With all of the rumors floating around the water cooler, misinformation and generic search engine optimization tips that keep anyone seeking the real truth about SEO at arm’s length. What is the gist that so many are missing when it comes to SEO?
Is it the fact that you feel SEO is mandatory? Absolutely not, sure you can rank without it, but you can also market products and services online without advertising, pay per click, or stay in business by word of mouth alone. However, somehow, just knowing that you can push the envelope of return on investment (or invested time to profitability or return on optimization) beyond the norm is what makes having options appealing to begin with.
Who Said SEO was Easy?
While many seem to argue about keyword placement and positioning, in reality market share and saturation are far more important. Does the average surfer care how many competing pages there are when they conduct a search?, No… but what they do care about is relevancy to their impulse or objective for initiating the search to begin with.
SEO is about creating long-term sustainable traffic that aggregates into more relevant traffic. With this as the blueprint, the real investment is time. Putting yourself in the eyes of the searcher is what allows you to outmaneuver your adversaries, but it really boils down to intent.
Intent is what compels people drill-down through the top 10 positions and if you are lucky, pursue their search to the top 20 results when looking for the right click trigger. After that, most abandon their search if they can’t find what their looking for or just go back to the search engine refine their search again.
Which is More Important Keywords or Market Share and Saturation?
The point made earlier about market share and spreading the funnel a bit wider makes perfect sense if you are entering a small niche or haven’t clearly identifies the keywords with the highest possible conversion. It’s time to move away from SEO by the numbers and truly use such expansive information for what it was originally intended for (capturing as much space above the fold as possible to funnel traffic to relevant landing pages).
Does this sound like PPC? Sort, of, but the only difference is, if you understand page weight and link weight you can set specific semantic benchmarks for your content and devour the phrases with traction in between as a by-product of intelligent design.
Sure, you can have a few keywords or a few hundred keywords driving traffic to your site as a deliberate effort, or you can target entire semantic landscapes and clean up on everything in from the gap that resides in between.
Don’t Dismiss Ambient Traffic
It’s not always what you set out and intended to rank for that yields the highest returns, sometimes you get lucky and someone sheds a spark of light by finding your website with a specific phrase that you may at the time have considered irrelevant.
Then as time progresses you notice an immense amount of consistent traffic reaching your site for unintentional keywords created by ambient traffic as a result of keyword co-occurrence, content creation and links.
The idea is to map out clear content creation objectives (50-100 well written pages of content introduced over time) while pursuing your crowning traffic achievement. One competitive keyword can be worth its weight in gold for the amount of traffic it delivers. However, the real intent is not to overlook the long-tail of search (longer key phrase queries) which also convert. The concept to grasp is, to quickly see a quantifiable return on optimization (ROO) with qualified traffic in less time while scaling more competitive benchmarks (and yes, I am attempting to coin this acronym)…
It’s Not the Number of Competing Pages, But How Relevant the Page is that Matters
A top 10 ranking is a top 10 ranking, and positioning above the fold is prime real estate on any screen with consumers attached. Is SEO rocket science?, absolutely not, is SEO easy? It depends on the keywords and competition.
Although the fundamentals remain intact, really grasping a holistic SEO campaign from inception to completion requires patience, understanding and expertise (to overcome your competition that is most certainly engaged in some form of organic optimization).
Thanks
Thanks once again for a great article I feel that the biggest part of seo is keeping up with the trends and making sure you dont go to the dark side of black hat.
Thanks Oliver and Danny, I have found that it’s all about nurturing a site with the right signals over time to acquire top ranking positions.
Appreciate the comments.
Great tips! Thanks!