SEO’s important, but it isn’t a business model
Posted in Search Marketing, Social MediaWhen search engine optimisation (SEO) is the main part of your business model, chances are you spend too much time trying to get traffic and not enough time improving your customer experience or building a brand.
I’ve heard plenty of people with “improving rankings” at the top of their list – SEO is one of those things people get caught up with when they don’t even have fundamentals right. It’s an easy trap for small businesses to fall into, but at the same time an easy trap for big businesses to dodge.
Let’s put SEO into perspective – imagine 3 restaurants
First restaurant ranks 1st for “restaurnts in internetville”
They’re going to get a lot of people discovering them this way and maybe even make a few $$$ along the way. Their food is average, nothing exciting and the service makes you yawn.
They’ll do OK but repeat visits and referral business will be lacking.
Second restaurant is invisible in search, but has a great reputation
This is the trendy place you heard about from your trendy friend. Always busy on a Friday night and serves a mean meal.
These guys will do pretty well…until the next trendy place comes along. Repeat visits and referrals will be what they rely on, fresh new business will be hard to come by without an established customer base to pass on the good word.
Third restaurant ranks 2nd for “restaurants in internetville” and has a good reputation
I think it’s pretty obvious where I’m going with my point. The 3rd restaurant of course wins the race.
Without good cusomer acquisition tactics (of course SEO is a big one) your business will peak and die as the trends do. With ONLY good acqusition tactics, you’re never going to grow organically.
So the point is: you do need both SEO & customer satisfaction to be significant. Thanks Captain Obvious.
There are a lot of Dotcoms who need SEO to survive as a business – to me they are the rats of the industry. The dodgy corner convenience stores of the web. Why would you want to be one of those?
With Facebook overtaking Google in terms of traffic, there’s an obvious increase to the importance of recommendations from friends over pure SEO. But Google is definitely not going away, you just need to be more accountable for your product/service.
Don’t get me wrong, SEO is a huge factor in any online business and something that can’t be ignored. While it presents a bunch of opportunities, by itself it’s not a sustainable strategy to run a company by.