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Search engine optimization strategy, is it what you need for your business? In our previous article, we have explained the concept of search engine optimization and its importance. SEO is considered as a subset of Digital Marketing and falls into the Digital Part of our Buzz Spot Concept. Yes, we previously said that a business should consider doing SEO and that it is an important strategy in the long run, but at the same time, we want you to understand that doing SEO may not always be the right move. Yep, you read that correctly! No, we are not saying that SEO is not a good strategy, in reality, it is very powerful, but you need to understand this well – it is not the same for all businesses. Okay, so before we dive into why it is not the right strategy for certain businesses, let us do a quick recap on what SEO is and how it can help.
To those who this term is new, SEO stands for search engine optimization. Let’s use simple words and avoid the technical terms here. The search engine is basically a program that identifies and searches stored databases in their collection when someone does a search. For example, Google is considered as a search engine where someone types a keyword or their search intent on the search tab. Now optimization means the process of improving your website so you can increase its visibility and ranking when people search for products or services related to your business. You should know that there are 3 main techniques to improve your website.
All these techniques help your website get better ranking and visibility on Google when people search for your product or services online. You should know that SEO helps generate organic traffic and thus enables you to rely less and less on paid advertisement. As an online marketing agency, we know how Google Ads can be quite expensive. We covered these techniques in our previous blog, not to go into details here else you’ll have your mind too heavy, but you still can have a read to get an idea on the techniques and if you want to know more, you can give us a quick call. We don’t mind helping you understand the concept of SEO in a better and simple way. You have nothing to lose here.
Let’s get back to the main focus of this article which is: when is search engine optimization strategy not the right strategy. There are various reasons but we’ll talk about 4 main reasons.
You launched a new website to sell your new product. That’s a great achievement already! Now you’re planning to promote that product and increase your website’s ranking related to that product. Does your audience know about your product or do they even know your brand? There’s no point in investing in SEO if your audience is not familiar with your brand or products especially if there’s no search at all. Keywords with low search volume do not mean your website is going to rank well or will have the minimum reach to give your website an organic boost. You need to understand that SEO revolves around the search intent of your audience and how much they are searching. The goal here is to get people to know about your business and product first, raising awareness to an extent that it starts generating searches, then SEO could be the next strategy to adopt. Why not?
Think of it this way – You have been learning the lyrics of the song A every day for 1 week now and song B for 1 day both in that same week. Now someone asks you to sing a song, so logically since you have been learning song A for a while, you will recall song A first, right? It’s not relatable, but this is to help you understand the concept of SEO. It’s the same with Google. When storing your content in its collection of databases, Google takes time to study and understand your content and to know which audience is relevant to your content. If your competitor has been working on SEO for 1 year now and you just started, then Google will most likely recall your competitor first. You need to feed Google by creating more and more unique and relevant content and by getting your website visible on other related websites. Get this straight, SEO is effective in the long run but it starts paying off in a minimum of 6 months or even more. Now the time and patience are not the same for all businesses. If you need to sell your products in a short period of time, then SEO is not your call when it comes to quick results. You will definitely need to rely on paid advertising.
What does a website that sucks have to do with ranking or visibility, in short with SEO? Crawlers also known as spiders and bots are the backbones of search engines. The job of the crawler is to access pages of your website, gather the content found there and add it to Google’s database. It is important that the web crawlers sent by Google find your content and are able to analyze and understand the relevancy, category, and authority of your content. However, if your website prevents the web crawlers from doing so for whichever reasons, Google will not be able to add your content to its database and then generate your website on search results pages for relevant keyword searches that could match your website. Google does not favor old websites or websites that are not well developed. Thus, if you have a website with issues such as not being mobile-friendly, broken pages, or long URLs, then your website will lose credibility and thus be penalized by Google. To sum up, if you have a website with all these issues, then be it On-Page SEO strategy or Off-Page SEO is the last thing you would want to do.
SEO is a long-term and daily investment if you want to see results quicker. An investment on a long-term and daily basis makes it important to have a good budget kept aside. What we mean here is that – imagine your competitors are gathering content every day on their website and doing 10 quality non paid link buildings with other related platforms and you on the other hand are writing one content only every 2 months or linking your website to only 1 website due to lack of resources and low budget, then SEO is definitely not going to pay off for you. SEO requires more than just important keywords, you will need a good budget to hire resources, we mean resources with the right expertise to produce relevant valuable content for you, resources to fix technical SEO errors, and link your website content to relevant platforms. Yes, we know that the content writing part you can tackle given it is your business and you can do it yourself, and some other SEO related tasks, but you should not forget that writing content takes time as well making it difficult to spend the rest of your energy and time on your business. At the end of the day, if you are facing budget and resources issues, then SEO is not the strategy to adopt.
If you find yourself in most of the conditions we listed above then most certainly your business is better off without a search engine optimization strategy, but that does not mean that you do not need a digital marketing strategy for your business. Before we forget, we’ve also compiled as bonus old SEO tactics you should ignore. If you have not downloaded it yet, you can download it here. Follow us on Facebook here for more valuable content updates. Keeping SEO aside, there are various online marketing strategies that you should start thinking about to give your business an online boost. The pandemic has created the urge to go online now but you cannot just go online without any proper strategy. With our new online marketing approach and concept “The Buzz Spot” – we guide you through your online journey with the proper strategies your business needs.
