Throughout my time in the digital arena Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has always been an area of hot debate. With every second email landing in your inbox sprouting “I can get you on the first page of google” and headlines like “If you’re not the top google result you may as well be dead.” SEO has become the go to phrase for many marketers. There seems to be is 2 trains of thought on the topic. Many people believe that SEO was made up by marketing companies so that they could charge for a product that couldn’t be seen, measured or disproved. Some believed that as long as you had a website, you had SEO… Surely.
Unfortunately many have been cornered into paying for something they believed was SEO and was simply the first scenario and therefore have been poisoned against it. I am a firm believer that when done right, SEO can benefit your company far more than that fresh out of Uni Social Media whizz that your paying to place content on a FaceBook page to get likes that will never convert. Yes, it’s a little hard to get right, and yes you actually need to know what you’re doing, but when you see it work, the results can be truly spectacular.
Search engines are a funny beast that require prodding from time to time and what better way to prod, then to peak their interest with new content. SEO, in the most part isn’t rocket science, it is fiddly, tricky at times and a little time consuming which is why I love it. (and most others hate it) its a fine balance of readability, knowing what to write and knowing where and how to present it.
Now there are experts in this field and there are fakers, just like anywhere else. The experts will explain as much as they can as to how and why things are done, fakers will baffle you with, you know what, until the cows come home, or you simply glaze over and go back to what you know.
In the end SEO can be your best source of free or next to free advertising, and it can drastically decrease your ad spend over time if done correctly. It is by no means an overnight fix, but what is? I bet the success of your business wasn’t. It took plenty of hours toiling away, seemingly staying still until you made it to where you are today. Not much in life comes without work, patience and process, neither do results from good SEO implementation, but what I can say is that if you choose your partner wisely and continue to work with them, you will see that this is certainly not a myth, but I’m not sure I believe in magic either…
