How’s that for an advice coming from a guy who eats, sleeps and breathes Search Engine Optimization? If the truth be told, I should be aiming to convince people that SEO is the holy grail of internet success rather than repelling them. Just to make it clear, I am in full senses and not in a mood to shoot myself in the foot.
So when I say, don’t get infatuated with search engine optimization and rankings, I m primarily addressing the online business owners and not SEO professionals (yes, it’s alright to be fanatical about search engines, back links, rankings and the likes, if you are an SEO professional, even though a multi-talented SEO is still better than a mere link developer).
Nevertheless, let’s take a look at how SEO syndrome can hurt your website in due course.
Listening more to some SEO nerd rather than listening to your customers:
First downside of getting fixated with this ranking stuff … you will start paying more attention to what SEO techies are saying instead of paying attention to your visitors. Now … SEO techies are not evil guys and their blogs are definitely not some no-go zones, neither are any of those websites talking about search engine algorithms, SEO guidelines or Google updates.
The problem actually transpires when you drive yourself into believing that your job starts and ends with improving the ranks. You know … all that hoopla about page impressions and unique visitors. Traffic, undoubtedly is the most needed sustenance for any website but it tends to be useless if the visitors are, just coming and going.
Therefore, do yourself and the visitors a favor, before you even try to get top rankings for a particular keyword. Make sure, your website has the information, product or services that the users will be looking for. Also, pay as much attention to user interface and the usability of your website, as you are paying to those on-page optimization checklists.
Wasting time in things that hardly matter:
At the end of the day … search engine optimization is all-about having great content and a steady growth in back links coming from relevant and trustworthy pages. Instead of keeping it simple (read: Occam’s razor principle) the obsession may lead you to a position where small things will start nagging, especially if you are not patient enough.
The problem with is that it takes some time before you can rank for anything noteworthy. Even if you were right on the mark from the word “Go”. Because the rankings won’t come overnight, the frustration may dupe you into thinking that something is wrong with your website. As a result you will start wasting too much time into research, tweaks and fixes that hardly matter.
Spending all the time and resources on optimization and not on conversion:
If you were asked to pick between two websites … one that gets 1000 daily visitors and manage to convert 1 out of these 1000 into a customer/subscriber, whereas the other one keeps getting 10,000 visitors and still fails to persuade any of them into purchasing … which one would you prefer? Clearly, the one that’s getting less traffic but more sales is the winner.
Yet, we see internet marketers, and even worse the business owners getting more concerned about “More” traffic and “Higher” rankings as compared to what they are making out of the visitors, they’ve already had. Search engine optimization alone is not going to cut it for you. Internet business profitability is measured by the number of sales and not rankings, which brings us back to the long-winded point of this article i.e. “getting overly obsessed with the rankings will kill your online business”
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