Google is ‘atrociously optimized’ for SEO, but great for customers

The above is clever SEO but dumb content. Variants of this dumb content are being produced by a great many sites in order to “get found.”

Let’s get back to Google. Today I searched for “search engine” on Google.

The first result was for Wikipedia, then came Dogpile, searchengine.ie, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. The Google search engine didn’t appear until the third page of results, which means it might as well be sitting on top of Mount Everest from an SEO perspective.

The Google homepage is absolutely atrociously optimized for search engines, but tremendously well optimized for people who search. Google’s design is focused on what the customer wants to do, which is to search and find stuff. Google is not focused on getting itself found but on helping customers find.

Strangely, many websites don’t have that focus. What needs do you satisfy? How well do you satisfy them? These are vital questions to answer.

Yes, it’s important to get found. But what happens after you get found is crucial. From a customer’s point of view, finding a particular website is just the first step in completing a task.