“So you’ll manipulate my website so that I’ll get higher rankings?”

The heading of this post is one of the most frequent statement/questions I come across when discussing search engine optimization with people that do not have any experience of SEO. Many people still view SEO as something shady and unclear. There are probably many reasons for this; mainly that SEO companies and consultants do not properly inform their clients and their prospects about what they will actually try to accomplish in detail. Of course, anyone can say “we will increase your traffic and generate more business”. And they might also keep that promise. But if the website owners never understand what’s been done, they might start thinking of SEO as something almost magical. This will in the long run create a mystified aura around SEO.

I’m sorry to disappoint all the people who would like to view search engine optimization as a magical art that comes with a black hat and a wand. In fact, there’s nothing magical about SEO at all. It’s all about strategic thinking in accordance with what you’re market requires and what you’re offering. Hence, a good search engine optimization is not about manipulating a website or read out a couple of spells – it’s about creating a website that is based on what is actually going on in the search engines.

Let’s first of all make one thing clear. I’m in no way trying to claim that there’s no manipulation going on at all in the industry. There’s probably tons of different websites that are manipulated in one way or another, but these are most likely not websites of serious businesses. A manipulated website usually has short term interests; SEO however is about the long term commitment.  Let me give some examples to illustrate this to you.

Manipulation: If you would want to manipulate a website there are many things you could do. For example you could optimize it for keywords that are irrelevant to what your website is actually about, and this way generate lots of traffic. This might fulfill a purpose for a short term website, but since the website would be irrelevant to most of its keywords the visitors would exit quickly. This is something that the search engines notice; some search engines also see this as a sign of irrelevance and bumps down the website.

For most businesses and websites however, it’s not the amount of traffic that is important, but how relevant that traffic is. It’s always better to rank on 1 very relevant keyword than to rank on 10 irrelevant. The reason is simple: if you’re offering something that fits what 1 person is looking for, and that person finds you, you’re more likely to see a conversion.

I would personally not even want to call this method SEO as I think it confuses things. I’d much rather call it SEM (Search Engine Manipulation) but then of course it would still confuse things; for those that don’t know, SEM actually stands for Search Engine Marketing.

Optimization: If you have a serious website that you want to have a solid and long term marketing plan for, then there should be no manipulation what so ever. This is where SEO comes in; Your website needs to be relevant. You do not want to get huge volumes of irrelevant traffic that will hit the back button in less than a second. You want to focus on searches that fits perfectly with what you do and offer, therefore you optimize.

An optimization always strives to make your website relevant to the visitors that are actively looking for your services or products. There is no manipulation involved what so ever. Let’s say you sell supplements and general health care products. To optimize your website we would need to find which of your products people are actually searching for, and match those searches with the content on your website for example. Again, there would be no manipulation involved, just adjustments to fit your audience.

Let’s face it; if you rank on a bunch of irrelevant keywords that are irrelevant to your business, then you won’t see any great results, if any at all. And if this is the case, then you have wasted time and money (in one way or another) for nothing. This is why you as a client need to make sure you’re not buying general traffic when you’re hiring an SEO consultant or company. You shouldn’t be interested in increasing you’re traffic; in fact you can decrease in traffic but still increase in sales. The reason is simple; by doing an SEO you might cut away a bunch of irrelevant traffic and only focus on a small volume of keywords that convert very well. This might lead to a traffic drop, but a sale increase. And no, there’s no magic behind it, just some good keywords.

SEO is not about making shady changes to a website, manipulating keywords and content or casting spells. It’s a sound way of matching what you actually have with who is actually looking for you. Nothing more or less than that.

Soheil Amorpour, CEO @ CPerspective Online Marketing Agency