3 Things SEO Doesn’t Do—And What It Definitely Does
It’s no secret that we’re HUGE believers in search engine optimization (aka SEO) here at Mountain Laurel Digital. We’re proud to offer comprehensive SEO planning and strategy, because we’ve seen firsthand, time and time again, just what these services can do for companies both big and small. No matter what type of business you own, a quality SEO plan implemented with skill and savvy can:
Increase your business’s online exposure and elevate your web presence
Improve your company’s digital relevancy to attract the people—i.e., potential customers—who are seeking your services, products, and/or content
Assist your business in meeting its marketing goals
Help build your brand’s equity
How does it accomplish these super important, vital, and wonderful things? Through a formula of research, targeting strategy, keywords, technical tactics, and tools, SEO grows both the quantity and quality of visits to your website. It puts your business name and website in front of more eyes, eyes looking for companies just like yours. It brings your site greater online traffic by earning you a high-ranking placement in the results page of a search engine, whether that’s Google or another option like Bing. And it does so—to use an SEO term—organically, which is really just a fancy-schmancy way of saying it gets you traffic without you having to pay directly for it via advertising. (Check out our blog on the three rules for navigating Google Ads to learn more about search engine placement through paid channels.)
But that’s not what this blog is about.
This article dives into what SEO can’t do. Why would we want to tell you what it doesn’t have the power to accomplish, when SEO is something we think you absolutely need to implement? Because whether you work with us, or tackle it yourself, your success with SEO depends upon your understanding of it—all aspects of it. What’s more, success happens when expectations are realistic and goals are reachable. And we really want you to be successful. Really, really successful. So, while can’t sounds negative, knowing what SEO won’t do for you is actually a positive.
The 3 Things You Shouldn’t Expect From SEO
1. SEO doesn’t create demand.
Let’s say you own a coffee shop in West Asheville, North Carolina. When a person types “coffee shops in West Asheville” into Google, you want to be sure your shop is one of the first they see, right? SEO can make that happen. Having an SEO strategy in place can position your website address and a link to your site in premier placement within a person’s search results for specific words and phrases, i.e. as the top result, or one of the first three results, or on the first page of results. In other words, if they’re searching for what you have to offer, SEO can make sure they find you. But it can’t make someone search for coffee shops in West Asheville. There’s simply no way it can influence a person’s behavior like that. People have to already be searching for your business; put simply, SEO works with existing demand, it doesn’t create it. Maybe you have an extremely niche business, say, making miniature replicas of downtown Asheville parking garages using toothpicks. You cater to a select few. Unfortunately, SEO can’t make more people search for “miniature replicas of downtown Asheville parking garages with toothpicks.”
That said, even if there isn’t a great deal of existing search demand for what you provide, SEO can still help you. (After all, your replicas are completely fabulous, and people need to see them!) As SEO strategists, we’re also crackerjack researchers. We’ll figure out what your potential customers are already searching for and help you reach them that way.
2. SEO doesn’t earn you customers.
It gets potential customers to your website. Period. It’s up to your website to convert them into actual customers. One way it can do that? By clearly providing what the user searched for. If you’re a nutritionist and someone comes to your website through a search for “dietary advice on managing diabetes,” for example, they need to see content about exactly that. If they visit your bio page and discover that you’ve been helping people manage diabetes through dietary changes for 30 years, they’ll be intrigued. If they then click around and find several articles and recipes targeted just to them and what they’re searching for, they’ll stay on your website, reading and browsing. And the longer they stay, the better the chance they’ll hire you for a nutrition coaching session or sign up for your online course. The better the chance they’ll become not just a visitor to your site but a customer of your business.
On the flip side, if they can’t find much information about eating for diabetes, content that positions you as an expert they can trust on the subject, then they’ll bounce, literally—and won’t be converted to a customer. (A site’s bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who click into the site but quickly leave, and don’t continue to view other pages.) They’ll head back to their original search results and click on your competitor. What’s more, if Google or another search engine consistently sees that users who find you through a certain keyword aren’t staying on your site, that tells them you aren’t delivering on that search term and you shouldn’t rank high for it. Not only won’t you earn customers, but you’ll ultimately harm your SEO strategy, too.
Another way to think of it: SEO doesn’t build a brand all on its own. It influences how your brand is seen in search results and helps build your brand’s online equity. But how people perceive and interact with your brand—whether they become customers, and whether they become one-time or repeat, life-long customers—depends on the experiences and interactions they have with your brand, online via your website as well as offline through your locations, products themselves, and the list goes on.
3. SEO doesn’t work instantly.
There definitely are ways to drive more traffic to your website overnight—chiefly, paid search advertising. You’ll instantly increase your paid search presence and thus, hopefully, the number of visits to your website. SEO, however, is more of a long game. First off, it takes time to research and understand your potential customers’ online behavior, and to develop a plan that utilizes that knowledge to your advantage. Then, of course, it takes time to implement that approach: to create and post content that delivers on search terms and phrases, to build out web pages that demonstrate that your brand has what potential customers are looking for. And finally, the SEO strategy needs to be in place and performing well for a good bit of time in order for the search engine to recognize and reward those efforts, for it to see your site as an authority on that word or phrase. Paid search advertising is a good choice in the interim, while your SEO strategy is gaining steam and more and more people are clicking on your website’s pages. Once SEO is getting your site prime real estate organically, then you may no longer need to continue paying for that placement.
In the same vein, one SEO plan doesn’t work forever. It needs to be regularly tweaked and adjusted to perform at its best. Not to mention, the world wide web can be a bit of the wild west; it’s always changing, with new rules and new opportunities and avenues available to better reach potential customers arising seemingly daily.
One Piece of the Puzzle
Collectively, what all three don’ts are saying to do is to think of SEO as one part of your digital marketing strategy. It’s an extremely important element in today’s fiercely competitive online world, but it’s still only one piece of the puzzle. SEO depends on you knowing your brand inside and out: knowing your target audience, and knowing how your business—and your business, specifically, versus your competitors—can meet customers’ needs, desires, problems, and interests. It works well when you have a strong website, one that clearly conveys your brand and supports your marketing mission and goals. It operates in tandem with compelling content that captures visitors’ attention; that provides the information they’re looking for and positions you as the brand with the answers they’re after. From your “About Us” content, to your mission statement, to your blog posts, each page on your site represents the chance to satisfy a user’s search and convert them into customers, right then and for years to come.
We can help with your marketing needs, from SEO planning, to market research and brand messaging clarity, to marketing consulting and content creation. Reach out!