Time for Business Owners to Change their Attitudes towards SEO

Date Published: 13-Aug-2014 | By: Shane K Morgan

SEO is dead. Today, It’s Digital Marketing Optimization

Executing tactics by SEO providers in past guaranteed results. Earlier they focused on lot of traffic and very little on their clients’ needs. If enough traffic comes then some would convert. Instead of working on the usability of site or serving the customers well, business owners focused on outsourcing their SEO projects to anyone who would do a lot for less. They bought links from many different providers to accumulate a very large number of links.

Businesses just encouraged these SEO Providers to implement strategies that generate traffic. Most of these strategies are against the current search engine guidelines. Such tactics did not negatively affect the sites much then. In fact, they worked in the past. Traffic did come. Some sales happened. Surely many visitors had bad experience but that did not matter at that time. There were many new visitors and someone purchased, the cash register rang and business continued.

Today, this does not work. If the visitors leave the website quickly, it is leads to high bounce rate. This is one of the major ranking factors today. If so many visitors leave the website without doing any activity, it shows that your website is not user-friendly. Emphasis should be more on usability of the website than just purely generating traffic and creating a bad experience. You need to have a great site, useful content and well thought out marketing campaigns to serve your customers well. As search engines grew smarter and advanced, most of these past traffic generating techniques have become spam and unacceptable by search engines.

Now a business that is focused on the customers and delivers great product/service to its customers wins.

Today, SEO is very challenging compared to the past
Regular and significant changes in search engines have become a big challenge for Internet marketers. Internet marketers need to have expertise in existing methods and ability to foresee the changes and make necessary adjustments to their SEO strategy so that their clients’ businesses don’t suffer due to future changes.

Updates and changes in search engines are also indicating that cheap tactics won’t work and you need to have a great website. Some of the updates in Google search engine that make ineffective and in fact cause negative impact on rankings for some earlier tactics are:

  • Panda: Low quality content like duplicate content, thin content and machine generated content (content ‘spun’ from other articles on the Internet)
  • Penguin: Over optimization like keyword stuffing, building thousands of keyword rich anchor text links, links bought from link schemes, links built on irrelevant sites to gain PageRank
  • EMD update: Domain name that matches exactly with the search query

A good digital marketer will be able to identify when search engines dislike a certain commonly used tactic and will stop doing it. Because in a few weeks or months the search engine will penalize that method by updating its algorithm. There will be some time lag before the search engines build a new algorithm. But before it is implemented, the SEO Provider should try to have a clean SEO profile for the website.

Long live digital marketing optimization – SEO as it was practiced in the past is dead
Business owners should understand that SEO as it was done in the past is dead. Making some on-page changes, writing a lot of low quality content and building a lot of links does not work. Low quality, simplistic solutions are not viable. What is required today is good judgment and competence.

Digital marketing optimization is a combination of IT, marketing, content, social credentials and web promotion. T-skills are very essential to coordinate and work with professionals of above areas. T-skills means apart from having deep expertise in digital marketing, you should also be able to connect and work with professionals of other areas.

Professional digital marketers educate clients
Only few good digital marketing companies take that extra responsibility of educating clients to understand the changes in the industry and relieve the anxiety of clients.

Many business owners need to change their attitude towards SEO – Look for digital marketers, not web developers or link builders
Some business owners are reducing budgets on internet marketing as link building has gone down. Out of ignorance and lack of awareness they are planning to reduce the budget for digital marketing or negotiating with the marketers. But, they should understand that digital marketing is not just link building. It is a multidisciplinary skill and very complex today. It requires skilled resources and expensive tools.

It is high time now for many of the business owners to understand the changing scenario of SEO and change their attitudes towards it. Reducing budgets at this crucial time is like losing the opportunity to stay ahead and win over competition. It is in fact the time to spend decently on digital marketing. At this time of transit, doing some decent digital marketing optimization will substantially benefit SMBs.

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