Oh my have we learned a lot in the last couple months. I think our biggest gains are in the area of SEO where we have quickly gone from the idea that “good content will be found” to “we need to make sure that good content will be found” to my current position of “improving SEO means improving the user experience.” I’ve realized that learning how Google taught bots to glean information from webpages can give incredible insights into how humans do it. Here are a few key insights and examples of how we got it wrong while trying to be right:

  • Consistently use the same terminology – For some reason we didn’t use the same phrase for what we do consistently throughout our site. I don’t know if it was because we weren’t sure about how to say what we did or we just wanted to add variety, but some places we said “IT” and others we said “Technology.” Having these two varieties of a similar concept makes us harder to find in Google for either. We’re changing everything to “Technology” which we also believe is a better fit for what we do.
  • If in doubt, use common phrases rather than more accurate phrases – I really like being accurate and that accuracy doesn’t always translate to humans or search bits. Since non-profits and not-for-profits are two similar but different things, I used the term “non/not-for-profits” throughout our site. Google’s search bots haven’t been very good at figuring out what I meant by that, so we’ve changed it to “non-profits.” Less accurate, much more clear.
  • If you have a local business, put your location or service area on every page – We only had “Denton” on one page when we first launched and it was in the middle of a paragraph. It’s no wonder we couldn’t be found for searches with “Denton” and even worse, humans would have had a hard time figuring out how much we value being a part of our local community.