The Truth about SEO

How many links do you have pointing to your website? What is your Domain Authority or Page Rank? What are your rankings?

Here’s the thing: no matter what technical SEO aspect you’re discussing, it doesn’t matter.

What has mattered most and will always matter most is your focus on developing relationships.

That’s always been what works in sales, since the very beginning of time… and SEO is all about sales.

How Does That Technical SEO Stuff Translate to Relationships?

Every SEO factor can be boiled down to relationships with humans in some way, shape, or form. Take a look at a few SEO factors and see how they really revolve around relationships:

Links. If you’re talking about links on other people’s websites, you have to first develop a relationship with the owner of the website. Sure, you can still spam links on directories, but Google doesn’t like those, so that’ll burn you eventually. Developing a relationship with a website owner is as simple as shooting them an e-mail and letting them know what you like about their website. You could also link to them first, and request one in return.

If you’re talking about links on your own website, you have to make sure they work, link to other valuable information sources on your website, and link to authority sources when going off-site. That builds trust with your visitors, a much stronger relationship.

Content. If you want mediocre relationships with people who simply visit your website once and leave, rewrite content you found on other websites. Or, write vague, generic stuff that can be found anywhere. You’ll get almost no inquires at your website, guaranteed.

If you want strong relationships, listen to your customers and their problems. Write detailed, in-depth blog posts that give precise answers to their questions. They’ll love you for it and reward you with their business.

Domain Authority/Page Rank. The better the content you write, and the more aggressively you promote it, the more links you get. It makes perfect sense that people will trust you more with the more expertise you demonstrate in your writing. People will just naturally want to link to your site, as it is more authoritative. And your site will continue to gain authority as they link to it.

Page load time. The faster your page loads, the more likely it is to convert. Everyone’s done their own tests to demonstrate how much each second of additional load time reduces sales. This number could be around 20% or more per second of load time, depending on who you read.

But the point is this: faster load times make visitors happier, which in turn builds stronger relationships.

Are you starting to see a trend here?

Keywords. You have to optimize across the entire buy cycle. Begin with awareness, move on to research, and then use purchase keywords. Get the wrong keyword on the wrong page, and your visitors are confused.

For example, if you’re searching for “SEO copywriting,” most likely you simply want to learn more about the subject. However, change the term to “SEO copywriting services,” and that customer knows what they want and is about ready to buy.

The content you have on each page should accurately reflect where the visitor is in the buy cycle so that they resonate to it more closely.

Navigation usability. Google likes websites that are fairly “flat.” You don’t have to dig deeply in order to get to all parts of the content.

Guess what? Your users appreciate this type of navigation too. It builds strong relationships with them when you do it.

Strong Relationships Give You the Best SEO

Yes the technical stuff is important, but really it’s more important to focus on your users first. The good things in SEO will follow.