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Think Like Google
Named one of the best marketing books of the decade by Winbound Marketing, Think Like Google is an intensely readable and value-packed guide to make your pages rank high in the SERPs and deliver massive ROI. This book espouses our content marketing philosophy, and underpins our process and the high-quality content we create.
Why is SEO like eating rocks? You struggle to rank high in Google, but it’s fiendishly difficult. Even when you manage to rank, your efforts invariably sink in the content morass. Then Google comes along with its next alliteratively-named update and — wham! — you’re in the dumps. Plus, are keywords natural? Does it make sense to write something based on a spreadsheet full of algorithm-generated turns of phrase?
It turns out things are getting better when it comes to SEO. It’s not magic. It’s not rocket science or even computer science. In its secret heart, SEO comes down to empathy. How can that be true? Google is an algorithm, right? How can it know how people feel? Well, it doesn’t — but it doesn’t have to. Yes, Google uses keywords to rank your pages. But it’s trying not to, and it’s succeeding. It doesn’t do that with some advanced and frightening AI. Instead, it uses user votes.Every time you search for something on the internet, Google serves up a list of articles that might be what you’re looking for. When you click one, Google sees that happen. Then it starts a virtual stopwatch. If you come back seconds later to click another link, Google sees that too, and notes it. But if you stay in that article for 15 minutes, Google notes that too.
This happens 63,000 times every second, all day, every day. Google is watching and recording all of it. God may note the fall of a sparrow, but Google notes each mouse click. It knows the pages people stay in longer and the pages people flee like their digital houses are on fire. Then it floats the popular pages higher in the search results, and drops the unloved ones down into the pits of SEM hell. What does this mean for you? It means Google is all about empathy. No, it doesn’t empathize with us. But it records our digital votes for every piece of content on the web. In this way, it approximates our empathy. It sees into our hearts.
We can use this. All it means is that we have to empathize with readers, right? Do that — find out what the reader needs and deliver it — and we’ll become the better mousetrap that the world will beat a path to. Except it’s not so easy to see into the searcher’s secret heart. That’s where true SEO comes in. We use keyword research not to put the right mix of terms into our content, but to build empathy. Once we know what terms people are searching in connection with our topic, we get a sense for how to build that piece of content. We use competitive analysis, social media, and a dozen other tools to think like Google and deliver what the reader wants.
In this book, you’ll learn:
- Why SEO Is Like Eating Rocks
- Google Is About Empathy, Not Keywords
- How to Use Keywords to Think Like Google-How to Use Competitive Analysis and Social Media Research to Rank
- Why Actionable Advice Should Be Your Shining Star
- Why Engaging Writing Matters and How to Do it Right
- How to Serve the Reader Through Better Structure
- What Google Thinks About Backlinks
- The World Google is Building and How to Stay on Top of It
- What Sales Writing Can Teach You About SEO
- How to Write H1s and H2s That Think Like Google
- How to Do it Faster
- Where Journalism Fits In
Think Like Google is a groundbreaking book that takes the mystery and magic out of SEO, and shows even beginners how to do it right. Author Tom Gerencer built traffic for a money site from 0 to 600,000 readers a month in 18 months through solid SEO. In a team of three writers, he helped build a career site from 1M to 3.5M readers a month. He’s a regular contributor to Boys’ Life and Scouting and is published in Better Homes & Gardens and Costco Connection.
Web content that converts by writers Google trusts
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