Originally published: 2015
Substantially updated: September 2026
Search engines have changed dramatically since this article was first published in 2015.
Google has become considerably better at understanding language, search intent, website quality and the relationship between different pieces of information. Search results themselves have also changed, with maps, featured snippets, shopping results, videos, local listings and AI-generated answers now appearing alongside traditional organic search results.
But one fundamental principle hasn’t really changed.
Google wants to give its users the most useful and relevant results it can.
That sounds simple, but it has major implications for how businesses should approach SEO.
Instead of asking:
“How do we make Google rank our website?”
A better question is:
“How do we make our website one of the best results Google can give someone searching for what we offer?”
That distinction is at the heart of modern SEO.
Start With the Person Behind the Search
Every Google search starts with a person looking for something.
They might want information.
They might be comparing products.
They might need a service provider.
They might be trying to solve a problem.
Or they might be ready to buy.
Google’s job is to understand what that person is looking for and provide results that are likely to satisfy their search.
Your job is to make sure your website provides those answers.
This is why successful SEO should begin with your customers rather than with search engines.
What questions do your customers ask?
What problems are they trying to solve?
What information do they need before contacting you?
What terminology do they use when describing your products or services?
What concerns might prevent them from making a decision?
Those questions can provide the foundation for an effective SEO and content strategy.
Understand Search Intent, Not Just Keywords
Keywords are still important.
If you provide a particular product or service, Google needs to understand that your website is relevant when somebody searches for it.
But modern SEO isn’t about repeating the same keyword as many times as possible.
Consider someone searching for:
“WordPress website design Johannesburg”
Including relevant terms such as WordPress, website design and Johannesburg naturally on the page helps Google understand what the page is about.
But simply repeating those phrases doesn’t make the page useful.
The person conducting the search may also want to know:
- What kind of websites you build
- Whether you specialise in WordPress
- What your website design process involves
- Examples of websites you have built
- Whether you provide hosting and maintenance
- Whether you offer SEO
- How long a website takes to build
- How they can contact you
A strong page doesn’t merely contain the keyword.
It satisfies the reason behind the search.
This is known as search intent, and it should influence both the content you create and the structure of your website.
Create Helpful, Original Content
There is more content online than ever before.
AI has also made it extraordinarily easy to produce large quantities of reasonably well-written content.
That means simply publishing more articles isn’t necessarily an effective SEO strategy.
The question is whether your content adds something useful.
A good business website should demonstrate genuine knowledge of its industry.
That could include:
- Answering questions customers regularly ask
- Explaining complicated subjects in understandable language
- Sharing practical advice
- Publishing case studies
- Discussing common mistakes
- Showing examples of completed work
- Comparing different approaches
- Explaining your processes
- Providing original observations from your industry
This is where real-world experience becomes particularly valuable.
For example, we regularly work on WordPress websites where performance problems aren’t caused by WordPress itself. Instead, we find oversized images, unnecessary plugins, poorly configured caching, excessive third-party scripts or outdated components contributing to slow loading times.
That observation comes from actually working on websites.
Content containing that kind of experience is considerably more useful than an article that simply says:
“Website speed is important for SEO.”
Your business knows things about your industry because you work in it every day.
Use that knowledge.
Demonstrate Experience, Expertise and Trust
Google’s quality guidelines discuss concepts commonly referred to as E-E-A-T:
Experience
Expertise
Authoritativeness
Trustworthiness
E-E-A-T isn’t a single SEO score that Google assigns to your website, but the underlying principles are useful when thinking about website quality.
Ask yourself:
Who created this content?
Why should someone trust what they’re saying?
Does the business demonstrate genuine experience in this subject?
Is it clear who operates the website?
Can visitors easily contact the business?
For a legitimate business website, trust can be reinforced through things such as clear company information, contact details, genuine customer reviews, staff profiles, professional accreditations where relevant, case studies, references to reliable sources and accurate, up-to-date information.
Trust isn’t something that can simply be added with an SEO plugin.
It needs to be demonstrated throughout the website.
Make Your Website Easy for Google to Understand
Great content still needs a technically sound website behind it.
Before Google can display one of your pages in search results, it generally needs to be able to discover the page, crawl it, understand it and decide whether it should be indexed.
Technical problems can interfere with this process.
Some of the areas we look at when auditing websites include:
- Website structure
- Internal linking
- Page titles
- Meta descriptions
- Heading structure
- Canonical URLs
- XML sitemaps
- Robots directives
- Broken links
- Redirects
- Duplicate content
- Mobile usability
- Structured data
- Page performance
- Indexing problems
Not every technical issue automatically prevents a website from ranking.
But technical SEO makes it easier for search engines to correctly understand the content you’ve worked hard to create.
Internal Links Matter More Than Many Businesses Realise
One particularly useful SEO technique is also one of the simplest.
Link related pages together.
If you publish an article explaining a particular service, link to the relevant service page.
If another article provides more detail about a topic you’ve mentioned, link to it.
Internal links help visitors discover additional useful information and help search engines understand relationships between pages.
They can also help establish which pages on your website are particularly important.
A website shouldn’t be a collection of isolated pages.
It should be a connected source of information about your business, services, products and expertise.
Give Visitors a Good Experience
Google doesn’t want to send users to websites that provide a frustrating experience.
Your website should therefore work well for humans as well as search engines.
That means considering things such as:
Mobile usability
Your website should work properly on phones and tablets, not merely shrink to fit the screen.
Page speed
Visitors shouldn’t have to wait unnecessarily for large images, scripts or other resources to load.
Navigation
People should be able to understand where they are and easily find the information they need.
Readability
Huge blocks of text, tiny fonts and confusing layouts make even excellent information difficult to consume.
Security
Your website should use HTTPS and be properly maintained.
A technically impressive website that people hate using isn’t a particularly good website.
Build Authority, Not Artificial Backlinks
Links from other websites have played an important role in Google’s ranking systems since the early days of the search engine.
But that doesn’t mean businesses should simply try to acquire as many links as possible.
Buying links, participating in artificial link schemes, generating large numbers of low-quality directory links or exchanging links purely for SEO purposes can create more problems than benefits.
A better objective is to earn relevant links and mentions because your business or content is worth referencing.
These could come from:
- Industry organisations
- Suppliers
- Business partners
- Professional associations
- News publications
- Useful directories
- Original research
- Case studies
- Community organisations
- High-quality resources other websites genuinely want to reference
One relevant link from a respected website within your industry can be considerably more meaningful than hundreds of links created purely to manipulate rankings.
Search Is No Longer Just Ten Blue Links
One of the biggest changes since this article was originally written is what we now mean by “search”.
Google search results can include:
- Traditional organic results
- Google Business Profiles
- Maps
- Images
- Videos
- Shopping results
- Featured snippets
- People Also Ask results
- AI Overviews
- AI-powered search experiences
Users are also increasingly discovering information through AI assistants and other platforms.
This has led to terms such as AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) becoming popular.
But businesses shouldn’t abandon traditional SEO principles every time a new acronym appears.
The fundamentals remain remarkably familiar.
Create information that is accurate, useful, accessible, trustworthy and genuinely worth finding.
What About AI Search?
AI is changing how information is discovered online.
That doesn’t mean you need to create an entirely separate website for AI.
Many of the same practices that help search engines understand your website also make your information easier for other systems to understand.
Clear page structures help.
Descriptive headings help.
Accurate information helps.
Structured data can help machines understand certain types of information.
Strong internal linking helps establish relationships between topics.
Original expertise helps differentiate your content.
And clearly identifying your business, services, people and areas of expertise can provide useful context.
Perhaps most importantly, don’t create content simply because an AI tool makes it possible to produce hundreds of articles quickly.
AI can be an extremely useful tool for researching, organising, drafting and improving content.
But the finished content should still provide genuine value.
The objective isn’t to create more content. It’s to create better content.
Don’t Chase Search Engine Tricks
SEO has always attracted shortcuts.
Years ago, businesses were told to stuff keywords into pages, create hundreds of backlinks, build separate pages for every imaginable keyword variation or hide keywords in website footers.
Today, some of the terminology has changed, but the temptation remains the same.
There will always be somebody promising a new technique that supposedly “guarantees” rankings or provides a secret way to manipulate Google’s latest algorithm or AI system.
Be cautious.
Search algorithms change constantly.
A strategy based entirely on exploiting a particular loophole can disappear overnight.
A strategy based on creating a technically sound website containing genuinely useful information is considerably more durable.
Use Google Search Console
You don’t have to guess how Google sees your website.
Google Search Console provides website owners with valuable information about their organic search visibility.
It can show you:
- Search queries generating impressions
- Pages appearing in search
- Clicks from Google
- Click-through rates
- Average search positions
- Indexing problems
- Sitemap information
- Page experience information
- Changes in search visibility
This data can help identify opportunities.
For example, you may discover a page receiving thousands of impressions but relatively few clicks.
You might find an important service page appearing on the second page of results.
You could discover that Google has crawled a page but hasn’t indexed it.
Or you might find a blog article generating search traffic for questions you hadn’t originally targeted.
SEO should therefore be an ongoing process of:
Create → Measure → Learn → Improve
rather than something you “do” once when a website is launched.
So, What Does Google Actually Want?
The technology behind Google Search has changed enormously since 2015.
The search results themselves have changed.
The way people search has changed.
AI is changing them again.
But the underlying objective remains surprisingly consistent.
Google wants to provide useful results to its users.
So rather than building your website around what you think a search engine algorithm wants, build it around the people you want the search engine to send you.
Create genuinely useful information.
Demonstrate your expertise.
Answer real customer questions.
Keep your information accurate.
Make your website technically accessible.
Build trust.
Provide a good user experience.
Measure what is happening.
And keep improving.
If your website becomes one of the best resources available for the products, services and expertise your business provides, you’re giving search engines a very good reason to show it.
Need Help Improving Your Website’s Search Visibility?
At Ipcoweb Digital, we work with businesses to improve their websites through SEO, WordPress development, content creation, technical website management and search performance analysis.
Rather than chasing short-term ranking tricks, we focus on building stronger websites and improving their long-term visibility.
If you’d like to understand how Google currently sees your website, contact Ipcoweb Digital and let’s take a closer look.
