Overcoming Weak SEO

No matter what kind of business you have, brick-and-mortar or online, having an online marketing campaign is vital. Many people get really caught up in search engine optimization (SEO) tricks; thinking that’s how online marketing works. Far from it. SEO is just a small element of online marketing.

SEO Doesn’t Not Equate to Instant High Traffic

There are popular blogs and websites that exist today which get tons of traffic but technically have horrific SEO.

When you check out a popular website that became highly read and shared without using SEO, ask yourself, “What did they do differently than someone who tricked out their website with SEO to land on the first page of Google Search?” The answer is content.

On most popular websites you’ll find a lot of well-written, compelling, unique, interesting content.

Focus on the Purpose of Your Content

One could debate that content is SEO and certainly a powerful facet of good SEO. However, focusing too much on SEO (like keywords) can make you ignore the purpose of your content. The point of content is to provide interesting, compelling and thoughtful content to your audience.

After that, the point of content is to provide keywords and keyword phrases to search engines so that your audience can find you.

Give Your Audience Something They Can Use

You must focus on helping your audience with information they seek and possibly information they didn’t know was out there. Then within that you intelligently weave keywords that they are using to seek out your information and others like it.
The new search engine algorithms no longer just look at keywords as an indicator of a good website on which to send readers. Instead, the algorithm looks at a variety of factors outside of keywords.

In fact, in many cases, you can’t even find out what keywords your readers are using to find you anyway. You can use tools such as Google Keywords to help you narrow down the ballparks, but you are still playing a guessing game of sorts.

So, instead of focusing so much on specific keywords, and SEO tricks, focus instead on providing your readers a good experience on your website. You want to give them awesome content that they can use, as well as point them to the right place for products and services that match your audience’s interests.

This will take more research into who your audience is, than research into the use of keywords.

Don’t Force Keywords; They Should Flow Naturally

The great thing about creating unique, compelling and useful content for your audience is that it’s going to naturally encompass keywords that your audience might use to find you, without artificially stuffing keywords into uncomfortable sentence structures. This is going to make your content even more readable and valuable to your readers.

In addition, focus on creating valuable communities on social media networks, as well as focus more on building your email list. Focus on ensuring that your URLs are keywords based on the topic of each page as a whole, rather than focusing on individual keywords.

The Rundown

This doesn’t mean you should give up the idea of keyword research, but it does mean that you need to focus on providing valuable content to your audience in a variety of formats on your website, as well as on social media accounts, blogs, and more. By remembering that marketing is about your customer first and foremost, you’ll likely find that your SEO improves dramatically, naturally.