In my day to day dealings with clients and friends who think they understand SEO (the key word here is think) I often find myself frustrated. Let me just get this off of my chest:
SEO ISN’T EASY, GET RICH QUICK OR A STANDALONE INITIATIVE.
Ah. That feels better. Now, allow me to explain:
“SEO isn’t easy” – Yes, that’s right. You’re not going to be able to execute some top secret, hulk smash, overnight top 3 method. Effective SEO is something that requires equal parts knowledge, persistence and luck. The key word here (us SEO guys like keywords) is effective. I’m not saying you can’t artificially inflate your rankings temporarily by spamming tens of thousands of profiles, forum signatures or blog comments in a few day’s time… Effective SEO, to me anyway, can be defined as efforts that cultivate stable results, those that aren’t temporary or at risk of sudden failure.
“SEO isn’t get-rich-quick” – Being marketers by trade, we’re probably to blame for this (I’m looking at you, you, and you). The truth of the matter is that even the best SEO guys out there can’t guarantee rankings, income or that their 10 minute top 3 technique will work today, tomorrow, or next year. We can however guarantee that being armed with knowledge (lots of it), being extremely persistent and by offering value in every possible way, you’ll do well in the long run. Which brings me to my next point:
“SEO isn’t a standalone initiative” – The most effective SEO guys I’ve seen (I’m a big proponent of this as well) don’t consider what they do to be SEO. Instead, to them, it’s marketing 101. Take for instance the example of increasing trust and authority. After launching a website and beginning the promotion, let’s pretend that Google didn’t exist. What would you do?
I’d do something like this:
- Reach out to the high traffic, authority resources in my niche. They’ve got the visitors and the cred – a good place for my marketing message and a link.
- Get listed in the relevant directories that people actually use. (DMOZ, LII, BOTW, Y!, etc)
- Approach the press – interviews, product reviews, launch coverage, etc.
Not only will these examples greatly benefit your website in terms of SEO, but they’ll also likely lend revenue and credibility. Also, it just so happens that the majority of ideas like these are going to help increase your trust and authority. We all know (or should know) by now that for a site, having substantial trust and authority tend to increase ranking stability, magnify backlink efforts and allow them to inject new posts or products into the top positions in search engines.
Also, for the same point, I’d like to mention that SEO isn’t the be-all-end-all of internet marketing. It’s slow, tedious and often unpredictable. Cashflow is crucial to a startup and SEO has a great ability to burn through cash faster than this lady can fold a t-shirt (god bless her), especially if you’re not managing your own campaign.
In closing, I don’t mean to discount the viability of SEO. I’ve greatly benefited from well executed SEO (as have my clients, friends, colleagues, and so on) and strongly believe most of the businesses out there can too. I just think that expectations need to be managed, myths need to be addressed and accountability & ROI should be the real metrics for evaluating progress and effectiveness.
