A page one ranking can be a beautiful storefront on a street where no one ever goes.
This is the next higher version of SEO. You can imagine the search engine results pages as Google's shop windows. If the title and the description carry relevant content, the website gets search engine traffic. The result pages are built in real time, depending on the search query and on the intent behind the words.
Search results are aimed at the end of the search. Knowledge begins after that point. This site works on the distance between the two.
Enough consensus, plus the part that is missing
Every subject has a settled core. Covering it is necessary and it takes a few paragraphs. Covering every semantically related term beyond it produces pages that are complete for a machine and exhausting for a person.
The useful work starts after the settled core: the questions that belong to the subject, that people demonstrably care about, and that the agreed coverage on the first page leaves out.
Forty-two subjects are treated here, across five fields. Each one states what is settled, then names what is missing from the agreement, then lists the questions people actually arrive with.
Five fields
Digital marketing
Digital marketing knows the funnel. It rarely knows the person in front of it.
Information retrieval
Information retrieval built the machine that marketing talks about without reading its manual.
Human-computer interaction
The result page is an interface. Most marketing treats it as a leaderboard.
Computational linguistics
Machines now read your text before any person does.
Social epistemology
A full page of results feels like knowledge. It is a selection nobody signed.
Conversion is the goal, and a ranking for its own sake is not
Content has to deliver answers to more than one query. It has to tell the whole solution story, including the effects that follow from the solution.
SEO knowledge is still largely limited to the question of how to rank. In marketing the position that pays is the first place in the relevance set of a target group.
Google ranks content pieces and excerpts, so every piece has to give the reader full orientation:
- Where am I here on this website?
- What do I get here?
- Is this true and complete?
People search for solutions, not for websites
A person wants to get rid of a headache and types headache tablet. The search intent is the tablet. The user intent is the end of the headache. She does not like pills and would prefer acupressure, and she does not yet know that acupressure exists.
Search intent and user intent differ in many cases. That difference is where results get built that surprise somebody.
The project
The personalization of the internet leads to hasty decisions. Small and medium-sized companies without marketing budgets of millions can only win customers with high effort for content development or search engine advertising.
The Search Result Optimization project invites you to put the user and their personal intention at the centre of your own presentation. In principle every company can find a niche with its own portfolio, particularly in local services and in medicine.
It starts where classical search engine optimization ends, beyond marketing that is driven by the result page.
I am Johannes Faupel, partner of FFM Coaching Associates in Frankfurt, Germany, Springer author and patent owner of an advanced psychoeducational tool. I work on executive coaching and communication development for demanding subjects, among them patient communication, burnout prevention and the underestimation of the human brain.