Talking People Out of SEO #1: Why SEO Is Not The Be-All and End-All

11/10/2012

Unscrupulous SEO agencies, let me count thy ways…

Thou shalt tout SEO as the be-all and end-all of online marketing which generates masses of free traffic to those with the wisdom to hire thy agency to do it
Thou shalt pretend complete ignorance of the term ROI
Thou shalt make enormous promises of boosting Google rank and getting websites to the first page without making reference to personalised search
Thou shalt guarantee top spot for overly specific long tail keywords which are not necessarily relevant to thy client’s business needs
Thou shalt measure results purely on the basis of rankings or page traffic rather than meaningful business metrics
Thou shalt not provide any useful reports or insights on work carried out each month except thy invoices to thy client
Thou shalt content spam, link spam, article spin and generally use incredibly black hat SEO tactics, in thy mercy…

Why SEO Isn't The Only Type Of Online Marketing

In the first part of this seven part series of articles, we'll look at why SEO may not in fact be the answer to all your online marketing woes. Contrary to what many marketers will tell you, SEO is not in fact the last word (or indeed the first word) when it comes to marketing your website or your business online. It may not be right for you. If may not give you the best return on investment. You may need something faster, better, stronger, which will give you more rapid or easily measurable results.

PPC advertising, like Google Adwords, for example, gives guaranteed very fast results. You bid only on keywords and traffic you want, which allows you to focus effort very specifically around the keywords and phrases that will give you the best return on your budget and time investment. With decent Adwords management you easily hit top or near top position on search engines so you quickly stand out from the bunch, and you can tie in plenty of other cleverness into your ads by showing them on mobile or non mobile platforms, adding in depth sitelinks to channel people into your site pages or even promoting social or mobile applications. The sheer speed of Adwords and similar PPC platforms makes it a tool of choice for people who need to run at top speed into their market and can’t afford the slower, steadier buildup that SEO work requires. Create an account, prep some ads and you’re off – whereas SEO payoff is normally measured in terms of weeks or months, PPC performance can get your phones ringing inside of a few hours or less.

Social media can be a highly valuable platform to focus on for marketing – think of it as an online way of drumming up business via word of mouth. Instead of spending ages working on your website content in the hopes of an audience that may never read it, you could instead spend that time investment in online networking, engaging in discussions and getting feedback from customers and prospects. If their alternatives are a relatively dull and non-interactive competitor or someone who does nothing but make like a sales robot on Facebook, chances are that you can build up a great deal of brand awareness and loyalty by interacting with your audience on these ready-made platforms using your own charm and knowledge rather than forcing people onto your website to read content that they’d rather get spoon-fed by a real person on a social network instead. Check out your audience – maybe they want you to be more social, in which case it may be time to pull back the SEO and get your talking shoes on.

Finally – perhaps most importantly – remember that content is king. Don’t expect SEO work to solve all your marketing woes if there is nothing for it to work with. One of the most common things we see is people turning up asking for SEO work on a site with three pages and maybe twenty words of copy, someone saying they want to appear “at the top of Google” for this or that keyword when their site hardly makes mention of it, or turning up with a generally poorly coded and designed website expecting “SEO work” to magically turn it into a moneymaker. SEO is at the end of the day based around content. If you want to rank well for “banana rum” then make sure you have at least one page – and preferably several – with good content and keyword sensitive copy about bananas and their consumption in rum-based form. If your SEO seems like an uphill struggle and a large investment is giving little return, it might be time to hang fire on the articles and backlink generation and return to your website content. Improve what is on the site, make it readable, keyword-relevant and interesting, and you might suddenly find that the SEO starts largely taking care of itself.

If you’re baffled by blogs and lost in links, pick up the phone and call 0330 555 4680 today to find out how Cornish WebServices can help you build a sensible and sustainable set of online marketing to include SEO, PPC, social media and more.

PS we build beautiful websites too!

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