The Pain of SEO

Businesses aren’t static; today’s search discovery is murky – with many unspoken rules for SEO. Yet garnering a top position in the search engines will bring about engagement, while still bringing a transparent, intelligible product or service to the marketplace. Concentrating your efforts all on SEO without the need to, or content along with it can risk branding your organization undesirably. Not only do you have competitors vying for the same leads and customers, you are competing with all small to large sized organizations globally, in real time. Is one organization necessarily “better” simply because they are one spot above you in the search engines? In such a dynamic environment, businesses need to weigh whether strategies such as SEO or value positioning and branding more essential. Planning is essential for such ventures, as a business must fully understand the roadmap to the goal they want to accomplish. Whether SEO positioning, social media branding or an interactive website is vital to such goals, it all starts with content and its utilization. No matter what activities your business decides on, it will be inconsequential without content. This is the cornerstone to successful businesses. Prior to the internet, content was distributed in newspapers, magazine and journals. The same methodologies still exist, transformed by the digital age for digital consumers. SEO is the practice of optimizing content to be discovered by search engines. Content includes anything related to your business, product or service. Press releases, image galleries, reports are all essential components of your content. Unlike what many gurus state, as a business, SEO isn’t necessary unless you purposely require the ranking and traffic. Unlike individuals, independent contractors or small firms, most businesses do not require this specific solution. Doing a search online for Brand X car dealerships or for the more generic “car dealerships” phrase is essential to your business. Deciding on whether to optimize your brand, or for your keyword will generate completely different online strategies. Alternatively, we have had clients ask us to not rank for their generic product/service or for their brand; as a boutique shop, they preferred optimization in a life style. While others optimized for car dealerships or car brands, they optimized for sports convertibles. Furthermore SEO needs to bring you insight about your products and your consumers. Assessing changes in the marketplace real time can help business identify risk, and minimize losses.