T his is quite an animated article. I have decided to write about my frustrations in the SEO field. Far too often I come across a client that’s been burned by an ‘SEO Expert.’ They have spent a ton of money with their ‘SEO guy’ and ended up getting mediocre results. There are so many reasons why their SEO strategies haven’t spewed out results. Our entire industry gets a bad reputation because the promise of coming up ‘#1 in Google Search’ was broken.
The SEO Guarantee
A lot of frustrations come from ‘SEO Experts’ using tactics that fall into black-hat, spammy, or website-optimization-only categories. It drives me absolutely crazy to hear of ‘guaranteed results’ or ‘money back’ promises because it is the equivalent of an attorney guaranteeing that you won’t pay a dime in child support while being the breadwinner. Plainly put, it’s not realistic and one way or another advertising costs or your precious time promoting your brand, are inevitable.
If You Don't Adapt In A Competitive SEO Environment, You Will Become Extinct.
SEO, And Then Some
Many of the mediums we use today to get traffic to our websites are the same. The tactics we use, however, have diversified. SEO is NOT enough. I repeat, NOT enough. SEO is one facet of digital marketing. What experts, that have adapted to the ever-evolving search atmosphere are doing, is engaging in a multi-faceted approach comprised of advertising, social media, display ads, content creation, video marketing, and engagement (among many others.) Google search, Adwords, or Adsense are not the only mediums you should be obsessing over. Depending on your industry and service/product, yelp ads, amazon ads, Facebook advertising, Bing ads, Instagram promotions, or specific authoritative directories will be beneficial to your bottom line. As we move towards more diverse search behaviors as consumers, there will be endless combinations of digital marketing strategies that provide results for the specific business goals of each client. Aside from the ‘search acquisition’ portion, people don’t just end up on your homepage. All of your landing pages need to be optimized and user-friendly, as they will be a starting point for someone’s journey.
SEO Guru to Digital Marketing Expert
Some have coined this all-encompassing marketing approach as ‘digital marketing’ or ‘search marketing.’ I prefer the term holistic digital marketing, but I get a few eyebrow raises when I say that. Whatever the term, our clients are still searching for ‘SEO Companies’ and 20 other similar sounding phrases, so we are optimizing for it, but as professionals, we need to teach people that SEO has evolved. There are digital marketing professionals out there that care about their clients’ success and won’t turn out to be bad business flings. Let’s all combine forces and set healthier expectations for our clients.
