You are browsing the Month: March 2019

There's a reason we love what we do.

When done ethically and organically, search engine optimization is a process that requires a lot of work, takes a lot of time and requires a lot of patience from the business and the SEO expert. An important aspect of SEO is understanding that it is different from other marketing strategies and that being in-tune with these differences assist in running and measuring a successful SEO campaign. Patience is critical, and we must approach an optimization project as one that builds long-term value.

One of the reasons we enjoy working to optimize our clients’ websites is that, by nature, we are very patient and understand that results take time. There’s a real reason many people struggle with SEO, the “feedback loop” is incredibly long.

Here’s an example. When you are learning to play the piano, you take your fingers and press the white and black keys on the keyboard. If you do it correctly, you instantly hear an ear-pleasing sound. Do it wrong, and you will also know right away. In this case, the feedback loop is instantaneous, and you can make adjustments quickly until you get it right. Search engine optimization is quite the opposite. You can make changes to content, saturate text that you think is important and work to send social signals and then, you simply have to sit and wait to see the effects. The results could happen in 4 to 6 weeks. Or, it could take 4 to 6 months. Or, the results might not occur at all. Your feedback loop is painfully long. You simply do not have the opportunity to make changes and instantly know if they are going to work. Because we spend hours every day optimizing for hundreds of keywords, all the while documenting our results, we focus on correlating results to actions to gain an in-depth understanding of how search engines work.

SEO is a never-ending process, and there is always optimization work to be done. There are no “once and done” projects. Search engine optimization is a process that needs to be done consistently over an extended period. It takes time for search engines to index changes in your content, discover new links to website pages and analyze the overall structure of the site. Further, it takes more time for all of those data points to be assessed by the search algorithms for authority, relevance, and trust. Only after that will the changes be reflected in search results. We have precise control over the entire process until the search engines step in. At that point, we must accept the truth that we have no control over the actual search algorithm.

The User Experience

What’s clear is that search engines focus on one thing, the user experience. Search engines are continually being improved to help provide robust, meaningful results to human initiated queries. Many times the changes are algorithmic, other times the search engines improve the types of content displayed. No matter the case, the changes are made to enhance the user experience.

Considering the humans and the algorithms

Successful SEO campaigns consider two distinct audiences, the people, and the search engine algorithms. One audience generates opportunities for the business through its website, and the other is responsible for creating visibility based on authority, relevance, and trust. What’s fascinating is that planning a careful balance of ethical optimization for one audience should provide a robust optimization foundation for the other.