It’s a congested field, but I suspect search engine optimisation (SEO) maybe the single most misunderstood topic in digital marketing today. And speaking of congested fields (there’s a reason some wags have dubbed this business ‘ShortFuse’ after all), when it comes to a good old-fashioned ‘forthright exchange of views’ SEO would be high on the list of subjects that get me going.
There’s a good reason for this. I’ll expand more below, but I’ll put it bluntly up here: the vast majority of content relating to SEO is written by people who want to sell you something relating to SEO. These people have a vested interest in being economical with the truth, and collectively they generate an awful lot of pretty ropey advice that becomes accepted as gospel.
This being the case, it might be helpful to discuss SEO in the light of three often-ignored and inconvenient truths - and discovering what they teach us about doing SEO right.
1. It Isn’t For Everyone
Life is about marshalling scarce resources and putting them to use where they will do the most good. So SEO, like any other marketing activity, should be measured in terms of the return on your investment. And speaking of ‘investment’, be aware that although the terms ‘organic’ search may try to persuade us otherwise, it takes a lot of blood, sweat and expensive tears to really perform in the SEO space.
So ask yourself first whether it is worth it. Do you expect most of your new business to come via web searches? In some cases the answer to that question will be an emphatic ‘yes’. You might be in the car rental business for example, and when someone searches ‘car hire Dublin’ you can be pretty sure they’d like to hire a car in Dublin and it would make a decent amount of sense to top that particular ranking.
For the rest of us it’s a little more complicated. In my line of work, for example, almost all new business comes through word of mouth or some form of referral. These pieces only exist because I like to write and they help convince potential customers that I know what I am talking about.
As a rule, the more targeted your marketing and the smaller your pool of potential customers, the less significant SEO becomes. Fortunately, it isn’t hard to establish where your new business is coming from today and making a reasonably accurate judgement call as to whether an investment in SEO will increase your ‘organic search’ number. Do that first.
2. It Is Frequently Oversold
Once upon a time it was easy to cheat search engines. All sorts of comical tricks, such as repeating keywords over and over again in white text on a white background (yes, really) were employed in order to fool the folks (or robots) at Google and Yahoo! that this particular site should be #1.
That doesn’t work so well any more. It turns out that the folks at Google are rather clever (we will say nothing about Yahoo!). Fooling them is tough nowadays, and if you doubt that just run a Google search on any term you care to think of. You’ll find that usually you’ll get the ‘right’ answer.
Now that’s great news for everybody, except the many and various SEO agencies that sprung up in the bad old days to help companies fool search engines. The response from a lot of them has been to pretend that the rules haven’t changed that much and that there remains some sort of magic SEO sauce that they can apply to your pages that will send you shooting up the results pages.
That really isn’t true any more. As long as you are doing the basic stuff right technically getting SEO right is a question of producing content and building inbound links. Don’t get me wrong, good SEO agencies can help with both those challenges. But there are no shortcuts. The belief that a small investment in SEO can yield big results is false and has been for some time. Don’t fall for anyone peddling it.
3. It’s Often Nothing To Do With Keywords
Nothing is more exciting than seeing your site ranking well for an important keyword. I get that. And it would be inaccurate to say that it makes little difference to the business - it can make a great deal of difference.
However, the truth is that a successful SEO strategy is nearly always not about ranking for individual popular keywords, but much more about ranking across an almost infinite number of searches you can’t anticipate because they are so many and varied in form.
Think about it - the average Google search includes 3 or 4 words, it’s almost impossible to anticipate every combination that might be interesting to you. These combinations make up the ‘long tail’ of searches and vastly outnumber any individual keyword, no matter how popular.
That’s why it is particularly dangerous to focus on a few keywords. The clue is in the word ‘focus’ - if you spend a lot of time creating content for a few specific words and phrases you’re ignoring every other term you might rank on and in some cases actively filling your site with terrible copy to please a robot.
So with all that said, here’s three simple high-level rules I would propose for an organisation willing to invest in SEO:
1. Write What You Love (And What You Know About)
Write for humans, not robots. Write at length, and write with passion about the specialist knowledge and experience your organisation has and your people have. There is no substitute. Look after the humans and the robots will look after themselves. To some this advice might sound naive, but I don’t believe that’s the case at all.
Ultimately, our content isn’t just about bringing people to the site (outside of a very limited number of organisations anyway). It’s about persuading them once they are there. And if you build up a strong enough body of content, you’ll find that your work delivers results across all those long tail searches we mentioned above.
2. Measure Success The Right Way
What is the point of SEO? That might sound like a daft question but answering it tells you how to think about measurement. Specifically, SEO does not exist to get the business onto the first page of Google for a particular keyword. That might make people feel warm and fuzzy but it doesn’t pay any bills, so measuring ‘success’ by rank for specific keywords is usually a mistake (even if that metric might be useful for other reasons).
Instead, measure what you actually care about. Total page views and new visitors from organic search, or in most cases total inbound sales and leads from organic search. The latter number is the one that actually matters. In fact in most B2B businesses we can and should go further again and measure sales-accepted leads from inbound search - otherwise we could simply be ranking for terms that don’t correlate with the business and are not searched for by our target audience.
3. Focus on Link Building
Having great content is one thing. But your ranking - for every search - is also influenced by your reputation. And that reputation is calculated (more or less) on the sum of inbound links to your site and content.
The good news is that if you’re diligently following my first piece of advice many of these links will happen naturally. But there’s certainly no harm in helping things along. Use social media to ensure as many people as possible are aware of your content and have an opportunity to link to it. Look to exchange content with organisations that are in adjacent fields and probably have their own blogs and resources online.
Work hard to attract the attention of influencers. Insert yourself into relevant conversations and reach out to ask if they’d like to contribute to your own content efforts (they will link back to anything you publish). This is the point at which SEO becomes more a form of digital PR than the activity that most agencies want to sell you - and it may be worthwhile thinking in PR terms when it comes to hires and agencies.
Good luck!
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