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While SEO is Important, it is Also Not Enough

Guest post by: Kalen Smith

Article Overview: SEO is a very important factor in promoting a website. However, too many website owners have focused almost exclusively on it and have overlooked other promotional strategies.

While SEO is Important, it is Also Not Enough

Throughout the Internet, there is a lot of hype about the importance of search engine optimization. In fact, the majority of the articles discussing strategies for building traffic to a website end up focusing exclusively on SEO strategies. This raises two major questions for website owners: 1) If I implement my SEO campaign incorrectly, will my online business efforts be wasted? 2) If I come up with the best SEO campaign and rank at the top of the search engines for my keywords, will I know the goals I have established for my website and business will soon be fulfilled? In response to the first question, I would say "Not necessarily." Obviously, Google isn't the only source of traffic. I have known entrepreneurs who have based all of their promotional efforts on email campaigns, while still others have found creative methods of promoting their websites by growing traffic while participating in popular blogs. However, these strategies are tricky to implement and require constant effort. Emails get deleted and blog discussions die, leaving the website owners with no alternative than to keep repeating the process over again.

The advantages of using an effective SEO strategy is that after a website achieves the necessary ranking in the search engines, the site has reached its own self-sustaining marketing program. At this point, it will only require a little additional maintenance on the webmaster's part. This sounds great to most webmasters. Unfortunately, in their pursuit for great SEO rankings, they lose sight of common sense from a business perspective. The biggest problem is that they believe that traffic volume is the "be all and end all" of a successful website. They often focus on optimizing for the highest volume keywords with reasonable levels of competition from other publishers. This leads to many website developers and SEO gurus selecting nonsense keywords that bring in irrelevant traffic. If the keywords that were selected for the site were not appropriate to target viewers, the site will develop high bounce rates as viewers immediately decide the site was not relevant to them, and then they will not stick around to read the content or make purchases. All that hard work optimizing for those keywords becomes worthless. It would make more sense to focus on keywords with smaller search volumes but substantially higher conversion rates as they provide more relevant traffic.

Another issue that SEO sometimes raises is brand confusion. If businesses feel that a particular keyword is not consistent with the mission of the company or the types of products and services it offers, chances are it should be avoided. Also, too many webmasters structure their content to appeal to search engines and forget that it is ultimately people that they should be writing for. They believe that SEO content needs to be presented in a much different format than other written content (which is most likely a bad SEO strategy by the way, since search engines are becoming more adept at understanding grammar and sentence structure). In their efforts to please Google they lose sight of the fact that they may have alienated their customers. Some sites are targeted towards very particular customers who are used to reading content in a certain way. Purely SEO content may scare them off before they can contribute to the website.

True entrepreneurs will find creative ways to get their products out to their customers. Those who jump on the SEO bandwagon are primarily just followers who cannot think of more original ways to get the word out about their company. SEO is a very important part of any website, but it should not lead to tunnel vision when it comes to marketing. SEO must focus on generating traffic that is high quality as well as quantity. It also is necessary to use SEO in conjunction with other marketing strategies such as viral marketing with YouTube videos or participating in niche discussions that can create traffic that has been carefully matched to the theme of the website.

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Article Tags: conversion rates, SEO



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