Prepare for the Long SEO Haul
Long-term financial stability – that’s your goal and your dream. But can working an SEO approach really get you there? The answer depends on innumerable variables, of course. But one necessary component is persistence over the long term. Shape your SEO approach around this concept, and you will stand a much better chance of outlasting and outfoxing your competitors.
What Do We Mean By This?
Many SEO firms out there – including extremely reputable firms with powerful corporate clients – focus on winning the short game. In other words, these firms help you rank very high in the search engines for a few key terms related to your business by doing things like creating content for you, driving in-pointing links, and so on and so forth. This is all well and good. However, if these SEOs do not create a resource that has lasting and abiding significance for your potential customers, your search engine rankings will ultimately erode. In other words, it is an SEO approach that is the equivalent of building on sand. A strong looking edifice rooted in a bogus foundation. Over time, no matter how much cash you sink in, if your SEO is not rooted in something that’s truly useful and unique and timely for your visitors, your dollars will evaporate.
On the other hand, let’s say that you build with a long-term horizon in mind, say 5+ years or so. You create timeless content that doesn’t exist elsewhere on the internet. You create truly usable resources for your customers. And you focus not only on SEO tactics but also on business strategy.
If you can successfully implement something like this, over the long-term, you will win at optimizing for the search engines. This is because you will be giving the search engines precisely what they want: reliable, useful, resources for the people who use the search engines — their customers! This makes Google happy. It makes Google’s advertisers happy. It makes your customers happy. And ultimately it makes you happy because, when you offer up a real and dynamic service on the web — you don’t need to worry (as much!) — about the vagaries of the latest SEO tricks.