“Get your website ranked in top 10 or your money back!”
Looks more like a weight loss advertisement. For people who are in a serious online marketing business, these advertisements are a good joke to laugh at. But for umpteen companies who get fooled by them it can be a total shocker when they don’t get the results they want.
Such claims by SEO companies are hard to digest, but it’s annoying to see that companies start building their expectation around such claims.
Online Marketing is not different from Offline Marketing
Let’s take an analogy between online marketing and offline marketing. You have built a product and are trying to sell it from a store located in one of the by-lanes of a market where there are countless other shops. A guy named SEO comes and tell you that he’ll place direction signs across the market in such a manner that everyone will come to your shop. Sounds so cool. But wait! Don’t you think if it was so easy other shop keepers would be doing the same thing? And with so many direction signs, the market authority would come into action and remove all of them. That’s exactly what happened in the online space when SEO was being misused.
SEO companies started using keywords and URLs to guide traffic to the websites which didn’t even have the substance they claimed. Now just like the market authority, Google isn’t stupid. It swung into action and built a smart crawler which started ranking websites more on the content than just keywords and links. Those who understood, started creating content to fulfill the requirements of these SEO efforts.
So if we go back to our market analogy, a smart shop owner now places hoardings, pamphlets and all sorts of advertisements highlighting the features and benefits, complemented by the efforts of the SEO guy who is now bringing people by guiding them through the traffic in the busy market.
Marketing is a continuous process
The next step is to keep creating content. Just like the marketplace, where other shopkeepers may follow your approach and you need to be always on your feet to place new hoardings and additional content. It will get you the competitive advantage and a buyer will be able to differentiate your product from others. Online users are also no different from those in the marketplace and exhibit the same consumer behaviour. Now the market authority also doesn’t stop you because of the credibility and substance your product has built in the market. Just like in Google SERPs, you get a higher ranking based on the organic efforts.
So SEO alone is never enough. In fact, it is incomplete without content. Both of them go hand in hand and add value to your website. If SEO guides your customers, then content convinces them. SEO needs an effective content strategy. A keyword called “Best e-commerce website” is wasted if we don’t tell people why it is the best.
Embrace both content and SEO to stay in the long run
The industry has reached a level where companies, irrespective of their size have started understanding the importance of online marketing. And the appetite is only going to increase. To stay competitive, you have to start building a strategy which is not only comprehensive but future oriented.
Short term tricks of only relying on SEO tricks will not work, and let’s say even if it does, then that will be for a very brief period. It’s better to embrace a full-fledged strategy comprised of content and SEO right now than to miss the bus.
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