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“Good
SEO work only gets better over time. It’s only search engine tricks
that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.”
– Jill Whalen (@jillwhalen)
In other words, SEO is
an asset. It’s like buying real estate and investing to remodel your
kitchen and bath. That work will increase the value of your home so
that you can sell it in the future for a profit.
Using SEO tricks or
hacks is like trying to beat the house in Vegas. Sure, you might get a
couple of quick wins, but in the long run you’re bound to lose because
“the house always wins.”
“My
rule of thumb is build a site for a user, not a spider.”
– Dave Naylor (@DaveNaylor)
The goal of SEO is not
to rank #1. The goal is to generate leads and sales for your business.
When you design your
website for Google’s search engine spider, then you’re ignoring the
most important part of SEO – your customers. At the end of the day,
ranking #1 in Google is completely worthless if your website is not
designed properly to convert that traffic into leads and sales!
“On
a broad scale, I see SEO becoming a normalized marketing tactic, the
same way TV, radio, and print are traditionally thought of as marketing
tactics.”
– Duane Forrester,
Senior Product Manager, Bing
If your prospective
customers are searching in Google, Bing, and Yahoo to find your
products or services, then you need an SEO strategy. More and more
people are using multiple channels to research products and services
and search engines are often part of the mix.
So even if you’re using
other tactics like TV, radio, and print, you still need an SEO strategy
to ensure you’re not losing customers when they turn to the internet to
do more research.
“Google
only loves you when everyone else loves you first.”
– Wendy Piersall
This is one of my
favorite SEO quotes because it’s so simple, yet so true. Google’s
mission is to organize all the information online and present it so
that the “best” is at the top of the search results.
How does Google
determine what is “best”?
Google’s algorithm
takes into account many factors, but one of the most important signals
is the number of websites that reference, or link, to the information.
Each link is like a vote in that website’s favor telling Google that it
deserves to rank high in the search results.
“Successful
SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to
provide the best search results for Google’s users.”
– Phil Frost, Main
Street ROI
One of the big
misconceptions about SEO is that it’s all about tricking Google to get
your website to rank high.
Again, it’s important
to consider Google’s mission. They want to organize all the information
online and present it to the searcher so that only the best websites
are at the top of the results page.
With that in mind, the
goal of SEO is to make it as easy as possible for Google to find your
website (by using proper HTML code, writing relevant copy, designing
for ease of use, optimizing page load speed) and then to give Google a
reason to rank your website higher than all the other relevant websites
(by publishing better and more robust information, getting more links,
more online PR).
“Today
it’s not about ‘get the traffic’ — it’s about ‘get the targeted and
relevant traffic.”
– Adam Audette, Chief Knowledge Officer, RKG
Again, the goal of SEO
is not to rank #1, it’s to generate leads and sales.
That means your SEO
strategy starts with finding the right keywords that will ultimately drive
conversions for your business. Use Google’s Keywords Planner Tool to
search for relevant keywords. Then take it one step further to organize
all the keywords you find into two categories:
- buying-intent
- research-intent
As you can probably
guess, the buying-intent keywords are the ones where the person
searching is most likely looking to make a purchase. The
research-intent keywords are the ones where the searcher is most likely
just doing research.
Focus your SEO efforts
on the buying-intent keywords first to give you the best chance to
drive leads and sales.
“It’s
much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate
than by doubling your traffic.”
– Jeff Eisenberg
Many businesses ignore
this simple truth.
Think about how hard it
is to double the amount of visitors to your website. You’ll have to
invest more in SEO, advertising, social media, email marketing, and/or
another marketing tactic to drive more website traffic.
Now consider the fact
that you would get the same impact on your business if instead, you
focused on doubling your website conversion rates.
It’s simple math…
(Traffic to your
website) x (Conversion rate) = (leads or sales)
Your conversion rate is
the number of leads or sales you generate from your website divided by
the total number of visitors. As you can see from that equation, you
can either double your traffic or double your conversion rate and the
result will be the same.
How can you double your
conversion rate? Try some of the following ideas:
- Present
a stronger, more compelling offer
- Change
the layout of your pages so that your offer is more easy to see
- Offer
free information in exchange for an email address so you can
follow up and convert over a longer time frame
- Use
retargeting ads to bring prospects (that didn’t convert) back to
your website
- Add
a lightbox popup so your offer can’t be missed
“The
best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google search.”
– Anonymous
I’ll admit, I “LOL’d”
when I first read this quote. :)
The sad truth with SEO
is that most people will not find your website unless you’re on the
first search results page. Keep in mind there are only 10 spots
available and likely tens of thousands or even tens of millions of
other websites vying for those coveted spots.
“Better
content is outweighing more content.”
– Rand Fishkin
This quote highlights a
recent shift in SEO.
In the past, publishing
more and more content was a great tactic to expand the reach of your SEO.
For example, as you publish more articles about different topics, your
website has more opportunities to rank in Google.
However, many
businesses took that tactic to the extreme and started to publish low
quality articles in an attempt to scale up article production at lower
costs.
Due to Google’s recent
algorithm updates, quality outweighs quantity. Always keep this in mind
and resist the urge to cut corners on quality in an attempt to publish
webpages faster.
“What
gets measured gets improved.”
– Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker was not
specifically talking about SEO in this quote, but it’s an important
point that deserves to make this list.
What needs to be
measured in SEO?
This may come as a
surprise, but tracking your rankings alone is worthless! Your rankings
should of course be measured, but they tell an incomplete story.
Even more important
than your rankings is your website traffic from SEO and your website
conversions from SEO.
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