Life Beyond Google: A Survival Strategy for Online Marketers
Do not laugh it away like any other nay saying. SEO is gonna die, SEO is doomed to perish and the usual blah, blah, blah. Yes we have heard these things time and again in the past but still it is here, and its presence is pretty much palpable but is it here to stay? This is the most difficult question. Marketers can stretch their imagination and spring to the defense of the fact that traditional SEO. But you cannot negate the fact that Google is giving more attention to users behaviors and it is getting smart at finding out which websites deserve to the top of the search and which should be weed out. So pretty much limited scope is out there for SEO companies besides doing some worthless link building but the bad news is that Google will soon reduce its dependency on links so, what you are supposed to do. Do not go nuts.
Here I am going to share some alternatives that can help you earn your bread and butter:
Salvage Yahoo and Bing
Yah, yah I know marketers are giving less importance to Bing and Yahoo and some are even ruling them out of their marketing mix completely. But from my personal experience, I can say that these two are not that much bad. Yahoo is certainly in shambles but the market share of Bing is growing steadily and if God permits, it can give Google a run for its money. And the best part of it is that, it is fairly easy to secure high ranks in yahoo and Bing, as these two search engines still give importance to links regardless of their relevancy, no follow tags and other factors. Just follow the traditional SEO and you might turn them on.
Lose Your Purse Strings
If you feel that you are no longer in a position to get your position back in the organic search result of Google, you can take a different route – code named – Google Adwords. Yes, all you need to do is to spend some bucks and remove the rust from your analytical skills, and you will see leads coming in bulk. There is enough guidance available and I fear you might have to read some really complex things, but believe me it worth the effort you are going to put in it. There are some options to reduce pay per click amount but for that you need to master the art of increasing Quality Score but it will take some time.
Be a Conversion Specialist
Yes, this is the only way to go. Since there will be nothing to optimize (I face this problem with wordpress websites, they are super optimized), you need to do everything possible to increase interactive with the visitors and make sure they are not bouncing back. There will be enough opportunity here but you need to have a great deal of patience and should have an eye for detail.
Affiliated Marketing
If you cannot bring visitors of your own, you should look for other options and one such great option is launching an affiliated marketing program. By doing so, you are inviting other websites to promote your service through their websites in return of certain percentage of profit. Besides helping you get some clients, it can help you get some visitors as well.
Go Off Line
If none of the above mentioned tricks work, I must confess that it is time for go for the offline. Do not take me wrong, I am not asking you to pull the plug on your website; rather what I am suggesting is just the opposite. Try to make people aware of your website by spending some money on TV commercial, add the URL of your company in business card etc. Try every possible source to promote your website and believe me, success will be waiting for you at the end.
Michael Evans is a passionate writer and he has been writing for Site2You which is the best business website builder. He has written different article on web design, online marketing and SEO. He is equally enthusiastic about latest gadgets.
Yahoo and Bing cannot give you such amount of traffic like Google does.
The problem with G is he delivers traffic from all the countries and that’s not quality traffic.
There is some current debate on how much Google is and should be tailoring every users individual experience. There not the only ones that do it – facebook, amazon, etc (everyone who makes big bucks do it because it makes more bucks). If things continue in this direction SEO will certain serve less purpose, but likely will still exist.
For example, if all of a sudden I need my house painted then I search for painters or consider doing it myself. The search engine will show me local painters (Google places – which you can optimize) and then stores that carry paint… which I likely won’t have some algorithm attached to show Google what paint stores I love the most.
Regardless, SEO’s purpose is likely going to dramatically change and predictably will have less of an effect. A smart move would be to build skills in Analytics as that will always be needed.
I especially liked the advice about “going offline”, a lot of people tend to forget the main reason for having a website is PEOPLE, ultimately, not Google or other search engines you want to optimize for! Thanks for the article!