Reached a very interesting tipping point in SEO. Client has been ranking #1 since 2010 for “parking lot lighting los angeles”, mostly due to having the domain parkinglotlightinglosangeles.com. That’s 7 years of #1 dominance. But now their main flagship website efficientlightingandelectric.com out ranks it. PLUS, the website shows up TWICE. And their flagship website outranks parkinglotlosangeles.com because of all of the short blogs we’ve been doing to produce content. And notice how both blogs don’t feature titles of “parking lot los angeles”. This could prove my theory that lots of content, focusing on specific, “long tail” keywords can eventually help a website rank for popular, highly competitive keywords. All without link building. Could it be that Google wants to reward websites that have lots of “answers” to user’s queries? I think the answer is yes. And I think this is where SEO is heading and has been heading. Content for specific keywords. Currently, link building does matter, but I predict that in a few years it’ll be obsolete. Internet traffic continues to trend mobile. Close to 60% mobile according to comscore. And people don’t link to websites on cell phones. They push the share button on their apps (which is easy to game the system). Therefore I think the main areas to focus on is having as many “answers” or content for specific keywords as possible and also having the right user engagement on the website. For example, if Google sees that there’s a high percentage of people that go on a parking lot lighting website and click the call button or contact page button, that’s affirmation that the user liked the content and therefore Google should rank it better. User engagement like that. Every different type of website will have different context of what positive user engagement is, but I think Google will eventually be able to figure it out.
