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Brands and SEO professionals need to take responsibility for the performance of the websites they run and manage.
Speaking at SMX Advanced, Bruce Clay, founder and president of digital marketing optimization firm Bruce Clay Inc., will help you achieve next-level website performance by applying these six SEO truths.
1. SEO should be a strategic enterprise-wide initiative
SEO involves the entire organization. It starts at the management level – everyone needs to understand that SEO is important, commit to it, and make it a priority.
You can’t just do SEO on Monday. One person cannot do SEO randomly. It won’t work if you don’t work on SEO every day.
An organization needs to think about SEO every time there is a meeting to discuss a website change. Someone in this room needs to ask, “How does this affect SEO?”
“How can we improve the overall quality and performance of our website so that it actually generates traffic or meets company KPIs? … If there’s a commitment to SEO and if you believe it’s going to be long-term, then SEO is a winning operation in your business,” Clay said.
2. SEO needs to beat the competition, not the algorithm
We need to understand how sorting algorithms work. But our job is not to beat the algorithm. Beating the algorithm is an insurmountable battle.
Google makes thousands of changes to its search engine every year. And every keyword you’re trying to optimize for is essentially a new algorithm.
Your job is to beat the competition.
The best we can do is determine who is on the chart and find out what they are doing. Are there any commonalities? Are there any common words and can we use them better?
“The story I always tell is about two friends who go camping. They pitched their tents. They start a fire. They are cooking a meal and a bear comes. They start running down the path. The bear is hunting them. The guy in front doesn’t have to be an Olympic runner. He just has to be faster than his friend,” Clay said.
Well, SEO is pretty much the same thing. You have competitors. You have to be better than them.
3. Properly executed SEO takes care of content architecture
Websites should be built in such a way that search engines see you as a subject matter expert. Posting authentic and trustworthy information requires a focused effort.
Google favors content that is presented in a clear hierarchical structure. In other words, drilling down (eg an electronics site has cameras > digital cameras; has a website about cars Ford > Mustang. This is called siloing.
“It’s actually better in search because you’ve concentrated all the information about a particular keyword in one place instead of spreading it all over the site,” Clay said. “For SEO to work properly, you need to be a subject matter expert. You can’t just randomly throw a bunch of stuff at a site and expect it to work.”
4. The task of SEO is not to make a pig out of a fly
Sometimes no amount of SEO can save a poorly maintained website. That’s why website maintenance should be built into your SEO program.
You can’t just hit the “easy” button and say you want to rank tomorrow if your site looks like it’s 20 years old, hasn’t been updated in years, or isn’t mobile friendly.
“SEO’s job is to take that pig and turn it into an eagle with genetic engineering. Then you might have something that works. Too many people are coming to us with old technology. They haven’t updated their website in five years. They haven’t updated the content. And they expect the search engine to reward them for the people who have maintained their sites all along,” Clay said.
Competition in organic search is high. Your competition may have an entire team working on their SEO. Sometimes it can be like trying to compete with sites armed with machine guns when you only have bows and arrows.
5. Cheap SEO is a near death experience
Cheap SEO has consequences. It can harm you. No business should expect cheap SEO to work well.
Do you want bad advice for half the price or do you want good advice? How long will it take to figure out what went wrong after it goes wrong? And how much will it cost you to fix later?
What you end up with with cheap SEO is inexperienced people experimenting at your expense. And they can often be wrong.
“Do it right and do it right the first time. You can’t afford to do that again,” Clay said.
6. SEO is over when Google stops changing things and all your competition dies
SEO is an ongoing project because search is constantly changing. So does your competition. (Oh, and also search behavior.)
Google’s goal is to satisfy users, so they’ve leaned heavily on things like user experience and rewarding truly professional, accurate, and trustworthy content.
“When you’re in an environment like this where the search engine is going to be constantly changing and experimenting and trying to get better — those are the changes that are going to seriously affect your performance in search results,” Clay said. “You can never be done with SEO. Search engines took care of that.”
Check out: The SEO Manifesto: 6 Fundamental Truths to Live By
Below is the full video of Clay’s SMX Advanced session.
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New to search engine land
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