Yesterday we suggested you take a moment and write down some of the romantic Valentine's Day stories you've heard over the last few days.
This wasn't just a wild suggestion, but rather the first step down a path of real world storytelling and answering of questions. Any time you add more stuff to your website, you are actually adding "content." It could be a product catalog, or it could be a story, but it needs to be written for real people to read rather than for search engines.
Quality content is rewarded, but let's explain how and why this is so.
As of today Google is already attempting to build a search engine powered by artificial intelligence (known as AI). According to Amit Singhal, one of Google's top engineers, they hope to one day have a very large database that understands the relationship between words, rather than just matching web pages to words based on mathematical values.
Google search is already influenced by AI relations. We demonstrated this in Nugget #398 when we explained how Google was relating the word "shop" to "store," and that "wedding ring" will trigger results for "bridal", "wedding", and "engagement". Only a year ago those types of word relationships didn't exist.
However, most of the current search results are still based on some mathematical models where, as Singhal explains, "We cross our fingers and hope someone on the web has written about these things or topics."
His explanation is the real key to adding content to your website. Throughout your website, on product pages, in blog posts, or educational pages, you simply need to keep talking about different topics within your industry. You might think that's it's all the same information day after day, but it really isn't.
As a jeweler, you could keep a regular storytelling journal of the things you hear from your customers. For example, let's say a parent and their child come into the store today looking for a book locket. Find out the story behind the need, and where they are from. Then go to your computer and write a little story about it. Change the names for anonymity, but include the details of how the child reacted when they saw the functionality of that locket. Provide details of who the locket was for, and anything else you might include in the story if you recounted it to someone else.
Storytelling creates a new library of related words for your website. On a single page you give Google the ability to match random phrases like "book style locket", "book locket", "photo locket", "multi-photo locket", and "best lockets for grandma". This is great content and natural storytelling without SEO specifically in mind.
Each of these stories will trigger the mathematical search results of today as well as whatever AI search results Google. If you have a limited budget of time or money, the process explained here will provide a long term, steady return on your investment.
