SEO is about the ‘big picture’

I often see people obsessing about a particular keyword ranking or other aspect of SEO – that’s a very narrow minded approach, particularly if you’re focusing your SEO resource on that goal.

SEO has a broad scope and is a long term strategy, so dwelling on minor facets of it can be detrimental to your campaign.

Diminishing returns

Of course, there are specific keywords you want to rank for and those are likely to be the ‘money’ keywords in your vertical. It’s quite likely that your competitors are also doing the same which is why those terms are probably the most competitive terms you’ll be targeting.

A good campaign will certainly still target those keywords (we’re not going to avoid the money terms – that wouldn’t be a good approach to marketing, would it?) and your site’s content, infrastructure and external marketing efforts should be support those goals.

But there comes a point of diminishing returns, after which there is more benefit allocating your resource (which for many business can be limited) to other areas.

Increased risk profile

Overtaking competitors for competitive keywords would generally involve acquiring more links.

Depending on your starting point (are you a new business with a new domain or an established entity in your market?) and the competitiveness of the keyword, this could involve fairly aggressive link building. This comes with a degree of risk, which is affected by a number of factors:

• The quality of your supplier.
• What techniques are being deployed.
• How likely your competitors are to cause problems for you.
• The saturation of your market.
• The availability of acquirable links.
• The likelihood of future algorithm changes negating your links.
• Your budget.
• The quality of the links you acquire.

You shouldn’t underestimate just how much your risk profile increases when you aggressively build links. By this, I’m not talking about naturally occurring links (e.g. as a result of PR or social media activity) or near-naturally occurring links (e.g. citations, link reclamation) – these are low risk activities.

Guest posting, buying links, blog comments, etc on the other hand, come with a variety of existing and future risks.

If you lost your organic traffic tomorrow, would your business survive? Is it worth the risk?

Vanity isn’t a business objective

Leave your ego at the door and focus on the big picture.

The real danger with ‘vanity rankings’ is that by focusing on those objectives, you’re not exploring other possibilities. Some of the most successful digital marketing campaigns deliver unexpected results – untapped micro-markets that your competition doesn’t know about.

Remember, not all of your potential customers currently know they want to buy your product or service, and therefore won’t be searching for whatever your ‘money’ keyword is. Demand can’t be satisfied if it doesn’t exist. There’s a much larger pool of ‘early funnel’ customers waiting to be engaged with.

The opposite of all this is also true

• There are plenty of keywords that can offer a great ROI and are well worth targeting.
• The risks involved in link building are manageable and it’s still an effective technique.
• In most situations, you wouldn’t turn away a customer who is ready to buy, just to engage with 10 that might later.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to SEO. Every business is different and that’s why it’s important to take a flexible approach to developing a SEO strategy. Many suppliers will swear by a singular approach and while that works some of time, there are occasions where a different approach would be more effective.

Be sure to pick a supplier that understands that.

Update: 23/4/18

I was browsing /r/BigSEO earlier and a thread covering this topic cropped up.

The sentiment is pretty much what I’ve said here. You’d perhaps expect a marketing agency to be less likely to focus on these things than other businesses, but remember ego is always a factor!

Have a read through the responses and you’ll notice a variety of opinions on how to approach the situation:

• Educate the client (the boss in this case)
• Don’t focus on the small things
• Make a case to add resource to other rankings
• Backlink audit / more link building
• Various blackhat suggestions

The point of my post isn’t to dismiss or advocate one approach or another, but to look at the value of taking a step back and understanding the bigger picture.

For example, in the case of the Reddit poster, we know he works for an ad agency and his boss is SEO savvy. Perhaps he is being tested by his boss with an “unlimited resource” challenge just to see how he responds?

Understanding how a staff member approaches a problem or how they (or indeed, if they) tell their boss ‘no’ is a valuable insight. Being able to have that conversation with clients is essential.