One of the questions that always haunts every eCommerce SEO expert is “Is there a hard and fast SEO process I can use for all of my clients?”
Most marketers begin their careers by applying the old good throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks technique. You know how it is, you do a little bit of digging, find how the most successful marketers bring success to their clients and then try to apply the whole book to your next project.
After a couple of years, and thousands of readings later, many come up with their own set of methods to provide satisfactory results for their customers. I know a lot of marketers who are happy with the results they get and have been able to bring meaningful results to their clients.
However, there are others who become obsessed with SEO. These are tormented souls who are indefatigably committed to finding the perfect SEO formula. The goal does not include learning about their clients and their products or finding ways to connect them with their audiences. What they want is a secret formula or set of steps that will allow them to position any website at the top of search results without fail.
This is nothing new. Ever since business directories appeared, marketers and business owners have tried to skip the hard part of owning a business which is having something others want and providing a great service. Some of them would name their businesses after famous people, or just try to climb the alphabetized order by registering their business as “AAA Locksmith” or “123 Dish”.
One would think that search engines would be the end of these spammy practices. Unfortunately, automation only exacerbated these problems. At various points in our history, internet pollution became so bad that many predicted the end of search engines. Some examples come to mind. For example, when search engines stopped considering domain names as a ranking factor and started evaluating on-page content and the use of keywords, there was an explosive growth of sites with unreadable gibberish in them, and stuffed with keywords up to the eyeballs, populating every search result page. And as soon as Google announced that they would take inbound links into account as a way of measuring popularity, a portal from the spam dimension opened to let link farms into our world.
One of the most recent fads was the “location” craze. When Google started to take location and nearness as a ranking factor, everyone thought it was a clever idea. Dishing out results based on how close the user was to a store was an incredible way to make sure users performing queries from their smartphones found what they were looking for faster.
However, this was soon co-opted by unscrupulous marketers who claimed locations virtually everywhere on US soil so their business would come up in search results no matter where you were. Fortunately, Google soon caught up and stopped these fraudsters in their tracks. Others tried leveraging the term “near me” as a keyword hoping to fool Google’s algorithms without much success as the tech giant is now able to understand searches at the level of intent and match searchers with websites that serve their interests better. As we can see, these gimmicky techniques do not last long and search engines have managed to save the internet time and again. However, these types of “marketers” are still out there trying to trick customers into believing they have the right formula to take them to the top in weeks.
Do not fall for that trick. If you value your business and want honest, reliable, and steady growth in the long run, you need to contact the eCommerce SEO experts at 1DigitalⓇ Agency. They have been in the business for more than 10 years helping out dozens of clients and brands of all sizes to increase their traffic and conversions.
