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What Is Trick SEO And Why Does It No Longer Work?
Trick SEO is an attitude in search engine optimisation that worked in the early 2000s until recently. People tried to create thematic relevance with SEO glossaries and online wiki pages.SEOs associated this with the hope that users would land on a website in an "informational" search and then somehow move on to a buying process.
In purely theoretical terms, this still works today. But there is a catch.
- People who want to buy something rarely look it up on Wikipedia.
- On the website with the purchase offer, he doesn't expect a mini-Wikipedia, but a sales process.
- Those who only want to inform themselves do so without a credit card.
Wiki pages on business websites generate bad user signals. If we really consider the business website as a business entity and not as a part of a museum or university, then there is no spatially separated (in another directory) extra section for information or for the history of the product. So no wiki, no glossary etc.
Why are SEO Tricks not useful anymore?
The old SEO trick of turning users into customers via information requests feels something like this:
Imagine you go to a historical exhibition. You just want to find out about a topic. Suddenly, however, a salesperson jumps out of the information board (this salesperson corresponds to an insert or a pop-up, for example) and says to you:"Buy this!"
How do you feel?
Now the serious approach:
There is no longer a wiki or glossary as an extra directory on the website. Instead, there is a directory for the specific product. This directory contains everything that has to do with the product:
- What is it?
- Who uses it?
- When does one use it?
- How do you probably feel when you don't use it?
- Who invented it?
- What alternatives are there to this product or solution? (Of course, do not name the competitors here, but other solutions with all their advantages and disadvantages.)
This is a transparent and fair way of dealing with questions and information.
- If you only want information, you will find an info page near the product. They can, but do not have to buy anything.
- Those who want to buy can get additional information before or after the purchase. But it is not necessary.
In this way, web presences are created in which the information offers are sorted according to user intention, but no longer placed in different silos. It is illogical for users and difficult for search systems to understand why a business site should have an information department (wiki) that is technically outsourced on the website and another department for customer stories (white paper / best practice). This information all belongs in one technical directory with subdirectories. Maximally successful websites deliver the complete information offering for the entire customer journey in one directory with subdirectory and parent directory.
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Written 2022-12-30, revised 2023-07-02, published here for the first time.