If you’re like most of the business owners and marketers that we talk to, SEO is one of the most confusing and frustrating things that you’ve had to deal with, in a long time. You get contradictory information from a lot of different people and the couple of times that you’ve gotten serious about it, you’ve not seen the results that you had hoped for.
If this SEO stuff really works, you sure can’t seem to figure it out or find anyone that does!
Holistic SEO
There are many reasons why SEO efforts don’t produce results. The most common reason that I’ve found is that SEO is viewed as a tactic as opposed to a strategy. Let me explain.
Most people, even when they are referring to SEO, are talking about it as a tactic. They’ll say things like “we’re doing SEO”. People look at SEO as if it is a task when in fact SEO is more of a strategy. By definition, SEO is the combined efforts that are used to get a web page to rank highly for a keyword or key-phrase.
There’s a lot that goes into this. If we review what search engines use to determine which web pages will appear and in what order for the phrase that someone entered into the search query box, the number of criteria are well over 200 different things that a search engine looks at to decide what web pages are highly relevant for that search term.
This is where the holistic SEO view is important. With over 200 things impacting your web pages ranking, there is no one thing that you can do to get high rankings. There are a lot of different things that you have to be actively participating with, to impact your rankings. Things like:
- Social Media
- Usability
- Relevant Content
- External and Internal Links
- Code Structure
- Key-words and Phrases
- Domain Name
- And a whole lot more!
Back in the day, SEO used to be all about picking key-words that were important to your business, using those key-words in the content of your site and then filling out a couple of meta tags with those key-words. Then, you would submit your site to the search engines and BOOM! You got ranked.
That’s no longer the case. Today, as you can see by this veryabreviated list. Just about everything about your site impacts your SEO rankings. Along with what you do on the social platforms, if you’re getting traffic, and so much more that you have to look at SEO from a holistic viewpoint.
User Experience
The best thing that you can do to improve your SEO rankings is to look at your site (yup, each page) from the standpoint of your audience. Will people on your site have a positive experience?
This one concept is so important that the concept is part of Google’s Basic Principles of SEO.In their Basic Principles, they state that you should, first and foremost make pages for people, not for the search engines. That means writing content that will be highly valuable for your readers. They go on to say that you should “think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.
Clearly, these Basic Principles can’t be met if your site has horrible content on it. Or if it takes forever for a page to load. Or if someone on a mobile device can’t read your website’s page.
Conclusion
Literally, everything you do with your site and a lot of what you are doing to market your business online will end up having an impact on your SEO. Looking at SEO as working in some keywords or tweaking the code on your site isn’t going to get you any results, alone. In today’s marketing world, SEO just like every other part of your marketing efforts requires a plan that will integrate with all of your other marketing campaigns.
