Why should we still talk about SEO?

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As a digital content professional, I’ve already heard a lot about how SEO is relevant — or not — for digital marketing strategies.

Some colleagues do believe that SEO is the key success of any digital strategy. In contrast, others say that SEO is just like any other marketing trend (like Inbound Marketing) and that its methods are already dead.

If you ask me about it, I will tell you that SEO is definitely not the solution for all your digital marketing issues. But I absolutely do not think of it as a trend that will flop.

We can agree on one thing, though: maybe SEO strategies are a bit overrated. Not because they don’t work, but because most people don’t have the know-how — or the patience — to use it correctly.

With that being said, I would like to state that we, digital and tech professionals, should still talk about SEO in 2021. But with another mindset.

SEO is not a game-changer — but can make your digital life easier

If you hired an SEO specialist hoping he is going to be the answer for your digital strategies problems, I regret to tell you that are already doing it wrong.

Sorry, dude.

SEO is definitely not a game-changer — on a short-term basis — to your marketing goals. And I am not afraid to say that, even though this is an integral part of my job. But SEO is a relevant part of your digital presence strategy — and that is why it matters to your marketing team.

When digital marketers first talked about SEO, at the beginning of the 2000s (although search engine optimization was a known practice for developers since the ‘90s), things in the “online search world” were quite different.

We, as users, had an extensive list of search engines we could use to find out more about (or, as we say today, google) something. And, for the marketers side, it was pretty simple to rank pages as a good result for any keyword search.

All you needed was:

• Some page content (good or not)
• The correct amount of words
• Some HTML tags
• Internal and external links (with the help of linking directories)
• Keyword stuffing.

This, of course, helped SEO black hat and SPAM practices grow throughout those first years of digital presence strategies.

But as Google’s search engine algorithms changed and got more competent (and we as users also got more demanding about the results we wanted to find in our web search), things changed a lot for SEO professionals over the last 20 years. And it did change SEO relevance as a fast, short-term solution for digital marketing strategies.

Now, SEO is more than just keyword research and on-page optimization. But it doesn’t mean that “doing SEO” doesn’t work anymore. On the contrary, it does — a lot.

And this is why having an SEO specialist — or at least someone who is up to date with Google’s constant algorithm changes — is still crucial to your digital team.

It is a long term strategy, but it is worth it

I know, I know all your managers, directors, coworkers, and clients hate the “long term” term. And I beg you not to press the stop button for all your SEO ongoing strategies after reading this here.

You think so? :)

The SEO expert’s job is to show the result is worth waiting for. Those strategies and optimizations will make short-term marketing strategies (like paid media or e-mail marketing) have better results in the future.

Better page optimization, content strategy, and user experience (all offered by a good and complete SEO strategic plan) can improve the results provided by those ongoing marketing strategies. And, of course, it will help your business rely not only on them to increase profit and user visits, by making organic traffic another important source for achieving your goals.

We are living the user experience era (and good SEO is a part of it)

Talking about user experience and marketing strategies can be a bit polemic.

Some user experience professionals (UX designers, strategists, and writers) often don’t see marketing practices as user-driven ones, and I understand their feelings about this. However, Digital Marketing strategies can be invasive and not user-centered if they are executed only focusing on immediate conversion and no user retaining plan.

But with SEO, things can be a little bit different.

Since SEO started having content production as a relevant part of its strategy, this marketing discipline (if we can call it that way) became the one that related the most to what users were looking for when using the internet. After all, SEO is all about user search, right?

But we already left the content SEO era to enter a new one that digital professionals call the SEO experience era. This means that content is still king to index your pages to the right keyword, but it will need more than just some relevant text to rank on the top of SERPs results.

This “extra effort” comes from the experience your page offers to the user.

All on-page and off-page optimization strategies today are about making the ranked webpage perform better:

• It needs to be mobile-friendly,
• have a nice and clean HTML structure,
• have good quality links,
• good page speed load,
• logic information architecture,
• a satisfactory dwell time (average user time on page)
• good click-through-rate,
• and, of course, quality and helpful content for the user.

This (and much more!) is SEO experience. Search engines want to show the users the results that give them the best experience they can have while navigating the web. And working on those on-page/off-page optimizations, you will have the user:

• spending more time on your pages
• visiting more internal links
• engaging with your page content

Although those metrics might not help you show that ROI your manager wants to see at your meetings (most of them don’t even know what a bounce rate is, right?), it will definitely help your web pages act as good resources for your clients/users.

This way, search engines will rank them well in the long term, and your organic traffic will improve — and that is the KPI an SEO professional wants to present growth on their work reports. ;)

Presenting KPIs like this.

SEO is all about data

SEO might seem like just another trendy marketing strategy involving content production and keywords, but today it is really all about data. This is why SEO professionals are always data-driven and have strong analytics skills (and if they aren’t, they are not doing this right).

Having an SEO team means you will always have someone looking for your page’s performance data and its capability to bring in more organic traffic. With this data it is possible to know where and when you need to refresh your SEO on-page and off-page optimizations.

They will also create KPI dashboards, metrics reports and send all insights they can find about page and organic performance to your other marketing and digital teams.

So SEO strategies can make your team analytics skills even higher — and valuable. So why wouldn’t you do that in 2021?

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With all that being said, SEO might not be the perfect marketing strategy for some of your digital goals, but it is, without a doubt, something to keep investing in, even in 2021.

But this is my opinion. How about yours?