# Taking a User-Centric Approach to SEO

The seventh tenant of Google's philosophy states "There's always more information out there." After years of providing marketers and webmasters more data concerning the performance of their websites, Google recently took an action to reverse data transparency by encrypting organic search terms. Some giants in the SEO industry have suggested the move was in response to the NSA leak in June, while others have written that Google may start charging because of this data.

Given the business's progression searching algorithms, the change is most likely here to stay. From Caffeine to Penguin to Hummingbird, Google has been trying to create search friendlier to get rid of users, often to the chagrin of SEO professionals. Rather than depending on creative hacks, by leveraging a technique that targets relevance and using tools to measure and guide decisions, SEO efforts may be preserved for years to come.

We have been around in this situation before; in 2011, Google announced it was implementing SSL encryption for users signed directly into its services. The company's core belief is "Focus on the consumer and all else will follow."

Set aside a second to take into account the weight of the statement, which decrees that se optimization should help users first and foremost. The years of quick, spammy meta tags and dirty, "visibility: hidden" keywords are over. SEO work now takes time and practice.

Google's switch to encrypted search uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) as opposed to the unencrypted HTTP schema. The referring URL is redirected, stripping the key word out from the URL string. Removing these search terms limits visit and conversation data at the organic keyword level.


Before, this data had been used to know the precise phrases customers used as search queries before visiting a site. Knowing what keywords brought probably the most traffic gave marketers a target to build pages around.

Herein arose an integral issue: SEO should not be understood as an island, but alternatively in relation to a number of factors both internal to the website and external to the web. Search engine algorithms have become exponentially complex and evaluate a site on hundreds of factors, all weighted differently. Do customers stay in your page? What's your website structure?

Exist legitimate links to your website? Therefore, SEO strategy should not only depend on picking a few keywords and creating a greater density of those keywords on a page, but should rather encompass a holistic way of attracting visitors. Emphasizing only the top three to four keywords is dangerous. Google has been pushing marketers to stop thinking about what is best for the se and start thinking about what is best for the user.

Taking a user-centric way **[keyword planner](https://zutrix.com/free-keyword-planner)** of SEO diminishes the importance of knowing exact conversion data and opting to attract visitors on multiple levels. What this means is keeping in mind Google's mantra: "Focus on the consumer and all else will follow."

Users may also be leaning more on social networking as an integral part of their search process. Finding new services or the best locations may be hard to do when considering a listing of search results on Google. Whether Google improves site rankings centered on social networking is debatable, but Google+ pages do receive special benefits to boost search visibility.

Smaller businesses should especially take note. A nearby restaurant may never beat Starbucks in a natural seek out coffee, but a great ranking on Yelp or Foursquare could make it edge out the major chain when a consumer performs a geographic search.