SEO Blog

There’s a popular misconception that SEO is a magic ticket to success. Rightly or wrongly, website owners are prone to becoming quite irate when it doesn’t start attracting more visitors to the site or sales aren’t instantly doubled.

The issue with SEO is that it is only one aspect of your website’s marketing. Yes, it is extremely important in terms of improving your visibility in the search engines, but it can’t cure a website that simply can’t convert.

Let me quantify that statement slightly. Imagine you are marketing a chocolate teapot. You can have all the marketing nous and give it all the exposure in the world, but ultimately it is the final product that will always let it down; after all who wants a chocolate teapot?

This translates to any aspect of business, because ultimately if you are going to sell an ideal you first need an ideal worth believing. If you’re a website owner, sometimes you have to take a step back and decide if what you are offering is really what people want. Maybe the product is good but the presentation isn’t there? It’s quite a common problem, but sometimes we become so driven by our own vision that we forget that the websites we create are designed for visitors’ ease not personal gratification.

It might sound a little glib, possibly even a little excessive, but unfortunately it is true. SEO is only as good as the website it promotes. You can get all the traffic in the world, but if nobody trusts what you have to say or your message is being lost in a tangled mess of a website, then you’ll never be able to convert them into any meaningful custom.

SEO experts should always be honest from the outset about the potential of a website. If you have a poor business plan and an even worse website, chances are that it won’t succeed; which would make investing in SEO the equivalent of throwing good money after bad. Most websites have potential though and a decent webmaster and/or SEO should be able to help you to get the very best out of it. However, to be really successful you have to be able to take on board the comments and criticisms that experts offer.

There’s no magic wand with SEO, whilst it is essential for all websites to adopt some kind of search engine optimisation strategy, it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll succeed. In the cutthroat world of the Internet, even exceptional websites with decent promotion and optimisation on their side haven’t succeeded. With this in mind, the importance of having your site’s house in order before you embark on an extensive marketing campaign should be all too obvious.

So don’t ignore SEO, that would be a major error in its own right; no, instead you need to be aware that it isn’t a cure for all your website’s ills. Seek out independent opinions on your site first, listen to what experts, customers and visitors think and make sure your site is meeting their expectations. Excellent websites, with equally impressive SEO and a decent business behind it are the only genuine recipe for success online.