Why SEO Has Its Limitations
Every now and then we like to talk about how SEO has limitations. It isn’t everything. You can have the very best optimized site in your niche and still not close any sales. You can achieve No. 1 rankings for a dozen keywords related to your niche and not make any money. A bit worthless that would be, wouldn’t it?
Of course, I’m a big believer in search engine optimization. It’s not much better to have a site that really sells, but can only achieve page 100 rankings. If people can’t find your website, what good is it that it can close sales?
Still, SEO. Important, right? Yes, it is. But it doesn’t solve every problem. Here are some additional things to consider as you plan your new website. It isn’t all about the SEO:
- Sales - Your content has to sell your service. Make sure it does.
- Design – Is your web design attractive? Will people like your site? While design isn’t everything, it does matter. In fact, a poorly designed site could cost you sales.
- Development - Do you need that widget? Will that RSS feed fit in to what we are doing? Not all sites should be strict HTML. In fact, many Web 2.0 features can help you in your SEO efforts as well as in your traffic conversions.
- Social Media Friendly – Is your website social media friendly? It’s hard to ignore the impact of sites like Digg, Facebook, and Twitter. Is your site set up to assist your readers in distributing your content through social media? That’s something you need to consider, not just that your site is set up for social media, but a consideration as to which social media sites it should be set up for.
- Functionality - What is your website designed to do? Is it a lead generation website? A membership site? The functionality should match the function. Make sure you include features in your site that make sense for its purpose.
Search engine optimization can go a long way and you should employ it well. But it does have its limitations. It alone can’t save your site from being irrelevant. Optimization should compliment everything else you do, and vice-versa.
7 Responses to “Why SEO Has Its Limitations”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
Totally true. Having your website come up for all your keywords doesn’t automatically guarantee business instant revenue. You need to have a good combination of good design, userbility, quality content (for both the user and search engine). Dependant on the site and its purpose of course, but you need to give the user what they are looking for.
There are ways of determining why your existing site may not be making money. These include installing google analytics – which looks at keywords, bounce rate, time spent on the site. This will judge design and content. If you have a high bounce rate, people are only going into your homepage and loosing interest.
There is also another piece of kit which you can install on your server – Click Heat. This basically shows a heat diagram of where people are most clicking. Again a good way of telling what most interests people.
@Nick Stamoulis – Thanks for the additional points Claire…it is amazing how many business people put all of their “eggs” into the SEO basket as the only online marketing effort…
question:
if i have great content and the design is close to perfection (as close as a human ca do it), tags are carefully chosen, blog and forum content + video materials… the only flow is rss that is not yet functional… how much time do you appreciate it would take to get from rank 0 to a respectable value (and what is a respectable value)?
if you say social media connection… can you appreciate the grade this is influencing in the growth of a website and if one is mor eimportant than the other (facebook better that other..)?
10x
cata
@Nick mate thanks for the nice simple post, its always good to see other people hold this view that traffic for the sake of traffic isnt always good.
The only thing that i would add is around using more web analytics tools such as @clair said.
Make sure that you have setup your goals correctly so that you not just guessing what is driving traffic, also look at some of those organice keywords driving sales and run a focused ppc campaign around those keywords and those geographic locations driving sales…
do some a/b tests using website optimiser start experimenting with elements on your site to lift conversions.
Also use a email marketing tool such as constant contact
Constant Contact
Lyris HQ
Vertical Response
Exact Target
@david – Thanks very much for the additional information and comment! I highly recommend Constant Contact as we are a business partner and I have personally used their email marketing product for over 8+ years…thanks again!
You know, it reminds me of what a wise old PR hand once said to me – “PR is about good news well told. Bad news told bent isn’t PR, it’s BS!”.
My own work is all about authenticity, no longer pretending that there are business ethics (crooked) and life ethics (honest).
So, get it right and get the good news out there: the first is down to your core business and the second is down to excellent seo. Good advice in this article.
Malcolm
Hi Malcolm – Thanks for reading and I tend to agree with you about news and BS….:)