Beat SEO experts with a stick until they go away

We’ve let the myths of SEO steal away our business long enough, and it’s high time to put an end to it.

Today, SEO is less about the technical (web-language gobbledygook) and more about the mechanical (exciting content). So it’s staggering that the SEO industry is populated by web-developers, when it should be populated by marketers.

So lets dispel a few myths. There is, comparatively, very little technical stuff involved in SEO. First you do a keyword analysis and then you internally optimise the website. Neither is especially difficult, don’t hire an expert; read around and become an expert. What’s left is external search engine optimisation, or as I like to call it, “marketing”.

If you examine the external optimisation strategies of a few top firms, you’ll quickly discover that all the “blog cross pollination strategies”, “semantic search”, and “link-building strategies” are SEO-created technical terms to justify fees, it's just about creating content (note: be sure to beat down harder on any SEO expert who tries to sell position tracking and any form of website/article submission). Perhaps worst of all, about 70% of the SEO companies that offered this service, don’t do this themselves.

HighPosition.net even offer a “Brand Integrity Plan which identifies and monitors competitors, malicious activity and other risks to your brand to help you devise an anti-competitive action plan” – That’s otherwise known as PR right?

In short, it’s a big fat scam. SEO today is primarily about creating engaging content. It’s about finding that audience, analysing that audience’s problems/needs and then speaking to that audience. And Marketers/PR Professionals are in a far more better position to do that than anyone else. Even better, Marketers/PR professionals are in a far better position to encourage your customers to do this than anyone else.

Search engines were created to rank websites by their usefulness to readers. So just be more useful, create the best content, focus on solving the problem better than your competitors, let Google do what it does best.

Comments

[katie moffat]

Great post. Some really good points here that I shall be making to some of my clients.

[Steve Robson]

I completely agree. We have launched over 100 sites and our clients are constantly asking us to provide SEO services. The best advice we can give them is create lots of great content and make it relevant to your niche.

Unless your SEO expert is an expert copywriter and is on the top page of Google for their own keywords don't even bother talking to them.

We have achieved our page rankings by constantly adding new articles. Not just random articles but content which is genuinely useful to our audience and readers. We make sure our website is for humans first and bots after.

[Pyrmont]

Awesome Post Mate,

Have just started attempting seo, after months of reading pages of the stuff all over the web...

So far so good...fingers crossed