Magic Bullet, Part II - SEO is a forever game

In one of our recent blog posts, we talked about the fact that there is no magic bullet in web design. Indeed, gaining visitors to your website is a complicated task and the competition is fierce. We covered the many ways that web design can hinder the user experience, and we spent a great deal of time talking about Google's prominence in the search engine industry and how they have restricted our access to valuable data to understand how users find our websites organically.

In this blog post, Magic Bullet Part II, we will further dispel the myth that SEO is a one-time event and continue with the line of thinking that you will need to pay your SEO forever. Sounds daunting, doesn't it?

Let's take a step back and review some of the onsite SEO basics that every small business owner needs to be paying attention to. In simpler times, on-site SEO was a one-time project consisting of mostly technical activities that were done to the code of your site.

Just a few years ago, you could hire an SEO professional and they would run your website through a checklist and make several tweaks to the code in fairly rapid fashion. Typical changes included an analysis and rewrite of your title tags, examination of your H1 tags, a review of your site speed and image compression and other various technical components of how the website was constructed.

There was, and continues to be, evidence that Google favors websites with solid construction and easy spider consumption. An on-site SEO project will position your website appropriately for Google and will certainly help in the writing process.

Offsite SEO is a term for activities that your marketing team will conduct that do not include any changes to the physical website itself. This is where things generally get pretty confusing for small business owners.

If you were going to optimize my website, how can you do that with activities that have nothing to do with my website?

A basic review of how the Google algorithm works reveals that backlinks are incredibly important components for ranking a website or any specific page of content on a website. Backlinks point to you from other domain names and essentially count as votes for your website.

In the early days of backlink building, SEO professionals would secure as many backlinks as possible. The thinking was that this was like stuffing the ballot box with votes and as Google saw those links your website would move up the rankings because it was very popular.

Google, of course, has made many modifications to their algorithm, and they have zeroed in on backlinks that they believe are manipulative in an attempt to discount them in the algorithm. In plain English, they've gotten very smart at detecting when a link was naturally placed versus placed simply to manipulate their search rankings.

One of the easiest ways for Google to detect a manipulative backlink pattern is through the analysis of anchor text. Anchor text is the English presented to the user in a hyperlink pointing to a website. If the anchor text is too similar across many different backlinks, this is a signal that they may have been placed with manipulative intent. The natural pattern of anchor text will include many varieties of words including instructional words like “click here” or “read more.” Google knows this and analyzes your anchor text to see if it deviates significantly from expected norms.

With the competition for page one rankings intensifying, many search engine optimization professionals have evolved their link building strategies into full blown content marketing. Content marketing is the practice of giving away very valuable information in return for gaining an audience of potential customers.

The focus here is producing extremely useful content for the end user. This is sometimes known as 10x content because it is 10 times better than anything else that is on page one of Google for a specific keyword phrase. Producing this kind of content is extremely time-intensive is often something agencies will outsource to a white label firm.

The heavy lifting in content marketing is actually in the promotion of the content after it has been created. Many experts recommend spending 20% of the allocated resource time on content production and 80% on the promotion of that content.

If you need confirmation of this statistic, take a look at any page one ranking for a blog post. You will quickly notice the content is extremely well-written, has probably over 1,500 words in the post, and the page hosting the content has at least 10 unique backlinks to it if not more.

These backlinks don't generate themselves, contrary to what Google wants you to believe. A concerted marketing effort is needed to promote good content to catch people's attention and lobby for a link from influencers in the industry.

Another way your SEO strategy will become evergreen in your marketing discussions becomes clear once you understand the interplay between SEO, social media, and email marketing. As you shift more to content marketing as a primary means for backlink acquisition, you realize that social and email are excellent channels for dissemination of content that has been published.

It's much harder to push great content if you do not have an active social media campaign running. If your social media pages are active and include many followers, putting new content out will instantly bring some click-throughs that will send positive signals to Google. Additionally, the people following you on social media are likely link creators looking for citations for their latest blog publication.

Email marketing can provide the same advantages to your search engine optimization that social media does. Despite the unsexy nature of email as a technology, it remains one of the most used platforms for most professionals. The strategy is to develop an extensive list of email addresses for users to opt-in to your content. The bigger your list the stronger your success will be with each new blog post as you can pull users back to your website and potentially pick up a link or two from interested readers.

After you've been through the content marketing production cycle and produced long blog posts of over 1,500 words, and spent the 80% of your effort on promotion through social media, email marketing, and perhaps even direct link outreach, you start to see that SEO is no longer a one-time technical event you “do to your website.”

In the end, SEO becomes a critical marketing activity that integrates nicely with your other digital strategies. In this fashion, you will be paying for SEO forever, but you will also want to. The quality of the leads that come in through this marketing strategy rival other advertising channelsas buying intent tends to be quite high. Inbound marketing channels generally close at much higher rates than outbound regeneration strategies, which will keep SEO at the top of your marketing lists as important small business activities for revenue growth.

If you have any questions about the content in this article, don't hesitate to contact me at info@bizzistance.com! If you found this article helpful, you may find other articles in my Small Business Tips Series helpful. Check out the Series here!