1 Trick Savvy Social Entrepreneurs Use To Have Their Websites Show Up High In Google Search Rankings

This might sound strange coming from someone who has a lot of experience with the web, but SEO in the traditional sense isn’t as important as it used to be.

Here’s what I mean by that statement.

According to online marketing guru Neil Patel, stuffing keywords throughout your website — what you often think of when you hear the word “SEO” — isn’t going to help much anymore in the search rankings department. That’s because almost every keyword has become too competitive and it could take hours to find a non-competitive one that works just for your social enterprise.

Instead, Patel said, it’s better to focus more on producing the best content with a variety of terms and context that really explain your issues to your main audience.

Confused? Don’t be. Here’s how I see this working out for most social enterprises, who are probably more focused on saving the world and getting off the ground in a competitive marketplace than getting caught up in all this search engine stuff.

What is SEO?

First of all, I think it’s important to keep in mind what is the purpose of SEO.

SEO (search engine optimization) is essentially the process of strategically placing keywords and links throughout a website to get the website found in search engines like Google.

This gets most people confused because when you’re creating a website, it doesn’t come with an instruction manual that says, “Here’s how to get your website to show up high in Google search rankings.” Which can be pretty frustrating after you’ve put in all this work to create the best website possible.

Since people are aware that search engines like Google have all these fancy algorithms that are constantly changing, it might seem impossible to play the game, especially when you know that your competitors have probably figured out enough about SEO to send a lot of traffic to their websites.

SEO: Another form of content marketing

But that’s the old way of thinking about SEO. The new way is remembering that SEO is just another form of content marketing.

Because what is content marketing after all? It’s the process of using content in order to promote a website.

So if it looks more as though you’re focused on delivering good content for your audience without being concerned about how it might impact your SEO, believe it or not, Google will actually reward you.

SEO and storytelling: A perfect match

Secondly, I think it’s important to keep in mind that storytelling is a huge component of SEO.

Storytelling is all about making your content much more personal and phrasing it as something that happened to you or to someone you know.

So instead of just talking about how one of your products changes the game for your industry, you might instead talk about how your life or a customer’s life has been changed as a result of your product.

This subtle shift will make anything you write about considerably more engaging — to the point that it has often been described as “SEO for the human brain.”

Storytelling is powerful because the brain has evolved to respond well to stories. Stories allow us to imagine ourselves in the storyteller’s shoes, which makes whatever is being said much more engaging, emotionally resonant and interesting.

What’s more, we like to hear how stories end: so if you start your story off in an impactful way, you can bet your audience is going to keep reading.

Savvy social entrepreneurs use this SEO trick

So what’s the trick to using these tactics to boost your social enterprise’s content marketing strategy?

Take some time to better explain what your social enterprise is all about and how you’re changing your community in a different way from everyone else. And don’t just do this on the homepage of your website. Keep explaining more about the difference your business or organization is making in people’s lives on every page of your website (even the contact page).

If you’re wondering where you get that information from, you’ve probably already summarized everything when you started having discussions about what problems your social enterprise wants to solve.

From those discussions and content that you plan to post on your website, you’re probably going to have some words or phrases that keep coming up. Those are the keywords that you should strategically place on pages throughout your website.

I just want to pause for a second and stress the importance of keyword research.

While traditional SEO might not be as important as it used to be, keyword research should never be ignored when it comes to SEO.

Doing the initial work to figure out what people are searching for, what problems they’re having and how they want to be talked to are so crucial when you’re doing keyword research.

This will support your whole business model because once you know who your target audience really is and what they really want to know, you’ll be able to have a more meaningful conversation with them on your website.

A more engaged audience means more opportunities for you to increase your profits.

How to compete with the big guys

Now let me tell you a quick story about an experience I had as a journalist when I was covering the biggest story of my career and what you can learn from it.

Years ago, I was the editor of an online news website covering a sleepy but thriving suburb in the Bay Area.

For the most part, this city was never in any of the major — or even local — news outlets. So when I launched the website, it was a big deal in the community and I spent a lot of time building relationships with people because the city had been neglected by the media for so long.

Then, a week after the site launched, out of nowhere, the biggest disaster in the city’s history happened.

A natural gas pipeline exploded in the middle of a residential neighborhood, setting off a huge fire. Eight people died and 38 homes were destroyed, and the explosion had an impact on the entire city.

As soon as I heard about the fire, I remember jumping straight into the action and doing my best to cover the story in real time with limited resources. But, of course, being in the competitive news business, I wasn’t the only one trying to cover the story.

It was a huge breaking news story so every other news outlet from all over the place parachuted into the city to try to be the first on the scene so they could get the best story that would ultimately boost their ratings or readership.

So on top of trying to get the most accurate information to the community I served and find the most compelling stories for my news site, I had to deal with the competition. That’s the name of the game in the news business.

Over the following days, weeks and months following the disaster, I had to quickly become familiar with all these technical terms and complex details related to how pipelines work so I could explain to my community in the simplest way possible why this disaster happened.

I learned so much about how pipelines work in such a short period of time (that’s what you’re forced to do as journalist) that I felt like Neo in the Matrix. And then came the lawsuits, so that meant I had to learn about and explain a whole new set of legal terms just so I could tell more stories that mattered to the community.

You know what happened in the process?

Although I knew there were more experienced journalists with more resources behind them covering the same story, I stopped worrying about what they were doing and just focused on telling the stories that mattered the most to the people who lived in the city I covered.

By simply being a part of the community and getting to know the people, the stories that I worked on had more meaning. As a result, I didn’t have to worry about losing readers to the bigger guys. In fact, interest in my small news site grew.

Bottom line: Deliver good content

The thing I really want you to take away from this is that SEO is more than just stuffing keywords throughout your website. It’s about delivering good content that your audience wants to see.

Overall, the best way to bring more people to your website (and essentially more customers and supporters to your social enterprise) is to speak to people’s values. The traffic will eventually come.

So if police brutality is a frequent problem in your community, I’m sure you already know how to make some noise in the streets. But make sure to document what you’re doing on your website, connect the issue to the product or idea you’re selling and explain the issue better than anyone who might have tried to explain it before. That’s when the real results happen with SEO.

Remember, you don’t have to work at Google or Facebook or be a computer science expert to get this stuff right.

Just know that when you focus more on producing good content for humans than on ranking for keywords, good things start happening for your website and your social enterprise.