What Google Wants II: Perfect Match Content

In the first part of this series (What Google Wants), we discussed who is in charge of search at Google and how we can use that to structure our web page content to rank better. Building on the idea that Google’s Search Team leans toward a higher education and research background, we can also make some assumptions about “what” to add to our web pages.

Now let’s talk about what Google is trying to accomplish at the most fundamental level.

Google’s goal for it’s Search product is user experience, and they want you to find what you are looking for within the first result. One click, or as close to it as possible, and you have the best piece of information on your topic available on the web. They actually keep track of which sites you hit the back button on and return to the results page. There software is believed to give that page an ever-so-slight penalty assuming that it was not sufficient in satisfying that particular search query.

Think about the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button from the early days. If they did their job right, you’d always be lucky. Maybe that’s the way Mark Cuban’s searches work every day.

That leads us to a second idea we can use to gain more search visibility.

Pages that are hyper focused on a single idea or topic tend to rank higher (for their topic) than a page covering lots of ideas.

We actually have a term we use here at Juicy—“Perfect Match” content—that refers to what we believe the perfect piece of content Google would ideally like to serve for a hyper-focused search term (also referred to as “long tail” search terms).

What is “Perfect Match” content?

To illustrate this further, if you search for “how do I teach a child to tie shoelaces,” they would love to show an article or video with that “perfect match” title.

All things considered equally, this article or video would outrank a similar article titled “Three tips for teaching children how to tie shoelaces” simply because it was a perfect match. Although, there is a good chance that Google would rank that other article on page one as well. The key takeaway is to understand all of the search combinations your customers might use, and then to create “perfect match” pages on your website. If you made money helping people teach kids how to tie shoelaces, I would encourage you to have both of the above example articles on your website.

Don’t try to find the singular best match keyword for a product or problem, brainstorm as many as you might think your customers use and develop “perfect match” content for all of them.

The concept of “perfect match” content is quite simple when someone explains this to you, yet few companies actively do this with persistence. Use this knowledge to your advantage!

This highlights the importance of having a target list of keywords identified for your SEO strategy. By simply having the target keyword in mind, you will be inspired to create more specific content for your website, thus increasing the keywords that your website ranks for over time.

Takeaway #2: Ask yourself, what would the perfect piece of content look like to Google for this search term. Then go and develop it.

Google, and your users, will reward you for it.

In the next part of the series, I’m going to give you some more tips on what Google wants and considers perfect match content for a search term.