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Search Engine Heuristics (SEH)

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First, I encourage you to look at the Wikipedia article about the concept of a heuristic. It is an approach to problem solving that is “good enough”.

If you work in Marketing, you might get asked to “improve SEO”. Regardless of how you feel about it. People might want answers, convincing sounding explanations that you are doing what you can.

Next time someone talks to you about SEO, I want to suggest you can think of SEH instead, even if you have to say “SEO”

No one really knows how search engines do their thing- even within the companies themselves i.e the one monopoly over search of Google, its unlikely any one person understands the movements and machinations of the big machine. Some of its proprietary, some of its public, its all an intentionally obfuscated machine, sort of like the Coca-Cola Recipe or something else powerful and corporate.

Its a big machine with human inputs, redundancies, edits, errors, priorities sometimes, biases- its about making power. It doesn’t exist to be optimized, except for shareholders.

Its not a consistent thing, its not a science, its a giant statistical ad machine that produces other results along with ads based on “personalized” crawled and scraped data and trends. The best practices and the suggestions are not universal and overall it is a fuzzy, almost astrological field of thought. It has strong signals of untrustworthiness, snakeoil to ever claim you fully understand it.

There are things you can do…

Some passionate website people avoid talking about search entirely. Its just such a bad field where people give advice all the time that you don’t even want to be considered to be selling advice. Well, I want to talk about it anyways.

Here is what I know about Search, through an example website.

Im calling this Search Engine Heuristics (SEH) for ways to think about search engine results. Just in some ways that might make sense, and provide context, but are completely unscientific or even based upon any solid practice. There is no secret here, just stuff that seems to my senses to make some kind of sense.

You can consider SEH to be pronounded like “Meh” with the same spirit of voice. It is a diminutive, uninspiring way of looking at something… but it has some value.

These are not suggestions for optimization, just a way that search can work, in one example:

WhatcomPublicHospital.org

Description: A non-profit volunteer website based around a cause of creating a Public Hospital District in the county in Whatcom, Washington State.

Site first indexed by Google over 1 year ago in 2024. Has no restrictions on crawling, robots.txt is permissive.

It somehow comes up really strongly in search, despite their being a really-existing single hospital already in the County.

What are some Heuristics? How can I understand this search result?

Don’t ask how it got there, ask how it didn’t not get there

It didnt not get there because it used Semantic HTML practices, clear content, and some people actually visited the site. It doesnt guarantee anything.

The domain WhatcomPublicHospital.org was new, there is no Whatcom Public Hospital that already exists in exact name.

This has a heuristic value that you might find it in search, if you look for it.

SEH Conclusion: If you are the only thing with a particular phrasing of words or names, you might show up in search.

Searching for the exact spelling of the Website, including expansion of the domain itself, seems to do something.

The words you put in your title, description, content… they are the words that may appear from a search result. There is NO guarantee they will show up, but they are not gonna have a chance at showing up much without the words (unless you pay for it to be an ad).

The stuff you put in is what you may find. Not guaranteed, not always, but your not gonna find things totally unrelated to your words (thats what ads are for).

Searching for “Whatcom Public Hospital” causes the website to appear first sometimes, but pretty consistently from my experiences:

First Search Result

Conclusion: Words have meaning, they don’t mean you will show up in search, but you might not show up in search without words. Unless its an Ad, which maybe it doesnt need the words at all. Also maybe there might be other trends of search results and tracking that affect whether it shows up.

Having a slightly different variety of wording can produce a higher search result, even with established “real” concrete competition in the physical world

First Search Result number two

St Josephs PeaceHealth Hospital is the existing hospital in Whatcom County. It is an actual living breathing hospital in the county that serves people. I and some others think there should be a second hospital or rather a “district”, but we are not a real hospital… yet.

The website I have worked on, WhatcomPublicHospital.org, appears above it when you search for Whatcom Hospital in many examples Ive encountered. It appears above it everytime I search for “Whatcom Hospital” Ive ever tried, and Ive got many other people to try searching for it too and confirmed this is the case.

What can I heuristic or SEH out of this?

One website has the word Whatcom in it. One is a name of a specific Hospital (in Whatcom). One seems to win or they are close in competition. Some of the time, under no reproducible conditions, for at least since 2024.

Quick ‘SEO’ magic intermission: Location Based Spot Check with SERP Api

There is no guarantee of search results, its not a science. But it is possible to confirm, briefly, that you are not the only one, and maybe location seems to be an ingredient. This is a way of partially falsifying a claim for example, that “you are just receiving personalized search results”. Even if this is astrology, if someone speaks the same language, then its possible to have a conversation. Even about astrology I guess? SEH (“said like Meh”).

I am not trying to sell a service, or promote it, I am trying to prove a point:

Consider SERP API, a service which allows you to enter a search query taken from a particular location of the world:

Apparently Searching “Whatcom Hospital” from Austin, TX, finds the WPH website as the first result.

SERP example

SEO Conclusion: Nothing. SERP API returned a result that matched my search result. So its not just you. Its you and an API. Doesn’t mean anything will show up for anyone else necessarily.

SEH Conclusion: A robot API call returned a similar result to a result I personally encountered.

Back to SEH… even more speculative heuristics…

I just thought about how the website I made resonated with some people. People search the phrase “Whatcom Hospital” and “Whatcom Public Hospital” because they might not know we only have one hospital that is private. It just had something new about it. Its made the Cascadia Daily News, and got me into some meetings about the issue with public figures.

If I had named it “We want a Public Hospital” it maybe would not have shown up in search if you searched “Whatcom Public Hospital”. I cant confirm that. But I know it did show up, and continues to show up, because the words are there in the content and the search for those words makes it currently appear.

Its totally arbitrary and dont rely on it

Search overall is so much worse now than before, but it still has characteristics that make some sense. Words you put into your domain, words that you put into the content, they might show up in search, they might not. Theres a lot that goes into it, and sometimes you might have a need to do “good enough”.

Focus on your users and your audience. Use the words that make the most sense to them. Its likely also “good enough” for search (which will be hammered with ads and things out of your control).