Traditional SEO has gone through phases over the years. A brief history would read something like this:
- experiment with search engine rankings
- do we really need to spend the budget?
- throw everything at the site
- don’t throw everything at the site
- It’s essential but has to be done correctly – who can we trust?
- Well, we should really be focusing on social media
This current phase, of redirecting budget to concentrate on social media and online marketing campaigns, is a fair one and I agree that both avenues for traffic are high priority in these times. However, this doesn’t mean to the detriment of your on-page SEO.
If you launch your website with no, or little, SEO you send out your top athlete to compete in a motorbike race with nothing but a bicycle – and not even an electric one!
Your website is your brochure, your shop window, your pathway for the majority of your business footfall, so surely you want to place it on the Internet equivalent of Oxford Street, not let it languish in a rarely visited side street in a run down part of the net where all the low-lifes and no-hopers hang out?
On-page SEO is an integral part of getting your site to the top of search engine results pages. Yes, it makes a difference how many great sites link to yours. Yes, your content is really important. Yes, you should get your site seen in other places. But good SEO will make a difference. With the number of websites on the Internet hovering around 1 billion, a spot of budget directed towards making it easier for the search engines to understand why your site stands out could take you off that dreaded page 3 of search results.
