Search Engine Optimization, A Necessity?
Digital Marketing • 15th Jul, 15
The SEO game has been pondered and dissected for as long as Google has been spewing out algorithms and updates, but is SEO truly a necessity and how much impact does it have on your site?
If you’ve ever received an SEO audit on your website, you have no doubt come face to face with a thousand issues that need fixing in order to improve and increase your SEO score. Many websites also offer to fix these issues, and while their claims may or may not be legitimate, they don’t really outline by how much your site will be improved. This is ultimately important as you should have a clear understanding of your return on what is probably a significant investment.
Improved SEO should not be a checklist!
Optimizing your site’s SEO should not involve going through a checklist and just clicking off thousands of items from a to-do list. Within SEO optimization, things are not always created equal, meaning you can probably spend hundreds of hours fixing the resulting audit “issues” of your site, but in more circumstances than not, you will not receive a proportional return in your score. Did you know that getting your articles shared across social media and linked by influential websites weighs heavier and contributes a significantly larger portion of the overall SEO score? This is a basic guideline and something that Google officially states in its “Steps to a Google-friendly site”.
Treat SEO like Job-Hunting
When looking at SEO as comparative to job hunting, we may pick up a few similarities. Your resume is similar to your website in that it’s filled with great amounts of content and keywords. The primary reader of your resume is your potential employer, but they are not the only ones who take a glance at it, and most times won’t even be the first to look at it. These days when applying for a job, your resume content gets processed by software in the format that ‘recruiters’ can run searches based on keywords. They type keywords into their resume database looking for specific job skillsets and experience to meet their demand.
It’s therefore a smart choice to include keywords in your resume that recruiters would be on the lookout for. If you’re a good match on their search, they take the time to look at your resume or CV. Is all this starting to sound familiar?
You may have come across dozens of resume optimization tips, and advice telling you to do ABC in order to fix various issues with your resume in order to improve its quality. In the end though, these are not a sure-fire means of getting hired, you may still lose out to the competition due to lack of experience, or because the other candidate is better connected and has a foot in the door. There’s obviously a limit to how much you can optimize your resume by stuffing it with keywords. Having a better qualification and higher social influence may just have a higher impact on whether you get the job or not.
And so the same applies to SEO and principles of its optimization. Valued content means a great deal more than content that’s just been stuffed with keywords in order to attain ranking. The value people place on your content results in it being shared across social networks, resulting in a higher impact on SEO. Google has become smart enough and implemented enough updates and algorithms to find out what’s more relevant to people and will no longer be fooled by basic SEO tactics and short cuts to ranking.
Focus on People, Focus on ROI
True and practical SEO optimization is more concerned with utilizing your limited resources to make the most out of them. Of course focus should be made on building a website that is friendly for robots to process content. Beyond that primary step, ultimate focus should be placed on publishing content that is valued by human readers first, so that robots will then pick it up afterwards. Take steps to stop spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into pleasing ‘bots and use your resources instead to create valued, high quality content. Remember your content will stay valuable and carry over even after you redesign your website, a lot of ‘fixing’ effort on existing sites however, will likely not cut it at all.
Focus on these few ideas to tweak your blog post and create value that may see real ROI:
- Don’t try to impress industry experts – what you and ‘the industry’ find interesting is often not what your readers may be interested in. So take note when talking to people and listen to what attracts and entices them. This will help in keeping your content interesting and insightful and your topics fresh.
- Delve into your library and turn your older print articles into digital articles online. Well written articles are timeless, they never get old; just make sure the topic is flexible and not outdated though.
- Pretend when writing blog posts (especially tips, tricks and guidelines) that you are educating a new employee that is starting this specific job for the first time. This will help in making your writing technique simple and less cluttered, making it easier to comprehend after just one read.
- If you are a strongly opinionated person about what goes on in your industry, don’t just verbally express that opinion with co-workers or friends, use your online platform to voice these constructively and publish online (be sure to cover yourself with some fact and research though).
Good SEO practice is often a very gray area, make sure that you incorporate what Google requires as important key elements and guidelines and make sure to try and encompass the above tips and tricks – don’t be blindly led by online websites promising you complete SEO solutions which you could actually better accomplish on your own.