I received a phone call the other night from a pollster. If you have ever been through a survey of this sort, they will ask you all kinds of demographic classification questions. They are trying to define you so they can categorize you with other respondents. This is a classical demographic breakdown – your sex, your education level, if you are employed, if you own your home or rent. This is all useful information for finding people within your target market.

There was a time when these were the types of questions we would ask a target audience for marketing purposes. With the increase of social media as a way to gather demographic information and to market to users specifically on their likes and dislikes, classical demographic classification has less and less to do with your age, your sex and your marital status. What Google and the rest of the search engine marketing world has figured out is users of social media will tell you what they like and what they don’t like based on what they click on their Facebook page, who they follow on Twitter, who they associate with on LinkedIn, and what they watch on YouTube. And you will get a truer sense of what they really like and dislike by gathering the information by looking into their activity on social media then you will get from a phone call. In other words, there is a disparity between what people tell you they like and what they actually like in practice. There has been a shift in the way that search engines work and rate web sites based on this new gathering of marketing demographics. This is particularly true of the past three years. No longer can your SEO strategy include stuffing a web site with high-ranking key words and expect to find yourself on the front page of a Google search. There is no standard Google search. The search is now individualized for each person. That means you and I could use the same search terms and end up with totally different results – all based on the information Google has tucked away in a database about you and me. Therefore, the marketing strategies that you had to get your name to the top of a Google search may not work anymore.

So, if you are a business, how do you get to the front page of a Google search? The key word now is engagement. How many visits do you get to your site through a link to a social media site? How many people are sharing what you have on your site in the things they post on their social media pages? If you can get someone to engage with you via social media (clicking to your web site, liking your post, sharing your post, commenting, etc.), their personal profile database now includes your business web site. You have scored an engagement point. That means it is important that you are putting info on your social media page that people will find interesting enough to actually look at and like. It is important that what you are also posting links back to your web site. This is where content marketing is so important. If you are blogging, posting case studies, adding news briefs about your company, etc., make sure you are adding content that people really want to read. Here is another key to engagement. When someone comes to your site, how long are they staying there before they bounce to another site? If you are pulling consistent numbers around 3 minutes, congratulations! That is a benchmark we use to determine an engaged visitor. So does Google. It is not just the amount of people you engage, but the length of time you engage them. Clicks count. So do long looks.

If you are using an old SEO marketing scheme based on keywords and metatags, you will need to change if you want to be effective. The world of search engines has changed to define each person by the searches they do, their likes, followings and followers. If you want your web site to be found in a Google search, you will need to shift your strategy to engage individuals as well.

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Photo by Alex Slobodkin