Why I Refuse to Ride the SEO Rollercoaster

I was having a phone conversation with friends Claudia and Garrett Pennington, who own and operate DIY Marketing LLC, along with SEOAuditGuide.com and TwoCupHouse.com. After speaking with them about how some recent presentations at the Bloggy Conference and FinCon 2018 went, I walked away convinced even more that sound, fundamental, time-tested SEO strategies are the way to go. I refuse to get on and ride the SEO rollercoaster. Let me explain:

Claudia has been connecting with a lot of bloggers, whether they be mommy bloggers at BloggyCon or the financial bloggers at FinCon. What she is discovering is a number of them want to know how they can utilize search engine optimization principles to increase revenue.

Some are earning a pretty good income now, but they have either reached a plateau or want to scale up. Others are getting a taste of earning an income through their blogs and want to attract more website traffic to drive up more online revenue. Others want to start generating revenue with their blogs. No matter where they are in their blogging journey, for them, SEO is an attractive way to do so.

Claudia’s and Garrett’s experience is similar to mine. I had the chance to engage bloggers from Northeast Ohio and Manhattan to share some of SEO’s fundamentals and help guide them through the process of improving SEO to improve traffic.

The SEO Rollercoaster

It seemed as soon as I dove into a career doing search engine optimization audits, content creation and social media management, everyone started writing “Why SEO is Dead,” “Why I am Abandoning SEO” and “Why SEO Doesn’t Work” blog posts — not exactly a ringing endorsement of the field in which I choose to earn a living.

Friends would tag me on Facebook or Twitter and want to know what I thought. I read the articles, and wouldn’t you know, each one of them didn’t really align with what the headline said.

Most of them appeared to be setting up a strawman, knocking it down and proclaiming some kind of victory. But, when you looked at the underlying arguments, they always were railing against SEO strategies I was never taught.

Because of articles like the ones mentioned, the existence of people who say search engine optimization is meaningless, and the unfortunate reality some engage in questionable practices (sometimes referred to as black hat or gray hat strategies), SEO sometimes falls out of favor.

However, based on Claudia’s experiences with bloggers, it seems they are revisiting SEO practices and their role in driving traffic, generating leads, converting sales, and increasing revenue.

Social media and its algorithms

For a while, driving traffic was cheap. You share a link on Facebook or Twitter, and visitors would land on your website. In fact, on my wife Wendi’s blog, Wendi’s Weekend Trips & Whatnot, Facebook drove 90 percent of her traffic in the first year or so. 

What Wendi and other bloggers encountered along the way was a social media landscape paved with ever-changing algorithms. Bloggers complained of no longer being able to reach the same number of people. The reason was simple: Money. Facebook offers its platform for free, but you need to monetize somewhere. The answer was Facebook ads.

I have no problem with Facebook ads. When I launched my digital marketing company, I did not advertise in a traditional way, rather in a digital way: Facebook ads. Those ads helped me increase my awareness, and it lead to contracts that far exceeded my ad spend. They were a good investment.

But, for those bloggers who relied on Facebook and Twitter to expand their reach, they seemed to be fighting an uphill battle. These platforms are still important, and I think businesses and bloggers need to have a presence there, but you also have to realize your reach will not be as great without supplementing your posts with ads.

Why I prefer SEO to SEM

Search engine optimization deals with improving your website to attract organic search, or as we say in the industry: Free traffic. SEM (search engine marketing, sometimes referred to as PPC or pay-per-click) is the use of paid ads to appear in search rankings. SEM has a place when you need to drive traffic in a hurry. Some entrepreneurs will use SEM to sell some products or services at a discount to generate some quick sales and create some cash flow.

I have chosen to focus my attention on SEO because it allows my clients to build a solid foundation over time in order to gain free traffic. Now, the irony of this is people pay good money for free traffic. It almost sounds like an oxymoron until you realize how competitive it is.

However, here is how I view the situation: With SEO you pay to build that strong foundation to improve organic search traffic, and you will reap the benefits time and time again. With SEM, you will pay someone good money to come up with an ad campaign and find the best words to target, and then you will pay for the ads. And, SEM will produce results as long as you spend money on ads. 

It always comes down to the fundamentals

There is always someone who has a flash-in-the-pan idea about how to do something better. There is always someone who is willing to cut corners to save a buck. To them, I say, “Good luck. Hope it works out for you.” But, if we are honest with ourselves, we know there is no such thing as a free lunch. It takes time, effort, and resources to do something right.

I don’t know who said, but it is true, “The hard way is the easy way.” There is no easy way to do SEO, but there is a right way. SEO requires you to pay attention to the details every single step of the way. If you try to find an easy way you, then you will pay for it down the road.

Stick to the fundamentals, some of which are:

• Page titles;
• Proper use of header tags;
• Concise meta descriptions; 
• Page titles;
• Appropriate use of keywords (no stuffing allowed!); 
  
• Page load speed; and
• Mobile-friendliness.

When we began implementing some SEO strategies on Wendi’s website, we were pleased to discover they worked. In the past year, organic search accounts for about half of her traffic instead of less than 10 percent. Not bad. SEO works.

So, where is your website in terms of SEO soundness? Investing in SEO is like investing for retirement: The best time to have started was years ago, but the next best time is today. Get in touch and let’s move the needle.