What Ned Flanders and Lisa Simpson can tell us about Google and are we all doing SEO wrong?

I just finished writing writing a book about SEO. As it turns out, the book was also about SEM, Adwords, UI, UX, Infrastructure, and a whole lot more, because SEO has been a whole lot more just good old than meta-titles and keywords for a long, long time now.

Worried that I'd meandered away from my core topic one time too often though, I decided to run a text analysis over the book and see what my keywords were. Unsurprisingly, there was one word that in the word cloud bigger than Mustafa's head at the end of the Lion King.

Google.

And it was then that I had an epiphany - we might all doing SEO really, really wrong.

There's an episode of The Simpsons where Ned Flanders' house to blown away in a hurricane. Everybody else's house is fine, it's just Ned who gets to watch his house vanishing into the wild blue yonder. It's the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back and Ned, finally, snaps.

In the midst of a truly epic rant, he describes poor little Lisa Simpson as "The perfect answer to a question that nobody was asking!"

And that's kind of what we're all doing with SEO.

Ask yourself this - what does Google want? Because that's what we all obsess about, right? Whenever even a tiny snippet of information is released on a change to the algorithm, whenever the slightest confirmation on something Google does or doesn't do with SERP drifts out, you can almost hear the mouse-clicks of a planet full of panicking web developers, digital marketers, "growth hackers" (whatever they are) and assorted consultants racing to Search Engine Land to find out what they need to do/change/say to their clients.

Forget the destruction of Alderaan by the Death Star, changes to Google's algorithm send enough shock-waves through the Force to make Obi-Wan Kenobi turn to the dark side.

But that's the game, right? Google are the biggest search engine and what they say goes.

Or does it?

Because asking what Google wants isn't the question. The real question is what does Google want today, and the problem with that is that the answer keeps changing. There's a very simple reason to that - they're asking a different question.

What Google are asking is - what does the customer want?

Google haven't stop building their search engine - it's in a constant state of change and improvement as Google try to increase its ability to provide you with the "best" answer. Some of the things they do are good. Some of the things they do are bad. Some ideas stick around and others vanish.

Remember Google+? There was a time when SEO consultants were crawling over themselves to build up reputation on Google+ because they wanted to get their little faces into the SERP. Brands were told to build a presence on Google+. Brands paid consultants (probably those ones with the faces in the SERP) to build their brand on Google+

And then...

The point is, I think we waste a lot of time and money chasing the Google dragon when we could be doing something else. We're all looking for Lisa Simpson - the perfect answer to a question that nobody is asking.

What we could be doing is taking a look at our websites without the latest news, tips, tricks, or rumours in front of us. What we could be doing is looking at our website the way our customers do, not the way the Google Lighthouse report says they do.

I'd like you to try that today.

Just use your website. Use it like a user. Use it like a first time customer. Use it like a customer who has been with you since day one. What do you actually like about it? What do you really, really hate about it? What could you change, today to make it better for your customer?

Fix those things and you'll have a better website and a better website, so we keep being told, will rank better. And, maybe it will. Maybe it won't. But... it will still be better - and that's something you can see and share the benefits of with your customers straight away.