Search engines are one of the most valuable marketing channels at your disposal, capable of driving thousands of engaged leads to your website.
Whilst SEO was once the go-to tactic for improving your rankings, the changing nature of search has left many businesses using expensive, outdated and potentially dangerous tactics. In order to earn meaningful search rankings, and attract relevant, engaged leads to your website, you need to understand why SEO is no substitute for inbound marketing as a whole.
SEO Encourages Businesses to Fixate on Meaningless Metrics
If you've ever engaged an SEO agency, and spent hard-earned money to receive monthly SEO ranking reports, you'll be aware of a fixation on a handful of metrics: keywords, dofollow and nofollow links, and SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings.
These metrics are at the heart of most SEO strategies, despite offering no intrinsic value or any direct connection to ROI. They aren’t meaningful metrics in themselves: they’re simply heuristics used by search engines as a stand-in for less tangible hallmarks of quality.
SEO agencies encourage an unhealthy obsession with these metrics because the outdated strategies they employ will never generate increases in meaningful metrics, like organic search traffic, conversion rates or new customers. By obsessing over SEO metrics, you're distracting yourself from real indicators of success.
Even a #1 ranking can be completely useless. For a search ranking to have an impact on sales and ROI, it has to attract sizeable numbers of relevant, qualified people to your business. Not all keywords are created equal, and in many instances, top rankings don't mean top sales.
Algorithm Changes Are Rendering SEO Redundant
Search engines strive to emulate real people, and aim to rank content in terms of quality, helpfulness and accuracy. Technological constraints mean that search engines have traditionally used links and keyword densities as a suitable approximation of content quality. As search technology has improved, however, Google and co. have refined their search algorithms, and begun to integrate better indicators of quality.
With every algorithm change, SEO tactics become more redundant:
- Google's Panda update penalised short, low quality, unoriginal content.
- Penguin targeted unnatural backlinks.
- Hummingbird improved how Google understands semantic search (the relationship between the keywords we search for, and the results we want to find).
The latest proposed changes to Google’s search algorithms take this a step further, with accurate facts set to replace links as the driving force behind high search rankings.
The increasing complexity and intelligence of these algorithms means that there are fewer and fewer shortcuts and quick fixes for SEO agencies to take. Increasingly, the only sure-fire way to rank highly is to create high quality, helpful content.
Standalone SEO Can Damage Your Reputation
Google has long advocated the creation of valuable, helpful content as the best way to improve search engine visibility. Whilst this is a core strategy in inbound marketing, standalone SEO strategies usually attempt to find a way around these requirements.
The shortcuts used by many SEO agencies are extremely high-risk. We've seen Google enact huge crackdowns on businesses that have engaged in link buying, extreme keyword manipulation and even paid blogging networks. Aside from now offering limited efficacy, these tactics have seen extremely high-profile businesses disappear entirely from search engine results.
Aside from the massive impact this has on lead generation and sales, many businesses have seen their reputation damaged irrevocably by poor choices made by their SEO agencies.
The Solution? Focus on the End-User
Whilst there's no quick fix for boosting SEO, there is a simple formula for success: instead of using outdated SEO tactics to optimise your online presence for search engines, use inbound marketing to optimise for the end-user.
Instead of fixating on meaningless metrics and high-risk tactics, businesses need to regularly create relevant, high-quality content. If you're able to impress real people with your content, you'll impress the search engines as well.
