Yes, you read that right. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a rort! This a great rort that has generated an entire industry of people who are willing to take your money in the name of optimising your website for search engines. The promises are alluring too, with SEO you can achieve “vast riches”, “skyrocketing revenue” and even “destroy your competition”. But let’s be honest, it’s not that at all.
You might be saying at this point, “but we’ve had benefits from doing SEO in the past?” So, let me be clear, the SEO rort is paying a digital marketing agency or SEO expert $1,500 a month to “do SEO”. You can’t just outsource SEO; this won’t produce the results you want or need – it just doesn’t work.
Even Google has been trying to kill off SEO for over 10 years! Both actively and vocally. That’s because SEO isn’t in anyone’s best interests. Let’s explore this further.
What is SEO?
Let’s get back to basics for a moment. SEO is to get Google to like your business (more and more over time), so it ranks your website higher in search results.
Why would Google rank you higher? To answer this question, we need to go back to why Google exists – to classify the world’s information. When you search for something, Google provides the most authoritative and informative pieces of information first and so on down the list.
Google is getting better and better and smarter and smarter at doing this. Every day every week of every year, Google leverages its money, people, smarts, and resources to improve what it does – and it is getting good at it, and tomorrow it will be better again.
The ‘rort’ of paying an SEO expert or agency to do it for you
Now that you understand Google’s role, you can start to see that to rank above your competitors, you need to be the most authoritative expert in your field and provide high-quality information on key aspects and issues of your industry and business. That’s how you win at Google.
So when you pay $750, $1,500 or $2,000 to an SEO expert, how are you being the most authoritative, expert, and informative business in your field? You’re not! That’s why it no longer works. You’re trying to shortcut the process and to be completely honest with you, it’s just downright lazy. And that’s not what good businesses do!
SEO is deceptive – and Google penalizes you for it.
SEO ‘tricks’ Google into thinking you are more of an authority than you are. But you haven’t earned it. That’s why it’s deceptive.
Google continues to penalize (not reward) laziness that attempts to shortcut the system. If you are paying someone to ‘do SEO’ and haven’t seen your day of reckoning yet, mark my words, it’s coming. Paying someone to build backlinks and optimise your website, is not enough to get you the results you need today and well into the future.
How do you rank higher than your competitors without ‘doing SEO’?
Now, that is a better question! In fact the right question is:
How do I better communicate (market) our expertise better than our competitors?
Communicating your expertise (aka building your authority) better than your competitors is what Google rewards over the short and long term. It’s simple, but not easy. To help, here are five core steps to outranking your competition:
- Have a great website
- Produce authority leading content
- Share your content, ideas, advice etc with the world
- Have a strong web presence
- Run a good business!
That’s it – nothing more, nothing less. It’s simple, elegant, and beautiful – and it’s the right thing to do. So, let’s explore this in more depth.
- Have a great website
The first step is to have a great website that engages with your target audience and clearly showcases your expertise. Your website is your shopfront and it’s where you need to share your expert knowledge and ideas.
What makes a great website? Here’s what your website should include:
- A clear user journey, so your target market knows where to go and what to do next
- Engaging marketing messages that differentiate you from your competitors
- Social proof to back up your claims of how good you are
- Your brand story, the one you’ve spent years honing
- A flawless experience for your target audience and Google. this means it needs to be technical sound (it loads quickly, has no broken links, etc.)
- An encyclopedia of information that covers every question your target audience could ask about your product, business, and industry.
- Produce authority leading content
The concept that ‘content is king’ has been around long enough now for all of us to realise the importance of content. But you don’t just want any content on your website – you need relevant and engaging content. It’s quality over quantity.
Here’s what makes authority-leading content:
- Good high-level summaries with the ability to drill down into minute industry details
- Informative product and service pages (with lots of detail!)
- Frequently asked questions – every question a potential customer ever asks you should have a great piece of content on
- Regular content that reflects your expertise (case studies, response to key issues/news, industry insights, statistics, etc.)
- Share your content with the world
Once you’ve produced your content, you need to share it! There’s not much point in doing it otherwise.
Here’s how you can make sure your content gets more views:
- Share it on your social media accounts
- Email it out to your database – if it’s good content they’ll want to read it, even when you don’t think they do!
- Send it onto industry-specific publications and websites
- Do wider digital PR – look at relevant local, national, and global media sites to distribute your content to (press release distribution, business sites, industry news, etc.)
This is the ‘backlinking’ that influences Google around the importance of your expertise.
- Have a strong web presence
In addition to a great website, you need a strong web presence – and no, these aren’t the same.
For a strong web presence, you need these foundations in place:
- Good listings on all the major business directories and citations sources
- Great reviews through Google My Business, Facebook, and other review sites
- Good listings on all map products (Google My Business, Apple Maps, Bing Maps, etc.)
- Profiles on industry-specific directories and associations
- Run a good business
What’s this got to do with SEO you ask? The answer is everything! Long-term SEO success is dependent on how well you run your business.
- Good businesses generate rave reviews and testimonials that customers are happy to share with others (both online and offline). This shows Google you truly are an authority in what you do
- Get active in your community – Attend local events, and sponsor the local sports team or homeless mission. Get involved, we’re here to serve others. This shows Google you are a nice person and a good corporate citizen. Your target market likes this too!
- Contribute to your industry – Speak, share, write and attend industry events, share your knowledge and make your industry better. Google loves that.
See where we’re going here?
Your business will grow by word of mouth alone!
But here’s the disclaimer, being an expert takes time. It’s a 3–5 year plan, not an overnight success. While you will get rewards relatively quickly, the real value comes long term with untold riches of good solid growth month-on-month, year-on-year.
The hard work will pay off. But it needs to start now (not tomorrow). It’s the accumulation of lots of little steps over time that compound into true riches. It is the same as financial investments over decades.
