How Search Engines and Social Media Have Reshaped Website Content

Image credit: https://www.pexels.com/@burst

When the web really caught traction in the late 1990s and early 2000s—such that people could easily create and maintain their own personal corners of the Internet—up popped blogs.

In that era, the old and original term, “web log” or “weblog,” truly suited the form: Blogs served as places for people to log information, whether as diaries and journals or personal essays and even short stories and long-work fiction in episodic form.

Some of these old-school blogs truly entertained the masses, spawning book deals, movies, speaking engagements, even B-list celebrities.

Back in the day, I had several blogs that I checked regularly for new posts, read avidly, and truly appreciated. I loved their raw, unedited, and off-the-cuff ramblings about the writers’ lives, interests, challenges, ideas, and foibles. As examples, I followed a blog about someone’s dating mishaps, another blog about someone’s fledgling career in politics, and yet a different blog written by a woman who worked in a video store (remember those?) that had a porn section in the basement with cameras monitoring for shenanigans. (The horrors.)

Fantastic.

Some of the more personal essays and journal-style posts on blogs truly changed my perspective and influenced my understanding of certain things in life, too.

I loved and miss the old blog-style websites. When social media cropped up and search engines took over the Internet (don’t forget that the Internet and the web existed before Google did), the old-style creative websites that people had developed from personal passions and interests and raw creativity began wither and die.

Content for Search Engines

Most traffic to websites today comes from search engines like Google and Bing.

Search engines don’t know how to categorize creativity, and creativity rarely answers questions that people know to ask or serves up products and services that people know exist. And if people don’t know something exists, they don’t know how to search for it.

Given that creativity doesn’t serve search engines and search engines control most of the traffic to websites, it makes sense that websites now create content that serves the search engines.

What types of content serves search engines?

Utilitarian website content serves search engines, quite frankly: To rank on search engine results when people ask a question on Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo, and the rest, a website needs to answer questions. After all, that’s why people visit search engines: To get answers.

What types of questions do people ask search engines to answer?

People ask about where to buy certain products and services and which products and services in a category have the best reviews and ratings. People search for specific companies and businesses that provide the products and services they buy. People visit search engines to learn how to do something or to learn more about a topic: How do I fill out a tax form? How do I install a sink? How many people live in Paris? Is Cameroon a country or a city?

If a website wants a search engine to show its page to people searching for answers to these questions, it needs to create clear-cut content that anticipates the types of questions people will have about the types of products, services, and things their website provides. Also, it needs to create this content in whatever format best serves search engines’ algorithms for searchability and usability.

Though everyone loves finding the answers to questions quickly and easily—who doesn’t appreciate that they can ask a search engine almost any question and get answers that cater to every want and need?—companies that create content to serve search engines rarely create terribly creative or entertaining content.

Content designed for search engines meets the need and may even turn into a trusted resource saved to your favorites. Yet you won’t necessarily read it or look at it or watch it just because you found it funny, innovative, or clever.

The Oxygen Suck of Social Media

Okay, so where do people go for fun and entertainment on-line?

You probably didn’t need much time to come up with an answer. (And you probably didn’t need to go to a search engine to figure it out.)

When people want a brain break or something diversionary today, they go to social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and the like.

Given that social media has sucked up all the interest of people that hasn’t gone toward getting questions answered on search engines, many people with a drive to create have moved to posting content directly on the social media platforms—bypassing creating their own websites or corners of the web entirely.

From the outside, social media looks like a playground of variety for bored and tired minds. However, what you get and what you see have been very carefully curated to serve the social media companies’ best interests.

Social media companies have designed astoundingly impressive algorithms to keep visitors engaged for as much time as possible, with the goal of delivering to them as many ads as possible. These companies—paid for mainly by advertising and by selling visitors’ data—show you just enough personal posts from friends and family to keep you scrolling through advertisements.

As these algorithms have learned that people like sensational and dramatic content the most—it gets the most attention, after all—social media platforms mainly show you this type of content. Even if you “like” or “follow” a page or person on social media, the companies only show you what will keep you tuned in long enough to serve up more ads. You will not see all the posts from a “liked” or “followed” person or page.

In other words, scrolling over for a “brain break” on social media mainly means taking a pause to receive ads.

(Disclaimer: I work in marketing. I understand and even admire the deftness with which these companies have crafted their algorithms. Social media ads really work.)

Therefore, you won’t find much by way of out-of-the-box creativity on social media, other than what serves the advertisers’ best interests. For maximum effectiveness, people who create content for social media platforms need to skew what they create to play to the algorithms as much as possible to capture as much exposure as possible—or, if necessary, pay for the exposure (in other words, advertising). In some cases, advertisers pay these people directly to create this content and gain more exposure for—you can guess it—their advertising.

And yet, at any moment, the social media platforms could decide to up the ante, requiring more money per view to get the same level of exposure. (They do this often. They’re for-profit companies, remember.)

Creating content for social media rarely works as a sustainable long-term strategy for anyone without truly deep pockets and doesn’t even work as a short-term strategy for someone creating work that doesn’t serve the social-media companies’ algorithm and goals.

Social media is a playground of creativity, but not as it might seem: Social media is an intensively creative algorithm and an intensely competitive landscape on which only people who succeed in delivering more advertising win in the short term (and on which no one wins in the long term).

How this Affects Observing Leslie

If I create something fun, creative, humorous, or (I hope) insightful on Observing Leslie, I get a jump of visits from regular readers (who are mostly friends and family and occasionally fans). These readers enjoy the personal-insights stuff that I write and they mainly follow my site for this type of content.

I’ll get a spike in visitors when a new personal post goes live; further, this type of post will get the highest amount of engagement in terms of comments and shares with other readers directly or via social media immediately after I’ve posted it.

However, once people have read the personal essay, they click away and never click back. And if they’ve shared it with others, those people do the same: They read it once and then traipse away elsewhere on the web.

After all, even if you really loved an article, essay, image, or book, how often do you go back and read it again? There’s just too much to read and to see.

Content written for search engines has a completely different trajectory. With this type of content, I don’t get much interest or traction from the people who follow my site. However, once the search engine indexes the content—provided that the content answers a question and suits the search engines’ measures of usability and speed—the search engines will send me visitors in a steady stream for months.

Further, people who get a question answered on my site may bookmark it to return when they have the question again or when they need to reference the information I’ve provided. Similarly, if you’ve found a great place to buy something, you return to it when you need that thing again. And if you’ve found a helpful how-to for repairing your dishwasher, you’re likely to save the link in case you need to revisit that chore. (For you, I hope not. For the website or social-media profile getting the visitors: Win!)

In short, the content I write for search engines has far more longevity and returns far more visitors than the creative content I write.

My regular readers may not get excited by content like Planning a Wedding in France, Who is Carlo Crivelli, and The Complex Symbolism of the Hoodie—preferring instead the fun stuff like The Coronavirus Diaries, articles stemming from the Stakes project, and funny episodes in my life like the one recounted in The Salt Spa Experience—but the search engines have the opposite preference. (Also of note: Even the entertaining content only gets attention and traffic when I post a link to it on social media. As I don’t pay for posts on social media, it doesn’t drive me terribly many visits all the same.)

A sad contradiction, no?

I’ll keep creating content of all kinds here on Observing Leslie, as doing so provides me a creative outlet and I enjoy interacting with the few people who manage to find and follow me. However, I realize that I won’t get anywhere beyond a handful of people as regular visitors and readers (and, even then, solely via engagement with social media).

And I must remember to feel okay about that sometimes, especially given the amount of work I put into this site.

Yet I look around the room of the Internet and I can’t avoid noticing that I write one of the few blogs left standing. Fighting the tide of social media and search engines has proved impossible for most creative people.

How Do You Find Engaging Content on the Web?

All this to ask: How do you find entertaining, creative, innovative articles, art, graphics, video, and so forth on the web today, especially if you’ve grown weary of (or wise to) the machinations of social media?

I don’t know.

Social media appears to satisfactorily serve the critical mass of people looking for diversion on-line. A few of us disaffected with social media can follow websites via RSS feeds and platforms like Feedly and Pocket, yet most people don’t bother to make the extra effort to set up something additional when they can simply click a social media app that has saved their log-in details. Easy-peasy.

The ship may have sailed on creative websites gaining true traction. On today’s bifurcated web, search engines answer questions efficiently and effectively and social media provides the entertainment. Needs met. Game over.

An ad-driven echo chamber may be all people want. And I may be one of the only people nostalgic for the good ol’ days of great web content.