Monday 15 July 2013

Why SEO is no longer just about SEO

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short is far more well-known nowadays than it was a few years ago. But whilst some of its principles still hold true today the very practice of SEO is so much more than backlink building and keyword rankings.

Effective SEO is really online marketing - think social media marketing, online PR, email marketing and content creation and you might have some idea of what we mean by the overall phrase ‘online marketing. The only reason it is still called SEO is that people have finally got to grips with the name and the concept so calling it something else would be like going back to square one.

So SEO should instead stand for the overall online marketing strategies that will involve optimisation up to a point but also other digital disciplines and channels that contribute to building up the visibility of a product, brand or business online. You cannot ignore the fact that Google has huge power over websites in terms of its algorithms and rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket and relying on organic search alone, or the traffic that is delivered by one or two keywords that are ranking on page one, you now need to cast your net a little wider and look to generate traffic from referrals, from social media channels and from a diverse range of semantically linked keywords.

Yes, gone are the days when you should be building a marketing strategy around 5 or 10 key phrases. There are still plenty of SEO companies out there who are charging per keyword but these strategies are old fashioned. After all, how many of us when searching for a builder in Birmingham would only consider typing builder Birmingham into Google? What about the many other possibilities such as builders in birmingham, birmingham building company and birmingham builder not to mention the fact that some of us will look on Facebook to search for a local company or perhaps act upon information shared when one of our friends retweeted?

If you want to truly build a lasting presence and help your business to grow online you need to accept that SEO is no longer just about SEO and that only an online marketing company that talks about innovation and implementing social media, online PR and other elements will be capable of getting you where you need to be.

Posted by Frances Berry