When you hear someone say “SEO” do you cringe? Do you roll your eyes? Do you think “yeah, yeah, SEO…blah…blah”
If you answered yes to any of these questions then you’re probably frustrated with SEO and have either given up on it or think it ranks up there with elusive creatures like Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster. I’ve seen eyes glaze over when the topic of SEO is brought up because it’s often oversold and under-delivered.

I could write a book about my experience with SEO over the past 25 years but here is a brief overview. My background in SEO started back when I was playing with AOL, Geocities, and Homestead website builders in high school – before SEO was even a thing or a phrase. I had a passion for building websites that brought people together – primarily built around event calendars and guides to the city – like cool places to go or things to do in Louisville. I wanted anyone searching for things to do in Louisville, KY to find my website and get useful information that would lead to happiness. I became extremely good at getting websites to rank high on Google through constant experimentation and measuring results.

Instead of diving into the history of how search engines and techniques have evolved over time – let’s look at:
1. Why SEO may be viewed as a bogus or dirty word
2. What SEO is today
3. What businesses, brands, and organizations should focus on today

Why SEO may be viewed as a bogus or dirty word:
Pretty plain and simple – SEO has been overly polluted, abused, and sold as snake oil over the past two decades. SEO was a perfect definition – Search Engine Optimization – that ultimately became a product/service name to be marketed and sold as a magic pill. SEO was the hottest thing on the block – everyone needed it, few understood it, and most traditional agencies, struggling to add digital to their portfolio, magically knew how to deliver it.

People have become burnt out because of a lot of promises with no delivery. The biggest contributors to this have been lack of knowledge, automation, one size fits all packaging, and price wars.

If you’re going to have great SEO – you must understand the big picture, you can’t automate it, you can’t use the same strategy for every client and every industry, and if it’s cheap – you’re going to get what you pay for.

What SEO is today:
SEO is still being sold today as a package or service by many companies, agencies, and organizations. There are still many different definitions of SEO that are out there, including other names like content marketing, SEM, PPC, etc. It makes it really hard to figure out what is the truth through all the noise. How many more 3 letter acronyms can the industry come up with and what are you actually getting under the label of SEO?

Pay attention: SEO today isn’t a product, a package, or a magic pill you can buy and sleep soundly knowing that you possess it. It’s no longer about “what you do” but it is about “how you do it”. It’s a technique. If you can buy a tool or an AI assistant, your competitors can too.

SEO today works a lot like an orchestra. It is composed of several sections and instruments whose goal is to work together to produce beautiful music for a deserving audience.

To truly excel at great SEO – your teams need to know how their part contributes to the big picture. Some of the biggest mistakes I see are when the teams operate separately. For example, a talented content team can create some excellent website copy but if the page is not strategically optimized for search in the meta data code or schema info – the odds of someone finding it from a search engine is usually slim. Just because it exists doesn’t mean it will rank.

Aside from direct traffic – organic search engine traffic is the most valuable traffic you can get. It means that someone searched online, found your website, and is relying on you for the solution to their problem – whether it be a question they need answered, a product they are looking for, or a service they need to hire. (and it works 24/7!)

SEO today is a combination of every aspect of your website and the customer journey – from search to conversion – it doesn’t have to be fancy, you don’t need movies playing in the background of your page (this often does more harm than good), and you don’t need pop ups and other gimmicks to get people to convert. Let me clarify that statement: You don’t need all that noise if you have a great product or service. You might need the gimmicks and trickery if you’re trying to bait people into submitting their info on your site. Ultimately all that does is create frustration for both you and the user through unqualified interactions. The easier you can make the experience for your customers and clients on your website – the better it will work for you and them in the long run.

What businesses, brands, and organizations should focus on today:
Focus on the needs of your customers first, then focus on your product or service. There is so much noise in the industry right now it can be extremely overwhelming and dilute the big picture goals of your company or organization.

Here’s what to focus on today:
1. Go Google your company name – do the search results represent your company the way you want them to? Are there good/bad reviews that need to be addressed? Does your search engine result link display accurate information that would help a user feel comfortable clicking on it or does it have random content from your home page? Do you have any competitors trying to falsely lure customers away from your site to theirs?
2. Visit your website as if you were going to walk the journey of a potential customer or client. Can you easily make a purchase, submit your information, or complete whatever the desired action would be? Is anything broken?
3. Use your mobile device to navigate your site – repeat the tests from #2
Do your confirmation/thank you pages appropriately further engage your audience? They arrived at this page because they’re interested enough in you to submit their information – don’t waste your thank you page!
4. Search Google for your product or service – do you come up on the first page? (I recommend doing this in In-Private or Incognito browsing to keep your search history from influencing your search results – if the link on the search engine result page on Google is purple, that means you have clicked on it before and Google is showing it to you again because of your search history – not because you are organically ranking well)
5. Review your current external efforts and ad spends. Are your ads being executed strategically with purpose or are they just running and spending money because that’s what Google suggested? Are you paying for ads you are already ranking for organically? (i.e. – are you paying for clicks you would otherwise be getting for free?)

If you’re investing money in paid advertising but can’t figure out why you’re not seeing an increase in conversions – the problem is most likely your website or the keywords you are bidding on.

If you have tested your website and everything is good then it may be time to look at other factors like online reputation and reviews, product relevancy, market share, etc. A simple tweak, like changing the description of a product or service to popular phrases in the service area, could be all you need to get back on the map and show up in relevant searches.

SEO is an extremely complex and abused beast but when simplified and used properly – it will be your best friend. There is no way to apply SEO advice to all situations in one article but feel free reach out for a review of your website!