One of the best things about the internet is instant access to just about any information you need. When researching search engine optimization (SEO), this is especially true.
Enjoy!
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.”
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.
Good SEO work only gets better over time.– Jill Whalen (@jillwhalen), WhatDidYouDoWithJill.com
— Dave Naylor (@DaveNaylor), Bronco.co.UK Managing Director
You’re ignoring the most important part of SEO– your customers when you design your website for Google’s search engine spider. 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 sales and leads!
The goal of SEO is not to rank # 1. The goal is to generate leads and sales for your business.
“My rule of thumb is build a site for a user, not a spider.”
Even if you’re using other tactics like Radio, tv, 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.
“On a broad scale, I see SEO becoming a normalized marketing tactic, the same way Print, radio, and tv 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, 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.
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.
“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.”– Wendy Piersall
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.
One of the big misconceptions about SEO is that it’s all about tricking Google to get your website to rank high.
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).
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.
Successful SEO is not about tricking Google.– Phil Frost, Main Street ROI
Again, the goal of SEO is not to rank # 1, it’s to generate sales and leads.
“Today it’s not about ‘get the traffic’– it’s about ‘get the targeted and relevant traffic.”– Adam Audette, Chief Knowledge Officer, RKG
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. 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 sales and leads.
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.
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.