SEO Is Only Part Of The Solution V 2.0

July 1, 2011

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This blog covers local SEO which is dominated by Google, Google Places and the need for citations. The blog also covers just about any thing related to Google search results and related topics. I hope that you might glean some useful resources while you are here.

The original post:  SEO Is Only Part Of The Solution

Recently, I had a discussion with our first SEO client. He had moved from his previous job in Tucson to a larger firm in Phoenix. His employer has four websites and he asked me to give him a bid for our search engines optimization services.

This was a very exciting opportunity but, I proceeded with caution. When I worked for this company it had a really bad website. I did a detailed website review and made a multitude of suggestion to improve the site before applying any SEO. The company was a moving and storage concern with a local customer base here in Tucson.

I was ecstatic. Going in I knew that we had a wonderful opportunity here to apply Geo-targeted SEO solutions. I believed that we would have tremendous impact for local moving company searches in Tucson. It was if all the stars had aligned in my favor. It wasn’t a competitive market and the competition did not have very well optimized websites. It looked like a slam dunk and it was. The problem is the company never made the needed changes to have a user friendly website.

When the SEO process began you could find this website 3 times on Google’s first page of results for moving services in Tucson. Two weeks after I had implemented Geo-targeting for their business in Tucson their was a dramatic change. Now, the site was ranking 16 times on the first page of Google. By the time 30 days had rolled around  you could find the site 33 different times on the Google first pages. It was as if we were in SEO nirvana. This was my first paying client.

The problem was that their website still was still a dreadful site. The home page included maybe 100 words that were not created very well. Things didn’t work all over the site. The site was not converting visitors into customers. What I learned from this experience was this. I would never again SEO a broken website. This company got lots of traffic from my SEO efforts but very little of that increased traffic converted into business. Broken websites don’t usually convert visitors no matter how many people visit.

It’s hard to overcome a bad website and the negative messages that it screams is deafening. It is very difficult to overcome an initial bad experience. You must always be cognizant that your visitor has their hand on there mouse and a quick and painless exit is a mere one click away. Your visitors are needing, wanting, and desiring to have their expectations meet or exceeded. Sadly most websites fail miserably.

From that time forward we made an ethical decision not to work on websites if all they wanted was increased traffic. We really wanted our efforts to not only increase traffic but we wanted that traffic to convert from visitors to customers. We want our clients to prosper from our efforts. We are not in SEO just to make a buck.

This is why we strongly believe in a holistic SEO approach where search engine optimization is not the solution, but part of the solution. If you have a defective website increased traffic is not going to make much difference.

Quite often the website owners do not have any idea that their website is even defective. I recently commented to a website owner that he should not worry about SEO because he needed to fix his website first. He was flabbergasted. He was clueless that their might be any thing wrong with his site and it had buckets of problems. This is especially true for the DIY  designed websites. They often look like a elementary school group project.

Our standard recommendation is that your website needs to be as good as if not better than your major competitors. I am discussing functionality and ease of use here. If you make it difficult for the visitor to find what they came for they are gone and gone quickly. Searchers scan websites to find what they desire and they have short attention spans. Again you job is to meet or exceed the visitors expectations.

Another area that is overlooked is the content. Most websites owners wrote their own copy and most of them are not professional marketing professionals. So you should have someone writing your content that merely provides information and not selling. I have seen beautiful sites where everything worked and worked well except the content. Website content needs to be written using a sales funnel that directs the visitor or make a buying decision.

That is why we practice a  holistic approach to SEO. We do so with the understanding that if your website isn’t likely to convert visitors into customers then why increase traffic. The problem is that many websites have never had much traffic so they have no way of judging whether the site converts visitors or not. Once the fixing and or re-designing has been completed we then provide the SEO portion. But there’s more to do if you want to gain and maintain high search rankings.

The fact remains that most website developers just don’t understand marketing and selling on a website. For many a “buy now” button is all that is required. Ask yourself this does my website sell? Do I ask for the sale? Does your website act as a sales funnel that directs your visitor into a buying decision? If you answered no to any of these questions then you might be ready for a holistic SEO approach.

Once the defective site has been fixed and optimized it then must enter another phase of the process. Where you will then need to market your website and develop backlinks. As we like to say, SEO is never a one and done proposition.

My first client was somewhat shocked that I was not very interested in his project. I explained that I had changed how I do business due to my previous experience with him. I was willing to provide a holistic SEO approach, but not merely SEO alone. It was later revealed that he had acquired bids from several other companies. These companies would gladly produce increased traffic without regards to whether that traffic would ever convert into customers. At that point we parted ways. This was a huge contract but we were not about to compromise our position.

So if you are actively looking to hire an SEO provider make sure they give serious consideration to the total health of your website. Providing assistance in developing your content into a sales presentation before you venture into acquiring increased website traffic through the implementation of SEO.

SEO isn’t the answer by itself; it is only part of the solution.

Update 06/06/2010: It amazes how many people have left comments on this post that diss SEO. I have not posted most of them. The reason is simple they either didn’t read the post or they are asleep at the wheel.

SEO is only part of having a quality website. You can rank # 1 and still not have a successful website if you have bad content. So the question then needs to be asked “what is good content.”  Well, this is difficult to quantify as different markets have different requirements.

As an example, I will mention that I visited a website design site today. The only reason that I visited the website was to verify if I wanted to link to this person website from a blog comment. I visit every site that I link to from this blog. As it turned out this web designers website looked like a bad middle school project. My point being if you sell web design services you should probably have a beautiful website. The content was good but the site was excessively bland. This site would likely fail to meet the expectations of most visitors whether it ranked well or not.

As for me quality content means that the content  has been developed as a sales funnel. So that by the end of the page the reader is being asked to make a buying decision. Nothing happens in a vacuum all the website pieces must be working together to have a truly successful website.

What say you?

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