A content designer's playlist: 10 songs that taught me SEO (and AEO)

As a content designer on a large public health project, I was recently asked to explore how SEO techniques could be applied to our service to improve its search rankings.

SEO often gets treated as a specialist discipline, but in many teams it falls to content designers. The good news? A lot of it overlaps with what we already do well.

And what Hippo teams do exceptionally well is collaborate. Every Friday, many of us contribute songs to a topical Spotify playlist we call SpotiFriday.

Inspired by that tradition, here is a playlist that reminds me of the SEO tips that took our site from total obscurity to the top of the rankings.

Content designers are often cautious about acronyms, so we shouldn’t assume everyone on a project understands what SEO means — let alone how it works. During our initial team discussions about implementing a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy, it became clear that some colleagues weren’t familiar with what SEO actually involves.

With that in mind, it’s worth taking the time to make sure everyone has a shared understanding of the basics.

Google finds (crawls) your pages from links and sitemaps. It then stores (indexes) them in a database. If the content is helpful and makes the best use of good content and structure then Google will decide where it shows up in search results (ranks).

If your page isn’t linked from anywhere it’s less likely that Google will find it. Even if it’s found, the content might be unhelpful and badly written. This will affect its ranking.

Getting to the top of Google is a bit like getting a song to number one in the charts –  if it’s not very good, it’s not getting there.

Song trivia – Uptown Top Rankin was number one in the UK charts for a week in 1978. The song’s breakthrough came unexpectedly when BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel accidentally played it on air, having intended to play the B-side.

Google wants to show the best answer for that specific intent.  For example, you might want to search for the best laptop for a student.

The highest ranking pages will have articles with lists of laptops, with comparisons and pros & cons of each model.

The type of pages that won’t rank as well are those that only feature a particular product or general articles about the basics of laptops.

It’s worth looking at the format of the highest ranking pages to get an idea of how to best structure your content.

Song trivia – The Best of You was covered by Prince at what is widely regarded as the greatest half time Superbowl performance of all time. Foo fighters singer Dave Grohl said, “What an honour to be covered by one of your heroes. He turns it into this gospel-rock experience that blows our version out of the water.”

Use user research and keyword tools to understand what people actually search for. If those words don’t appear in your content, well, you can guess the rest.

Be smart about how you frame keywords in your content by using long-tail keywords. So, if your service is to help students find volunteering opportunities, instead of just using the word ‘volunteering’,  where there will be massive competition in the rankings, include some relevant details around the keyword.

For example,  ‘best volunteering opportunities for students in Leeds’. This will ensure less competition, clearer intent and a higher chance of ranking.

Trivia – Released in 1986, ‘Word Up’ is a landmark funk-rock song that became the band’s biggest hit. The song’s title was a popular New York urban phrase meaning “affirmation” or “you bet”.

If your page titles and headings aren’t clear, Google (and users) will misunderstand what your content is about.

Like labelling boxes, you need to tell Google what the page is about so it understands your content.

So, if your service is about volunteering for students, you need to ensure this is clearly mentioned in the page title, URL, headers and any relevant links.

For example, the URL might be ‘/volunteering-opportunities-for-students’

This seems really obvious, but I’ve worked on large public sector services that have scored poorly in SEO reviews because they didn’t follow this guidance.

Trivia – Nina Simone’s real name was Eunice Waymon. She changed her name to keep her mother from finding out about her performances.

Earning links from trusted, reputable sources strengthens your service’s credibility and enhances its reputation. These links act like votes of confidence, signalling to search engines that your content is reliable and valuable – helping to improve your rankings.

Not all links carry the same weight.  A handful of high-quality links from respected sites will have far more impact than dozens from low-quality or untrustworthy sources.

After a content review of 40 sites that were part of the same organisation,  I found that despite some of them mentioning the activity of our service, none of them linked directly to it.

If your own team doesn’t pass you the ball how are you expected to score!

Trivia –  Etta James had professional singing lessons from the age of five. Her teacher used to punch her in the chest while she sang to force her voice to come from her gut. Her step father would wake her in the night and force her to sing for his drunken friends. Despite being ranked highly in a list of the greatest singers of all time, this trauma caused her to have difficulties with singing on demand throughout her career.

Google needs help to access your site and there are a few lines of HTML code in each page that need your attention. You don’t need to be great at coding, but knowing what to check under the hood is a valuable skill for any content designer. And don’t assume the developers on your team are responsible for them.

Meta tags are snippets of HTML code in the <head> section of a webpage that describe its content to search engines and browsers. They are invisible to users on the page itself, but crucial for SEO.

Robot tags instruct search engine crawlers on how to index and serve specific pages.

Submitting a site map to Google is essential.  A site map is an XML file that lists all important pages, videos and images on a website, acting as a roadmap to help it get crawled and index content more efficiently.

After wondering why our site wasn’t appearing anywhere on Google, I discovered:

These simple omissions meant Google was effectively blind to our service. Stakeholders were wondering why there was a low take up on our service. It was like arranging an event without any advertising.

Just building something doesn’t mean people will come to it.

Trivia – Formed in 1970 Kraftwerk were among the first successful acts to popularise electronic music.  Their name is the German word for “power plant.”

Once Google has crawled and indexed your site it doesn’t end there. It sounds a bit sinister, but Google is continually watching user behavior.

It notices how long users spend on your page. If your page is clean, readable and loads quickly,  it will rank higher than a page full of pop ups, badly structured walls of text and that is slow to load.

I’ve worked on various projects where pages have taken too long to load because images haven’t been sized correctly. 

Always check the dimensions of hi-res images before uploading them to your site. The HTML code might say it is 200 pixels wide and display it as such, but if the actual size of the image it’s referencing is really 2000 pixels it will make your site about as fast as a queue at the post office.

Trivia – Rockwell is Kennedy Gordy, son of Motown CEO Berry Gordy. He was trying to establish his own career without using his father’s help, which initially caused an estrangement. Berry Gordy was initially unenthusiastic about his son’s music until he heard the single, not knowing it was Michael Jackson singing the chorus.

Good SEO isn’t guesswork – it’s data-driven. Content designers need to keep a close eye on how a service is performing and where it might be failing. 

Back in the early days of web design, a popular, but very tacky idea, was to put an animated hit counter on your home page. It was a way of showing how many people had clicked on your site and how fantastic you were.

In truth, it made sites look desperate and unprofessional.

The launch of Google Analytics in 2005 more or less signalled the end of the hit counter.  Ironically this coincided with the demise of the television series ‘Top of the Pops’. It’s as if we reached a point where we realised quality beats quantity. 

And for quality data that actually measures user engagement, content designers need to get access to Google Analytics. 

Another essential tool is Google Search Console. This shows the exact queries users type to find your content. Content designers can compare these queries to their original keyword strategy and adjust any relevant content.

I have also found it useful to highlight the reasons why pages might not be getting indexed.

Google Search Console also shows:

Trivia – Sheilagh Hynd, the lead singer of The Rezillos changed her name to Fay Fife, a joke relating to her birthplace (“from Fife”, spoken in her Scottish accent).

After finally ticking all the SEO boxes, it’s tempting to think your site is going to instantly appear somewhere near the top of Google’s search results. Unfortunately, the process is slow and it can take 2 to 3 months after publishing before your site is indexed and ranked.

Don’t expect much growth in traffic until around 4 to 6 months later.

These time constraints are always worth sharing with stakeholders who might be planning SEO work in sprints and SOWs.

Song trivia – “The Edge, the band’s guitarist, wasn’t keen on the song initially and compared it to “‘Eye of the Tiger’ played by a reggae band.

Just when you thought you’d mastered SEO, along comes a few more acronyms to learn: AEO and GEO. 

As the ways people search change, we have to “turn and face the strange” and adapt our content strategies.

Like anything new, there’s still a bit of confusion about how to use them, but they are both very much a part of modern SEO. Ultimately, it’s just the next phase of evolution for content designers.

Song trivia: David Bowie was always ahead of the curve when it came to tech evolution. In 1998, he launched his own internet service provider called “BowieNet.” Long before social media, he predicted how the internet would completely transform the relationship between creators and audiences.

To conclude, SEO isn’t magic –  it’s mostly good content, clear structure, and patience.

Get those right, and like any good song, your content has a much better chance of climbing the rankings.