Black hat SEO is a strategy that contradicts what the search engineers at Google want you to do.

It’s based on taking shortcuts.  You game the system to try to get faster results for the keyword phrases you want to target.

Early in SEO history, black hat was common and easy.  The first strategy was keyword stuffing.  If you wanted to rank for the term “chiropractors in Buffalo” you’d repeat that phrase all over your website.  It made for awful reading but – at first – it worked.

Then Google got smarter.

Next, marketers learned that inbound links to their domains improved their rankings.  Black hat set-up sites so that marketers could buy a large volume of links and quickly improve rankings.  In a week you could have thousands of links based on the text “best chiropractors Texas” and rank for that keyword phrase.

But Google got smarter.  It learned how to detect those fake links and punish the websites that used them.

Next, black hatters said let’s focus on content.  We’ll produce vast amounts of nonsensical content quickly so Google will think we’re adding lots of important content to our site  (it can’t tell that what we write barely makes sense).

But it got smarter.  It learned to understand what content was consumed by real people – and what wasn’t.

And today?  There isn’t really much of a “black hat” strategy left.  Short-cuts have no shelf-life.

Google has a team (who knows how big) of very smart people who overcame black hat.  You ain’t gonna outsmart them.

And beyond that, they have a ringer.  RankBrain is their artificial intelligence program that understands the intent searches, even when they don’t use the right keywords.  And it understands if people stayed on your page and made use of your content, or if you’re just providing fluff of no real value to anyone.

You ain’t gonna outsmart RankBrain.

The path forward is clear.  For small business web marketing, the best SEO strategy is to build a series of pages (on your site, on other chiropractic websites, social media, etc.) that gives people valid, unique, useful information. Not boilerplate stuff repeated from other websites in your vertical.  Instead, follow web marketing fixture Gary Vaynerchuk’s advice:

Your SEO content will be most effective when it fits in as a natural step along the customer’s path to making a purchase.  Useful information and memorable storytelling are not only great for reaching consumers, it’s the kind of content Google wants to see on your domain.

It’s pretty straightforward (though hardly easy).  Understand the searchers intent and build keyword lists and content topics around that concept.  Don’t just focus on capturing traffic, but instead focusing on providing genuinely useful information for people.

You have to work with what Google wants rather than against it.  Black hat can’t win this game anymore.

This article first appeared on Chiropractic Marketing360®.