Is SEO the Best Way of Marketing Your Business For Free?

Money is the big mover. Back in the bad old days when SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was all about getting hundreds of links and writing pages after pages of inane text just to get your web page ranked, there were websites with money. Those with money paid for the most content, the most links, the most MySpace attention, Google Plus attention, and most affiliate ads. They ruled the roost.

Nowadays, SEO is more about content appeal and popularity, and guess who can pay to make their websites the most popular? Those with the biggest marketing money. In other words, Good SEO goes hand in hand with good marketing. Ergo, you need to spend money on your SEO.

I Cannot Compete With The Big-Money Websites Because I Do Not Have Their Budget

That is true. Even if you run a medium-sized business, you are always going to play second fiddle to larger companies that can invest money into having marketing companies and SEO agencies work night and day to keep them popular and keep them on the top of the search engines, apps, web crawlers, and so forth.

However, just under the layer of rich cream is a foggy world of trifle, and that is where you can exist. Perhaps you do not need to be at the top of Google if you can simply be on the first page. Perhaps your affiliate advertising doesn’t have to take the top spot and compete for the top bid prices. Maybe it is okay if your website appears third or fourth in an online crawler search, online directory, or web spider/crawler app.

The Murky Middle Ground

If you are aiming to utilize SEO in a big way, then the middle ground (under the bigger companies) is where you can make your mark. Do not forget that SEO is not just about getting ranked on Google and the Bing/Yahoo alliance. Many online search bots, search websites, and comparison websites also use Google in a big way, and those that rank below the first 10 or 20 entries in the Google search engine results are often left off of such search/comparison websites.

The same is true of a wide number of apps. They, too, use the Google search index to find companies to populate their results, and they too will limit their searches to the first ten or twenty Google results. Finally, online writers and content creators will also use Google to find resources for their work (they need somebody to link to). They will search far beyond page one of Google to find their links. You may think nobody is going to link to your website if you are on page two or beyond on Google, but you will be surprised how far online writers will dig to find relevant websites to link to.

My Attempts at Ranking on Google Are For Naught

There are two mistakes you are making. The first is that you are trusting in old advice, and the second is that your content doesn’t have a real meaning or pull.

Putting trust in old advice, such as having a publishing schedule, keep churning out content, more than 750 words, etc., is useless. Your content, be it images, visual media, audio, or text, is ranked based on how popular it is. Your content is ranked on how quickly people leave it, how many people click on your search result and then stop searching for the same query (suggesting they found the answer on your website).

The second problem is that your content doesn’t have any real pull. You may be offering the top ten ways to review a movie, or the six methods people “need” to know for losing weight, but there is no real value in what you are offering.

Now, take the gamer who cannot install the new version of the XCOM game. He finds the solution including downloading a NET 3.5 file and posts the solution and the file on his website. It may not pull down thousands of views per week, but that page is the sort of page that people will bookmark, share, and link to. It is valuable information that people want to possess and keep. As a result, when people have trouble installing the XCOM game, the gamer’ s website will always rank on the first page.

Conclusion – Where Do I Go From Here?

You start by creating content that has pull. It has to have value; the sort of value people want to hold onto, to keep, own and possess.

Secondly, you need to tone down the monetizing, such as getting rid of your pop-ups and most of your ads. You need to take a slow burn approach with the use of free online marketing methods so that the following for your content grows slowly and organically.

If you already have a very established website with lots of content, then it is probably time to hire an SEO agency to help you start reworking a lot of your content. Plus, you may wish to tone down your plugins, change your template for a faster one, and take Google’s advice on speeding up your website. That’s because larger and more established websites tend to have problems with slower loading and rendering speeds, and these can affect how popular (ergo how search engine friendly) your website is.