Over the last 10 or so years, it’s been drummed into business owner’s heads that they need to invest heavily in search engine optimization (SEO) in order for their website to be successful. As a result, many businesses have become obsessed with Google search engine optimization. After working in the industry for years, we've seen a gradual decrease in results; which has led to a lot of frustration for both clients and SEO experts. Because of this, we have been telling clients to stop worrying so much about search engine optimization and instead to focus on internet marketing as a whole.
I know, I know. Alarm bells and questions must be going off in your head right now. What about Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)? What about getting high placements for keywords? We are going to look at the top reasons you shouldn’t worry so much about SEO to put your mind at ease.
Top 5 reasons to stop worrying about Google Search Engine Optimization
Many times, after performing a lot of on-site and off-site SEO work, we see some traffic increases but not a lot of new customers. Why is this? Well, the first time we started seeing this we were baffled as well. It should be obvious but once we looked closer, we started to see why. Here are 5 reasons:
- Social media is a resource for information.
We all use social media as a tool to find information because we trust our friends and family more than we trust the internet. If a business spends all its resources on SEO, they will miss out on the opportunity to reach customers through social media.
- Users already have their bookmarks and favorites.
If users already have their favorite business for a particular product or service, they will go directly to that business’ website instead of doing a search for the product or service. Those who do find your business through search may not be looking for a new option but simply to find the business they already use, thus decreasing their value. Many visitors are not engaged enough and not necessarily looking for your product or service.
- People are searching for more long tail keywords.
In the past, businesses could get away with individual keywords to optimize their websites for search engines. For example, “{my town} dentist”. Searchers are now much more likely to use long tail keywords – a string of words closer to a sentence to make their search such as "dentist who specializes in gold crowns in {my town}". Attracting visitors who use long tail keywords requires a different SEO method to get placed higher in search engine results.
- Google algorithms are changing rapidly.
So, you hire a savvy SEO expert to analyze some keywords and to perform on-site optimization and link building. It takes three months for the results to kick in and then four months later your rankings are down again. The problem here is that Google reserves the right to change their algorithms whenever they feel like it and small businesses are at their mercy.
- Internet marketing tactics are more effective.
There is a new age emerging that is focused more on attracting visitors via social media and engaging for conversions to leads. There is a very specific process that has been designed to optimize your efforts to get more business from the internet and SEO is just a part of this process.
So, what should you do? Focus on your internet marketing as a whole. Work on generating better content for your customers and interacting with them on social media rather than obsessing over keywords.
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