Digital Marketing Fuel
SEO is the foundation of your digital marketing efforts but the fuel that feeds both your SEO and social marketing is content.
Breaking News SEOs!
Guess what? The search engines love content. Who knew? Google loves it so much it wants to marry it. Of course most SEOs who know this believe that churning out bunches of words loosely strung together to form sentences combined with a bunch of backlinks that only money can buy will somehow get them ranked. Well actually right now it will. I can point to a number of ranking results like SEO Consultant and SEO Melbourne where the majority of SEO companies ranking are basically there because of bought backlinks. For the most part, their content reads like it was squeezed quickly out of some poor bastard named Ahmed, working 20 hours a day in a third world digital sweatshop. Which of course it probably was.
Jealous Much?
Am I envious of those ranking above me for these phrases? More annoyed really. Don’t get me wrong this site was no.1 for SEO Melbourne for about six years and has been on the first page of results for the phrase for the last 10 and it’s great bragging rights. Guess what though? The people who type that in are not our typical customers. Usually the enquiries we get from SEO related searches are budget conscious smaller businesses that we are too expensive for. Our long term customers are ones that find us because of our content. I know a lot of SEOs will welcome a $500/month customer. What possible rankings could you get for $500/month though? Short term ones that have been achieved by paying Ahmed and his mates $1.50/hour. By the way that would be top dollar.
Pursuing a strategy of getting to no.1 for “blah keyword” ignores the bigger picture of your brand. Our clients ultimately choose us because of our brand that has been built from our content. Our content on this blog and on Youtube serves several purposes. It gets us ranked in Google for thousands of phrases but it also helps potential clients understand who we are and what we believe. If you simply churn out content with a total disregard for who is reading it, like most of the SEO companies do, your strategy is a short term one.
Unlimited Keywords
Focusing on ranking for a finite number of keywords is the wrong approach. Yes you need to measure your rankings to understand how Google is responding to your efforts but you should be looking at broad keyword groups. That’s why our clients all now have unlimited keywords. It’s been an annoyance of mine for a while, selling SEO based on a number of keywords but it is an industry standard. Ultimately though for a client to stay with us for years the measure of our success has to be much more than a number one result for a number of keywords. As I pointed out in my digital marketing post, ranking is not a goal, it’s simply a strategy to achieve our goal which is more revenue.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
