DIY SEO Often Doesn’t Produce the Long-term Engagement Your Company Needs
Whether you own a small business or lead a marketing team in a larger firm, you have probably dabbled in DIY SEO, but has it produced the results you need?
Armed with Google’s SEO Starter Guide, you might feel you have the tools you need to optimize your site for search, but there are a few problems you have likely encountered in your efforts:
It’s More Complex than You Realized
Even a brief glance at Google SEO guide reveals the first challenge with DIY SEO. That “beginner” guide features 11 fairly cryptic sections filled with advice like:
“For optimal rendering and indexing, always allow Googlebot access to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files used by your website. If your site’s robots.txt file disallows crawling of these assets, it directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content. This can result in suboptimal rankings.”
That’s not exactly beginner material. Although you can pick through guides like this one and find useful tips to apply, there are several SEO techniques than can be more challenging for a layperson to use.
Another expert offers this “32-Point SEO Checklist.” Right. Just 32 “simple” steps – on top of the 83 tasks you need to complete to run your company this week. Bottom line, SEO takes time and effort, and even the simplest approaches take an investment of both time and learning.
You Can’t Set It and Forget It
As you build your website or add new pages, you might follow the best practice of adding page titles, meta descriptions and categories. If so, great. You are ahead of the game. However, you can’t expect to set SEO for a page and then walk away.
Effective SEO requires ongoing maintenance and updating. As search engine algorithms change, your SEO tactics should change. In addition, you should periodically update old content to improve your site’s search rankings.
According to Neil Patel:
“…in Google’s algorithm, you’re more likely to rank higher if more people click on your content from the search engine results page. So updating your content will make it more appealing, and that appeal will tell Google it’s a better resource that should rank higher.”
SEO won’t work if you approach it with a one-and-done approach. Your site, and overall SEO strategy, need regular attention to ensure optimization.
SEO Needs Content
It’s important to remember that the best SEO strategy includes development of new, useful content. Content can take the form of how-to videos, blogs, white papers and much more, but you need a consistent source for generating this new material.
For small business owners in particular, creating new content can prove to be a big hurdle. You already feel stretched to the limit with running your business, and marketing and content can easily take a backseat to more urgent tasks.
According to Pamela Slim, for Entrepreneur:
“Most small business owners aren’t marketers by trade, but almost all (95 percent) do some form of marketing for themselves, and many need to master what can feel like a very steep learning curve quickly. Most entrepreneurs and small business owners (64 percent) are self-taught and less than half (46 percent) consider themselves ‘marketing savvy.’”
Slim counsels small business owners to consider ways to automate or outsource some functions to “make the most of their time and resources.”
If you have been attempting to manage your SEO and content marketing on your own, without success, contact us to learn more about our integrated approach to marketing, SEO and web design.