Why do SEO?

I got into the hobby of SEO about three or four years ago. I learned enough to get my main site ranked for some pretty obscure terms - which was more than good enough to meet my goal since my target market is less than 10,000 global customers - and nobody - I mean nobody - does any daily searching in this market.

I then brought about two other businesses with varying degrees of difficulty. Neither was a big money maker for me, but these two subsequent projects were enough to get me to think that this hobby can turn very worthwhile in terms of personal satisfaction and monetary return.

My latest project was to attack some highly competitive terms for which I haven't been very successful, but frankly I haven't accomplished several of my major goals that I perceived as necessary to get me over the hump.

In all this time, I've gotten a fairly firm grasp of the basics, learned a lot about web design, internet marketing, the value of several intangible things, and I've come accross more scams than I ever thought would exist in a single marketplace.

Anyhow, the purpose of this thread isn't so much to ask the question - the answer is obvious - we do SEO to get our sites highly ranked to get traffic to our sites. Some do it for money, some do it to spread information, some do it for the challenge. The purpose of this thread is to bring up something I learned early on, and it isn't a piece of knowledge that I have leveraged enough.

Gaining a high ranking in competitive SERPs can bring about an extremely large amount of traffic. In really competitive SERPs it can be a high amount of sustained traffic for as long as you are ranked. But then the ranking goes away - inevitably. If you keep working at it, the problem can be temporary, but there will always be someone fighting for those golden terms and that someone will always have more resources than you. It's simply not possible to sustain the energy required to keep hold of a large amount of great keywords.

The point of this expenditure of your time, energy, and money is to introduce people to your sites. If your site is good enough, people will search for your site specifically when you disappear from the rankings. If your site is good enough, people will add you to their hot lists, bookmarks, favorites, or whatever. If your site is good enough, you will be able to sustain reasonable income levels when your site loses it's hot rankings and you will not be held hostage by the search engines.

So what makes a site good enough? Here's a brief list, and I'm sure there are other factors:

1) Community - if there's good interaction in the community, people will come back just to be a part of it.
2) Appearance - very low on the list, but a really neat looking site will keep drawing repeat traffic. At the very least, the site should be readable, navigable, and not obnoxious in it's advertising efforts. People who put 10 CPM banners on their sites with a paragraph of text don't get repeat traffic in large numbers.
3) Information - Uniqueness of information is important, but even if you don't have any unique information, the presentation of that information in a useful format can make a site successful.
4) Reputation/Marketing - There is at least one site in every niche that is an assumed authority site. theknot.com isn't the most useful wedding site, it's not really the best at anything - but everybody knows about it and everybody goes there at least once when they are getting married. How many nerds do you know that haven't been to slashdot? When people talk about your site off line, then you have made it to the big time.
5) Services - A service that is unique, or better than other tools is bound to get a lot of repeat visitors - moreso if it is free.
6) Continual Improvement - changes to a site's appearance, information offering, service offering, etc. all show that there's someone behind the scenes doing something. If a site changes regularly, it gives people a reason to check back and get an update.

There are a ton more aspects to this thing, and I'm no guru. Do all the SEO you can, but it won't mean anything if people don't want to come back. Make your site great, then get the hot rankings, and those visitors will keep coming back even after google has abandoned you in favor of some other less valuable site.

I've had a few instances that I kick myself over - where I've simply not taken advantage of temporary high traffic levels because I was simply unprepared.

A really good website can earn a lot of residual money with very little administration. When you are targetting terms, don't just think about what it's going to take to reach the top of the rankings, think about how you are going to make sure that every visitor you get when you are at the top will come back to your site again and again. SEO is important in web marketing, but don't forget to think past SEO. It's only one piece of the success puzzle.

 

Good thoughts. If I ever see a big surge in traffic, reading this will add to my "intuitive" response and I'll put my best foot forward freshening and polishing.

It is fascinating, solving the SEO puzzle, but it's pure fun for me to focus on the site design, subject and users.

As in many things it comes down to balance.

 

Excellent post, Steven. A great reminder of what too many webmasters forget and too many SEO players fail to mention to potential clients. Getting people to your site is one thing. Giving them a reason to come back is another.