To save you disappointment this post isn’t about SEO. This post is to dispel some common misconceptions about SEO that people have.
Hop in a time machine and go back 15 years to 2007 and the majority of small business owners didn’t know anything about SEO. they had business websites that were an addition to their business and they either helped them get business or they didn’t. Often they were successful as inadvertently they wrote great content that attracted search engines.
Great content is a pillar of SEO – but NOT the only part. But I digrtess.
As you sterp out of the time machine around that time STeve Jobs created one of the most popular mobile phones of all time and we all know the rest of the story. Now there were mobile phones before that and of course many many types since. but what the iPhone largely did was make the internet come closer to people who up to then didn’t really use it much.
These days of course it is a bodily part for some people.
So back to SEO.
I get asked all the time by clients to do the following
- SEO their website.
- Add SEO to the website
- Include SEO designed elements
And variations on that theme. Now in man cases the client (and understandably) doesn’t understand what SEO is. Nor do I expect them to. In fact there isn’t a single person in the world who completely understands how search works – not even in Google.
The Google search engine is around since 1998 (if you fancy another time machine trip) and in the intervening time it has grown and grown and grown. Estimates are that there are now 2 billion lines of code in it. So don’t tell me one person in Google knows how it works.
So do I say no to SEO. Not at all. What SEO professionals do know in the years since Google has dominated the market is what possibly works and what possibly doesn’t work. And google doesn’t say much and when they do people pay way too much attention to it. People scour their patent reviews and every utterance for the single scrap of information that will help them improve their online presence and be seen by more and more eyes.
Now I don’t plan to share a handy list of things that when you do this all of a sudden your world will change. But there are two things that do stand out. One is content and the other is backlinks.
Great content (as in amazing ly great top class platinum content) gets Google attention and also in some cases backlinks from reputable sources. Yes there are many many companies out there who can get you backlinks and most of them are garbage. But a single reputable backlink to the above platinum content is what often moves the dial and helps you dominate in organic search.
Along with those two things there are 40-50 other things that need to be done and please listen here often continually done.
But back to content. Creating any old content is easy. Bash out 600 words in a blog post. Check the spelling and you think you have ticked the content box. and yes this may work but in a competitive niche that isn’t enough.
Bash in keywords about your service and it will work. Emm yes but guess what every 5 cent content writer is doing this already.
So how do you create this magical piece of content. Well you take a ton of time, get good content creators (writers, videos , designers) and put a plan together to create something that your target market will read, share, like and come to your site for.
I bolded this as this is how I approach SEO with my clients. Also if you create such a piece of content you can reuse it on multiple occasions for marketing. Gary Vaynerchuck who has both fans and critics wrote a piece on this about creating 64 pieces of content in one day. I like it a lot and I believe this is something you should aspire to.
And no you won’t even get to 4-5 if you work really hard but having a content mind is important for marketing.
But two last things.
Please don’t read the latest piece of SEO literature and wave the metaphorical blog post in the air as “the way to go” for SEO. it isn’t. SEO is joined-up thinking. A lot of my SEO work is understanding my clients market and actually learning about it so WITH the customer we can build solid plans, activities. And (point 1.1) not every single thing works harking back to what we know and don’t know about Google. And also don’t forget your completion isn’t sitting on their hands either.
Finally paid search trumps all organic SEO. I have a client with an average looking website (we are working with him to improve it to improve conversions) who with paid Google Ads and FAcebook ADs is netting €200K a month. He is spending 15-20K on advertising and plans to increase it.
Does he use SEO no. Does it matter no. But he has focussed exclusively on paid search as his market doesn’t care where they click and his products are decent and well priced.