There has been a lot of hype lately about how to market to Millennials, how to get them to buy your products, etc.
Let’s start with what a “Millennial” is. Millennials are loosely defined as those persons who have reached adulthood in the year 2000, commonly called “Generation Y”, or the “Net Generation”. Researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s, according to the Internet “encyclopedia”, Wikipedia. With that definition, a Millennial covers an age span between 18 to 35 years of age.
Millennials, usually tagged with the misconception that they are “obsessed” with technology, i.e., “always have their noses in their iPhone”, are in fact more interested in doing things in the fastest and most efficient way using the latest available technology.
Next, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results (emphasis added) – often referred to as “natural,” “organic” or “earned” results.
Everyone knows what a website is but, again, according to Wiki, “A website, also written as web site, or simply site, is a set of related web pages typically served from a single “web domain”.” Think Amazon.com, Pinterest, or YouTube.
So, how do all of these tie together? Millennials use the latest technology available to search for information on the Internet with the fastest means possible. That information is found on websites. They don’t want to waste their time in searching. They would prefer getting the right results, right now, so they can get on with their lives doing what they intended to do with the information.
With all of the recent search engine algorithm changes, (over 120 since 2000), search engines try to determine what the intent of the searcher is, and then tries to provide information that is as close as possible to that perceived intent. That means if your website does not have the information that is pertinent, it won’t show up in Internet searches. Keywords are no longer the bait of searchers – it is relevant information on the pages they land on.
So, what applies to Millennials, also really applies to everyone. If you want to maximize your chances of a Millennial, a Baby Boomer, or anyone for that matter to visit your website and do that conversion, you must make sure you have good quality content on each of your website pages.
So, what have you done to adapt to the latest Google algorithm changes?
I like how clear your definitions are. but one Question; How do the searchers recognize and classify “relevent information” from a page besides key words? And how would the SEO professional develope relevant information?
Hello Joel,
Thank you for your comments. As you know, relevant information has been researched for several decades when Google began applying their search engine matrix in earnest. Relevant information can be anything from page title tags, meta descriptions, anchor text, alt and title tags, and the content on the page. Users can complete a search many different ways using Internet Explorer, as an example, and come up with just as many different search results. Google has continuously stated that in order to be properly indexed, all of the above elements have to match the content of that page in order to qualify for indexing. Even so, we still can come up with pages that do not match our search terms many times. A website can be developed with excellent content and all elements matching perfectly, but search results are still reliant on the user and how they form their search request. The bottom line is that keywords are what the user thinks they are supposed to be and there lies the problem.
Very truth, Rob. Keywords are not really a relevant factor anymore. However Key Topics definitely are. We must keep in mind that the google algorithms now include a concept or semantic topic sorting system. I think that if the contain of a webpage connects with and highlights the topic of interest, regardless of the keywords they use, google’s AI can understand and assimilate that. The proper semantic ‘packing’ and embedding also helps this process. I think that It is really time for all of us in the SEO field to stop clinging to old notions and techniques to trick search engines and more on producing high quality and proper web semantic programming/markup on if.