The point is, you need to show up when consumers search for your products or services on the Internet.
- 80 percent of consumers search for a product or service before purchasing it
- 70 percent read online reviews before making a purchase decision
- 68 percent of consumers begin their decision-making while searching for a keyword
- Websites that blog regularly receive 55 percent more traffic and over 80 percent more leads compared to websites that don’t
- Over 70 percent of search clicks are organic
You don’t need a lot of statistics to know that your Internet appearance is an important aspect for your business. People turn to Google, social media, review blogs, and many other places on the Internet when they make most decisions in their life, including purchase decisions.
Do a quick test now. Google a couple of keywords that best describe your product or service. Not your brand keywords, but more generic terms. If they can’t find you, you don’t exist. If you don’t talk to them, you are not relevant. Without awesome content, you are boring. In a world where 80 percent of consumers search for a product or service before purchasing it, invisibility is a fate much worse than failure.
The good news is, TWMG can help you gain high SERP in no time.
The Three Types Of SEO Practitioners
Over the years, SEO practitioners have contributed to a massive amount of spam and poor quality content on the Internet. They broke directories, stuffed content with keywords, spammed the comments on blogs, bought and traded links in order to trick Google’s algorithm and push mediocre content toward the top in keyword rankings. It was bad, and sometimes ugly, but it worked well. This is might be the ‘Wild West Era’ of SEO.
Until 2011, when Google released its first major anti-spam algorithm called Panda, you got on top of Google by buying links and banging out tons of low-quality content. Recent Google algorithm updates, both Panda and Penguin, rendered most of the old SEO tactics obsolete. You still need to understand how the search algorithm works to make your content perform on Google or on Facebook’s Graph Search. The game change is that, as marketers, we can’t be merely concerned about the ‘keyword.’ Instead, we must optimise our content to relate to ‘who’ typed it into the search box.
Here are three types of common SEO practitioners:
1. The Good White Hat SEO
The keyword to SEO success is quality. The optimisation, content and relationships should be good enough to get the best result. With quality on your side, both users and search engines will be on your side as well.
- Quality Optimisation. Optimising your website to help search engine spiders understand what your content is about through on-site technical SEO.
- Quality Content. Creating valuable content for your target users that is both shareworthy and linkworthy.
- Quality Relationships. Building strong relationships with others in your industry through social media to amplify your content and improve your chances of gaining valuable backlinks to your website.
2. The Bad Black Hat SEO
There are lots of SEO companies and consultants that apply bad techniques in order to elevate rankings. Every second, a new business gets sold on $200 hassle-free SEO packages guaranteed to get them on the top pages of Google for a number of keywords.
Sadly, there is no such thing as a free lunch in SEO. The end result is often more harmful than beneficial if any of the following practices are involved:
- Buying Links. Participating in any type of link schemes or farms. Paying for links is a major violation of Google’s terms of service.
- Acquiring poor quality links. Creating hundreds of low-quality backlinks manually through directory submissions and commenting, Google knows better; you should too.
- Article spinning. Rewriting and publishing low-quality content at scale across the Web.
3. The Ugly SEO Spammer
There are many forms of spam that the shady Internet element of hackers and unethical SEOs thought of over the years. It’s a big problem for Google, which is constantly trying to filter its search results from spam. You can get flagged for spamming and get thrown out of Google’s index for practicing any of the below spammy SEO tactics:
- Fake accounts, reviews or comments. You can also get sued and fined.
- Content spam. These techniques involve keyword stuffing, doorway pages, or hidden or invisible text straight from the 1990s playbook.
- Spam blogs. Blogs built on stolen, duplicate content with thousands of useless web pages. These sites exist only for monetisation and provide no value to the user.