SEO has been praised by many people as a way to get hundreds of daily visitors. In fact, some blogs get thousands of daily visitors from SEO, but there are certain details about SEO that many of the experts leave out. I now get hundreds of daily visitors from SEO alone, but that only happened when I did not focus most of my attention on SEO. I know; very ironic.
I have come to a conclusion. While it is good to do some SEO, it is completely overrated. Some people think of SEO as an easy to access gold mine, but it is anything but that. The only way you land in that gold mine is by driving a clown car and falling into it. Maybe I’m just adding another flavor to Mark Zuckerberg’s comment about Twitter, but that is really what happens with SEO. Ultimately, it’s overrated, and here’s why.
- SEO takes a boat load of time to build up. It took me almost two years before I got hundreds of daily visitors from the search engines. Some people take even longer.
- My SEO traffic only went up when my social media traffic went up. I’m not going to question that it also takes a long time to build up social media traffic. It took me 993 days to reach my first 100,000 Twitter followers. However, by building your social media presence, you will be hitting two birds with one stone. In addition, once you build your social media audience the first time, it becomes easier over time. Although it took me 993 days to get 100,000 Twitter followers, I can now reach the same milestone in less than 200 days. When I reach 200,000 Twitter followers, I expect to get the same feat accomplished in under 150 days.
- Learning SEO takes up too much time. Most people browse through dozens of SEO articles to learn how to boost their SEO. All you need to do is read this article about SEO, and you will have all of the basic knowledge about SEO that you need.
- By focusing on SEO, you are competing with millions of other articles. There are millions of articles on the web that are about the same topic as your blog post. By only focusing on SEO, you are competing with the millions of other articles on the search engines. Building a powerful social media presence allows you to escape relying on being on top of this competition. In addition, a powerful social media presence will allow you to eventually end up on the first page of search engines.
- Many people strive for SEO more than social media traffic. Many people are implementing tactics to enhance their blogs’ SEO without giving social media a glance. Many of these people have fewer than 1,000 followers on their social networks, but when it comes to bounce rate, catchy headlines, and tags, these people know what they are doing. The result is no blog traffic because SEO needs a big push, social media traffic, in order to bring in more traffic for your blog.
Those are the five reasons why SEO is completely overrated. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips and advice? Please share your thoughts and advice below.
UPDATE: Looking back at this article, I realize SEO traffic is important, but still overrated. Boosting your social media audience and getting more social shares boosts SEO, so I believe focusing on social media is the better strategy. I’ve read more blog posts from QuickSprout so I know SEO is important, but regardless of what stream you use to boost traffic, valuable content is critical towards any blog’s success.
Perhaps this has changed, but I thought most social media sites’ links were NoFollow links and thus not counted toward rankings. Signals, yes, that can help distinguish between businesses with the same name (or some such benefit) but not for rankings. But maybe this has changed.
Links from Facebook and Twitter are nofollow, but I view social media traffic as votes of approval for your blog that Google considers when ranking your content. Anytime my Twitter traffic significantly increases, my search engine traffic increases at the same rate.
Throughout years seo reamins a painful problem. Since the very beginning, web masters have been guessing its secrets and strategies but its means and results still remain unknown and unpredictable. What’s even worse, they change. On the other hand, knowing seo secrets and real working strategies (which in reality noone’s willing to share) can bring you long-term success and ranking.
SEO is valuable in the long-term but overrated in the short-term. I didn’t start strongly focusing on SEO until I got enough social media traffic. SEO involves a lot of work and is a high patience endeavor. That’s why I don’t recommend beginners to take SEO seriously. Only after you have a love for writing content and are building a social media community should you take SEO seriously.
I also disagree. The same could be said for social media, (although I agree social is easier to learn than SEO). At this point in the marketing game, its all about integrated strategies. SEO alone, or Social alone don’t really cut it anymore. They both help, but are much more effective when used together.
You made some great points Danny. Marketing is definitely filled with integrated strategies. It seems as if we have to do multiple things to move one step forward. Ever since my journey began, I’ve developed a deeper appreciation for SEO and its ability to generate traffic, but SEO shouldn’t be viewed as the silver bullet (in fact, there is no silver bullet to marketing). I think beginners would be very intimidated by SEO. Out of all of the things I have learned in my niche, SEO was the most challenging thing to learn due to constant algorithm changes. I’d recommend creating a good foundation of knowledge for something else (i.e. social media) before taking the plunge into SEO.
Hey !! Great summary. I’ve long thought it was a LOT of hype … valid, but hyped. DM’ed you on Twitter.
Thank you Kathe. I am glad to hear that you enjoyed the summary, and in addition, thank you for that DM! I greatly appreciate it.
Marc,
It all depends on what you do, how you do it and why. We do Online Marketing primarily for Business websites.
For a business offering a service or product that people want SEO makes good sense. The article you refer to about SEO seems to be primarily about blogs and blogs are social media. Social media is definitely good for SEO – it increases quality links to a website and people talk and discuss a business online.
Most SEO/Internet Marketing is done on/for peoples business websites.
It definitely works. We can prove huge increases in traffic to clients sites due to the SEO and internet marketing work we have done for them.
It certainly works better than traditional marketing. When someone types a specific term into a search engine and gets results that is SEO at work.
See also: http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2014/03/26/7-reasons-why-your-business-should-invest-in-seo/
I agree that SEO results in more traffic, but growing a presence on social media also boosts SEO. In addition, SEO is something that many people spend too much time trying to learn about. That time would be better utilized growing a big social media audience. In the end, it all comes down to having valuable content on your blog so readers stick around.
Hi,
I am sorry, I do not agree with you. I do agree that it takes time to learn to apply seo, but the moment you get the hang of it, it will start to work for you. Especially if you build your site in a silo-structure.
I totally agree with you in the area of the value of social media.
Have you considered what the real value of combining the two could mean?
I believe that similar to the concept of a good offense making a good defense, good social media traffic makes good SEO traffic.