Above all aspects of online marketing, SEO still is my first and only true love.
For those who do not know, SEO is short for search engine optimization. It is the process of attempting to improve a website’s (or any of its pages’) visibility in the search engine’s unpaid results pages in order to bring in targeted organic traffic. It is in short a deliberate effort of making your website rank for particular search keywords. To illustrate it better, try to search “best broadband connection in the Philippines” on Google. On top of the results page are 2 pages from MoneyMax.ph (as of June 22, 2015 haha).
Awesome, right?
But to know more about SEO, here are my own personal reasons why I love this discipline:
1. SEO is both art and science.
It follows a universal body of knowledge (set by Google for webmasters) that is so basic..that for your website to achieve its goals, you need to identify problems, hypothesize, test, measure, conclude, test again, until there are no more problems (which never happens). SEO, as a science, is highly data-driven. You need to do a lot of experimentation in order to get the results you want for your website. You need to test and test and test. You need to break through an algorithm that is based on thousands of factors. And when numbers just won’t cut it, creativity must come in.
SEO is an art, because it requires a highly specialized skill of understanding the things that numbers can’t explain. What is the website’s business? What are its main products? Are these products searched by people? Who and where are the people searching for these products? How do they search it? How can you expose the products to those who are not searching for it? SEO, as an art, is instinct-driven. It requires a deep sense of knowing how people communicate, search for information, look for answers, buy products or make decisions. It requires a strong sense of gut feel and intuition that can be backed and validated by data.
2. SEO is interdisciplinary.
SEO has two phases, and most of the time, practitioners these days know only one or two things of this discipline. SEO has on-site and off-site activities that content marketing actually binds together.
A sustainable SEO campaign involves a powerful on-site optimization. It requires an extensive understanding of web architecture and development as well as technical aspects that determine how the search engines crawl your web pages. At the same time, on-site SEO requires you to have business analysis skills and a powerful content background. It’s all about making sure your website represents your business well and making sure that the search engines find it smoothly.
Off-site SEO, on the other hand, involves website promotion, PR and outreach. It’s how you intentionally get people (through their websites and social media) to talk about you and point to you. This phase of SEO requires strong interpersonal skills, stalking techniques, and a whole lot of effective emails and relationship-building.
3. SEO is content-driven.
As previously mentioned, SEO now goes hand-in-hand with content marketing. Gone are the days when content can be spun and you can just stuff your articles with keywords and hide them in white fonts or those days when commenting in as many blogs will boost your pagerank. Gone are the days when search engines are dumb that they can still be tricked.
Google, for instance, is getting much smarter and smarter these days. It’s not too far away when you can ask and type a very specific question on the search bar and Google gives you a straight answer. It happens now for some queries, actually, and it’s the reason behind the series of algorithm updates over the years. It aims to be the smartest platform in the world as it is today –and for this to happen, they need powerful and well-organized content from us. SEO is content and information driven, which I am most passionate about because of my background in Development Communication.
4. SEO is mass communication.
I never liked working in mainstream media as these are oftentimes highly established linear organizations you cannot have a huge impact on. And so I loved the fact that SEO enables me to practice mass communication at its geekiest and most practical form.
SEO requires knowing your target market or target audience, and keyword research is just a part of it. I love the fact that this discipline enables me to reach out to those who actually need the information I can provide. It’s not blind or random marketing; it’s highly targeted and can be cunning at times.
5. SEO is highly rewarding.
I never liked doing tasks wherein you cannot see the direct value of what you’re doing. In this discipline, SEO gives you the results according to your efforts and sometimes even more. SEO enables you to understand man’s behavior when it comes to information search or product search, and coupled with a few more skills, you can understand consumer’s buying behavior too.
This is gold mine if you are business-minded, and when properly done, it’s super valuable to anyone’s business.
Do you like to increase your website’s visibility and traffic? Let me know!