “logical” process with no human or subjective biases being introduced into the search results. Hence, SEO professionals who understand how the search process works will be able to introduce changes to a website to help the website do better in the search rankings. Google also provides general guidelines about how to tweak the website to make it more crawler-friendly when the search engine crawlers visit the website.

You can keep track of how people’s search preferences are evolving over a period of time using different tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Wordtracker, and Google Trends. This gives SEO professionals hints about how search keywords are performing now and how they are going to perform in the future. Websites need to be tweaked to keep up with the changing search preferences of users.

With the latest innovations such as semantic search and the Google Hummingbird updates, search engines are trying to infer the meaning of natural language queries and return the most relevant results. These are all very scientific in their workings. So, SEO that takes steps to help websites do well after the Hummingbird updates, will also be scientific.

However, there is a lot of art involved in SEO too. The fact of the matter is that aesthetic sense is a very human quality. Artistic beauty cannot be broken down to its ‘components’ like engineering instruments. There’s no science to explain the allure of the Mona Lisa or Bach and Beethoven’s compositions. Artistic stuff cannot be analyzed scientifically. From an SEO perspective, how users behave on search engines is subjective and has to do with human psychology. Humans are mercurial creatures who have different moods. These moods may be time-dependent and may also have to do with what day of the week it is.

So SEOs need to be aware of the psychological aspects of human behavior. Humans love to read a good story. Hence search engines are promoting good content. But Google’s crawlers probably cannot decipher who the next Hemingway or Faulkner is going to be by reading some content written by an unknown writer. SEOs have to identify and push good content via content marketing. SEO professionals have to judge what is good content using an artistic sense. Content marketing and creating a buzz on social media via viral content are all artistic endeavors that cannot be captured by any algorithm. You cannot have a ‘formula’ about “how to create the next Gangnam Style video.

All these aspects surely make SEO both a science as well as an art form. If you need any help on the art or science part of SEO, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.

Related Posts

Popular post