Today I talk about peer pressure in SEO. This is really for small business owners. A lot of you feel the pressure to do SEO. We get tons of email offers. Even as someone who runs a an SEO firm, I get a lot of emails every every day from people in other parts of the world trying to get me to hire them to do my SEO. They obviously don’t check my website before sending me those. Primarily they want to do link-building through the creation of fake user profiles. They promise to make you number one in Google. And it’s kind of funny because I know what it really takes and they send these lists of all their activities and the things that they’ll do. They call it Penguin and Panda safe, but their list never changes, and all they do is spam other people. The reality is that it’s all unnatural. And if you’re really looking for Google to reward you with a a top listing in one of their search results pages, then you have to know what Google is looking for.
Just checking a bunch of boxes doesn’t mean that you’re adding value to the internet.
What I’ve learned though working with companies, and this is one of the main themes in my book, is users versus search engines. And you don’t really have a business if people go to your website and they don’t buy from you. So my advice to everybody is this: don’t succumb to peer pressure.
Instead, you should be making sure that your website makes sales. If you have a webpage, and if someone goes to your webpage and they aren’t buying what you’re selling, then you don’t want to worry about getting more eyeballs on your webpage, you have a more serious problem. If a hundred people who are your ideal customer go to your page and only a few of them buy, then SEO isn’t really going to help you much.
You should first focus on your message and find out why more people aren’t buying when they go to your website. A lot of people are wasting money on search engine optimization and trying to figure out how to show up at the top of Google. But the reality is their webpage isn’t going to make a sale. And so no matter how many more people they put through their engine, it’s not going to really change much. And so think about it from a business perspective, what you really have to consider. Maybe your message needs to be improved. Maybe the titles or your headlines need to be rewritten a little bit. Maybe you have too many things going on with your webpage and you need to narrow your focus just to a specific goal or action that you want people to take. I briefly touched on that yesterday.
So an interesting theme in my book is that I’m focusing more on optimizing the website for people before you optimize for search engines. And I think it’s common sense. Don’t listen to all the people who are out there telling you that you need to be focusing on getting links and optimizing all the keywords and various things on your page. If when someone goes to your site they don’t buy, then why would you be trying to send more people? You need to be spending your energy and time solving that problem first.