Cre­ate An SEO Strat­egy For 2014 That Will Work

Some peo­ple would sug­gest that there has al­ways been a ten­dency to over-com­­pli­­cate SEO strategies.

For years dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing ex­perts told clients that an enor­mous amount of work is re­quired to im­prove search en­gine positioning.

Many of us within the SEO in­dus­try, how­ever, know that this sim­ply hasn’t al­ways been the case.

De­pend­ing upon the tar­get key­words, some im­proved SERP po­si­tion­ing has of­ten been that bit eas­ier to attain.

Google’s key up­dates over the past two years have cer­tainly changed the over­all scene.

One of the biggest im­pacts of the Panda and Pen­guin al­go­rithm up­dates has been to put a firm em­pha­sis on the need to pro­duce qual­ity con­tent and use qual­ity link build­ing tech­niques.

This has been bad news for some small busi­ness own­ers, where there hasn’t been that re­liance on good qual­ity approaches.

The im­pact on the SEO industry

The changes have come as a shock to many SEO con­sul­tants. Those who have re­lied on low-grade link build­ing ap­proaches, have dis­cov­ered that their work has not pro­duced sus­tain­able re­sults. In many cases, there is a fail­ure to iden­tify what is re­quired, to pro­duce a sound strat­egy for the future.

There is an enor­mous amount of con­fu­sion sur­round­ing these is­sues. It shouldn’t re­ally be a sur­prise that some web­site own­ers are strug­gling to un­der­stand what to do next.

What steps should they take, in or­der to build a suc­cess­ful busi­ness for the future?

It’s al­most im­pos­si­ble to an­swer that ques­tion, with­out men­tion­ing the need to con­cen­trate on great con­tent. I would sug­gest that con­tent will be at the heart of all suc­cess­ful search en­gine strate­gies in 2014.

I be­lieve that this is also a good thing, al­though it will re­quire a change of pri­or­i­ties for some. So why is it a pro­gres­sive step? If you have a web pres­ence, it should of­fer a pos­i­tive view of your busi­ness and the ser­vices that they provide.

This is a sig­nif­i­cant change for those who have pre­vi­ously re­lied on putting up con­tent in bulk, with­out giv­ing  con­sid­er­a­tion to what is be­ing said about the busi­ness. Im­prov­ing the qual­ity of con­tent can only be a good thing, en­sur­ing that con­ver­sion rates are likely to rise too.

In­creas­ing costs

The change in em­pha­sis­ing qual­ity con­tent and high value links will clearly have fi­nan­cial im­pli­ca­tions. Af­ter all, build­ing low qual­ity links in bulk tended to be pretty cheap. At least, it should have been, given that most of the ac­tual work was prob­a­bly car­ried out overseas.

Mak­ing the move to a strat­egy that in­volves cre­at­ing ex­clu­sive, unique con­tent and con­duct­ing man­ual out­reach means spend­ing more hours on the process. That can only ever work out more expensive.

But such a change will be worth­while. A new work flow is needed to pro­duce sus­tain­able re­sults. You shouldn’t have to pay for SEO, only to then pay even more money to tidy up SEO mistakes.

It should be a con­tin­u­ous process, al­low­ing you to move from one SEO suc­cess to the next.

This is a strate­gic ap­proach that should de­liver a clear re­turn on your investment. 

You’ll be spend­ing money on putting great con­tent in place, but with the ob­vi­ous aim of get­ting great SEO re­sults. Be­fore long, you’ll see that it’s worth­while spend­ing more on SEO, sim­ply be­cause it will de­liver in­creas­ing re­sults for your business.

It’s time to for­get about some of the old ways of car­ry­ing out SEO. If you want suc­cess in 2014, then you need to em­brace an ap­proach that pri­ori­tises real quality.