19 Aug SEO, What Are You Paying For?
Good morning, folks. Thanks for joining me this week for another edition of Internet Business Quick Tips. We’re talking about SEO, seach engine optimisation, and what it is that you’re paying for when you outsource this to some company or some person.
There is a song, written in 1969, for the Motown label called “War.” You know the one, “War, what is it good for?” Well, I think along the same lines for SEO. Often a protest against what people are doing or what they should be doing.
I’ve had some e-mail conversations with a client this past week, who came to one of my SEO training workshops. After learning exactly what was required in order to gain good results in Google and other search engines and have your content appearing top billing in the search engines, she contacted the person who was doing this for her and basically said, “What are you doing for me? Here are my notes. Here are my suggestions. Here are my questions,” She also mentioned that she’d been to my workshop and that she had spoken to me directly about taking over the business.
The response from her website host, her developer simply sounded like a sales pitch for an “add this” type of application, and then they would outsource everything to make it easier for her. But here’s the thing. There was no involvement, no question of them doing detailed keyword research. There was no mention of them redesigning her internal site structure and internal links. There was no mention of them going through each page by page and doing detailed on-page SEO analysis, changing things such as images, alt tags, H1 header tags, H2s, paragraph and sentence structures. There’s no mention whatsoever of basically rebuilding the site and creating it for search engines, but also making it attractive to people. They were simply interested in, “Yes, let us outsource this for you and make it as cheap as possible.”
So what would they be outsourcing? I don’t know for certain, but here’s my best guess – external link building, the last of my four pillars of success when it comes to search engine marketing and optimisation. Yes, external link building is necessary, but it is the last and final thing that you should do only after everything else has already been done.
So, I ask you this question. SEO, what are you paying for? If the person or the business or the company whom you are paying is not doing for you all of the things I have mentioned above and in that order, you should ask them the question: “What are you good for?” Because building links alone to a lame duck site will not help you convert visitors into customers.
Traffic on its own means nothing. You need to also convert that traffic from browsers into buyers.
That’s what true SEO marketing is all about.
