At this point, it would be rare to find a business owner, large or small, that hasn’t come across the term “search engine optimization.”
Most business owners, in fact, could probably provide a good overview statement of what Charleston SEO does, something like “It helps your website show up in Google searches.”
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But beyond that basic premise, we find that many people have wildly false ideas about how SEO works, and those false ideas hurt their business in the critically important area of marketing.
Here are three common false ideas people have about Charleston SEO and how those ideas can hold back their online marketing strategies.
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1. SEO Is All About the Keywords
A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. When a small business owner digs a little deeper and finds out that one of the key facets of SEO is keyword placement on the website, sometimes that business owner stops reading and starts rewriting the content on his site, plugging in as many relevant keywords as he can.
This approach is like reading that milk has calcium, then going on an all-dairy diet in order to stay healthy!
Keyword density and placement are important, but they are only one feature of a healthy SEO campaign. If this feature is overemphasized and other features are absent, Google will completely ignore the website.
SEO might not mean what you think it means!
2. SEO Produces Quick Results
Unfortunately, this misconception is often reinforced by online marketing sales tactics. Despite the promises you might hear from competing marketing firms, organic SEO done correctly is a long-term process.
There are other strategies your organization can pursue to get its name in front of potential customers very quickly, the most common (and effective) being pay-per-click. But building an SEO campaign takes time, typically beginning to yield visible results after a few months of work.
If you’re expecting your website to vault to the first few search results after just a few days of SEO work, you’ll experience a lot of frustration! But it doesn’t mean your campaign isn’t working; it just means that your digital marketing partner is building a highly effective long-term strategy—and taking the time to do it right.
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3. SEO Is an Established Science
This is a very complicated misconception! The natural way to think about SEO is that there is a list of rules and best practices, and following those rules will result in great search rankings. It usually doesn’t work that way, though.
The fact is, search engine optimization is still a fairly new field of the marketing world. Search engines themselves have only existed for a little over three decades, and in that time they have undergone tremendous evolution.
Every “tweak” that engineers make to the algorithms that find and rank search results means that the rules of great SEO also change. One of the biggest responsibilities of an effective SEO manager is keeping up with these changes and implementing them across his clients’ websites.
To make things even more complicated, best practices can be different in different industries. A website that advertises professional photography, for instance, should use SEO methods much different from those of an e-commerce website. A site for a non-profit organization, likewise, should be marketed differently from that of a company selling electrical repair services to a local audience.
Get the Right Idea About SEO
Obviously, you want the company providing SEO services for your organization to understand exactly what search engine optimization is, what the current best practices are for your industry, and how those best practices might change with the introduction of new technologies and online tools.
At PalmettoSoft, one of the things we do differently is to make an effort to help our clients understand just what we do in their SEO and other digital marketing campaigns. We believe this type of open communication makes our working relationships stronger and leads to better ideas for creating highly effective online marketing strategies.
Get in touch with us today to start marketing your website online. We’ll work with you to create a package that has everything you need to make it to page one of the search results.
