If you could start over and rebuild your website; its structure and content, without giving a single thought to SEO, how different would it be? If you thought only about creating a positive experience for visitors, providing useful, educational content, images and resources,would your website look any different? If the answer is “yes’, it’s likely time you took an objective look at your website design and made some changes.
As with most of you reading this blog, traffic and good SEO is important because it’s almost always tied directly with your company’s bottom line. But we may need to approach our quest for more website traffic and profits from a different angle.
Content and User Experience are Paramount.
With Google’s continuous advancements in technology and intelligence, we may sound a bit foolish, proclaiming that link-building and keyword stuffing is somehow going to yield us a favourable ranking. It won’t. Imagine hundreds of nerdy, propeller-heads working around the clock, making the world’s #1 search engine smarter and better, because this is what your Internet marketing is up against. While link data helps search engines score your website’s authority and popularity, it certainly won’t move the proverbial needle if the content and positive user experience aren’t there.
It’s no secret, as we’ve already witnessed with massive changes brought about by Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, along with those critical success factors that SEO scholars have been repeatedly warning about. Google is becoming less about counting links; less about exact match keywords, and has managed to out-step even the most clever SEOs, sending many back to the drawing board to create plain, old-fashioned, quality content. This is great news for small business owners who are enjoying a level playing field once again. Without breaking the bank, the ‘little guy’ can now keep pace with large companies that have massive marketing budgets and staff with a grass roots approach to content creation. Remember that SEO strategies can grow beyond good content and a positive user experience to grow ranking results. Search engines also record click through ratios (CTRs) and ‘dwell time’. This means that getting your website listed into a top ranking position is only part of the battle, as you will also need to draw clicks through the use of good teaser snippets (meta descriptions), and keep those visitors from bouncing back to the results page too quickly.
I know it sounds kind of crazy, but good SEO means forgetting about search engine rankings, and forgetting about sales and profit.
LET’S WORK TOGETHER
Whether you’re a startup or multi-million dollar organization, we’re up for anything.
